We’re so used to seeing top ten lists of the ten best of whatever that a list of the worst always seems like a fresh look. Joey Redner, who writes for the Tampa Bay Times, in a recent column listed his choices for the world’s worst beers. Like any such list, it will never find universal agreement, but that’s okay. There are a number of truly horrible beer on his list. I’m not sure it’s fair to include a non-alcoholic beer — which he awards the top spot — as without the alcohol I’m not sure it actually qualifies as beer.

Here’s his list.

1. Busch NA
2. Camo Genuine Ale
3. Chapeau Exotic
4. Hurricane High Gravity Lager
5. Bootie U95
6. Winter Park Beer
7. Cave Creek Chili Beer
8. Sleeman Clear Lager
9. Milwaukee’s Best
10. Coors Aspen Edge

Frankly, I’d put Corona and Heineken on the list for sheer popularity vs. lack of taste (not to mention being frequently lightstruck). And I suppose the entire exercise begs the question as to whether bad and bland are one and the same or distinctively different enough. Should the merely bland and inoffensive be considered bad or must a beer be particularly and specifically ill-conceived, badly executed or so obviously lacking in graces to be considered one of the worst?

A while ago when I was actively trying to increase my collection of beer quotations, the ones that randomly appear in the upper right-hand corner every time you reload the page, I kept finding ones that were part of larger poems. Having something of an obsession with words — and poetry for that matter — I made a page of beer poetry. When I come across another one I find interesting, I add it. There are now 22 of them. Some are quite old, some are by famous poets, and a few are just plain goofy. Take the one below, for example, a spoof of Joyce Kilmer’s famous Trees poem, credited to a Joyce Killjoy by a homebrew club in Boston, The Boston Wort Processors. They have their own small page of five beer poems, including this Trees spoof.

I think that I shall never hear A poem as lovely as a beer The brew that Joe’s bar has on tap With golden base and snowy cap The foamy stuff I drink all day Until my memory melts away Poems are made by fools I fear But only the Worts can make a beer   Notice it’s 4 lines short from the original and references the club in the final line.

It’s good on its own, but enter that word obsession of mine, and I couldn’t let well enough alone. I added the four missing lines and made several additional modifications. I think I improved it, but what do you think?

This video was sent to me by the folks at Holy Taco, which appears to be a humor site for the college crowd. It’s a little goofy and some of the humor, sorry Alan — humour, misses the mark, though I certainly did laugh at parts of it. But what made it worthwhile, for me at least, is that they actually let them film inside one of the tanks, empty except for the beechwood chips. Having toured my fair share of Budweiser plants, they really gave these guys “inside access.” Though the segment where the host and the tour guide help “give birth” to the beer seems a little too over the top for my tastes, that or it may be I’m just getting old.

Holy Taco Goes To Budweiser

April Fool’s Day is a great time for a laugh. I usually get a few good pranks. Greg Koch from Stone Brewing often has a good one. So far, this is my favorite one today.

After five years of great fun and success with our Canned Beer Apocalypse, we’re changing our packaging to glass bottles.   “Cans, schmans,” says Oskar Blues founder Dale Katechis. “It’s time we…..   Happy April Fools Day.   Foolishly,   Marty Jones Oskar Blues Brewery

A new study by a Czech ornithologist, Tomas Grim, in which he studied not the birds that are his usual subject, but his fellow avian scientists … and their beer-drinking habits. The study, published last month in Oikos, was titled A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists. Here is the abstract:

Publication output is the standard by which scientific productivity is evaluated. Despite a plethora of papers on the issue of publication and citation biases, no study has so far considered a possible effect of social activities on publication output. One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking alcohol. In Europe, most alcohol is consumed as beer and, based on well known negative effects of alcohol consumption on cognitive performance, I predicted negative correlations between beer consumption and several measures of scientific performance. Using a survey from the Czech Republic, that has the highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world, I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality). In addition I found the same predicted trends in comparison of two separate geographic areas within the Czech Republic that are also known to differ in beer consumption rates. These correlations are consistent with the possibility that leisure time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and citation biases.

Essentially, that can be summarized as “the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.”

The New York Times summarized the findings like this:

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

But as Dave Bacon, the Quantum Physicist, takes the study (and the Times) to task in a post entitled Ecologists Can’t Handle Their Beer Like Physicists, there are more than a few problems with the study and its conclusions. First of all, the paper studied “avian ecologists,” essentially bird scientists, and extended out the findings to include all scientists, a conceit Bacon didn’t think was very reasonable, writing. “I mean, come on, has anyone ever heard of bird watchers being known for their beer drinking abilities? I suspect if I had to pick the group of scientists least likely to be able to take their beer, avian ecologists would be right up there on my list. Show me a study about Czech physicists damaging their publication record by too much beer consumption, and then you’ll get my attention.”

He continues:

I’d also note that the study covers the amazingly huge sample size of less than twenty, that the beer consumption rates are huge for the outliers (Czech, burp!), that there was no description of the methodology for choosing the survey sample (were they his friends, his colleagues? Since the sample was chosen from the author’s field, it sure sounds like it), that any effect, if it is there, is coming from the very high end of the beer consumption spectra (which is fairly spectacular consumption), and certainly a linear regression seems like a spectacularly poor notion of how beer drinking has an effect on scientific output., and that no attempt to separate out the effect of different quality universities and the different geographic consumption levels was made.

