German Town Goes On Beer Buying Spree To Annoy Neo-Nazis

Residents of Ostritz, Germany are seen here buying up all the beer
at the town's supermarket so an influx of Nazis at a right-wing
festival wouldn't be able to buy any. 

The area around Ostritz in the Saxony area of Germany is dealing with the Shield and Sword rock music festival, a favored gathering for neo-Nazis and other like-minded creeps.

The only thing worse than a Nazi is a drunk Nazi, so people in Ostritz had that in mind when they came up with an "evil" plan.

A court had earlier ruled that booze would be banned inside the event, so Ostritz residents figured the Nazis would buy their beer in town on the way to the festival.

So, residents raided the local supermarket and bought every last bit of beer in there before the festival-going right wing assholes couldn't get any.

Double bonus: Townspeople could down a nice cold one or two while holding their own peaceful demonstration agains the Neo-Nazis. It's a win-win.

No word from the Nazi creeps if they were unduly thirsty during the festival. Poor babies.

Want A Beer At Applebee's Buy The Small Size. Here's Why

Somebody posted a video that shows how restaurants use different shaped glasses to make us think we're getting a lot more to drink in large sizes than small.

At Applebee's the people in the video ordered a small beer and a large beer. They drank the small beer. Then they poured the contents of the large beer into the smaller glass. When the small glass was full, there was barely anything at all in the large glass.

I'm guessing a lot of other restaurants do this, too. Watch and see for yourself:

Now It's A Fight: Government Shutdown Blocks New Craft Beers

Vermont has a LOT of craft breweries, and the government shutdown
is preventing them all from rolling out new brews. This is
a problem nationwide because of the Washington stupidity. 

This week, I learned of a new, terrible effect of the long partial federal government shutdown.

Breweries, including all of Vermont's many craft breweries can't release new beers to the public.

There's an obscure federal agency called the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) that must approve all new beers and their labels before they can be sold.  It's an arm of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

This agency is shut down. It's a bit of a crisis for breweries because now is the time of year they prepare to release their summer beers. That's a big marketing push, and if breweries can't release the summer stuff, they can't sell it, and we can't try it.

Yes, I know this is a much smaller crisis than the fact that hundreds of thousands of workers are not getting paid and face potential financial ruin. It's also not as important that public safety is compromised, and unsupervised national parks are being trashed by legions of idiots.

Brewers are saying if the government reopens this week, they might be able to get their summer products on store shelves in May. A little late, but still OK. If the government is shut down longer than that, it might be August before those new summer beers hit the shelves. At that point, why bother?

Even when or if the federal bureau opens, there's going to be a big backlog of new beer applications they're going to have to deal with.

This won't just hurt breweries, Rob Burns of Night Shift Brewing in Everett, Massachusetts told NBC  News. "Business is really so unpredictable and fragile and things that are completely out of control can have a big impact,"

The business model for most craft breweries is to constantly churn out new, innovative beers people love to try, notes Esquire. The government shutdown is, well, shutting down that tap. Craft Brewing in the United States is now a $76 billion industry. This will not be good.

This is particularly bad in Vermont, which is sort of the Napa Valley of craft beers. The Vermont Brewers Association says as of 2017, says the industry in the state has an overall economic impact of $378.2 million. Of that, $126.7 million is direct to tourism, and the industry accounts for $107.8 million in labor income.

Vermont has 11.49 breweries per capita, which is first in the nation.

A shorter government shutdown in 2013 had Vermont brewers pulling out their hair, VPR reported at the time. It has to be much worse now.

My Favorite New Pipeline Transports Beer, Not Oil

The beautiful of city of Bruges, Belgium now
has a beer pipeline.  

Pipelines have been controversial and in the news lately.

There's the standoff in North Dakota over the oil pipeline there, and here in Vermont, they're still fighting about a natural gas pipeline into Addison County.

In Belgium, though, one pipeline is causing no concern, but celebration. That's because it's transporting not oil, but beer.

According to The Guardian, a two mile pipeline is starting operations from De Halve Maan (Half Moon) brewery in the middle of Bruges, Belgium, to a bottling plant just outside the city. The pipeline has the capacity to fill 12,000 bottles of beer per hour.

Xavier Vanneste, director and heir to De Halve Maan, said he saw workers laying broadband cables outside his house, and had a flash of inspiration.

His brewery is in the middle of the old city of Bruges, and because of the lack of space in town, the bottling plant is a couple miles away. That meant he had to truck beer to the bottling plant - expensive for him and annoying to the city because of all those trucks.

This schematic aerial photo shows the path of the
beer pipeline from the center of Bruges, Belgium to a
a bottling plant out by the expressway.

