Tag: beer

Beer Drinkers and Bone Raisers

Seth Anderson0 comment

Books and Beer

Apologies to ZZ Top for misappropriating their title

Researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, have found beer is a rich source of silicon and may help prevent osteoporosis, as dietary silicon is a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density.

These were the findings after researchers tested 100 commercial beers for silicon content and categorized the data according to beer style and source.

Previous research has suggested beer contained silicon but little was known about how silicon levels varied with the different types of beer and malting processes.

“We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer,” researcher Charles Bamforth said in a statement.

The study, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, found the beers’ silicon content ranged from 6.4 milligrams per liter to 56.5 mg per liter. The average person’s silicon intake each day is between 20 and 50 mgs.

The researchers found there was little change in the silicon content of barley during the malting process as most of the silicon in barley is in the husk, which is not affected greatly during malting.

They found pale ales showed the highest silicon content while non-alcoholic beers, light lagers and wheat beers had the least silicon.

[Click to continue reading Study toasts beer as being good for your bones | Reuters ]

House of Beer

So quaff a couple of pale ales this evening, for health reasons only.

I’m sure the real science is more complex and nuanced, but hey, beer! Billy Dee Williams would approve…

This Establishment is Billy Dee Williams Approved

Reading Around on March 24th through March 27th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected March 24th through March 27th:

  • Is Jon Stewart Our Ed Murrow? Maybe… – Mr. Stewart. Yes, he makes funny faces and starred in Death to Smoochy, but, along with Stephen Colbert, his ability to entertain is what lends him his authority in the first place. Think about it. Why should we care who this or that newspaper publisher endorses for president? Answer: we only care because we care about the editorial influence on the audience. Presidential candidates don’t go seeking the endorsement of high school newspapers because, well, dude, kids don’t vote. Stewart and Colbert have the audience that powerful people want to reach; yet at the same time, these two men do not participate in a pack mentality, and that’s what makes them politically invaluable (and at this point, irreplaceable).

  • The President Vs. the Press – The Daily Beast – There you have it. CNN wants emotions, theatrics, the stamping of feet, mano-a-mano anger, and outrage contests. This is a presidency defined by cable news food-fights and Maureen Dowd-style armchair psychoanalysis. Obama wants to “know what he’s talking about,” pick the best policy to achieve it, and explain it as calmly as he can to his country. … Take a look at the blogging of the news conference by the New York Times’ Helene Cooper and Jeff Zeleny: At 8:28, Cooper writes: “Finally! A break from the wonkish budget talk.” Eight minutes later, Zeleny adds, “At the half-way mark, Mr. Obama has yet to make much news.” In the meantime, Obama has been trying to explain, in part using the press and in part going over the heads of the press, why what he’s trying to do with his budget will address the source of their concern about their futures. Where’s the fun in that?

  • All Ears: Dancing with the Scars (Emotional Ones) – Photo Credit: Seth Anderson

  • Beer drinkers could purchase direct from local breweries under compromise plan | Texas Watchdog – Shiner beer photo by flickr user swanksalot, used via a Creative Commons license.

Reading Around on February 20th

swanksalot2 Comments

Some additional reading February 20th from 19:14 to 20:35:

  • So How Many Calories Are In That Beer Anyway? – A Good Beer Blog – * Guinness (4.1%) – 2000 ml equals a little under 840 calories. * Blue Moon (5.4%) – 2000 ml is around 1026 calories. * Anchor Porter (5.7%) – 2000ml equals 1180 calories. * Dragon Stout (6.8%) – 2000 ml equals 1240 calories. You can see where I am going with this. I feel like I am breaking some sort of guy rule. Some sort of unwritten law of the beer men. But we have to walk in this world in awareness. So you will not cringe when I note that one McDonalds Angus burger and medium fries is 950 calories or that the same number of calories in raw chopped red cabbage is found takes over 30 cups …which is like 3 bushels, right? You can handle this information. Because you are strong. Because you really prefer a six of Anchor Porter to 46 cups of raw chopped red cabbage.

  • Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA? – Last.FM might just be dead – I would stop using it

  • update: false! Good.

Reading Around on February 19th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected February 17th through February 19th:

  • CBS Falsely Portrays Stanford as Democratic Scandal – But as Public Citizen, Huffington Post, ABC News and Talking Points Memo all reported, Stanford and his Stanford Financial Group PAC contributed to politicians and political action committees of both parties (including $448,000 in soft money contributions from 2000 to 2001 alone) to advance his agenda of banking and money-laundering deregulation. Many others journeyed on Stanford's junkets to Antigua and elsewhere, prompting TPM to brand his company "a travel agent for Congress." (TPM has a slide show of one of those of Stanford getaways.)

    As it turns out, the list of Stanford beneficiaries is long – and bipartisan.

  • Remembering Gene – Roger Ebert's Journal – Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
  • TidBITS iPod & iPhone: iPhone to Add Location Logging? – Could the iPhone soon be able to track your location in the background as you walk around? A hint that such a capability is in the works at Apple comes from a programmer friend who spent some time spelunking around inside iPhoto '09, which shows traces of being able to associate such GPS log data with photos.
  • Daily Kos: Chocolate Covered Cotton – billmon – The fatal innovation…was the rise of so-called collateralized obligations, in which the payment streams from supposedly uniform pools of assets (say, for example, 30-year fixed prime mortgages issued in the first six months of 2006 to California borrowers) could be sliced and diced into different securities (known as tranches) each with different payment characteristics.

    This began as a tool for managing (or speculating on) changes in interest rates, which are a particular problem for mortgage lenders, since homeowners usually have the right to repay (i.e. refinance) their loan when rates fall, forcing lenders to put the money back out on the street at the new, lower rates. This means mortgage-backed securities can go down in value when rates fall as well as when they rise. By shielding some tranches from prepayments (in other words, by directing them to other tranches) the favored tranches are made less volatile and thus can be sold at a higher price and a lower yield.

  • An old habit dies… hard. « chuck.goolsbee.org – "I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

    I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period."

    I'm still using Eudora on three of our most used Macs (since 1995 probably -only 14 years), but the writing is on the wall. Have to check out Gyazmail.

  • Hands on: Drop.io's private, easy file sharing with a twist – Ars Technica – Sharing information online is getting more complex than it sometimes should be. If you want to share pictures, files, plain ideas, or even faxes with friends or businesses, you can try the old e-mail standby, but you may end up joining a social network, agree to a dense privacy policy, and then track down an app made by who-knows-who to get the job done. Even starting a simple blog usually involves more time than most users can afford‚ and more features than they'll ever need. Drop.io is an intriguing, but simple, new service that is part wiki, part file sharing, and part personal secretary, with an emphasis on privacy and ubiquitous access, requiring no signup or account activation.

    Upon visiting Drop.io—pronounced as a seamless single word: "drop-ee-o"—the site presents a basic elevator pitch about its services and a short form with which to get started uploading files.

  • Fat Tire Ale Downed Near Load Of Burgers – A Good Beer Blog – Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours. The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate…A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays. Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan… The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.
  • The Associated Press: Chimp owner begs police in 911 call to stop attack – Police said that the chimp was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp.

    In humans, Xanax can cause memory loss, lack of coordination, reduced sex drive and other side effects. It can also lead to aggression in people who were unstable to begin with, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

    "Xanax could have made him worse," if human studies are any indication, Coccaro said.

  • Facebook | Home – Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

    If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

  • Big Tuna – Chicago — Anthony 'Big Tuna' Accardo, reputed crime syndicate figure, and his wife are shown as they arrive at the St. Vincent Ferrer Church in suburban River Forest to attend wedding of their son Anthony Jr, who was married to the former Janet Hawley, 1961 Miss Utah. Many top gangland bosses and other underworld figures attended the wedding under the watchful eye of law enforcement agencies
  • Home | Recovery.gov – Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
  • George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking | The Loom | Discover Magazine – In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

    It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

  • Wonk Room » George Will Believes In Recycling – Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

    But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:

MillerCoors selects Chicago HQ

Seth Anderson0 comment

MillerCoors1 is moving headquarters from Milwaukee to Chicago:

A River never forgets
[Chicago River just south of Jackson]

MillerCoors announced Wednesday that it has signed a 15-year lease agreement for nearly 130,000 square feet of office space for its new headquarters location at 250 S. Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago.

