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Stephanie View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Stephanie Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Did you know?
    Posted: May/18/2006 at 10:55

There are more than 20,000 brands of beer

Worldwide, 20,000 brands of beer are brewed brewed in 180 styles, from ales, lagers, pilsner and stouts to bitters, cream ales and iced beers.

Beer has been a popular beverage for a long time. Babylonian clay tablets show detailed recipes of beer making in 4300 BC. Beer was also brewed by the ancient Chinese, Assyrians and Incas.

An Egyptian text of 1600 BC gives 100 medical prescriptions using beer. A few years ago, the New Castle Brewery in England brewed 1,000 bottles Tutankhamun Ale from a 3,200-year old recipe found in the sun temple of Queen Nefertiti.

Commercial beer making was established in 1200 AD in present-day Germany. In 1506, the German Purity Law is issued, specifying that beer ingredients must only be water, barley, wheat and hops. Bottling of beer started in 1605.

Making beer
Brewing is the process of changing water and grain into beer through a yeast catalyst. The quality of the water is extremely important. Hard water produce a bitter ale, soft water produce bitter lager. Barley or hops, or a combination of them, is used for the grain.

Getting dry grain ready for fermentation is called malting. The grain is steeped in water until it sprouts. The sprouting or germination is not allowed to end naturally but is interrupted either by drying or roasting in kilns.

Barley
Barley has been a grain of choice for thousands of years. The longer the roasting of the malted barley, the darker the beer. Barley, or wheat beers have a sweet taste.

Hops
Hops are herbaceous climbing vines and look like a cross between pine cores and artichokes. The bitter, dry flavour of hops counterbalance the sweetness of malt.

Yeast
Sugars in the malted grains are converted into alcohol by yeast. Different yeast ferment sugars into different flavours. For ales, top fermentation yeast is used, while bottom fermentation yeast is used for lagers.

The beer making process starts by germinating the grain, then steeping the resulting malt in hot water to get the wort. Base wort contents means the percentage of wort in the beer before fermentation. The alcohol contents is roughly one third of the base wort contents.The wort is boiled (brewed) and hops are added. After brewing, fermentation starts by adding yeast. After fermentation, the wort is drown into tanks where it is allowed to condition or age. Yeast and hops are sometimes added in a secondary fermentation process.

Ales and Lagers
Ales, stouts and several other types of brews, like porter, are top-fermented. The top-fermentation yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, usually produces stronger alcohol contents than the bottom-fermentation yeast, Saccharomyces carlsbergi, but the latter produces more quality-consistent brew. Lagers are bottom-fermented.

Ales usually are heavily hopped, and include bitters, brown ales, cream ales, mild ale, pale ale, India pale ale, barley wine and several other types. There are two types of the aboriginal ale still brewed in Europe. They are Belgian "lambic" and Finnish "sahti", which is brewed from rye malt. They are brewed on wild yeast and spontaneous fermentation. Both have very distinct tastes.

The word "lager" is German and means "storage", which refers to the lager (storage) fermentation. The main fermentation of both ales and lager are done on the similar temperature for 7-14 days. After that time the ale, depending on the type, may be ready for bottling. With lagers, this is only the start. After the main fermentation the beer is pumped into lager (storage) tanks with temperature some 10 deg C lower than room temperature. It is then let to mature and ferment for several weeks, usually 6-10 weeks. At 270 days, the longest lager fermentation is for that of Budejovicky Budvar brewery's Bud Strong.

Best taste
The best taste usually is acquired at an alcohol contents of 4.7% ethanol per volume. Less than that results in a beer with a bland taste. More than that and the higher alcohols (butanol, pentanol etc) become overpowering and spoils the taste.

The strongest beer type by alcohol content is doppelbock, which is usually 8%-10% ethanol by its volume content. The strongest beer brand in production is German "Eisbock", with some 14% ethanol by volume.

 

Cheers!

The first beer brewery in the US opened in Manhattan in 1623.

The first Octoberfest was held in 1810 in Munich, Germany.

The oldest brewery in Munich, Löwenbrau, was founded 1373.

The Czech Republic has the highest per capita beer consumption in the world, at 155 litres (40 gal).

Ice beer is produced by freezing the brew and filtering the ice crystals, increasing the alcohol content. This process was already known in the Middle Ages to "cold-distil" brandy from wine, and the ancient Chinese produced rice hooch that way. The Canadians adopted the cold-distillation method for ice beer.

A true pilsner comes from the Pilsner, Czech Republic. The original pilsner was Pilsner Urquell (Plzensky Prazrod), meaning "The Original Spring of Pilsen." It still is one of the most popular pilsner in the world.

Sake, the Japanese rice brew, is closer to beer than wine by its production method.

The English word "brewer" refers to a male beer-maker; "brewster" to a female.