De Halve Maan could have just moved the brewery out to where the bottling plant is, but that would mean he could no longer say De Halve Maan was brewed in the historic beer city of Bruges.

Vanneste wanted to preserve the brewery tradition of the city, which dates back at least to the mid 1500s.

Vanneste hired tunneling experts from the oil and gas industry and Belgium's top professor in malting and brewing to plan and construct the pipeline, according to The Guardian.

By the way, you can buy Half Moon beer in the United States, so if you want to support the company that came up with this great idea, I'd say go for it.

Of course, a lot of people would like to have a beer pipeline going by their house. Although it wouldn't happen in this case, wouldn't be cool if the beer pipeline was like a municipal water line?

You could tap into the beer pipe and have very good beer running out of your faucets in the kitchen.

Any local entrepreneurs want to try that idea?

Ben & Jerry's Intensifies Their Campaign To Make Me Fatter

Ben & Jerry's is teaming up with New Belgium
Brewing for more sinfulness in the food and drink department. 

It's hard to resist the temptation of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

Sometimes, it's also hard to resist the temptation to resist a good brewski.

Thank goodness Ben & Jerry's doesn't make beer.

Wait, what's that? They do? Or at least they will? Great. It looks like I'll be too big to fit into anything anymore.

Apparently, Ben & Jerry's is teaming up with New Belgium Brewing for "Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale, which could hit the store shelves as early as this autumn.

I'll reserve judgement on how this beer tastes until I try it this fall, but it looks promising.

Maybe we can all make meals of this. Ben & Jerry's ice cream for dinner and their beer to wash it down. Yum!

Some proceeds from sale of the beer will go to an outfit called Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit organization that is battling climate change.

So drink up!

Maybe We Can Get Our Beer and Other Supplies By Drones After All

Awhile back, toward the end of January, I bemoaned the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration put the stop to a brewery who was trying to deliver beer to ice fishing enthusiasts out on a Wisconsin lake.  

Flower deliveries via drone? So far, it looks
like it might be legal.  

Well, now, there's a glimmer of hope.

In a move similar to the beer drone enforcement, the FAA in February ordered FlowerDeliveryExpress.com, part of Wesley Berry Flowers, in Michigan to stop its experiment of delivery blooms via drone, CBS Detroit reported.

However, a federal administrative law judge, Patrick Geraghty, ruled that he could not accep the FAA's argument for regulating drones, which applies to flights below 400 feet.

Had he agreed with the FAA, the judge said, "a flight in the air of a paper airplane or a toy balsa wood glider could subject the operator" to FAA penalties.

The judge's ruling applies to fights under the ceiling of 400 feet. Drone flights above that are still definitely iffy in the legal department.

Geraghty wasn't ruling on the flower deliveries, but instead another guy who was fined $10,000 for reckless flying when he used a drone to film a 2011 University of Virginia promotional film, CBS Detroit said.

Official FAA rules about drones are due late this autumn, but those rules have already been delayed over and over again.

Judge Geraghty's ruling in favor of the Virginia photographer basically means there are currently no rules for drone flights that don't go above 400 feet. The Detroit florist said that means he'll resume testing his drone flower delivery system.

And presumably, beer can go out via drone to those Wisconsin ice fishing enthusiasts.

You know what would get really interesting is now that pot is legal in Colorado, will drones deliver that, too?

Terrible Ice Fishing News: FAA Says No Drone Beer Deliveries Out To Lakes

It seemed like a stupendously brilliant idea. The Lakemaid Brewery in Stevens Point, Wisconsin thought it would be a fantastic idea to deliver 12-packs of its beer via drone to people ice fishing on nearby lakes.

A drone delivers beer to ice fishermen on a Wisconsin
lake. The FAA says no more deliveries are allowed.  

They did a test, which is in a video below, and it worked wonderfully.

However, all you ice fishing enthusiasts out on the lakes in the Great White North of this great nation, no drones are going to deliver beer to you, the Federal Aviation Administration has decreed.

If you want some refreshments you have to get off the ice and get it yourself.

Lakemaid Brewery Managing Partner Jack Supple said he was a bit surprised by the FAA's ruling, according to NPR:

"We were a little surprised at the FAA interest in this since we thought we were operating under the 400-foot limit....(we) figured a vast frozen lake was a lot safer that (what) Amazon was showing on 60 Minutes."

Supple was referring to a tentative plan by Amazon to deliver goods via drone that was highlighted on the CBS news show. 

It turns out commercial deliveries via drones are illegal in the United States. The Amazon drone demonstration was done in another country so they didn't break any laws.

Supple said he does understand the FAA's reasoning with it's ruling that ended the ice fishing beer deliveries before they really got off the ground.

