Last week, Stevens Point Brewing of the eponymous town in Wisconsin, released their summer beer, Nude Beach Summer Wheat, with a label featuring nudists frolicking in the sand and surf, with beach accessories showing up in conveniently immodest places making the whole scene decidedly PG. And that might have been the end of it, were it not for the sudden and apparently unexpected support of the American Association for Nude Recreation.

From the press release: Summer Wheat Ale is Point Brewery’s Latest Seasonal Beer Summer is coming so it’s the perfect time to take the wraps off and enjoy Point Nude Beach Summer Wheat, a new hand-crafted seasonal specialty beer from the Stevens Point Brewery. Beginning May 1st, Point Nude Beach Summer Wheat, a satisfying unfiltered wheat ale, will be available in 12-ounce bottles and kegs wherever Point brands are sold. Point Nude Beach Summer Wheat is a fun, refreshing beer for hot summer afternoons and evenings, according to Joe Martino, Stevens Point Brewery Operating Partner. “It’s the perfect summer brew for summer thirsts. What can be more fun than a nude beach?” he said. “Where and how you enjoy Point Nude Beach Summer Wheat is up to you. Clothing is optional.” “Wheat beers represent one of the most popular segments of the 8-million-barrel U.S. craft beer market and have recently enjoyed double-digit sales growth in many regions, including the Midwest where Point sales are strong,” Martino said, adding that he expects wheat beer sales to keep up their brisk pace this summer, too. Brewed with Wheat and Barley With a rich golden color reminiscent of an early summer tan, Point Nude Beach Summer Wheat is brewed with “au naturel” raw white wheat, malted red wheat and highly kilned specialty barley malts, according to Point Brewmaster John Zappa. “The barley malts are very different from other malts used to brew Point beers and add a slightly sweet maltiness to the flavor,” he said. The Stevens Point Brewery In addition to the seasonal beers Point Oktoberfest, Einbock and St. Benedict’s Winter Ale, the Point brands include Point Special Lager, Point Classic Amber, Point Cascade Pale Ale, Point Belgian White and Point Horizon Wheat. Point Special Lager won the gold medal in the American Premium Lager category at the 2003 Great American Beer Festival.

According to a story in today’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the new seasonal beer “quickly drew attention from the nation’s nudists, said Carolyn Hawkins, spokeswoman for the American Association for Nude Recreation, a group that claims 47,000 members who enjoy sunbathing, swimming and other activities au naturel. The Kissimmee, Fla.-based group bills itself as ‘a trusted source for nudist information on such topics as what to expect at a nudist club, a nudist resort, or even from a skinny dipping experience. Our members have bombarded us with messages’ about Nude Beach, Hawkins said.”

So she got in touch with the brewery and inquired if they would be willing to provide beer for the group’s annual convention, which this year will be held in the nearby “Turtle Lake Resort in Union City, Mich., which is south of Battle Creek, from Aug. 11-17.” Steven Point Brewing agreed to give the AANR twenty-five cases in exchange for some advertisements in the newsletter and convention program. The group’s second choice was New Belgium’s Skinny Dip, but it’s not distributed in Michigan.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel piece ends with:

Nude Beach will probably see a spike in sales thanks to the buzz among nudists, Hawkins predicted.

“The nudist organizations all stick together,” she said.

Martino welcomes the fans of his nude, uh, new beer.

“It’s a whole subculture that I didn’t know existed,” said Martino, whose company is probably best known for brewing Point Special Lager.

He had me going up to that point, but here’s how the brewery’s website describes the beer:

Point Nude Beach is the perfect summer pleasure. Available only during the warm months of summer, this lively and unfiltered wheat ale is well balanced using “au naturel” raw and red wheat, then delicately finished with Yakima hops. With a refreshing light flavor, Point Nude Beach is perfect while enjoying summer activities or just hanging out with friends. Clothing optional.

Introduced: 2008
Availability: May 1 - August 1
Suggested Pairings: Chicken, Pork, Summer Salads, SPF 30 and Swim Suit (optional.)

Sounds like their tongue was fully inserted in their cheek from the get-go. If they didn’t know it existed, how did they manage to depict it so well on the label? Anyway, false modestly aside it’s still pretty funny. especially that the nudists so quickly embraced it.

