Do you feel like a rebel when you have a breakfast beer? Well, you are in good company with distinguished patrons like George Washington and William Shakespeare who felt beer is a great way to start the day. Having a breakfast beer dates back to the Mesopotamians and has continued through the modern age. Pairing a beer with a breakfast is quite easy. For a bacon and eggs breakfast, consider trying a Rogue Chipotle Ale (Oregon) or a Founder’s Breakfast Stout (Michigan). You have a lot of great choices and remember that you are keeping an age old tradidtion going.

Some other beers that are just right for breakfast:
Imperial Java Stout, Santa Fe Brewing Company (New Mexico)
Oatmeal Stout, Breckenridge Brewery (Colorado)
Moa Breakfast, Moa Brewing Company (New Zealand)

Cheers!

Everything you wanted to know about the very many varieties of beer but did not know how to ask.

The Phoenix Ale Brewery

Camelback India Pale Ale (IPA)

This is the first of The Phoeinx Ale Brewery’s ‘phresh brewed ales’ that I tasted and right away noticed their simple yet distinct logo with a familiar feel to another new microbrewery where I grew up, Lake Bluff Brewing Company. Do most city named breweries go for a simple logo to keep the focus on the city name + beer? As far as the Camelback IPA goes, it is really not a true IPA in taste as much as it is a strong ale. It doesn’t have that hoppy, bitter bite that I have grow to love and set as a basis for rating IPAs. Even though it is not a hoppy IPA, it is still a good beer and pretty tasty.

My first tasting of this beer was at The Great Arizona Beer Festival on tap. This testing was in the bottle and after a familiarity with the label beer and the label, I was happy to see a bomber size bottle of Camelback IPA at the Arizona Diamondbacks game. Nice work Phoenix Ale Brewery with your distribution success and leveraging a great AZ landmark and immortalizing it in a beer. It makes me feel good about drinking local beer!

Overall, Camelback IPA is like a pale ale with more kick yet wanted to to have smoother upfront taste and finish, like a scotch ale (think Kiltlifter by Four Peaks). At 6.1% alcohol, it feels closer to an IPA on the buzz-factor. If you venture to sample more beers by PHX Ale Brewery, give their Frenzy a try, an unfiltered Ale. It is a signature ‘unfiltered’ beer for them.

The question has to be asked, “What about women…do women get smarter drinking beer too?”

Article by Corky Siemaszko (New York Daily News)

This is exactly what you want to hear being Friday if you plan on having some adult beverages this weekend. A study from the University of Illinois in Chicago has found that men that have drunk a few beers were better at solving brainteasers than sober counterparts. The researchers invented their own bar game to perform the study.

The game gave each of the 40 men three words and then told them to come up with a fourth word that fits the pattern. One example of the question that might’ve been asked in the game is being offered words such as blue, cottage, Swiss, and then coming up with cheese. In the study, half the players drank 2 pints of beer, and the other half got none.

The study found that those who had drunk the beer solved 40% more of the problems than their sober opponents. The men who drank beer finished the problems quicker than sober players as well with the typical drinker needing 12 seconds and the non-drinker needing 15.5 seconds. The results of the study are interesting because most people think beer slows thinking. Read the full article via NYDailyNews.

Looking for more Beer Tips?

“The spontaneously hip beer, Pabst Blue Ribbon, is loved by all…pictured a group of duck hunters celebrating a successful outing with their favorite beer.”

On a July afternoon, Evan and Daren Metropoulos, the new owners of Pabst Brewing, showed up at the lounge on the 35th floor of the Mandarin Oriental in midtown Manhattan. They had come to discuss their plans for Pabst, which their father and co-owner, C. Dean Metropoulos, bought in May for about $250 million.

The Oriental does not serve Pabst Blue Ribbon, the company’s flagship brew, so the brothers ordered a lemonade and an iced tea. A hotel like the Mandarin may seem an unlikely meeting place for the owners of a beer that has long traded on its working-class image—the Lutz Tavern, a dive in Portland, Ore., is more like it, where 16-ounce tallboys go for $1.75. But the Metropoulos brothers were very much at home. They were passing through on their way to a wedding in Rhinebeck, N.Y., of an old friend from Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where they have summered since they were boys.

Evan, 29, divides his time between Miami Beach, Los Angeles, and New York City. Daren, 27, lives in Los Angeles, in Hugh Hefner’s old residence, a 7,300-square-foot English manor house he recently bought for $18 million.

