Beer News (Feb. 10–17)

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Graphic by John Weerts. (I taught him how to homebrew. So if you ever meet him at a homebrew event, that’s my fault.)

I’ll start this week’s news wrap up with a reminder that there are dangers to brewing. In Houston, a fermenter ruptured during a tour of Franconia Brewing. (Note: there is NSFW language on embedded video.) Homebrewers should keep an eye on airlocks and blowoff tubes to ensure they don’t get blocked. Many a homebrewer has had to mop their ceiling when a fermentation bucket lid has blown off after the airlock got plugged. Worse things can result if this happens in a glass carboy. Brew safely.

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Beer News (Jan. 11–18)

There are scads of  “best beers in the world” lists out there. You’ve probably seen and disagreed with many. Here’s a top 5 beers in the world list that almost everyone agrees with. Turning to science, archaeologists pillage some Viking graves, then make themselves useful by formulating a reconstruction of ancient Scandinavian grog. (Dogfish Head brews a version of it.) Speaking of things Nordic, remember that whale beer (from last week’s news compilation)? Well, forget it, you can’t drink it.

 

Football!

In Denver, a brewery makes a playoff beer . . . and now you can’t get it. Speaking of not getting it, here’s a story on what Peyton Manning likes to drink

 

Not Football

If you want something to do besides brewing, you can put your creative impulses to work and make a film for New Belgium. Or, you could take a free Chemistry of Beer course online. (It’s already started, but you’ll catch up.) And finally, Stone’s Greg Koch is taking a sabbatical to go off the communications grid. First step? Alert the media.

 

And finally, here’s how hipsters order beer:

This Week’s Beer News (January 6–11, 2014)

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St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts. Home of the Spencer brewery, the first Trappist brewery in the US. (Photo by John Phelan, via Wikipedia, under Creation Commons license.)

The United States is poised to get its first Trappist brewery. The brothers at St. Joseph’s abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts are brewing and Spencer Trappist Ale and is due out this week. Meanwhile, in Iceland, a brewery is coming under fire for releasing a beer brewed with whale meat.

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