Beer Living

Well folks I’m back. After a month or so of being incommunicado, I am back to regularly posting on an irregular basis.

In my time off I started experimenting in future viewing. I use a technique called, well it doesn’t really have a name, but beer is involved. And I saw some very interesting things.  One time I thought I caught a glimpse of very bad things happening in the year 2012.  I didn’t put too much faith in that vision as I also saw myself winning the Powerball lottery  last week.  But then today I saw this :

Anheuser-Busch expands Bud Light Platinum production

American brewer Anheuser-Busch is expanding the production of Bud Light Platinum to three breweries to meet the growing demand.

Anheuser-Busch North America zone president Luiz Edmond said trial and repeat purchases have been tremendous since the first ads aired during the Super Bowl, and while supplies were tight in the first few months, having to double the number breweries producing Bud Light Platinum is a great problem to have.

Bud Light Platinum is available nationally in cobalt blue 12oz glass bottles in six and 12 pack formats.

That news sounds bad enough, but then I saw the following  news blurb. At first glance the two stories appear to have very little in common.  Until the last line that is.

 
Archeologists in Central America have finally broken the language code for this Mayan tablet found in what was believed to be an ancient brewery.

According to the research team, the tablet details how the bad times will be upon us  when the beer turns blue and  tastes like monkey butt.

Since I can’t do much about either one,  I think I will  go have another beer……

I’m a bit late in posting this but tomorrow is the First Annual Sanford Pints n’ Paws Craft Beer Festival in Sanford (FL).   You still might be able to get in on the pre-sale tickets and save a few bucks.  Not a bad beer lineup and 50% of the proceeds go to pet related charities.

In addition to the tasty beer and food, there will be a pet contest as well.  Prizes for Best Trick, Best Howling,and Most Original Costume will be awarded.  I’m assuming those are the categories for the pets,  not their owners.

Since it is a pet friendly event, watch your step ….

Check out the event website for more information:  http://sanfordpintsandpaws.com/default.html

Unless you’ve been living in a hole you know that Groundhog Day took place on February 2nd.
This year the groundhog (Punxsutawney Phil ) saw his shadow which supposedly means 6 more weeks of winter.  Which got me to thinking (yes I was drinking a beer at the time). How in the heck did we come up with this tradition of forecasting the weather by having an animal look for its shadow ? So I put on my detective hat and looked for the answers.

My first question was why on February 2nd ? That seems like a somewhat arbitrary date. Why not February 1st or something.  Well it happens that February 2nd is exactly half way between the first day of winter and the first day of spring.  I’m not sure what happens in a leap year because that extra day probably screws up the calculations.

On to my next question. Why a groundhog ?  This took a bit more of research (and another beer). It turns out that  Germans had a tradition going back hundreds of years  where they would celebrate the half way point of winter by drinking beer (big surprise) and pulling a hedgehog out of a hole. If they saw its shadow it meant more winter.  Hedgehogs soon began to hate February 2nd.

Zoom forward a few hundred years to when the German colonists came to America. They  brought many of their traditions with them but when they went to grab a hedgehog on February 2nd , they came up short. It seems that the old world hedgehogs had somehow got the word out to their new world cousins and no hedgehogs could be found. So they looked for some other animal to play the shadow game with.  Enter the groundhog..

Here are some other Groundhog Day factoids:

A groundhog and a woodchuck are the same animal.  You know…How much ground could a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground.

Over the past 10 years, the rodent  groundhog/woodchuck has a 39% success rate in forecasting the weather. While that number sounds low, it is probably still ahead of most local television weather forecasters.

Punxsutawney Phil’s  full name is actually “Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinary.”

The name ‘woodchuck’ actually gets its name from the North American Indian legend of ‘Wojak’  The legend goes back hundreds of years ago to a bald headed woodchuck who liked lollipops.

For the other 364 days of the year, Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators and Weather Prophet Extraordinary lives in a climate controlled home in the town library. He enjoys reading mysteries and vegetarian cooking books.

In keeping with the February 2nd tradition, I snuck outside at 1:30  and looked for my shadow. I saw it.  From looking at my shadow I couldn’t tell if it meant more winter, but I could tell that I needed another beer.

And I’m not talking about the first beer of the Chinese New Year either. I am now back  home after my overseas business trip and I’m finally feeling better. My illness is on the way out (although one of my lungs is still partially collapsed) and I can sleep without coughing all night (much to the delight of The Beer Goddess). But the best part of feeling better ? I can taste beer and food again. Woo Hoooo!

It has been a rough 6 weeks. Of course I’ve drank beers in that time frame but I really could not taste them much. Occasionally a glimmer of hops would work their way through my taste system but that was somewhat rare. For the most part everything I drank tasted like water.  So I guess I had a case of the Bud flu.

I’m glad to be back to the Beer Living…….

In case you have noticed, updates to Beerliving have been non-existent for several weeks. And its probably going to be a few more weeks before I get back into the swing of regular (or even irregular) postings. As I write this, I’m overseas, in the middle of  a long business trip. I would love to be writing about the great beers I’m tasting, but I’m not tasting anything. Which brings me to the main reason I haven’t been posting. Since the holidays I have become the worlds biggest producer of mucus. Which means I can’t taste a damn thing.  I can see people physically cringe when my coughing attacks start. Little children  scurry away as I walk by them hacking up my lungs. The hotel staff where I’m staying at has starting calling me the coughing guy (but it has a nice ring to with the accent and all) So until I get my taste buds back and am feeling better  there ain’t (I resort to southernese when I’m sick) going to be much going on at Beerliving. This is the snoterator, signing off.

A couple of months ago (has it really been that long ago?) a very loyal reader of this blog  brought back a beer from Switzerland for me to try.  At the time I was in the middle of my Oktoberfest (with a K) beer marathon so I hid the beer safely in the back of my beer closet.  Recently I finally got a chance to try it.

The beer is Feldschlösschen Premium.  From Feldschlösschen Brewery in Switzerland. My Swiss contact  has said that Feldschlösschen means little field castle. I’m not sure if that means a little castle in a field, or a normal castle in a little field. Either way I guess it doesn’t matter.

This beer is in the Pilsner style and I have to say it was excellent. I can describe the mouth feel as smooooth.  Nice flavor as well.  Highly recommended.

The Feldschlösschen website isn’t in English (available languages are French, Italian, and German) so I couldn’t get a lot of information about the beer other than it has a 5.0 % abv.

Feldschlösschen Brewery was acquired by the Carlsberg Beer Group in 2000 and is the best known beer brand in Switzerland. It has been brewed at the Feldschlösschen brewery in Rheinfelden near Basel since 1876 and has been the leading Swiss beer brand for more than 100 years. I’m not sure what the leading Swiss beer brand was for the other 35 years.

In researching this Swiss company, I learned something new. Velcro. No, I knew what Velcro was before drinking this beer. I just always assumed it was invented by NASA or something. But no. It was actually invented in Switzerland in 1948.  A few other things invented by the Swiss : Milk Chocolate (adding condensed milk to sweeten the bitterness of chocolate), the Swiss Army Knife (Great naming job on that one!), Bank Secrecy, and of course, holes in cheese.

Again a special thanks goes out to my Swiss undercover agent for bringing me this beer. Maybe on your next trip you can bring a larger suitcase