A passion for drinking on the job

Sure, it sounds cool. In fact, being a beer judge is cool. But no self-respecting competition organizer will expect any judge to handle 101 beers in a single day. Two words: palate fatigue. There's no way to even pretend to evaluate a beer subjectively after that many.

Colin Mallon is in no danger of being fired for drinking on the job, which is just as well considering he recently tasted 101 beers in six hours.



The impressive feat happened when Mr Mallon, 37, judged his first big beer competition an annual Wellington beer survey. Unlike wine tasters, beer judges must swallow each brew so they can get the full impact of its colour, smell and taste.

Read the whole (very misleading) story at stuff.co.nz.

U of Saskatchewan student completing PhD in how to save beer from going bad

I wasted my university education on computer science and astrophysics.

Monique Haakensen is not just another university student who claims to have spent her academic years occupied by beer.



Haakensen has helped discover three new methods of detecting beer-spoiling bacteria, including a DNA-based technique, that has big breweries around the globe hoisting pints in celebration.



Breweries usually have to keep batches of beer for two to three months to make sure they haven't spoiled before cases are shipped out on trucks to liquor stores, says Haakensen.



"What we've done here is, by using DNA methods, we can actually figure out in a matter of one to two days if that beer will spoil," Haakensen says.

Read the whole story at Yahoo! Canada News.

Beer straight from the kitchen counter

Not long after I started homebrewing nearly 20 years ago, I had an idea for a countertop machine that would brew beer. My machine never made it past the sketches-on-paper stage, but these guys have made theirs a reality:

Housing a complete brewery inside of a 2-foot by 8-foot kitchen counter, the NanoBrewMaster is compact, mobile, and more exciting than your everyday kitchen cupboard. From sterilization on through to beer at the tap, the brewing of beer is handled automatically by the onboard computer system.



In addition to self-cleaning, the system also recognizes when to heat and when to cool, insuring that a cool, refreshing home brew is waiting for you at the other end of the tap. Two 7.5-gallon containers allow for up to 15 gallons of beer per brewing cycle. Experiment with one, and stay traditional with the other.

Neat stuff. Read the whole story at CNET.

Beer lake freezes in German city

A busy intersection in the German city of Kassel turned into a lake of frozen beer when some 1,600 bottles smashed after poorly secured crates flew off a delivery truck, police said.

Read the whole story at ABC News (no, not that one, the other one). Thanks to Fark.com for the link.

Scientists No Closer to Curing Hangovers

With New Year's Day right around the corner, here's something to ponder:

They can put a man on the moon, the saying goes, but they can't come up with a decent hangover cure. Considering how hangovers have been afflicting humans since time immemorial, you'd think that finding a cure would be a major public health goal, right up there with clean water and female literacy.



Yet there's no war on hangovers, as there is with cancer. There's no multinational race to find the hangover gene. What's the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism working on, anyway?



If ever a Nobel Prize was merited, it would be for the team that finds a hangover cure.

Read the recommendations at LiveScience.com.

Germany in January

Our next trip: Bad Waldsee, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, January 10-16. A Google Earth map of my planned brewery visits is in the Travels section at beerme.com.

BrewCasted again!

Back in October, the BrewCast.NET crew came to Columbus and brewed our latest Impromptu Pale Ale. They came back a couple of weeks later after it was tapped, filled their growlers, went back to Lincoln and tasted it on their podcast.

This is the third time this year that Gottberg has been featured at BrewCast.NET; here are links to each episode:

• Episode 114 — Love Those Hops (14 Nov 2008)


• Episode 103 — Gottberg Is Fun In Columbus (28 Aug 2008)


• Episode 92 — Gotta Have Gottberg (13 June 2008)

Listen to their show, then take their advice and come drink my beer.