Waiting on Cans: Beer writer and Instagram champ Josh Bernstein hit the pages of the New York Times this week to cover the increasing practice of beer lovers (and mules) waiting in epic lines for limited beer releases. From a man camping out overnight in a McDonald’s parking lot across from Other Half to the breweries scrambling to keep things civil, this scarce market is unique but vaguely threatening. For the record, your author has never been on one of those lines, but he did wait several hours for the seventh Harry Potter book.
Beer Stats: A Harris Poll published this week found that beer is still the number one choice of regular drinkers in the United States. 38% of respondents chose beer as their primary drink, beating out wine at 31% and liquor at 28%. Unfortunately, the report did not comment on what qualified “regular” drinkers, or speculate on whether “super” drinkers may exist. We feel a Marvel series coming on!
The Brooklyn Bridge Gets Cooler: Recent reports have shown that the Brooklyn Bridge was originally designed and used with massive wine cellars in its foundation, making the already iconic bridge even cooler. Unfortunately, the spaces have fallen into disuse or storage over the years, which we can all agree is kind of lame. With some grassroots organizing and a little luck, one day we could all live in a world with ragers under the bridge. Or at least, a cool secret society. We’re not that picky.
Cheers to Laura Bell: Laura Bell was promoted to CEO of Bell’s Brewery this week, while founder Larry Bell will continue on as president and head of several special projects. Laura is a second-generation owner and has worked for the brewery since her years taking on odd jobs as a child through her more recent history in almost every department of the brewery. We wish the best of luck to Laura, and raise a can of Two Hearted in her honor.
Hooch At Home: A new device on the market called Alchema is poised to revolutionize both food waste by turning old fruit and vegetables into booze instead. The product promises to convert unwanted or suspicious foodstuffs, combine them and ferment them with ease into a completely untested variant on, well, toilet wine. The idea sounds terrific, but we’d like to see you try it before we go running bodega bananas through the system.
Friday Geekery: Beer Goddesses: We’ll leave you here with a handy round up of the many ancient goddesses directly impacting beer. Casual drinkers may only need to know these for bar trivia, but any homebrewer who has dealt with a stuck sparge or sudden siphon failure knows that the more beings you can invoke for a quick fix, the better.