Ninkasi - The Goddess of Beer

Soft-serve beer ice cream up next?

Cold beer: Soft-serve head keeps brew chilled
John Roach

Cold beer is cherished around the world, especially during the warmer months of the year. Frosty mugs and insulated sleeves known as beer koozies do the job well enough. But why not top off your suds with frozen beer foam instead?

Now, thanks to the clever folks at Japanese brewing giant Kirin, you can. They’ve figured out how to create frozen foam and dispense it on top of a beer like a person filling a cone with soft-serve ice cream. Gizmag has the details:

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Raise Your Glass: 10 Intoxicating Beer Facts
by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
17 March 2011

As early as the 6th millennium B.C., ancient Sumerians had discovered the art of fermentation. By the 19th century B.C., they were inscribing beer recipes into tablets in the form of a Hymn to Ninkasi, their female deity of beer.

Other cultures around the world developed beer independently, but the job of brewing often went to women. Tenenit, the Egyptian deity of beer, was female, as was the Zulu beer goddess Mbaba Mwana Waresa. A 2005 study found that among the Wari people of ancient Peru, elite women brewed the beer.

Light makes beer go bad: A 2001 study published in Chemistry – A European Journal traced the breakdown of beer to light-sensitive hop compounds called isohumulones.

BeerSci: What Running Marathons Can Teach You About Beer
Martha Harbison, a senior editor at Popular Science and former physical chemist, introduces a new column on the science of homebrewing
by Martha Harbison
October 05, 2012

The United States has an estimated 1 million homebrewers, according to the American Homebrewers Association. That's just slightly under the estimated number of nutjobs in the U.S. who have run a marathon.

Even though the two activities seem pretty unlike each other--the payoff for one is a 26.2-mile slog while people scream at you; the payoff for the other is being able to sit in front of the TV in your underwear while you scream at people--they have similarities. Both can be intimidating and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Both require planning, time, and a hefty investment in equipment. And both can sometimes make you want to cry.

The reason for this PopSci.com column is twofold. First, I want to help demystify and exalt beer. There has never been a better time to be a beer fanatic. Second, I want to sweet-talk more intrepid souls into trying homebrewing for themselves.

Awesomeness! We start our brewers young here in CO and they take it to the next level with science!

Denver Post: Colorado 6th grader's beer-making experiment headed for Space Station
October 7, 2013

Michal, who reads Popular Science magazine to "find out what's trending now in the science world," is more likely to know about spacecraft landing systems than Colorado's latest craft beers.

But when his class at Douglas County's STEM School and Academy entered a national science competition — with the hope of getting their microgravity experiment flown to the International Space Station — beer came to mind. <snip> ...came up with his idea after reading a book called "Gruesome Facts" that explained about why beer was so popular in the Middle Ages. "It was a punishment for crimes, that you couldn't drink beer," he said, "and most people didn't survive (that) because the water was contaminated."

The competition is part of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, launched in 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education to spark interest in a new generation of students for careers in science, technology, engineering and math — known as called STEM.

Read more: Colorado 6th grader's beer-making experiment headed for Space Station - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_24253 ... z2i6WGUQ38
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And it made it to Mashable, where they did a video spot on it!
Forget Dried Ice Cream, This Kid Wants to Brew Beer in Space
By Colin Daileda
October 18, 2013

The International Space Station may soon have its own little brewery thanks to a kid who still has a decade before he can legally drink.

Michal Bodzianowski, 11, was among several winners of a national science competition that is part of the Student Spaceflights Experiments Program. His entry, titled "What Are the Effects of Creation of Beer in Microgravity and Is It Possible?" grew out of his knowledge that beer was popular in the middle ages because, unlike water, it wasn't filled with bacteria.

He theorized, according to the Denver Post, that if a manned space mission went horribly awry and their water was somehow contaminated, they might be able to brew beer to stay alive, because alcohol kills bacteria.

While he and other students worked on the plan, the school raised $21,500 to ensure that the mini brewery would leave the atmosphere.

A friend shared a meme this morning about it being amazing that potatoes gave us chips, fries, and vodka so every other vegetable needed to get their act together. Well, what do you know, you can make alcohol out of just about anything, even broccoli.

Apocalypse Beer: How to Ferment Anything
Posted on October 25, 2012 by Jon Abernathy

Did that catch your attention? Good! Understanding fermentation is a key component to making beer (indeed, any alcohol) but it turns out, the formula for fermentation is really pretty simple:

Water + Sugar + Yeast = Alcohol

You might think that the yeast is the biggest unknown here, but in reality wild yeasts are abundant in nature and many fruits by themselves have an abundance of yeast naturally present on them that will start fermentation with little to no effort.

No, the real unknown is the “sugar” in this equation, and thus the idea of “how to ferment anything” really means, “how to get the sugar from anything.” Once you have the sugar(s), fermentation is the easy part.

Ummm, what?

Someone Finally Invented Peeps-Flavored Beer
By Clint Rainey
March 27, 2018

The beer, called Peep This Collab, is a sour ale brewed with more than 30 boxes of Peeps, some vanilla, and butterfly-pea flower, which mixologists love because it’s a natural blossom that turns drinks a very unnatural purply blue.

If that weren’t enough, the brewers also added edible glitter once the beer was fermented “to really make it shine.” The taste is supposedly “marshmallow-y” and “lightly tart.”