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Trouble brewing for beer makers

Small brewers from Australia to the US face the daunting prospect of tweaking their recipes or experimenting less with new brews thanks to a worldwide shortage of one key beer ingredient and rising prices for others.

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Beer Haiku Friday

Today's Beer Haiku just sums up my plans perfectly. It is called "Ahhhh" and is by Captain Hops.

Deep blue skies, cool breeze
long liquid lunch break on deck
you know work can wait

Glass Tip - The erstwhile Beer Haiku Daily

WHY YOU GET CROOK ON BEER

I thought posting this might be fun just to see what comments we got. Not sure if this was a joke posting or a serious one. Read and make up your own mind, and please post your comments.

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The number one reason is that you are drinking a beer made from an accelerated brewing process.

This is a practice carried out by the major breweries to make a brew in about ten days as opposed to the 30 days used by Craft Brewers and also Guinness.

How they do it is they use copious quantities of liquid sugar.

That’s why some people have big fat guts, shocking red noses, capillaries, jowls and die young. While other serious drinkers who drink naturally brewed beers are skinny and look healthy.

Doctors tell us that liquid sugar in bulk brewed beers is the main cause of hangovers which more specifically is dehydration in our systems and this not only leads to our feeling parched and having headaches, it also shrivels up our kidneys like walnuts, turns our liver into boot leather and it also causes diabetes and heart disease.

Then we die young, quite often lingering painful deaths.

But hang on; … Most of us enjoy a beer and we don’t want to get crook or die young??

Well drink a naturally brewed craft beer.

All brews from The West Coast Brewery DO NOT HAVE LIQUID SUGAR.

• West Coast Draught
• West Coast Black
• West Coast Classic Lager
• West Coast Pure Gold
• Green Fern Certified Organic
• Good Bastards Dark Ale
• Good Bastards Lager

GET INTO THE GOOD GROG, GET INTO WEST COAST BEER

http://www. good bastards. com/

Beer Haiku Fridays - the World Cup Edition

The Beer Haiku World Cup Disaster seemed appropriate for this week. It is by Gary O Johnson.

All Blacks lose to France
And Aussies lose to England
Chimay to forget

Glass Tip - Beer Haiku Daily

Final Salient Columns for 2007

Here are the final two Salient columns for the year. The first is my own personal beer awards for the best and worst of 2007:

Beers I wrote about too much this year
Flame – least deserving cult since Social Credit.
Mash – though it was the first ever beer review to mention Chuck Norris.
Budweiser – so many words on so little flavour.

The absolute last column compiled some highlights from the year:

There were many memorable metaphors including “the [Mount Street Café] balcony is nominally smoke-free but I saw more smoke there than the J-Day organizing committee watching a Bob Marley marathon” and “just like an emo’s poetry, beers tend to get darker in winter”. In this post-world cup world, the joke about “telling students where to drink can be a bit like telling the French how to surrender – it can feel just a little redundant” does not work.

Beer Haiku - Day Dreams

Chances are many of us have felt like Captain Hops when he penned this masterful Haiku Day Dreams

A beer with my lunch
takes me out of the rat race
for too short a time

Glass Tip - those clever poets at Beer Haiku Daily

Beerly Writing: Salient

This is the 600th post on the Real Beer blog and it contains two more beer columns from Salient.

The first is a report on the Brew NZ Beer Awards 2007:

The lovely city of Wellington recently hosted what is possibly the world’s most important awards ceremony. It had more artistic merit than the MTV Awards because Britney Spears did not attend, far less “perform”, and while there was all the pomp and ceremony of the Oscars, this event was thankfully a full 11 hours shorter. For many in attendance, the evening’s urbane Master of Ceremonies reminded them of a young Ryan Seacrest - if Ryan Seacrest had any talent.

The second is on American Beers:

The flavour is almost invisible, though as the beer warms up the taste becomes slightly chemical. There is so much rice in Bud that it is hard to know if you have bought a six pack or sushi box. Sure, if you can put a man on the moon I guess it is relatively simple to take all the flavour out of beer, but I’d question the point.

Beer News around the World

Some slightly off-beat news snippets from the world of beer today.

Nigerians' taste for Guinness outstrips Irish from Stuff:

[Guinness] sales in Britain fell 3 percent and in Ireland by 7 percent in the year to June, while Diageo's international region, which covers Africa and Asia, saw sales rise 15 percent. Nigeria pushed aside Ireland to be the beer's No 2 market after Britain.