You can get a better look at the label on the six-pack carrier.

For our 15th Session, the topic remains personal, but instead of profiling another person, the goal is to hold up a mirror to see ourselves. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how did you get started in this all? Our hosts, Boak and Bailey, want to know “the moment when you saw the light. At what point did you realise you were a beer lover / geek / enthusiast? What beer(s) triggered the conversion? Did someone help you along your way, or did you come to it yourself?”

I’ve actually written about this before, two years ago. And if you think I’ve been long-winded before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There’s a collective writing exercise known as NaNoWriMo, which is short for “National Novel Writing Month.” During the month of November, whoever wants to participate is challenged to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. That works out to just under 1,700-words per day. The first NaNoWriMo took place in November of 1999 with under two dozen friends of founder Chris Baty trying to write a novel in his apartment. Last year, it’s ninth, over 100,000 people gave it a shot. Of those, 15,000 people managed to finish writing 50,000 words, which is the equivalent of a short novel of around 175 pages.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo three times, and managed to complete it each time. I skipped last year because I was in Bavaria for almost two weeks in November, but the previous three years I spent my Novembers writing even more than I usually do. It was a terrific experience each time and one I heartily recommend. It made me a much faster writer. When you have such daunting deadlines, you learn to just keep going and write through any blocks. You get into a zone where it just pours out of you, akin to a runner’s high. And that’s proved quite valuable as I take on more and more writing assignments. Plus it’s a lot of fun just to see what comes out.

The NaNoWriMo website puts it like this:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

So why bring this up? Because in 2006, I wrote a literary memoir about growing up with beer. It was called Under the Table and subtitled A Fictional Memoir of Growing Up With Beer. What I meant by that I wrote about in a foreword, but essentially I combined events and characters, moved some dates around and changed a few details in order to make the story work better, a perfectly acceptable practice in the genre. Since I was writing on the fly, I organized it into twenty-four chapters, a case of chapters. I chose two dozen beers that I remember from my childhood and used each one as a jumping off point to trigger remembering incidents in my life, similar to the way Proust did with pastry in Remembrance of Things Past. The story is filled with underage drinking, teen sex and violent alcoholic psychopaths. Almost all of it is true, but I’m not saying which is which.

The question of how it all started for me with better beer is largely answered in Chapter 24, Jazz in the Dark. The beers were Bass Ale and Guinness that introduced me to beer with flavor. I was stationed on Staten Island with an Army Band and many of the Manhattan jazz clubs I frequented in New York City in the late 1970s had begun carrying the two. They were as different as night and day from the regional lagers that all tasted the same I had grown up on. They were the catalyst that drove me to learn more about beer and discover what else beer could be. That was exactly thirty years ago and I’ve never looked back.

The whole novel is online if you’re feeling really bored or have a long wait ahead of you in the emergency room. Be warned, it is a rough draft, literally written in one take — extemporaneously — eighteen months ago. At the end of November 2006, I crossed the finish line at 55,622 words. But although I met the challenge of 50,000 words in thirty days, I had stopped in the middle of the second to last chapter. It’s hard to explain, but once the peer pressure and self-imposed routine has ended I’ve found it near impossible to keep going on December 1. But that was okay, because there was only one person who really wanted me to finish it. Shaun O’Sullivan, from 21st Amendment, got pneumonia that same November, and was stuck at home, bored. So he ended up reading — and apparently enjoying — Under the Table. He continued to pester me for months afterwards to finish the last two chapters and it became a running gag between us. So Shaun, I’m happy to tell you the wait is over and it’s finally done, or at least the first draft is.

