Friends and regular Bulletin readers will already be aware of my obsession with comfort foods. Almost all of my favorite foods fall into that category: frites, potato chips, bacon, shepherd’s pie, Monte Cristo sandwiches, cheese, peanut butter pie and pretty much anything fried. So a few weeks ago, when I got a call from my [...]

CNN is reporting that the World’s ‘Oldest Beer’ Found in Shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Åland Islands . The Ålands are an autonomous group of nearly 6,000 islands near Finland. The cargo ship is believed to have been sailing from Denmark, most likely Copenhagen, sometime between 1800 and 1830 possibly bound for St. Petersburg, [...]

Thursday’s ad is a second French poster with the title Bieres de la Meuse and the less well know of the two, because the other was done by the well-known artist Alphonse Mucha. It doesn’t quite have the majesty of the Mucha poster, but it’s very striking in its own right.

Did I miss a meeting? The malt beverages that are flavored with something else — fruit, essence of liquor or whatever — have been called by many names. Alcopop is always the one that first leaps to mind, even though that’s supposedly a derogatory term. Why? Apparently adding “pop” makes it for the kiddies, something [...]

Last week I shared some of the highlights from the Brewers Association ‘s bi-monthly Power Hour session that Ray Daniels tweeted about throughout the hour, whose topic was ” Craft Brewing & Mid-Year Category Sales Review .” As a BA member, I also was able to look at the presentation after the fact and — with the Brewers Association’s permission [...]

Wednesday’s ad is for another Swiss beer, Brauerei Zum Sternenberg, from Basel. With the tagline “Trinkt Sternenberg Bier” or drink Sternenberg beer, the artwork resembles an illustration from a children’s book. The “king” sits on a throne with brewer’s stars on each arm and there’s one behind him, too. Below the throne, a triple tap [...]

Tuesday’s ad is for the London brand Barclay’s Lager. Getty Images claims it’s from around 1900 but the artist, Tom Purvis , was born in 1888 meaning he’d have been 12 then, so it seems more likely it was actually later. The ad reminds me a bit of the Blues Brothers movie, the scene at the bar where [...]

On KQED Radio this morning on the local show Forum with Michael Krasney held a defacto debate on the proposed Alcohol Mitigation Fee between San Francisco Brewers Guild president Rich Higgins and city supervisor John Avalos, who introduced the ordinance to tax alcohol sold in San Francisco. Rich held his own as best he could, but Avalos is [...]

Here’s another interesting infographic that nicely shows both the production and consumption of beer worldwide. It’s interesting to see the relationship between the two for each nation side by side. You can then easily work out how much beer they export or how much beer is imported into each country. One caveat, it shows Europe [...]

There’s only two days left before the new NFL season of football begins on Thursday night. And as we’ve done for the past few years, there are two simple games for Bulletin readers to play, and plenty of room to fit as many as want to play (or at least the first 50 people anyway). [...]

Many different studies have shown that people who drink alcohol in moderation liver longer than binge drinkers and abstainers. Anti-alcohol groups, and especially AA, have petulantly insisted the reason that abstainers show up in the data as having shorter lifespans than moderate drinkers is because they are all former heavy drinkers who stopped drinking after the [...]

Monday’s ad is for the Swiss brand Löwenbräu. “Trinkt Furcher Zöwenbräu” is essentially “drink Swiss Löwenbräu.” It was done by the Swiss artist Otto Baumberger. I love the look of the mug.

Gizmodo has an interesting article on Friday speculating that Canned Beer Is The Future of Good Beer . Like most Gizmodo articles, it’s in-your-face opinionated (especially in the comments, where it turns decidedly loopy) but makes most of the points we all know about that are advantages for canned beer. I don’t believe cans will ever replace bottles entirely, [...]

The Turbo Tax Blog last month had an interesting post looking at the question of How Much Money Does The Government Make From Alcohol? It’s an overview, of course, and doesn’t include some of the dirty details that make alcohol the most taxed consumer good out there (though tobacco is pretty high, too), but there certainly is some [...]

NPR’s Science Friday had a show last week devoted to The Science of Smell . If you’ve ever taken tasting beer seriously, you know how important smell is to the flavor of beer (and everything else). Host Ira Flatow discussed Olfaction with research scientists Stuart Firestein and Donald Wilson. The show’s only a little under 18 minutes but [...]