Beer firms rapped over adverts from Talking Retail:

InBev UK – the firm behind Belgian beer brand Stella Artois – has been criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for implying that one family had brewed the lager for the past 600 years.

The watchdog has also rapped Miller Brands over an advert showing a roller-skating stuntman, which the ASA claimed would appeal to minors.

Will biofuel leave the poor hungry?

"If you start to fuel cars with crops," says Ed Matthew, "you are instantly putting the world's one billion starving people in competition with the world's one billion motorists. It's as simple as that."

Green groups and aid agencies cite biofuels as forming part of the "perfect storm" of poor harvests, rising oil prices and a surge in demand for food from China and India that are all pushing up the price of everything from pasta to a loaf of bread.

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Beerly Writing

From the Free Radical, I have the invididual freedom to reproduce this article about American beers:

This is not what I expect or want from the greatest nation on the planet. The country which invented muscle cars, cheese burgers, smart missiles and Pamela Anderson’s red swimsuit should not be represented by such timid brews. These are beers designed by committees with recipes written by accountants.

And from the Wellingtonian newspaper, I have permission to post this article on the Monteith's Wild Food Challenge:

That said, the pillow of potatoes still stole the show. They were rich, light and fluffy. It was like snogging an angel. Sure, the butter needed to get such a marvelous texture was probably peeling days off my life but it was completely worth it. As a card-carrying carnivore, I don’t usually talk about mashed potatoes in such a way.

Toast to Michael Jackson

It's Beer Haiku Time

In honor of the approaching SOBA Homebrew Championships, today's Beer Haiku is by Mark and is simply entitled Marriage?

Homemade beer? Who Knew?
Makes me so gosh darn happy.
Can I marry it?

Glass Tip - Beer Haiku Daily

Now that is what I call Salient material!

Salient columns aplenty today, with the first being on my favorite guilty beer secret, bus stop beers!

The big 500ml cans of very strong lager are sometimes dubbed “bus stop beers” because that is where they are frequently and usually furtively quaffed. Often concealed within the least effective form of surreptitious drinking camouflage (a brown paper bag has never fooled anyone), these super-lagers have a lower-class to no-class reputation even in their spiritual home of inner city England.

Then a radical shift in direction to Low-Carb beer:

A student drinking a light beer makes a bold statement. That statement is generally either, “I’m the designated driver, can we go already?” or “I don’t really like the taste of beer but I do enjoy going to the bathroom a lot!”

Uniquely, light beer has a poor reputation with both students and beer anoraks. The student body tends to deride it for its lack of alcoholic content while the anoraks lament the general absence of taste.

Finally, a column about proper beers - Pale Ales!

The quest for proper context was my excuse at least for eating gourmet hot dogs and watching the opening match of the NFL while sampling the first bottle of Emerson’s American Pale Ale (6 per cent). The star-spangled label would outrage Nick Kelly and Keith Locke - always a huge bonus. It pours a deep burnished gold which would not be out of place in Fort Knox.

This is a big, strong and independent beer with plenty of rich orange and grapefruit notes – like snogging a Californian fruit salad - before a unilaterally firm finish. The day this beer is released each September should be a public holiday. No one would really miss Labour Day.

Beer Tasting Results

The theme of the September Cellar Vate tasting was English beers:

The theme of the September Cellar Vate Beer tasting was English beer though there was one invader from Scotland. The beers selected demonstrated a number of current trends in British brewing including historic breweries under pressure, traditional recipes, centralization of ownership, the rise of organic beer and the creation of new styles designed to appeal to non-traditional beer drinkers.

The August Cellar Vate tasting was "All Hail Pale Ale, All Hail Pale Ale, All Hail Pale Ale!:

I just love the theme “all hail pale ale” and it has quickly become an annual tasting at the Cellar-Vate Beer Club. The August tasting saw a full house of 50 people try seven pale ales (a mix of traditional, IPA and APA) and the very rare smoked bock from Invercargill as a treat. There were two breweries making their debut and a special guest presenter!

There was also excellent tasting for the social club at Buddle Findlay:

Last week I ran a beer tasting in the panoramic boardroom of Buddle Findlay for their social club. The fantastic views of the Wellington harbor were matched only by the quality of food. Not many tastings these days serve chips AND peanuts! Thankfully, the snacks did not over shadow the awesome beer menu.

Beyond beer goggles: Drinking makes you deaf too

It's not clear why drinking may have this effect, but alcohol could either damage the auditory nerves or affect the brain's processing of sound, according to Upile's team.