"I understand their concern... Drones whizzing around piloted by any knucklehead is probably not the Jetsons future we all imagined."

Here's the beer deliver video. It really is quite cool:

Ultimate DYI Guy: Shark Bites Man, Man Stabs Shark, Stitches Up His Wound, Goes Out For A Beer

I've always liked the kind of guy who takes care of his own problems, just solves the issues that comes up and moves on.

James Grant recovering nicely
from the shark bite that he fixed up on his own.  

Which is why New Zealander James Grant, 24, is my kind of guy.

According to the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, Grant was spearfishing along the coast of New Zealand, in maybe about six feet of water when he felt a shark bite his leg.

Grant said he thought, "Bugger, now I have to try and get this thing off my leg."

Let's stop there for a second. Notice the lack of panic. I love it. He sounded about as alarmed as when us normal people would like to remove a non-biting fly that landed on our arm.

Grant had a knife, for his spearfishing, so he stabbed the offending shark, which then let go of its grip. Grant said his friends didn't notice, so he waded to shore and used the first aid kit he uses for his pig hunting dogs (!!!)  to stitch up the bite on his lower leg.

Eventually, his friends returned, and after their fun day retired to Colac Bay Tavern for a beer. The people at the tavern like Grant, but were slightly annoyed by the blood dripping on the floor, so they gave him a bandage to help contain the mess.

After his beer, he went to a nearby hospital where he works so they could improve upon his stitching a bit.

And so, after another enjoyable but routine weekend, he went back to work the following Monday.

I really do have to wonder what in the world, if anything, would alarm Grant. If an army of space aliens tried to kidnap him, would he just fend them off, while yawning, with his spearfishing knife?

If somebody decided to try dropping a nuclear bomb on Grant's head, would he just swat it away like a picnicker dispatching a vaguely annoying mosquito?

The Morning Herald article says Grant is a junior doctor. Maybe his real calling is to be some sort of superhero.

Rare Case: Man Gets Drunk Every Time He Eats Starchy Food

For those of you out there who love to get drunk but hate the expense and trouble of buying booze to feed your habit, you've to meet this guy.

A Texas home brewer accidentally
established a brewery in his stomach.  

He's a 61-year-old Texan. Privacy rules prohibit health officials from giving out his name, but he'd always seem to get drunk at the drop of a hat.

He denied boozing it up, but people were unconvinced. He was probably a closet drinker, taking nips in the back room or whatever when nobody was looking. His wife was fed up.

Finally, they isolated the man in a hospital room and made sure he had no access to alcohol. And he got drunk anyway.

It turns out the man, a home brewer, had an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut. Combined with some of the usual bugs everybody has in their system, he'd get drunk when he ate carbohydrate-heavy food. The yeast in his gut combined with the carbohydrates was, in effect, a brewery in his stomach.

And he'd get drunk.

Before you go out and start consuming brewer's yeast, be warned this is a very rare condition and probably won't get you tipsy. And it probably isn't good for your health to do this.

Really, you'll be happier if you're not drunk all the time anyway. Maybe have a glass of wine with dinner and call it a day.

World's Most Useless Record Holder: Beer Chugger

It's always good to dream of greatness. Who doesn't want to be the first, the best, the most outstanding, the one who is a fixture in the Guinness Book of World Records?

Well, we found a video that captures that spirit. He went for the big time. I can't prove this yet, but the video indicates he's the world's fastest at biting into a beer can and sucking all the brew out. What a hero!

I had a roommate in college who drank beer that way. The only way he would drink beer, which was often, was to bite into a can of beer and suck the contents out. I'm sure it did wonder for his teeth.

I guess I'm just a boring guy. I grab a 12-ounce bottle, a bottle opener, lift the cap off, and enjoy. So while I'm happy and content, don't look for me anytime soon in the Guinness Book of World Records. I'll just drink a Guinness instead.

Herd the Beer Drinkers, the Guinness Way

It seems like there's a law that all beer commercial must be as STOOPID as possible. They must feature juvenile, dumb men,  half naked, pneumatic, artificial women gyrating as if having a slow motion epileptic seizure and unlikely situations involving slapstick pratfalls that are so lowbrow, said brows fall to the floor.

Guinness manages to make a advertisement
as tasty as their beer.

Apparently, if you drive people crazy with stupidity, they will drink your beer.

So it was refreshing when I saw an advertisement for beer on Copyranter via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog,  that was humorous and actually a bit clever.

The ad is for Guinness, and depicts a quintessentially British sporting competition, or at least a competition from the goofy imagination of ad agency Abbott Mead Vickers/BBDO of London.

Watch and enjoy, especially if you're a dog lover: