Friday, November 27, 2009

Ethanol Energizes Enterprise Engines

Thanks to Brookston Beer Bulletin for the inside scoop on the engineering decks of the Enterprise.




If you’re like me, you love what I call “brewery porn,” which is photos of brewing equipment either installed or by themselves. So when I watched the film reboot of Star Trek, I was convinced that portions of the movie — the engineering deck — were filmed inside a large brewery. Sitting in the darkened theater back in May, I remember thinking it looked a lot like Anheuser-Busch’s brewery in Fort Collins. But I forgot about it until last night, when I re-watched the film on DVD. It turns out I was half-right. It was filmed in a large Anheuser-Busch brewery, but it was the one in Van Nuys, California (which in retrospect makes sense, since it’s closer to Hollywood).


Read lots more and see the pictures at Brookston Beer Bulletin.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Oberschwaben 4

We're leaving Sunday afternoon for this year's fourth trip to Oberschwaben. Here's the itinerary:





Follow along on the Google Earth map.

A new look for the site

I just uploaded a new version of Beer Me! this afternoon. (We'll call it version 3.1.) Although quite a bit of the underlying code is different, the changes are mainly cosmetic.



Anyway, let me know if you find broken links or anything that doesn't work the way it should. Thanks!

Monday, November 23, 2009

A beer a day for 10,000 days

He's got a 21-year head start, but I'm catching up quick! I should reach 10,000 different beers on December 28, 2018.




The first was Dinkel Acker.



Dale Van Wieren of Lansdale, Montgomery County, cracked open the dark German lager on March 19, 1971, wrote its name in a notebook, poured himself a glass and put the bottle on a shelf.



The next was Fix, a Greek beer, then, San Miguel from the Philippines.



And so it went, year after year, shelf by shelf, from one room to the next and out into the garage - more than 7,200 bottles plus hundreds more drafts enjoyed in brewpubs and taverns, each meticulously entered into a notebook.



No. 10,000 will be tomorrow.



That's when Sly Fox Brewery & Restaurant, in Phoenixville, will honor the prolific suds-sipper with a ceremonial tapping of the specially made Dale's 10K Brew.


Congratulations to Dale! You can read his whole story at the Philadelphia Daily News.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Brass Monkeys fill the Lucky Bucket

Kevin and Maria from the Brass Monkey Sports Bar organized a tour of Lucky Bucket Brewing last night, and a good time was had by all.




Lucky Bucket Brewing and Sòlas Distillery, La Vista, Nebraska



Zac Triemert explains the still



Lucky Bucket's 20-barrel brewhouse



Sòlas Distillery



Bottling Lucky Bucket Lager



Jason Payne wraps a pallet of Lucky Bucket Lager cases



Lucky Bucket Certified Evil lurks in the wood



Lucky Bucket's 120-gallon hopback



Zac explains the brewhouse



Sòlas vodka and rum labels



Lucky Bucket's brewer's office



Standing in line for some Certified Evil



Thanks to Kevin and Maria and Zac for a great time!

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

"Beer Me!" on Facebook

The "Beer Me!" Blog is now available on Facebook. The daily list of site updates will appear there too, once I write the code.



Befriend me!

Sunday, November 15, 2009

"Beer Me!" mobile app submitted to Palm

A while back, I asked for volunteers to test my "Beer Me! mobile" app for the Palm Pre. Today, I submitted version 1.0.0 to the Palm App Catalog. With luck, I'll sell a few copies; in any event, I'll let you know what they say.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Hindenburg airship beer auctioned

A new kind of smoked beer...?




A blackened bottle of beer found in the wreck of the Hindenburg zeppelin is expected to fetch thousands of pounds at auction.



The bottle was found by a fire-fighter cleaning up the American airfield where the German airship exploded in 1937.



The bottle will be the most expensive ever bought if it meets its estimated price of £5,000 ($8,337) on Saturday.


Read the whole story at BBC News.

Friday, November 6, 2009

4 Things H.P. Lovecraft Taught Me About Barleywines

John Schuff of BrewCast.NET shares some recently-found wisdom.




4 Things H.P. Lovecraft Taught Me About Barleywines



1. Some Things Are Best Left Sleeping

2. Cold Can Take The Life Out Of Things

3. Strength Without Finesse Is A Monster

4. Strength With Finesse Is Even Scarier Than A Monster


To find out just how those points relate to beer, you'll have to read John's article.



Cthulhu fhtagn.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Home from Dublin

Yesterday: Last day in Dublin



(Warning: there is virtually no beer-related information in this article.)



Hey, Delta! You suck.



Friday morning, 24 hours before our 8:20am Saturday flight, I printed our boarding passes. Exit row seats from Dublin to JFK. First class upgrade from JFK to Cincinnati. Exit row seats from Cincinnati to Omaha. Not perfect, but comfortable.



Saturday morning, checking in at the Dublin airport, the Delta agent handed us new boarding passes, saying that there had been equipment changes on the first two legs. No more exit row to JFK. No more first class to CVG. They didn't have Paris and me sitting next to each other anymore. And she said she couldn't do anything about that; we'd have to wait until we got to JFK.



We got to JFK not long before our next flight was supposed to be boarding. The agent there said there was nothing he could do. This did not sit well with Paris, who has flown 150,000 miles with Delta this year, and whose so-called "Elite" status entitles her to better treatment. After some discussion, two adjacent seats magically became available.



We boarded, a bit later than scheduled. The plane was full except for one seat. We sat at the gate for twenty minutes. We were told that we were waiting for a Delta crew member to arrive from LaGuardia, who needed to be on this flight to commute to another flight. We waited another twenty minutes. We were told that the commuting Delta crew member wasn't coming after all. We backed away from the gate.



Let me emphasize this: they held a flight full of paying customers for a Delta employee, who never actually arrived.



The airport was operating on only one runway because of high winds, and we were fifteenth in line. After thirty minutes, we reached the number one position. The pilot announced that ATC had closed our departure corridor, so we had to pull out of line and wait five or ten minutes for it to reopen. We finally took off about an hour and a half behind schedule.



Arriving in Cincinnati, we — and everybody else on the flight — found that we had missed our connection to Omaha by twenty minutes.



Let me emphasize this: they held a flight full of paying customers for a Delta employee, but they did not hold the connecting flights for those same paying customers.



Delta put us up in a hotel and gave us each $21 in meal vouchers. The gate agent was friendly and apologetic, and she told us we could go relax in the Crown Room Lounge before heading the the hotel. Upon entering the Crown Room Lounge, a phenomenally snotty woman told us that we had "no authority to be here", and she would have to track down the person who had supposedly given us that authority. After a few minutes of her attitude, we said the hell with it and went to the hotel. Besides, all they had was industrial yellow beer.



They rebooked us to Omaha via Atlanta first thing Sunday morning. Those flights ran a little late (and they didn't even bother to tell us about the available first-class upgrades) but we did make it home in the end.



Look, I understand weather delays and equipment delays. But it's damned irresponsible and insulting for them to delay the flight for one of their own, and not offer the same courtesy to us who pay the bills. And the incompetence and arrogance with which they handled the situation is inexcusable.



I'll have to look back through my past travel notes, but I don't remember Northwest ever treating us this poorly. If this is the service we can expect from "the new Delta", I'm going to have to find some other way to get around.



Hey, Delta! You suck. Thanks for fucking up our first wedding anniversary.