Evan, in a green polo shirt and gold necklace, has a generous build and gregarious manner. Ideas for the future of Pabst’s portfolio of brands spilled out of him in an entrepreneurial stream of consciousness. Daren, who occasionally interrupted, was in a navy blazer and button-down shirt. He is narrower, quieter, and cleaner shaven than his effusive brother. Evan had been thinking about Red White & Blue beer, one of the company’s roughly two dozen defunct brands, which they hope to revive.

“What if we made that the military beer?” asked Evan. “What if we gave a huge portion of the proceeds to military charities—a grassroots program with military families? Why shouldn’t Red White & Blue be the absolute American beer for the American soldier? We’ll bring, you know, the Rotary Club, the veterans.” “To help collaborate and get involved,” added Daren.

“To support our troops,” Evan continued. “We could develop a whole beer brand around our troops. So that when you see Red White & Blue at your barbecue, you know that money’s supporting people who have died for our country. Those are ways that Budweiser will never be able to relate to. They’re not American, like us.” “This is an American company serving the American people,” noted Daren.

Evan began to get worked up, saying: “If you knew that 25 percent of your proceeds from Red White & Blue Beer were going to support these charities, then shame on you for drinking Bud Light! What the hell are you drinking that for? To support some foreigners?”

The brothers went on to lay out the Metropoulos strategy—a series of grassroots campaigns targeting regional markets. Celebrities, musicians, and local festivals would figure prominently. Lone Star, their Texas label, might sponsor rodeo riders. Primo, a Hawaiian beer, might build relationships with big-wave surfers. These campaigns would be supported by their father’s knack for winning over distributors, as well as new product and flavor launches to build out Pabst’s portfolio of brands.

Not present that evening, but central to the plans, was their father, 64, a billionaire known as “Mr. Shelf Space” for his ability to boost the sales of supermarket brands. The senior Metropoulos started out with a feta cheese business in Vermont and has established a long record of turning around names like Bumble Bee Tuna, Perrier-Jouët, Chef Boyardee, Duncan Hines, Aunt Jemima, Vlasic Pickles, Swanson frozen dinners, and Ghirardelli Chocolate. He bought Pabst from the charitable trust of Paul Kalmanovitz, the company’s late owner, acquiring a trove of musty American beer brands, among them Colt 45, Old Milwaukee, Primo, Rainier, Schaefer, Stroh’s, Schlitz, Schmidt, Lone Star, National Bohemian, and the flagship, Pabst Blue Ribbon. The company, based in Woodbridge, Ill., has about 200 employees and more than 80 trademarks and 42 beer brands, fewer than half of which are active.

Read the reast of the story by By Matt Schwartz in Businessweek: http://bit.ly/ho1ILz

Read “Move Over Budweiser – Pabst Blue Ribbon is the New Low Cost, Drinking Man’s Beer” – http://bit.ly/f2NHPY

watch the beer demo at the end……it has sound!!

Police are warning all men who frequent clubs, parties & local pubs to be alert and stay cautious when offered a drink by any woman.

Many females use a date-rape-drug on the market called ‘ Beer’ .

The drug is found in liquid form and is available anywhere. It comes in bottles, cans, or from taps and in large kegs. 

Beer is used by female sexual predators at parties and bars to persuade their male victims to go home and sleep with them.

A woman needs only to get a guy to consume a few units of Beer and then simply ask him home for no-strings-attached sex.

Men are rendered helpless against this approach. After several Beers , men will often succumb to the desires to sleep with horrific looking women to whom they would never normally be attracted.

After drinking Beer , men often awaken with only hazy memories of exactly what happened to them the night before, often with just a vague feeling that ‘something bad’ occurred.

At other times these unfortunate men are swindled out of their life’s savings, in a familiar scam known as ‘a relationship’. In extreme cases, the female may even be shrewd enough to entrap the unsuspecting male into a longer-term form of servitude and punishment referred to as ‘marriage’.

Men are much more susceptible to this scam after Beer is administered and sex is offered by the predatory females. 

Please forward this warning to every male you know.

If you fall victim to this ‘ Beer’ scam and the women administering it, there are male support groups where you can discuss the details of your shocking encounter with similarly victimized men.

For the support group nearest you, just look up ‘Golf Courses‘ in the phone book.

For a video to see how Beer works click below: 

click here - Beer Demo

Now that your liver has just about recovered from St. Patrick’s Day, we have Cinco de Mayo around the corner. Another great reason to gather in bars and drink beer. Just in case you need to recoup your beer prowess because you ordered a Smithwick’s on St. Paddy’s Day and pronounced the ‘W’ vs. the proper annunciation that looks like Smidicks, here is your chance to get back your street cred on beer. To look like an expert on Mexican Beers on Cinco de Mayo, it is only fitting to sample the best from Mexico in advance. After all, perfect practice makes perfect. Therefore, my recommendations for the best Mexican beers are:

Carta Blanca (Can you find the vintage bottles with the bottle opener built into the bottom of the bottle?)

