Yank fires up iPhone-controlled beer cannon A Virginia Tech university graduate and a couple of chums have come up with what one YouTube commenter rates as the "Greatest. Invention. Ever" – an iPhone-controlled beer-dispensing cannon. Ryan Rusnak, 25, first rigged up a bog-standard refrigerated beer vending machine to dispense refreshment at the touch of his Jesus Phone …
Ahh, that reminds me of an incident in a pub that happend yonks ago near Temple Bar. I bumped into a lovely Bud promo girl and asked her whether she knew the similarity between Budweiser and having sex in a canoe. Well, she wasn't very amused when I told her it's both fucking close to water.
Have you had the misfortune to try Bud 66? It's the wateriest pish I have ever tasted, and I generally like wussy watery beer of the kind blokes despise. It was the official beer of a festival I went to last year and you couldn't get much else. It was like water that once dreamed it was beer, and then it woke up. And it came in pathetic little bottles ("It's awful, and such tiny portions" etc) which just added insult to bankruptcy. I stayed sober in protest.
I can't stomach full-strength Bud anyway. It is an ugly substance.
Most of the world's best *and* most interesting beer comes from the States - the craft brewing renaissance first took hold in the Pacific Northwest 20+ years ago, and the rest of us are still catching up.
No relationship to random supermarket swill that holds 95% of the market, of course.
"Most of the world's best *and* most interesting beer comes from the States" - you need to get out more. Look up "Beer in Belgium" in Wikipedia..
I was amusing myself with going through about 150 different beers in a local pub in Belgium (yes, I once lived there too - bit of a contrast with Singapore and London :-), and that was 30 years ago. The most potent one was/is "Kwak" beer, which is served in a special glass where you don't just drink the beer, you also inhale the fumes, a rather lethal combination (2 for the brave, 3 for those with a death wish). I'm still quite partial to Hoegaarden, which my local super imports at frankly ridiculous prices.. The Belgians offered beer first as medicine (hence the link to monks and monastries), and seldom was medicine taken so enthusiastically..
You'd almost forgive them for inventing techno when you look at their other great idea: planting a brewery in the middle of a student town (Leuven). In principle they could skip the intermediate step of botlles and cans and just use hoses :-).
I'm pretty sure the UK and other countries have been at it for some time too, IMHO the US are merely catching up..
Spent some time in WA state.
A fine collection of micro breweries up there, much of the beer is wonderful (honest)
More importantly, although pubs are few and far between (and strangely outnumbered by churches - please Americans you HAVE got that VERY wrong) if you get known in a decent bar they WILL find warm glasses and leave beer to warm to a sensible temperature before serving it! (Try the bar in Sammamish for proof - just say the two Daves sent you.
...about how all your major American brands need to be consumed ice cold, so that it kills the taste. Stay with the craft/microbrews and smaller brands -- Dogfish Head and Magic Hat are good ones -- and you're OK in the States.
I wonder if he could adapt that thing to launch cans of Guinness Draught or Newcastle, at least?
Pint of ale icon, because it's 16:06 on the US East Coast right now. Almost there.
Budweiser (the US one) is possibly one of the cheapest beer to make, and massively marked up = Yanks raking it in from idiots. Of course, if they will make it from bloody rice, it's no wonder it tastes like used urinal blocks.
Still, just when you think they can't make it any worse, you get Bud Light, and the utter abortion that is Bud Ice <shudder>. I sometimes wonder why I didn't like beer in my youth, and then realised why - I grew up in a place that served Tenants, Bud and Rolling Rock.
Nowadays, I'm in the west country and suddenly every pub has a glorious variety of breweries, including my new favourite, Bath Ales. Pint of Gem, lovely... In fact if a pub only has a row of Stella, 1664, Carling, Strongbow and Peroni, it's an indication to walk out.
Foul stuff, all the Anheuser Budweiser available in the UK although the bottles you can get hold of on US airbases are almost palatable.
To cheat you should try Budweiser Budvar, it's a Czech brew that's rather excellent (because it's nothing to do with Anheuser Busch) and goes well with a curry.
You know, Bud isn't so bad from America. What we get over here is absolutely horrific, but rarely you can find the proper American Budweiser, and it's good on a hot summers day, similar to Brahma in my opinion.
You can occasionally find the decent Budweiser lurking around in the UK. They stopped selling the easiest way to get it years ago... Big Bud, which was imported, unlike the crated bottles. For the World Cup, the Budweiser in the Aluminium bottle was imported also...
It's the old problem of taking a local recipe, and making it in a different location. Beer takes so much of its character from it's ingredients, franchising it, essentially.. barely works.
I'm a bit particularly about beer, I won't buy a locally made version of a foreign beer, ever.
Aside from the lolly water 'beer' samples, this has got to be the single most compelling reason to buy an iPhone. Now if they could port the system to Symbian for Nokia owners and we can look at some ales worthy of such a system, we can realise nirvana like conditions while still being alive.
As an aside, what happens when you open the can after such shaking and jostling. I can only imagine it would be a very heady beer with little else. Nice proof of concept, now to tweak it for the real world!
As a further aside, is something of this nature likely to appear in a forthcoming BOFH chapter???
In the 80's, whenever we diverted one of our F-111s to RAF Lossiemouth, step one (literally) in the recovery checklist was to purchase a case of Budweiser (we used the maintenance commander's slush fund) for the RAF senior Warrant Officer up there. If you showed up with case in hand, you got to stay in a nice B&B, lights and power on the flightline, and a truck to use. No case of Bud: sleep in the barracks, no help, no transport. So, don't badmouth Bud too much, it help me get a lot of aircraft fixed...