In July, following the closing of a transaction to combine the U.S. and Puerto Rico operations of Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing Co. and Coors Brewing Company of Golden, Colo., the newly formed MillerCoors selected Chicago as the home city for its corporate headquarters.

MillerCoors selected the West Loop high-rise office building because of its “dynamic environment for employees and visitors, access to public transportation, green space, and surrounding amenities,” MillerCoors management said.

The new location provides a unique opportunity to establish MillerCoors identity as a beer company in downtown Chicago, MillerCoors chief executive officer Leo Kiely said.

“We are a beer company and you’ll know that as soon as you walk through the doors of our Chicago headquarters,” said Kiely. “The offices will showcase our brands and create a work environment that inspires our employees’ passion for beer.”

MillerCoors will be the largest tenant in the building housing nearly 400 employees on eight floors. The headquarters will house a majority of MillerCoors senior executives, as well as marketing, human resources, legal, finance, information technology and communications divisions.

Chicago-based architecture and interior design firm VOA has been selected for the interior design and construction of the headquarters.

As part of the project, VOA will develop sustainable and environmentally responsible designs.

[From MillerCoors selects Chicago headquarters site – The Business Journal of Milwaukee: ]

(h/t Colonel Tribune’s twitter feed)

Minor quibble, I consider the Chicago River the demarcation between the Loop and the West Loop, and 250 S. Wacker is on the east of the river, not the west.


View Larger Map

Chicago River Taxi is Yellow
[Chicago River, near Jackson and Wacker]

Footnotes:
  1. what a lame-o name [↩]

Brazilian Takeover Bid Imperils Bud Brand

Seth Anderson2 Comments

V is for Victory
[V is for Victory – click to embiggen]

Blah blah blah. Bud was so eager to wrap itself with the American flag, I have no sympathy for them now.

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — As Anheuser-Busch frets over how to ward off a takeover attempt from Brazilian-run InBev, the positioning of its flagship brand might just be the closest thing the No. 1 U.S. brewer has to a poison pill.

In fact, A-B distributors and agency executives who have worked on Bud and its sibling brands have grave doubts that a brand as overtly red, white and blue as Budweiser — and, by connection, its siblings — would remain credible with consumers under a Belgian owner operated by Brazilians.

“It could be a disaster,” said an executive at one of A-B’s agencies. “It’s all-American above all else — the Clydesdales, all the imagery. It’s an enormous challenge” if the brand becomes foreign-owned. And there’s a lot at stake: In 2007, $8.5 billion of A-B’s $16.7 billion in total global revenue came from sales of Bud-family brands in the U.S.

The situation is made even more ironic by the fact that A-B has in the past been willing to play the patriotism card against competitors. Earlier this decade, after Miller was acquired by South African Breweries and Coors merged with Canada-based Molson, A-B railed against their owners as “foreign interests” with a nativist strategy that would make Lou Dobbs blush.

On its websites and in point-of-sale materials, A-B ripped Miller and Coors for sending profits abroad and closing breweries here. “With over 80% of its employees outside of the United States, it’s hard to ignore a simple question: Does Miller reflect the American spirit?” said Budweiser’s official website at the time.

[From Brazilian Takeover Bid Imperils Bud Brand – Advertising Age – News]

American corporations like Anheuser-Busch who helped the Republicans get in power are now reaping their rewards – a dollar at near historic lows, and absentee corporate ownership in countries with stronger economies. Budweiser makes crappy beer to boot. They import a few quality brews (Bass Ale, for instance), but that has nothing to do with their brewing skills, just their distributing and political clout.