ailill mac máta

A pair of prodigal County Roscommon residents, interesting in plying their craft brewing experiences in their homeland isolated and fermented a special troglodytic wild yeast from a paleolithic archaeological site and cave complex to provide a point of departure to explore the influence and the background of the story of Queen Medb, also tied to this land.
Not to be confused with Queen Mab, Shakespeare’s invented fairy monarch though perhaps informed by the semi-legendary figure, her name shares its etymology—appropriately—with mead as she who intoxicates and according to ancient sources, Medb was born in the same cave, Oweynagat, held also to be a portal to the Underworld. The warrior queen, as all females in the egalitarian world of the Celts, was liberated and independent and not defined by her gender, unlike most women in other contemporary Western European cultures. The brewster (see also) worked with experts in microbiology to detect the undomesticated varieties of catalyst and bravely—since the divide between the world of the living and the world of the dead is most porous at that time of year—went spelunking in Oweynagat on Samhain to collect the yeast. Read more about the quest for the ingredients of this special ale and discover more strange brews at the link up top.

decorative gourd season

Building off an earlier exercise in training a neural network to conjure up extremely plausible sounding names for craft beer and small batch breweries, Janelle Shane (previously here and here) brilliantly tweaked the naming conventions slightly to infuse the results with pumpkin spice and other seasonal trappings. Here are some of our favourites but they whole beer menu is definitely worth sampling:

Bog Porter
Winter Winter This Dead Ale
Warmer Hollow
Ale Gore
Spice Prophecy
Pumpkin Disaster
Faceless Ole Ale
Winter Zuul

Check out AI Weirdness (aka Lewis and Quark) at the link above for more and to study the methodology and learn how to develop an artificial intelligence of your own.

snap pack

Danish pilsner Carlsberg will replace the usual plastic ring binding used to secure multipacks of beer with a specially formulated glue that’s has both the properties to hold the aluminium cans together securely for transport but are still easy to separate and with no residual stickiness. Reducing its plastic use by the equivalent of sixty million plastic bags a year, the global brewery ought to be applauded for demonstrating that with just a little ingenuity, we can be better stewards of the environment. Skål!

punky brewster

While there’s no definitive link between the stereotypical image of a witch and the business attire, signpost and shingle of the medieval alewives (braciatrix, brewess, brewster) that dominated beer brewing as a cottage industry from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages does certainly seem to inform the Western world’s conception with the distinguishing calling-cards of a tall, pointy hat, cauldron, broomstick and a feline familiar.
Despite inconclusive scholarship and myriad neighbourhood jealousies that can set off a flurry of accusations, that men—seeing a business opportunity and wanting to dispose of the competition, would resort to calling their established counterparts enchantresses and in league with the Devil does not surprise. The first outbreaks of the Plague across Europe caused significant shifts in the production of beer and spirits, taking it out of the home and making it a larger scale enterprise, often under the charter of the Church and a venture for monasteries to make beer to standard and making independent women entrepreneurs more and more marginalised. An empowered beer wench could certainly push a man to behave below his station, driving him to make poor choices and spend all his money on drink, and once women were forced to abandon their craft brew, they maintained their treacherous wiles by more unnatural means.

bierkönig

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals, we are introduced to a comprehensive and exhaustive collection of drink coasters, beermats and other bar paraphernalia from around the world. A casual curator myself, I was really engrossed with the history—the first non-saucers made from high grammage pasteboard were produced in the town of Magdeburg in 1880 as a way to primarily protect tables from condensation but quickly became a vehicle for advertising and other messaging spreading from Europe outward.

state of inebriation

We are treated to another example of persuasive cartography (previously) in this 1931 map of the Isle of Pleasure published by Houston, Texas draughtsman and architect H. J. Lawrence, two years before the experiment with Prohibition in the United States (1920-1933).

Lawrence makes his opinion on the temperance movement and the constitutional amendment that outlawed alcohol fairly clear as he charts his longing to return to the days when liquor was free flowing and not something reveled in covertly and at a high premium due to the black market. Be sure to visit the link above to see more detailed insets and instructions for mixing some of the Prohibition-era cocktails referenced on the map.

6x6

media obsolescence: a personalised nostalgic romp through which ‘tech world’ informed your formative years, via Things Magazine

temperance: a 1908 map that charts insobriety across England

don’t make them like they used to: after nearly four decades of dormancy, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent Voyager 1 course-correcting instructions—from twenty-one billion kilometres away, and the little probe complied

petard hoist much: why a legislative victory on tax reform could furnish the Republican party with exactly what it needs to abandon Dear Leader

vizard: bizarre sixteenth and seventeenth century fashion trend of obscuring the female visage with a featureless black dot to preserve the skin from the sun and errant glances

