International Beverage Company

First there was the discovery of dozens of bottles of 200-year-old champagne, but now salvage divers have recovered what they believe to be the world's oldest beer, taking advertisers' notion of 'drinkability' to another level. Though the effort to lift the reserve of champagne had just ended, researchers uncovered a small collection of bottled beer on Wednesday from the same shipwreck south of the autonomous Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea.

"At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world's oldest bottles of beer," Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island's ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.

"It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living."

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How do you feel about food?

I like it a lot. I spend even more time thinking about it than I do beer. Those two subjects pretty much command every waking moment. And, if I'm planning on having beer with dinner, as I do on many — OK, most ... OK pretty much every — night, I contemplate what beer or beers it will be.

Beer has a vastly greater range of flavors than wine. It just does. Therefore it should, and does, go better with a wider variety of dishes and cuisines than wine.

Who are you going to believe, me or Garrett Oliver? Oliver, he of Brooklyn Brewery and author of the canonical "The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food," is a world-renowned authority on beer and wine and food. He says there's no comparison and regularly hosts food pairings with both beer and wine facing off, deliberately salting the crowd with wine-centric types. At last count, when it comes time to vote which overall went better, beer always won. Beer's carbonation cleanses the palate, and the variety of beers versus red or white makes for no contest. (Although if I'm having a steak, I'll probably go for a big cabernet. Some things just can't be beat.)

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The end of the Summer always brings with it piles of tasty sun-ripened fruit. Juicy peaches, sweet cherries, tart raspberries and a bushel of other examples of what Ned Flanders might call “nature's candy” are stacked high in grocery stores everywhere. So what if breweries used this bounty in their creations? Would civilization as we know it come crashing down around us any more quickly than it already is if beer had a little fruit in it?

Luckily, the answer is a resounding no, especially since brewers have a long tradition of adding fruit to the mix in any number of different beer styles – from lambics to witbiers. The assumption that most make about these beers is that they're overly sweet, cloying, syrupy and not fit for anything but a dessert topping or what some less enlightened souls might term “chick beer.”

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Beer is food is a popular war cry among craft brew enthusiasts, and a local baked goods upstart is looking to expand on that. Founded earlier this year by self-proclaimed “Beer Girl” Misty Birchall, PubCakes is looking to simultaneously satisfy San Diego’s sweet-tooth and thirst for superior suds, with a line of cupcakesusing beer as the primary flavoring agent.

Birchall is a San Diego native who served six years abroad in the U.S. Navy before returning to discover the brewers in her hometown “make some damn good beer.” She funneled her awe over craft beer’s broad spectrum of flavor complexities straight into the stainless steel bowl of her KitchenAid mixer.

The result is a variety of artisanal cupcakes that includes:

-- Stoned Portzilla, a cake made with Stone Smoked Porter and topped with coffee-infused chocolate ganache and caramelized coconut flakes;

-- Top Ten Cake made with Karl Strauss’s hoppy Top Ten IPA, cherries, ancho chilies and cayenne-spiked caramel;

--Beer For Breakfast, which is fortified with AleSmith’s high alcohol toasty caramel Wee Heavy Scottish Ale, adorned with maple cream cheese frosting and garnished with crispy flecks of bacon

Read this full article and more from San Diego Dining by clicking here.

A global consumer trend towards craft beer is being mirrored in Australia with a Perth-based retailer claiming the local market is on the brink of a beer revolution.

Perth’s International Beer Shop has stocked premium and exclusive international and local beers since its inception in 2001 and now boasts a range of over 850, including ciders.

“The world is currently undergoing a craft beer revival,” said The International Beer Shop store manager, Cameron Stewart.

“Experimental US Craft Breweries have tipped the dominos, and they are falling throughout the Western World.”

The International Beer Shop seeks out the best beers and ciders from around the globe, from its modest base – a tiny suburban bottle store in West Leederville, northwest of Perth.

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Brewing for a Cause

Tommyknocker Brewery is proud to announce the release of its most recent specialty beer Tommyknocker Golden Saison. Tommyknocker Golden Saison is a light, refreshing beer typically brewed during winter months for consumption during the summer months.

This project has special meaning to Tommyknocker Brewery, because of what it will be creating for a special non-profit organization called the Gulf Restoration Network. The Gulf Restoration Network's mission is committed to uniting and empowering people to protect and restore the natural resources of the Gulf Region for future generations. The GRN's vision is that the Gulf of Mexico will continue to be a natural, economic, and recreational resource that is central to the culture and heritage of five states and three nations. The people of the region will be stewards of this vital but imperiled treasure, and they will assume the responsibility of returning the Gulf to its previous splendor.

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Jack McAuliffe is one of the most significant figures in United States brewing history.

He's also one of the most elusive.

As a young Navy technician servicing Uncle Sam's nuclear sub fleet, McAuliffe found himself stationed in Scotland, where he developed a taste for the indigenous ales. When he returned to America, he couldn't find any equivalent beer, so in 1976 he used his engineering skills to fabricate his own brewery out of cast-off dairy and soft drink equipment.

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Many people take pride in drinking American beer, looking down on those un-patriotic "imports." But, really, how American is the beer they're drinking? Budweiser, "The Great American Lager," is produced by a Belgian company now known as Anheuser-Busch InBev. Many other iconic American beers such as Miller, Coors and Blue Moon are sold by MillerCoors; this company is a joint venture between SABMiller, based in the United Kingdom, and the Molson Coors Brewing Company, which is half-American and half-Canadian. Even Pabst Blue Ribbon, the ubiquitous drink of hipsters these days, is contract brewed by MillerCoors. In fact, Boston Beer Company, the brewers of Samuel Adams, is the largest American-owned brewer, closely followed by D.G. Yuengling & Son. The most depressing part of this, to me at least, is the beer produced by these large conglomerates. The vast majority of the beer they brew is of the American Golden Lager variety, which is a modification of the Pilsner style beers native to Germany. In fact, rice has been used to replace substantial portions of the grain used to brew these beers; this results in decreased development of the flavor profile, but has the advantage of being inexpensive. In fact, the only widely distributed example of a traditional American lager is Yuengling Traditional Lager. This beer is brewed with the use of corn as an adjunct instead of rice, which is a tradition that predates the American Revolution and contributes a distinctive taste to the beer.

At this point, you may ask why I have been bashing the American breweries and the beers they brew. First, I'm not a fan of their beers; I prefer other beer styles to golden lager, and I like taste in my beer. The second reason is that I've been laying the groundwork for the introduction of this week's review, Anchor Steam Beer. Anchor Steam Beer is the sole remaining commercial example of the 19th century beer brewed in San Francisco, around which the modern California Common Beer style was modeled.

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Americans hosting Fourth of July barbecues will pay more cold cash for the cold ones this year as beer joins the list of foods and beverages whose prices are jumping, in part because of the booming ethanol market.

Retail prices for beer at supermarkets and other stores were up 3% in May from a year earlier, the biggest increase in 2½ years, according to the latest data from the Labor Department. That's higher than the inflation rate for the overall economy, and a bigger gain than in prices of liquor and wine bought to be consumed at home.

Those going out will also pay more for beer. Prices for beer poured away from home were up 3.8% in May from a year earlier.

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