Beer and ale volumes:
4 gills = 1 pint
2 pints = 1 quart
4 quarts = 1 gallon
9 gallons = 1 firkin
2 firkins = 1 kilderkin
3 kilderkins = 1 hogshead
2 hogsheads = 1 butt

       

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Roy Finn View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Roy Finn Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: May/18/2006 at 13:06

For Dale or lucznik. Is this a syllogism?

a)  9 gallons

b)  1 frickin

c)   Massive hangover!!!

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Dale Clifford Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: May/18/2006 at 13:07
Even the mil-dot came from beer. The sumarians used numerical base 60 and it's portions to measure the amount of grains used. A bag of fixed proportion was 1 unit and divided by it's base, was 1/60and again by its base 1/60 which was later translated to a circle such that 360 degrees became a circle whose portions became hours,minutes and seconds. (I don't think you want the long version).
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Dale Clifford Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: May/18/2006 at 13:18

Close Roy- predicate needs some work

 

9 gallons

 

'something' like drink in morning

 

1 frickin hangover

 

(something needed to link alcohol with aldehyde dehyrogenase enzyme saturation)

 

bet your sorry you asked!!!!

 

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Roy Finn Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: May/18/2006 at 13:43

So that's a hangover. Knew there were details missing from the equation!!! Never sorry to learn.

 

 9 gallons

 hair of the dog

 one frickin hangover

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote hotshot110 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: May/18/2006 at 18:33
Kant post         repli 2 mucch beeR
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Dale Clifford Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: May/20/2006 at 14:43
A tautology
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote lucznik Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: May/31/2006 at 18:56
Originally posted by Roy Finn Roy Finn wrote:

For Dale or lucznik. Is this a syllogism?

a)  9 gallons

b)  1 frickin

c)   Massive hangover!!!

 

Sorry Roy, I didn't see this until just now. I don't drink beer so I originally just sort of glazed over the post.

 

Dale has already answered your question but,  I'm curious,  why the interest in syllogisms?

What if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about?
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote GSPKurt Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: June/04/2006 at 21:01
Great post, Stephanie!
Kurt
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Popeye Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: June/05/2006 at 00:49

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants to be happy"

   Benjamin Franklin

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Stephanie View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Stephanie Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: June/09/2006 at 14:40

Did you know??? Part II

 

                        Nobody knows who invented spectacles "glasses"

 

Roman tragedian Seneca (4 BC–AD 65) is said to have read "all the books in Rome" by peering through a glass globe of water. A thousand years later, presbyopic monks used segments of glass spheres that could be laid against reading material to magnify the letters, basically a magnifying glass, called a "reading stone." They based their invention on the theories of the Arabic mathematician Alhazen (roughly 1000 AD).

 

Yet, Greek philosopher Aristophanes (c. 448 BC-380 BC) knew that glass could be used as a magnifying glass. Nevertheless it was not until roughly 150 AD that Ptolemy discovered the basic rules of light diffraction and wrote extensively on the subject. (The laws of diffraction was formulated much later by Snellius, between 1600 and 1620.)

 

Venetian glass blowers, who had learned how to produce glass for reading stones, later constructed lenses that could be held in a frame in front of the eye instead of directly on the reading material. It was intended for use by one eye; the idea to frame two ground glasses using wood or horn, making them into a single unit was born in the 13th century.

 

In 1268 Roger Bacon made the first known scientific commentary on lenses for vision correction. Salvino D’Armate of Pisa and Alessandro Spina of Florence are often credited with the invention of spectacles around 1284 but there is no evidence to conclude this. The first mention of actual glasses is found in a 1289 manuscript when a member of the Popozo family wrote: "I am so debilitated by age that without the glasses known as spectacles, I would no longer be able to read or write." In 1306, a monk of Pisa mentioned in a sermon: "It is not yet 20 years since the art of making spectacles, one of the most useful arts on earth, was discovered." But nobody mentioned the inventor.

 

In the Middle Ages wearing spectacles signified knowledge and learning. Painters of the time often included spectacles when portraying famous persons even when depicting people who lived before the known invention of spectacles. On numerous paintings the religious teacher Sofronius Eusebius Hieronymus (340 - 420 AD) is portrayed with a lion, a skull and a pair of reading glasses. He is the patron saint of spectacle makers.

 

It actually is true that eating carrots can help you see better. Carrots contain Vitamin A, which feeds the chemicals that the eye shafts and cones are made of. The shafts capture black and white vision. The cones capture colour images.



Edited by Stephanie
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote buxll Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: June/11/2006 at 07:37
There was this guy whose wife put him on a tight budget and cut his beer supply off but when she came home from shopping with a whole lot of new makeup he went crook at her. Her answer to him was that the makeup was to make her look good for him to which he replied  "That was what the beer was for"

LOL
Some people make it happen,
some people want it to happen
& some people wonder what the *#%* happened!!
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