Since this is a post about ourselves, I pulled out this old label. It’s for a private label brand we were developing at Beverages & more shortly before I left the company. It wasn’t my idea. The VP of marketing, who himself was a Brit, came up with it and the plan was to have a line of English-style ales to complement some of the others we were working on, like Coastal Fog, Brandenburg Gate and Truman’s True Blue. I guess he thought my name sounded sufficiently English. The initial styles were to be an IPA and an ESB. Anyway, it got scrapped but I still have a few labels left and they’re fun to see. I like the fact that not only am I bitter, but Extra Specially Bitter. That’s me, alright. To read Under the Table, follow this link to the home page. You can either just scroll down as you read or use the chapter numbers in the sidebar to move from chapter to chapter. I confess I’m more than a little nervous that it’s too self-indulgent or just plain crap, but you only learn by doing and this is definitely me just going for it and giving it a try. If you do actually give a read, even just part of it, please let me know what you thought. But please do go easy on me. Not only is it as rough a draft as I could imagine, but it’s very personal, too. Constructive criticism is always appreciated but let’s not be too insulting or harsh. This is my life we’re talking about, after all. My life with beer. Cheers!

If you saw my last post, about a Czech Ornithologist suggesting a correlation between beer consumption and academic output among his peers, you may have noticed my little joke at the end about him drinking only beer with birds on the label. I knew there were plenty of dogs on beer labels (I recall Stephen Beaumont doing an article about that several years ago, which I helped with infinitesimally by putting together a list of ones I knew about). Then there was Session #7 hosted by Rick Lyke, The Brew Zoo: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6, where animals of all stripes were found lurking on beer labels.

So I did a little search to see if I could find out if indeed there were a lot of labels with birds on them, and I found more than I bargained for. First, there’s this online collection of Birds on Beer Labels, which features scans of quite a few, including Mendocino’s Red Tail Ale. But then I came across this: The International Bird Beer Label Association, a 15-year old group dedicated to documenting beer labels with birds on them! The IBBLA, as of November of last year, has 296 confirmed sightings of birds on beer labels plus three homebrew labels and three more beers with a bird in the name, but no corresponding image on the label. They’re all listed on their checklist, and a few scans are up on the Species Photos page. The group’s slogan is “Fostering An Appreciation For Birds and Brew.” Talk about a niche hobby. I’m speechless.

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?
 

If you’re as much of a history buff as I am, you’re no doubt aware that HBO is currently airing a seven-part miniseries on John Adams, based on the popular Pulitzer-winning book of the same name by David McCullough. I confess I haven’t watched it yet. It’s building up in my Tivo queue so I can watch it all at once. I also didn’t read the book, though I’ve read McCullough’s 1776 and plenty of other books about the same period in history. I’ve always been fascinated by that time in our history, not least of which because my ancestors came to Pennsylvania from Switzerland in the early 1700s. The son of my original descendant in America—at least on my mother’s side—even fought in the war before returning to take over the family farm near what today is Bernville, Pennsylvania.

Samuel Adams, as portrayed by Danny Huston in the new HBO miniseries John Adams.

But what’s interesting about the new series is not about John Adams, but what is being said about the portrayal of his cousin, Samuel Adams. In my own reading, I recall him being portrayed as totally committed to the cause of revolution—to the point of obsession—and that he worked tirelessly toward that end. My memory is that he was beloved by his friends, though not everyone thought his methods (he was notoriously unwilling to compromise or negotiate) to be the best approach. I believe it was Samuel who got John Hancock, one of the richest men in New England, involved in the revolutionary cause and, eventually, his now more famous cousin John. When he was chosen to be represent in the first Continental Congress his friends got together and bought him a new suit, because he cared so little for his own appearance. The fact that he later receded into the background of history is a shame, because apparently he was very instrumental in bringing about our independence from England. It’s quite possible that without the Boston Beer Company using him on their beer labels, he might even be less well-known today than he already is. But I’m sure there are many such men whose early efforts have been overshadowed by the politicians who signed the Declaration of Independence and hammered out the Constitution. Those are the people we tend to remember as our founding fathers.

But according to some reviews, Samuel Adams is portrayed as “little more than a common thug whose idea of a good time is watching British dudes get Gatoraded with tar” and as “a leering, ranting, even dangerous fanatic … the very image of the corrupt urban politician.” Another reviewer says Samuel is “a character who seems at once both sinister and benign” and wonders when he’ll “finally give the others a taste of that new ale he’s been raving about?”

But Jeremy A. Stern, a historian writing on the History News Network, tells a different tale. His article, entitled What’s Inaccurate About the New HBO Series on John Adams, points out a number of inaccuracies from the first episode alone, before launching into his Sam Adams defense.

Most egregious, however, is the all-too-typical depiction of Samuel Adams, often a symbol for these mistrusted early years of the Revolution, as a leering, ranting, even dangerous fanatic. Samuel may be the most misunderstood figure of the Revolutionary generation, still generally regarded as a disingenuous, scheming, unprincipled and Machiavellian rabble-rouser, manipulating the mobs and fomenting disorder for sinister purposes — the very image of the corrupt urban politician. It is an image straight from the words of his enemies, fostered and perpetuated by neo-Tory historians such as Hiller Zobel, and so deeply ingrained in the assumptions of scholars that few have even questioned it. (The notable exception is Pauline Maier, whose 1976 article, “Coming to Terms with Samuel Adams,” in the American Historical Review and 1980 book, The Old Revolutionaries: Political lives in the age of Samuel Adams, should have thoroughly discredited these distortions decades ago, had her arguments received the attention they deserve.) In reality, none other than John Adams, notorious for rarely praising anyone, wrote of his cousin Samuel with frank admiration — except to note his own superior legal knowledge — and was particularly aware of Samuel’s distaste for violence: “[Samuel] Adams is zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause, is always for Softness, and Delicacy, and Prudence where they will do, but is stanch and stiff and strict and rigid and inflexible, in the Cause …. Adams I believe has the most thorough Understanding of Liberty, and her Resources, in the Temper and Character of the People, tho not in the Law and Constitution, as well as the most habitual, radical Love of it, of any of them — as well as the most correct, genteel and artful Pen. He is a Man of refined Policy, stedfast Integrity, exquisite Humanity, genteel Erudition, obliging, engaging Manners, real as well as professed Piety, and a universal good Character, unless it should be admitted that he is too attentive to the Public and not enough so, to himself and his family” (in John Adams’s diary, Dec. 23, 1765).

A portrait of Samuel Adams by one of the most well-known artists of the time, John Singleton Copley, painted around 1774, two years before the events in episode one of the HBO miniseries, when he would have been 50 years of age. Today it hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Certainly, this testimony to Samuel’s ‘gentility’ is absent from the HBO program, which shows him practically as a dockyard thug – and yet at the same time ironically suggests that he is rich, and thus at leisure to pursue his devious wiles. This contradictory claim ignores John’s actual worry about Samuel’s neglect of himself and his own: Samuel was in fact in constant financial trouble, often dependent on the charity of his friends. Praise for Samuel’s character went beyond Massachusetts. In 1819, Thomas Jefferson, who had no reason to polish Samuel’s record, wrote almost as fulsome a tribute: “I can say that he was truly a great man, wise in council, fertile in resources, immoveable in his purposes.”

In the Boston Globe’s own condemnation of the series’ inaccuracies, they also mention a local historical researcher, James Bell, and his blog, Boston 1775. He, too, has posted a raft of inaccuracies not only about the miniseries itself, but specifically about Samuel Adams.

There’s more, too, both by Stern and Bell, but I’ll let you read that at your leisure, if you’re interested. Suffice it to say that historical dramas are almost always riddled with inaccuracies, that’s certainly nothing new. Usually, the excuse is something like “dramatic license” or “pacing” or some other story-driven nonsense. Of course, people watch history shows like this expecting them to be accurate, so I think it’s doubly bad when they’re not. But accepting that it’s just entertainment is harder to justify when you realize that HBO sent out leaflets to 10,000 teachers with “John Adams” agitprop urging them to show it to their classes. Of course, history textbooks are already riddled with mistakes, inaccuracies and propaganda, so maybe it doesn’t matter (for a wonderful book on this subject, see James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me). But it still seems weird that a Pulitzer Prize winning novel would be so compromised, but such is the way of the entertainment business. I’m thirsty now. Who wants to join me for a Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

Hilarious. I love this story of British publicans taking matters into their own hands. It seems the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, placed a 4p increase on the price of a pint, at a time when a pint already costs 25p more than it did one month ago, plus has “pledged to raise duty on alcohol by 2% above inflation for the next four years.” His budget is seen as only helping supermarket chains, whose share of the beer market has increased due to cheap pricing, which many have termed “pretty irresponsible alcohol retailing.” Pubs had already been losing ground to retail pricing wars and had asked for a freeze on prices to hep save pubs. Apparently, Darling was deaf to their concerns and now they’ve responded by banning him from every pub in England (or at least in all the participating ones—which after one day numbers 170). Obviously, the actual banning will do little to change things, but presumably the attendant publicity might.