Modelo (Negro and Especial)

Bohemia

Pacifico

Tecate (in a can…see below)

Dos Equis (Stay thirsty my friends!)

Note Corona is not listed but if you want a decent light Mexican beer, Corona Light is not bad. As for the fruit additive (limes), the only combo that must be tries as described below:

Get a Tecate in a can…cut a lime in half and squeeze the juice in the beer and on top so that their is a layer of lime juice on the top of the can…then take salt and shake it on the top of the can in the lime juice. This action can be repeated until the beer is empty. This way of drinking Tecate was introduced to me in Mexico playing golf in Juarez Mexico on Compestre Golf Course. This is one of the better course in Juarez and caddies are required. Before you get your caddie selection, the caddies place wagers on who is the best golfer in the foursome by reviewing the golf clubs, golf bag and player. I was not tuned in on where I stood in the pecking order but I do know that the $2 Tecates were being pushed on be and I was not turning them away. How the caddies served them up for us was cracking open the Tecate, using half a lime and a lime press to squeeze the lime juice into the can and then giving salt packs to add on top as needed. This being my first experience with drinking Tecate like this, I found that I prefer Tecate in a can now and do recreate the Jaurez drinking experience with each can. But as for adding the lime in other Mexican beers, I typically decline unless it is a Corona since this is my least favorite of the Mexican beers…and the whole rumor of why Coronas are filled at varying levels because the brew-makers are pissing in the beer helps to reinforce the lime addition to a Corona.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I have to admit to being a Budweiser drinker since earlier than I was legal to drink and have been loyal to the brand up until now. However, most recently, I have found a new loyalty to the “every day, drinking man’s beer”. Unfortunately for me, light beer is not an option…not a fan. So what makes me switch from a staple beer like Budweiser to a new brand? Read on…

Budweiser is still an option and, of course, if you are offering, I will accept. However, when it is my dollar on the line, Pabst Blue Ribbon has become my favorite of the low cost, quantity based beers of choice. Here are my top three reasons why, not in any particular order:

1. Pabst tastes better than Budweiser
2. Pabst gets the bitch placement when it comes to SKUs and shelf space in retail. It is placed with the lower cost beers (Busch, Milwaukee’s Best “The Beast”, Meister Brau, Ice House, etc). The cheap version of Pabst is Red, White and Blue (not than you could ever find it) but why the lower class status right out of the gate?
3. If you buy bottles, you can collect the bottle tops and have a deck of cards to add a whole new dimension to playing cards.

What is even more interesting is the stigma that comes along with Pabst. Offer someone a Pabst Blue Ribbon and they think you are slummin’ and trying to drag them down with you. Budweiser does not get the same bad rap. Force a Pabst on them and you get a 50/50 chance that they will even drink it. Come on. This goes back to the fact that sometimes perception is reality.

So what is the solution? Let’s get a blind taste test going with Budweiser, Miller and Pabst and may the best low cost, drinking man’s beer win!

Men’s Journal just did a piece on the top 5 beer towns. Talk about an obvious list: New York, Chicago and Portland. They also include San Diego and Philadelphia to complete their top 5 list. Where is any town in Wisconsin, especially Milwaukee and if you are going to just name the obvious or the big cities, how about San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Denver?

It gets even worse…the #1 beer city is San Diego but they do not mention arguable one of the best beers made, Stone Brewing Company (Escondido, CA). It makes you wonder what these beer drinking virgins based their results on. They claim it is quality vs. quantity but how to you not mention Stone in relation to San Diego.

Let’s have some fun and name the best towns to bar hop (pub crawls) and tie one on. I am biased growing up in the Chicago area but her it is:

1. Chicago – There are too many great neighborhoods in the Chicago area; Lincoln Park, Wrigleyville, Wicker Park, Rush and Division and Bucktown, to name a few and depending on the type of crowd you are with.
2. Madison – This town knows how to party and State Street it the ultimate pub crawl experience.
3. Denver – LoDo area is a killer bar hopping area.
4. Seattle – I have always enjoyed hitting Kell’s to start things off right.
5. San Diego (Gas Lamp District) – Recommended approach…appetizer and beer hopping all night long.
6. Portland (it would be in the top 5 but I have not been there…just lived the experience through friends (pretty lame I know)

I have lost my creativity to say more. It could be from a lack of beer or a hangover cure.