The Image of the Invisible (Breweries)

Tired of those ugly "Closed" and "No longer brewing" entries cluttering up the regional indexes? Click the new checkbox in the upper left corner of the screen, near the words Show closed breweries. Mirabile dictu, they're gone! Unclick the checkbox to make those breweries visible again.

I've tested this new feature with Firefox 1.5, Netscape 8.1, and Internet Explorer 6.0. If it doesn't work with your browser, send me its name and version number, and I'll see if I can get it to work.

World's first beer health spa opens in Czech

From Zee News:

"A family brewery in the Czech Republic has opened the world’s first beer health centre in its cellar. The Chodovar Family brewery in Chodova Plana offers beer baths, beer massages and beer cosmetics." [...more...]

Malt, Hops, Water, and Yeast

As part of their Continuing Education Program, the Beer Judge Certification Program has made available some Power Point presentations that may be of interest to homebrewers and beer judges. They cover these subjects:

• The Malting and Extract Process (Briess Malt and Ingredients Co.) — How Briess malts barley and makes extract, the characteristics of the various types of malt



• Hop Quality, from the Field to the Brewer (HopUnion) — Growing and evaluating hops


• W.O.W. — Waters of the World (Kris England) — Summary of water types, filtration methods, and minerals


• The Meaning of Life According to Yeast (Wyeast) — How to make yeast happy, how to tell if it's happy, and the flavors it produces

They're massive files, and reading a PPT just isn't the same as attending the actual presentation, but there's lots of good information here nonetheless.

Russia

Well, I did it. I attacked Russia today. That is, I broke down the monolithic list according to oblast', okrug, kray, or respublik as appropriate.

Virtually all of the information came from Falling Rain's Directory of Cities and Towns in Russia. The problem is that a lot of towns in Russia share the same names, so I had to make some arbitrary assumptions when assigning them to a region. I have no doubt that I made dozens — hundreds? — of errors, so when you spot them, please let me know.

China

The list of Chinese breweries was getting pretty big, so I've broken it down by province. If you're familiar with the breweries in China, please take a look at the provincial listings and let me know if I've made any mistakes.

I'd like to do the same thing for Russia — the largest list on the site — but I don't have nearly enough information on each city's oblast' or okrug. Can you help? (Sławomir?)

have fun

RDS

Questions for You

I'm still straightening out what goes where with all this new "blog" stuff, along with the new site design, so I need to know what works best for you.

1. "What's New?" Is it best left on its own page (syndicated here), or as daily posts here in the blog?


2. Beer tasting notes. Useful or no?


3. Any ideas on what I could do to make the site easier to navigate? Easier to find what you're looking for?

Leave a comment or send an email and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

have fun
RDS

beermapping.com

Clicking on a "Map" link for a US brewery now sends you to Beermapping.com, which is a whole lot more useful than Mapquest because it also shows you all of the breweries nearby.

Beermapping.com is a magnificent tool that I wish I'd thought of. I'm using it right now to plan my trip to the Craft Brewers Conference in Seattle next month.