It’s certainly a strange topic to be published in a serious academic journal. Since the author admits to enjoying as many as twelve beers in a single session (making him a binge drinker by American standards), it’s clear he’s not arguing for scientists to drink less. [Note to neo-prohibitionists: notice that Professor Bacon is able to drink more than you think he should and still manages to be a respected ornithologist at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. Let me know when you’re ready to concede your definition of binging is ridiculous, and wrong.] I wonder if the ornithologists only drink brands like Red Tail Ale or one of the other 300 beers with a bird on their label?
 

I was forwarded this something like fourth-hand, but I’ve been assured it’s also on Magic Hat Brewing’s website (though I couldn’t find it) and was created by them as a goof. I think it’s pretty funny, but then I have a dark, twisted sense of humor. If you’ve been following the Hookergate scandal in the New York Governor’s office you know the former top dog was referred to as customer #9. But there’s already a beer by that name, but you probably already knew that ….

This doesn’t have anything to do with beer, but someone sent me a link (thanks, Cindy) correctly believing I’d enjoy it. In fact, it’s surreal, weird and perversely hilarious. Food Fight is simply the history of warfare since World War II told through food fights, with national foods representing each country, or as the Food Fight website put is.

Food Fight is an abridged history of war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

They’ve also thoughtfully provided a cheat sheet listing all of the foods in the film and which nation they’re associated with. And since it’s war, expect a lot of ketchup. Enjoy.
 

While searching for an image of a beer delivery truck yesterday, I noticed a photo of this truck kept popping up in the search results, but always identified as a beer truck, or words to that effect. However, take a close look at the bottle.

Cool as the image is, it sure didn’t look like beer inside the bottle to me. So I did a little research to find out what Bionade is. It turns out that it’s organic soda made in Germany. But interestingly, it does have a brewing pedigree. Here’s the story, from Wikipedia:

Bionade was created in 1995 by Dieter Leipold. Leipold was the master brewer at Privatbrauerei Peter in Ostheim, a town in northern Bavaria with just 4,000 inhabitants, and a friend of the family that owned the brewery. He was worried about the future of the company, which was about to go bankrupt, as import beers like Corona and Miller Lite were taking over the German market. He got the idea of creating a nonalcoholic drink produced with the same principles and under the same purity laws used to brew beer:[3] not using corn syrup or other artificial additives and making it by fermentation. The drink would consist only of the natural ingredients malt, water, sugar, and fruit essences. For eight years, Leipold experimented spending €1.5 million of the brewery owner Peter Kowalsky’s money. His lab was a bathroom. He isolated a strain of bacteria capable of converting the sugar that normally becomes alcohol into nonalcoholic gluconic acid, which he used to ferment the new drink.

Bionade’s premise was that it tasted like soft drinks, but contained little sugar and no stabilizing or flavor-enhancing additives. It thus combines the taste of soft drinks with the healthiness of juice. It also contains both calcium and magnesium, in such quantities that they do not cancel each other out and is low in sodium and free of phosphorus

To this day, Leipold refuses divulge the exact chemical process he used to do this. the gluconic acid also has the advantage that it allows him to reduce the amount of sugar, because it strengths the sugar’s taste. After fermentation, the natural flavors, elderberry, litchi, orange-ginger, and herb are added along with carbonation.

Apparently sales Bionade started out slowly but with the recent popularity of healthy food and drinks, things have picked up considerably. Since 2006, it’s been sold in the U.S., though I can’t say I recall ever seeing it. But then I don’t drink soda so I wouldn’t have been looking for it, either. It might be worth giving it a try, since it was created by a brewer and he’s managed to keep the secret of how it’s made. There’s also an article about it from Time Magazine that was published last January.

This is part two in my two-part series of goofy YouTube videos about beer I’ve stumbled upon. This one uses stop-motion, a cheap but time-consuming way to make an animated film. If you haven’t guessed by now, among my many other idiosyncratic passions, is animation. I fell in love with cartoons and all things animated at an early age and never really stopped. My favorites are Rocky & Bullwinkle (I even tried to name my son Bullwinkle, but my wife vetoed that one), the old black and white Max Fleischer Popeyes, anything by Tex Avery and more recently, Wallace & Gromit. Anyway, this one isn’t high quality, animation-wise, but it is a little humorous and the idea has potential. Enjoy.

You’ve probably heard this song before. I know I have. It’s been around for a while now, attributed to everybody from Weird Al Yankovic to They Might Be Giants, though I’m still not entirely sure who actually performs it. It’s only mildly amusing, in a baser sort of way, but the video here really makes it. Whoever edited this together did a great job of matching the song to various snippets from Japanese anime. That’s what makes it funny, at least in my opinion. Enjoy.

I’m not one to pimp beer commercials very often, but I found this one pretty clever. It’s simply the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, on stage in their tuxedos, performing the theme song for Foster’s most popular beer in Australia, Victoria Bitter. But instead of their normal instruments, the song is played on beer bottles. Believe it or not, when I first started college my major was music theory/comp (composition) and I had aspirations to write classical music, so it was fun to see the inventive ways they found to make sounds from the beer bottles. Simple and with no catch phrases, animals or mud-wrestling. If only the beer was better.

I’m not entirely sure why this exists, but I did have fun with it — so perhaps that’s enough of a reason — but Strange Brew, a Canadian software company that makes programs for homebrewers, also has an online Random Beer Name Generator. My first beer name:

Flying Squirrel-Mash Oud Bruin

Being a huge fan of Rocky & Bullwinkle, I thought this one was a great name for a beer. But some others were equally intriguing, such as Craptacular Loch Ness Monster Tripel, Barney and Spiderman’s Transgendered Bière de Garde and even The Squid Formerly Known As Winston Churchill’s Unbefreakinglievable Pilsner. I don’t know how many names are in there. I tried quite a few and never got a duplicate. Give it a try. Let me know your best ones.