They’ve created a poster which they’re encouraging pub owners to display in the window of their establishment featuring Darling behind bars and the word BARRED in large block letters.

It’s even spread to Brussels, where at least one pub—O’Farrells—has also put the poster in their front window. UK Independence Party head Nigel Farage noticed while there earlier today, about which he is quoted.

“Every politician who voted for the smoking ban and an increase in alcohol taxes at this difficult time for our pubs should be banned,” said Farage.

“However, most of our politicians are so detached from reality that they probably don’t visit pubs.”

They’ve also set up a group about the ban on Facebook.

I can think of plenty of our own politicians we should do likewise with.

This is the poster is available for download.
 

The full quote from Proverbs 16:18, at least in the King James’ version, is “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” but the more common shortened version says it all. Essentially, the modern meaning of this proverb is not to be overly confident, especially in yourself, or you’re likely to have something bad happen to put you back in your place. If you allow yourself to become full of pride, you will find yourself humiliated. Be modest, that’s good advice to remember. It’s what happened to me on Sunday, and I offer up my cautionary tale by way of illustration.

I’ve done my fair share of prolonged drinking over the years, and rarely have I not been able to muddle through to the end. We (and by we I mean those of us who have been regularly attending GABF for many years) generally say about the Great American Beer Festival—by way of advice—that it’s a marathon, not a sprint to suggest that pacing is very important to a full enjoyment of the week’s events. So when I was invited to the 4th annual Keene Tasting on Sunday, the day after the Hard Liver Barleywine Fest at Brouwer’s Cafe, it simply never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be still standing after twelve hours and 150 beers. Alas, my body had other plans for me.

At 11:00 a.m., with our first beer of the day. Things went fine through the first 50 beers or so, when suddenly and quite unexpectedly I felt cold shivers shoot through my body. Initially undaunted, I assumed that the open windows letting in the fresh Seattle air had simply chilled the room so I put on my jacket and resumed tasting. But after another half-hour of involuntarily shivering it became obvious that all was not well and my body had decided to pitch a fit. I felt fine, apart from the chills, and struggled through until we almost reached the half-way point, 75 beers, and it was time for another break. I hunkered down in a comfy chair during the break and tried to will myself to warm up, but it did no good. When tasting resumed, I stayed put figuring I should not ignore my body’s tantrum, and still hoped it was just a temporary thing and my recovery was minutes away. A few kind souls asked if I was okay (perhaps I looked as bad as I felt) and I nodded and muttered that I was fine. But as more time passed and I was feeling worse, I decided to spare myself further humiliation and called in the evacuation troops — my wife — to come and collect me. About an hour later I was standing out front shivering in the cold and waiting for her arrival to whisk me to safety and nurse me back to health. This proved trickier than I might have imagined. Whether my weekend drinking had finally lowered my immune system to the point where I got the flu that’s been circulating in my friends and family for weeks or I simply drank too much, too fast, I can’t really say. All I know is that my chills turned to heat as I burned off a fever so bright that my wife said my skin was hot to the touch like an old-fashioned radiator and that she couldn’t even lie near me because I was radiating so much heat. By morning I only felt lousy, a distinct improvement. But that was nothing compared to the disappointment at not finishing the tasting. Perhaps I was at least a source of amusement for those I left behind, as I heard Bonney calling my name from the window above me as I waited for my ride. I called up, but I don’t think he heard me. C’est la vie. There’s always next year.

Our hosts, Vern and Bonney, the two Matts, during a toast to Michael Jackson’s memory with the beer made by Pike Brewing for the Michael Jackson Tribute dinner held the night before in Philadelphia. The first half of the tasting I enjoyed immensely, right up to the point where I had to leave or die.

