Shiner light on me

Today is National Bock Day, a day to celebrate bock beer. And, not to go all Texan on you but just to brag a little, Shiner Bock was, before microbrews took hold, the best beer to come out of that state.

It's still really good, and I still haven't tasted any other beer from the Spoetzl brewery that tastes as good.

According to Wikipedia,

Spoetzl was founded in 1909, and claims to be the oldest independent brewery in Texas. A group of businessmen incorporated Shiner Brewing Association and placed Herman Weiss in as the company's first brewmaster. In 1914 a German immigrant brewer named Kosmas (or Kosmos) Spoetzl co-leased with Oswald Petzold with an option to buy in 1915. Spoetzl had attended brewmaster's school and apprenticed for three years in Germany, worked for eight years at the Pyramids Brewery in Cairo, Egypt, and then worked in Canada. He moved to San Antonio in search of a better climate for his health, bringing with him a family recipe for a Bavarian beer made from malted barley and hops.

Underrated Mexican beers

Maybe the title of this post should be "Under-distributed Mexican beers" - because those of us who have tasted them have enjoyed them, but we find few other beer lovers who have any idea what we are talking about.

But there's new hope for a more widespread distribution of Noche Buena (my favorite Christmas beer, with the little poinsettia on the label) and Indio (Jim's favorite that he had feared had passed into oblivion): Heineken is buying up their parent company, Femsa (see the New York Times story, here).

Or will the corporate gorilla just focus on two or three most profitable brands and ditch the rest, so that even in Mexico we will be deprived of our favorite brews? Time will tell.

East-West brewfest

Jay R. Brooks (Brooks on Beer) had an interesting article on a collaboration of two of my favorite beers: Sierra Nevada and Dogfish Ale:

Collaboration beers are the epitome of the mythic win-win. Two or more brewers share their knowledge, stretch their creative muscles and create a beer that's usually greater than the sum of its parts. And beer lovers are treated to a special, limited edition beer that is usually made just once.
One of the most recent collaborations was between Sierra Nevada Brewing and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. The pair embodies the very notion of opposites. One is West Coast — Chico — while the other is from Delaware. Sierra Nevada is one of the largest craft breweries in the country. Dogfish Head is considerably smaller. And while Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head's owner, has done countless collaboration beers, this is Sierra Nevada's first.
Calagione and Ken Grossman, Sierra Nevada's founder, have known one another for several years. They both served on the board of the Brewers Association, a trade organization that works on behalf of smaller breweries. Late one night — over a few beers, naturally — Grossman suggested the two create a beer together, using ingredients from their respective family farms and breweries to make the beer more personally meaningful.
Life and Limb
The beer was dubbed "Life and Limb," a nod to both the interconnections of the craft beer world and to family trees — both Sierra Nevada and Dogfish Head are family-owned and run. And while a children's illustrator did a beautiful label evoking those themes, where it really came together was in the beer itself.
A blend of their two house yeasts was used, along with maple syrup from Calagione's father's Massachusetts farm and barley from Sierra Nevada (the same barley used to create their recent Estate Brewers Harvest Ale.) They also used birch syrup in the beer, and they believe this may be the first time it's ever been used in brewing.
The result is a strong, dark beer that defies categorization. It's 10.5 percent alcohol by volume, or a.b.v., and black as a starless night. It's also rich and slightly sweet, from the maple syrup, no doubt. Despite being so strong, it's quite delicate and complex. Its strength is well hidden by that complexity, making it a dangerous beer to quaff. This is a beer made to sip and share.
Available now on draft, beginning this week, 24-oz. bottles of Life and Limb will be available throughout the country, though in very limited quantities.

Reach Jay R. Brooks at BrooksOnBeer@gmail.com. Read more by Brooks at www.ibabuzz.com/bottomsup/

To wine, to life

From an undisclosed iPhone deep in the Upper West Side comes this bit of cheery news:

Half a glass of wine a day may add five years to your life, a new study suggests. Drink beer, and you’ll live only 2 1/2 years longer.

Dutch researchers followed 1,373 men for more than four decades, noting their eating and drinking habits. Men who had about 20 grams of alcohol daily -- equivalent to a half a glass of wine -- had 2 1/2 years added to their life expectancy at age 50, compared with men who didn’t drink at all, according to the research published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Men who consumed only wine had twice as much added longevity.

Light alcohol intake was linked to lower cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and overall mortality in the study. Researchers had known that moderate drinking is tied to a lower risk of heart disease, possibly because of an increase in high density lipoprotein or so-called good cholesterol as well as a reduction in platelet clumping, making it more unlikely for clots to form. It is the first study to show that one kind of alcohol is superior to others in prolonging life, the researchers said.

“In this study, 70 percent of all wine consumed was red wine,” the researchers, led by Marinette Streppel of the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, said in the paper. “This suggests that the cardioprotective effect of wine could be due to a protective effect of polyphenol compounds in red wine, but other explanations cannot be ruled out.”

Polyphenols are chemical substances found in plants such as tannins and flavonoids.

The research, dubbed Zutphen Study after the Dutch town from which the participants were recruited, followed men born between 1900 and 1920 and examined them several times between 1960 and 2000.

To contact the reporter on this story: Eva von Schaper in Munich at evonschaper@bloomberg.net.

To which I add: Salud!