News

Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of The Brooklyn Brewery, has signed on as the Editor-In-Chief and leading author of The Oxford Companion to Beer, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

The book will offer thousands of entries on beer-related topics, from history to styles, detailed methods of production, ingredients and their varieties, politics of beer, topics of debate, yeasts, climate change, wild fermentations, innovations and more.

A press release from Oxford press states, “It will be unlike any beer book ever published.” It points to Jancis Robinson’s seminal book The Oxford Companion to Wine to give readers and idea what to expect. That book weighs almost seven pounds.

“We couldn’t be more happy to be adding this title to our Oxford Food Reference list,” said Christian Purdy, director of publicity for Oxford University Press.

Oliver is author of The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food, which won the 2004 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Book Award and was also a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Book Award. Oliver has been brewing for 18 years and is a veteran of more than 500 beer dinners and tastings in eight countries.

What’s the result of drinking 60 pints of beer during the course of a four-day drinking binge?

A hangover. A big hangover. But not necessarily as big as that of a man in Scotland, who had a non-stop headache for four weeks, blurred vision and didn’t recover for six months.

The story:

When a 37-year old man walked into a hospital emergency room in Glasgow, Scotland last October complaining of “wavy” vision and a non-stop headache that had lasted four weeks, doctors were at first stumped, the British journal The Lancet reported Friday.

The unnamed patient “had no history of head injury or loss of consciousness; his past medical record was unremarkable, and he was taking no medications,” Zia Carrim and two other physicians from Southern General Hospital said in a case report.

When an eye specialist was called in, the fog began to clear, at least for the doctors.

The patient, said the ophthalmologist, had swollen optical discs, greatly enlarged blind spots and what eye doctors call “flame haemorrhages,” or bleeding nerve fibres.

Then the doctors learned the man revealed he had consumed some 60 pints – roughly 35 litres – of beer over a four day period, following a domestic crisis.

Severe dehydration caused the alcohol, the doctors guessed, had led to a rare condition called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST).

It took more than six months of long-term blood-thinning treatment to restore the man’s normal vision – and to get rid of the headache, the doctors reported.

The Oregon Brewers Festival made a donation of $10,301 to the Oregon Commission for the Blind Foundation (OCBF) with money raised at the 20th annual Oregon Brewers Festival that took place at Tom McCall Waterfront Park July 27-30.

From the press release:

The $10,000 was a direct contribution from the festival; the additional $301 was raised at the Crater Lake Soda Co. Root Beer Garden through donations from attendees.

OBF Director Art Larrance presented a check on Sept. 11 to Charlene Cook, a teacher and former Commissioner for the Oregon Commission for the Blind (OCB). According to Cook, the money will support the goals set by the OCB, including providing access to technology and education, and emotional and physical support to blind and visually impaired Oregonians.

Larrance selected the organization in honor of his college friend, Steve Hanamura, who is legally blind. This is the second year the OBF has made a donation to the OCBF.

The British pint and mile are safe forever after the European Commission announced a policy change.

The European Union executive said British and Irish pubs may go on serving beer in pints after 2009, when such measures were due to be phased out.

A spokesman said the proposal, which must be rubber-stamped by member nations, would also help trade with the United States by extending indefinitely the right to use dual measurement in labeling in the metric and imperial systems.