Beer culture

A Danish study published in a British Medical Journal reports that people who buy wine also buy healthier food and therefore have healthier diets than people who buy beer.

Note that the issue is that bag of chips you have along with beer, not the beer itself. We must admit that there are tradeoffs when it comes to beer and your health. Here’s one point and countrpoint:

Point
Beer contains significant amounts of magnesium, selenium, potassium, phosphorus, biotin, and is chock full of B vitamins.

Counterpoint
Alcohol destroys Vitamin C and Vitamin B complex. Drinking beer that has not filtered out the Vitamin B (such as English “real ale,” many microbrewed beers and homebrew) will help combat the effects of alcohol — most notably a hangover.

More comparisons.

An excellent question from the Accidental Hedonist:

Is it socially acceptable simply to say “I drink alcoholic beverages” and leave it at that?

Or are qualifiers like this necessary? “What I’m trying to say is this: I drink alcoholic beverages. I do so for a variety of reasons, including taste and for the slight buzz it may bring. I endeavor to drink responsibly, and I never drive after drinking, nor drink if I’m driving.”

The article points out how American culture has changed in the last 50 years. Beer culture certainly has. In the 1950s the beer industry worked together to provide advertisements that said “Beer Belongs” and a message that beer was the beverage of moderation.

Now, a new move afoot would boost beer’s image, but there’s much work to be done, according to an article fromt he Wharton School of Penn University. Marketing professor Patricia Williams says breweries “have trended cruder and cruder” in an attempt to break through the clutter of TV ads and have dug a deep hole for themselves. “They have just descended into the depths as a product category. Unless that stops, no industry ad campaign will do it for them. I don’t see that happening.”

Headline: “Beer Is Proof of Stereotypical Sex Roles.”

The point: “So finally, beer teaches us about competition: The microbrewers appeared on the scene to tell the ignorati (myself included, back then) that there were infinite possibilities.”

Maybe not quite right: “The big American breweries can do anything smaller brewers can do, and better. They don’t do what the smaller brewers do partly because they don’t want to. To produce niche flavors is costly, and you’ll notice that large brewers typically charge around three to five dollars per six-pack, while the micros start at $7.”

The large breweries can’t do everything smaller ones can better. Part of it is a numbers thing: There are scores of small brewers across the country thinking up something different every day. Many of the ideas will be terrible, but some will be terrific.

It isn’t necessarily great business but it is great art. And if you like flavorful beer you benefit.

The creators of the German Museum of Hops in Wolnzach claim they’ve created the largest hop cone in the world. It’s five meters high, built on a scale of 1 million to one and museum visitors can walk through it, sniffing hops if they press the right button. The museum opened in June.

A Harvard professor moonlighting for beer giant Anheuser-Busch finds himself under fire from substance abuse counselors for saying the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption outweigh the risks. And for how he appears to be benefiting from the stance.

Meir Stampfer, a leading researcher on alcohol consumption, has traveled to Chicago and New York to tout the benefits of alcohol at Anheuser-Busch sponsored lunches.

While the company never paid Stampfer for his talks, it footed his travel expenses and donated $150,000 in scholarship money to the Harvard School of Public Health.

[From BostonHerald.com.]

Could Mexico be developing a microbrewery culture?

SignOnSanDiego.com reports Tijuana’s International Beer Festival was a step in the right direction.

“We don’t have the money to compete” with Corona, Pacifico, Dos Equis and other megabrews, one microbrewery owner said. “But I can provide to my customers what the others can’t, even with all their money. Because it’s not about a marketing concept.”

The story comes complete with tasting notes.

The Dartmouth student newspaper offers “a three-part series looking at the evolution of beer pong as a social and cultural phenomenon at Dartmouth.”

From the first part:

But the pong players of today, whether or not they realize it, are partaking in a pastime that has come a long way from the original game. Pong consisted of two cups of beer per side from the 1950s until the 1990s, and the last 10 years have seen a proliferation in the amount of beer consumed during one game. The most common pong formations at Dartmouth include “shrub” and “tree,” which consist of seven and 11 cups of beer, respectively. According to common definitions of “binge drinking,” even a single game of pong can cross the line from social to binge drinking.

From the second:

For decades, speed pong dominated — a fast-paced game of table tennis with the added target of beers on the table. Eventually, slam pong came into fashion. In slam pong, one partner lobs the ball to his teammate who slams the ball toward the cup, similar to a set and spike in volleyball. This version, also known as volley pong at the time, was invented around 1979 and came into style in the early 1980s.

“Slam was for the hardcore,” Marriott said. “Regular pong was for women and [fre]’shmen.”

British beer writer Ben McFarland tells his countrymen about the Great American Beer Festival in The Publican. He begins:

I’ve just returned from the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in Denver, Colorado, where my flabber was well and truly gasted.

Later he writes:

While nearly all US craft beers can trace their origins to European roots, the artesian brewers currently transforming the landscape of US beer are crafting brews that are bigger, brasher and boast bigger balls than anything being produced in Europe.