For many more photos from at least the first half of the Keene Tasting, including some bottle shots of the beers sampled, visit the photo gallery.
 

It’s not perhaps the worst thing about being blind, but it would be problematic to figure out exactly what’s inside that can of beer you just picked up if you can’t read the label. According to the Inventor Spot, Kirin Brewing has solved this dilemma by putting braille on the top of their beer cans. The braille on the cans apparently spell out “alcohol” on some and “Kirin Beer” on others. But until more breweries take up the cause, all anyone will be able to distinguish is Kirin from everything else. And what if you prefer a bottle? Oh, well, it’s the thought that counts, right?
 

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.
 

I’ve found that liquor stores in Colorado tend to be, on average, larger than in the rest of the country. And that’s most likely because of their laws. In an effort to keep chains out of the state, any business is only allowed to own one liquor license. So that means instead of successful companies opening new locations (which is prohibited), they instead make their one location larger. So there’s Applejack’s in Denver or Liquor Mart in Boulder and probably countless others I’m unaware of. Then there’s Daveco Liquors in Thornton, Colorado (a few miles north of Denver along I-25). The Guinness Book of World Records has certified that it’s the “largest liquor store in the world.” The 102,000 square foot store has 7,500 bottles in the wine cellar, 9,000 types of wine, 2,400 brands of liquor and 800 different beers (though that last one actually seems small to me).

From an article in today’s Denver Post:

“I kept saying this is the world’s largest liquor store, and people kept saying ‘You can never prove that,’ ” said [owner Henry] Sawaged. “But now people know I am a man of my word.”

Congratulations to Daveco.

While searching for a generic beer label for my previous post, I stumbled upon the Free Beer organization, a Danish art project applying the open source or Creative Commons idea to beer. The Creative Commons is a more open approach to copyright law, created by people who think copyright law as it exists today does more to stifle creativity than allow it to flourish. If that seems at first counter-intuitive, I would recommend you read Lawrence Lessig’s wonderful book, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity and/or see the film Revolution OS, which has as much to do with this fascinating idea as it does with the history of computer operating systems (and it details the contributions of Richard Stallman). Anyway, the idea of a looser way to reserve some rights but allow people to build on previous efforts to collectively come up with better solutions and products because they’re designed in the open by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people working on them is at the heart of this idea. Originally, of course, this notion was applied to software. This blog you’re reading, for example, runs on WordPress, an open source blogging software that is essentially free to use and has been created by untold numbers of programmers who are working constantly to make it better.

From the Free Beer website:

The project, originally conceived by Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex and students at the Copenhagen IT University, applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product — namely the alcoholic beverage loved and enjoyed globally, and commonly known as beer.

It seems to me that homebrewers already share recipes fairly freely, and I know of instances where commercial brewers have all made the same beer (using the same hops or to celebrate Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday, for example) so I’m not sure how novel this is, but it’s still a worthwhile idea to promote, at least in my opinion.

The English version of the Free Beer label.

Apparently, there won’t be any Southern Baptists attending the Highland Vineyard Church of Louisville, Kentucky any time soon, as we’ve recently learned that some of them are literally afraid of beer. That’s because Highland Vineyard’s pastor, Robert Pitman, has been holding “Sunday Nights on Tap” services, which are held at Flanagan’s Ale House, a local Irish-style pub with a great beer selection and pub food.

As Pastor Pitman tells it, in a recent Louisville Courier-Journal article:

“I think there’s a lot of people that want to get close to God, but they don’t connect with the church today,” said Robert Pitman, Highland Vineyard’s lead pastor. “Maybe they either just have never been or they’ve been and had bad experiences, but it just doesn’t seem to connect with them.”

Last Sunday the church held the second of its Sunday Nights on Tap at Flanagan’s. Like the first, it drew about 35-40 people ranging in age from early 20s to late 50s. The events start out with live music — some original, some covers — followed by a message from Pitman and time to hang out and socialize.

For now, the church will be holding these beer bar revivals only once a month, but if successful, who knows? It’s nice to see not every religion is against beer. I certainly know plenty of religious beer-drinkers, but a church that embraces it and even makes it a part of their worship? Now that warms the soul like a good barleywine-style ale.