Just googled budweiser and apparently:
Alcohol by volume 5.0%
So I don't know what all you beer snobs are moaning on about. 5% is a decent strength for a lager, not so strong you can't have a few but relatively effective.
I drunk "proper" ales for a while in my youth, some at room temperature. I found out that I preferred the taste of a cold lager to warm bitter. Each to his own, I say. Pass the gin...
ABV is not a measure of a beer's quality. I would assume that most people's objection to Bud would be it's lack of flavour.
The reason most lagers are served chilled is to hide the bitter flavours produced from the fast fermentation of cheap grain in industrialised brewing, and the lack of the complex flavours produced by ale yeast strains.
'Real' beer is brewed more slowly, with a different yeast species, and using malted barley, which actually gives flavour, rather than a tiny amount of malt extract and rice starch which is the carbohydrate source for the yeast when manufacturing Bud.
The reason proper beer is served at closer to room temperature is so that you can taste the flavours, rather than to hide them.
NB I don't think all lager is bad. For instance, many European lagers such as properly brewed Amstel, or Mythos can be very nice. Industrially produced piss, however, is just that.
> Big Trak, need I say more?
I had one of those first time round. Bit disappointing looking back - it wouldn't turn by the specified angles on tiled floors, and it wouldn't turn by the specified by the specified angles on carpet. It's probably still packed straight back up in my parents' loft (unless my nephews have pestered my brother for one, in which case it's probably gone walkies).
I remember delightedly discovering that the trailer could be made to tip by shorting the connector with a paperclip, so maybe there is at least some mileage in the idea though.
// is it me or do the new ones look small?
Just to correct some of the folks above: there's plenty of decent American beer from the smaller breweries; we just keep it for ourselves. I'd put a micro up against any of the English beer we commonly see on this side of the pond (Bass, Newcastle, and sometimes Boddington). But, I know there's better ales in England that don't make it here. See how that works?
And as for cans, they have their uses for things like camping and boating. The trick is find a micro that cans stuff. A local one here (Sly Fox) cans their Pale Ale, IPA, and Weiss for a contract with the local sports teams. You do NOT want to give Philly fans bottles to throw at people. Caldera IPA from Oregon is also a fantastic canned IPA.
http://www.slyfoxbeer.com/index.php/front/beer_packaged
http://www.calderabrewing.com/index.asp
There are some good micro-breweries in the US so I've been told (I have a friend who's half American by birth and now lives over there - the "wonders" at British customs kicked his American wife out of the country so he went with her) though I've only experienced Sam Adams which is perfectly drinkable.
The same can certainly be said in the UK - there are some micro-breweries making some truly great beer. I'll take your Sly Fox and Caldera Brewing and raise you Brew Dog http://www.brewdog.com/ ;)
It is now your problem. Anheuser-Busch was bought out by Belgian beverage giant InBev a couple of years ago. True American owned breweries are making some of the best beer in the world right now. We just don't share it with you lot across the pond, because there isn't enough. There are even some decent brews in cans now. Try a Dale's Pale Ale or Little Yellow Pils.
Dogfish Head is making extraordinary stuff, as are Flying Dog and Clipper City/Heavy Seas. And those are just the breweries that are local to me. Go to a hotbed of craft breweryship like Colorado or Oregon, and you'll find dozens, if not hundreds, of incredibly tasty beers that are only sold on tap within a 50-mile radius of the brewery.
Unfortunately, we were settled by a bunch of tight-a$$es who got kicked out of Britain because of it, and they wrote all the liquor laws here, which favor the large distributors who have marketing agreements with the giants like A-B and Miller-Coors. It's just like Microsoft and Dell put a stranglehold on the availability of [computers with] decent operating systems.
Prohibition killed the American beer culture, before prohibition there were lots of breweries selling all kinds of beer. Remember there was a large german origin migrant intake.
After prohibition the breweries were shut down and all the malters too with the exception of some that produced baby food and extracts for baking and other cooking. The modern American flavourless beer originated in WW2 as the women working the factories wanted a cold beer and did not want strong flavours.
personaly i dont like lagers or beers.... they ether taste nasty or give me gut ache and have done so since i was 13 lol..
you can keep these so called real ales that use 200 year old yeast cultures, twigs from a particular tree that grows in the grounds of the brewery, a good scoop of horse shite from the clydesdales that used to pull the drays... not forgetting the forskin of the original brewer.... it all tastes like pish with variying amounts of added shite...
on a hot humid day, there is nothing more refreshing than an ice cold pint of dry cider.
Since you were 13. And now you're 13.5?
Cider gets mangles just as badly as beer - often worse - which is probably why you can tolerate it. Cider is often fermented to higher alcohol levels (it is after all a wine rather than a beer), then diluted, flavoured and carbonated. Basically an RTD wine cooler mix.
It is indeed a lot harder to find a reasonable commercial cider than a good commercial beer.
The vast majority of the few decent beers born on this side of the Atlantic are brewed here in Colorado. Notable exceptions are Dogfish Head and Sam Adams breweries. Other than that, we've got the few craft breweries who know that ale is not lager with brown food coloring stirred in, and that not all stouts must taste like automotive cleaner.
Here's to dark beer and the demise of Buttweiser.
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