#otd: the US senate voted overwhelmingly to censure colleague Joseph R McCarthy in 1954 for his persecution of ruthless investigations of thousands of alleged Communists which brought dishonour and disrepute on the government

weiße haus

I’ve passed this villa in the Hessian capital numerous times and it always caused me to do a bit of a double-take but never realised until recently that the similarity to the US presidential mansion was intentional.
In 1903, sparkling white wine (Sekt) magnate Friedrich Wilhelm Söhnlein commissioned a Zürich architectural group to build a residence for him and his new wife and re-import Emma Pabst, heiress to the American brewing dynasty, specifically in the style of the White House. The design (an homage to Irish architect Jame Hoban) was also part of the motivation for the US military authorities to commandeer the compound from 1945 until 1990 and utilise it as a local head-quarters—just removed from the Kurpark by a few hundred metres. When the villa was returned to the state, it was considered for a time as a new home for the state government or alternately listing the property as a consulate—even though many countries were represented in nearby Frankfurt. Presently the building is in private hands but can be rented for special events.

snowflakes

Via Nag on the Lake, we not only learn the etymology of the term scofflaw but also how a bar in Paris—a country that’s demonstrated its sensibility previously for not experimenting with government imposed prohibition on alcoholic beverages—took advantage of the ensuing hoopla and stumbled onto buzz-marketing.
A Boston banker and staunch Prohibitionist named Delcevare King, seeing that the experiment was a failing one with the otherwise law abiding flagrantly flouting the law (the constitutional amendment was in force from 1920 until 1933 when it was repealed by a second amendment) and criminal gangs forming to create a lucrative black market, sought to find the perfect derogatory term to shame the misguided into compliance. To that end, King sponsored a contest soliciting the best epithet and enticed over twenty-five thousand entrants with a prize in the form of two hundred dollars-worth of gold—an inconceivable ransom for a wordsmith in 1923 and it made the papers worldwide. King’s efforts to “stab awake the public conscience of law enforcement” choose—over boozeshevik, boozocrat and many others, the neologism scofflaw but was himself made a rather international laughing stock for publicly harbouring such puritanical condemnation. Seizing the opportunity, Harry’s New York bar (an American extract from 1911, shipped to the City of Light) patronised by the expatriate community named a cocktail after the new term. A recipe and review of the Scofflaw can be found at the link above, a clever project linking letters and liquor through history.

spirit of the law

In response to new legislation that stipulates that bars and similar establishments in India must be separated from highways by no less than half a kilometre, one existing pub has successfully skirted the law by compacting that space and time into a series of barrier mazes—like those set up for queuing at airports and amusement parks. As the purpose of the law is not necessarily to limit access and egress but to prevent patrons from stumbling into to traffic—which seems like a long way to stumble, local authorities let the innovative solution stand.

7x7

teardrop trailer: veteran and prisoner-of-war designs for a camper-caravan realised after eight decades

what wizardry is this: BLDGBlog contemplates spells against autonomy

it’s dangerous to go alone – take this: Zelda fan automates his home controlled by playing the ocarina

no wine before its time: Moldova declares wine to be a food, a status that beer has enjoyed in Germany for centuries

don’t be jimmy: Colorado mass-transit just adopted an awful, crass mascot as an negative example for passengers, very unlike NYC’s good-mannered feline

ronald the grump: Sesame Street characters respond to news that they are being defunded

inter-city express: passenger train passes through residential apartment block in Chongqing 

5x5

crate & barrel: a glimpse inside the outfitteries that design and deliver prefabricated Irish Pubs around the world, via Boing Boing

la gioconda: researchers, including a relative of the Bishop of Bling, in Germany conclude Mona Lisa’s smile means she happy

inception: more recursive, panoramic landscapes from Aydın Büyüktaş, via Kottke 

pacific rim: demonstration of robots controlled by the hemispheres of two separate volunteers’ brains

ligature: a clever type face that reacts intuitively to the characters that precede and follow 

7x7

cabin-brew: brewery formulates a beer that’s optimised for enjoyment whilst flying

dynamo: the Earth core and magnetic field is powered by the crystallization of silicon dioxide

faster empire, strike, strike: a clever fan made a modern trailer for Star Wars Episode V

the night Chicago died: the story of how angry white men tried to destroy disco

lift every voice and sing: the lost, forgotten artwork of Augusta Savage

wiphala: the strikingly colourful mansions of La Paz

momofuku: a visit to the Cup Noodles museum in Japan

tømmermænd

Amsterdam can proudly boast the world’s first hangover recovery bar—that requires patrons fail a breathalyser test to get inside, as Dangerous Minds informs.
Once granted entry, to separate those nursing a bad night out from those who’d simply like a bit of quiet pampering—though I can’t imagine that they are that strict and one has to make an absolute wreck of themselves to go inside, patrons are triaged and put into comfy beds—the whole arrangement conceived by an enterprising mattress salesman, to rehydrate and sleep it off and later enjoy some traditional and proven remedies—including an oxygen bar. I am glad that we didn’t require such services during our recent visit—although it would have been nice to be brought a nice, late breakfast in bed.

5x5

hop’n gator: interesting trivia about Gatorade and beer and their short-lived unholy merger

enter the dragon: the philosophical notebooks of Bruce Lee

 lullaby: parent finches signal to the unhatched broods about global warming

unwaxed: maybe there are benefits to flossing after all, if our simian friends are so keen to do it

history, ink: an interesting look at the last surviving tattoo parlour in Jerusalem that original catered to medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land 

that glaswegian, tall chavvy fighting idiot of old

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we learn about the recent surfacing of a list of personae non-grata from the legendary venue, the Half Moon pub of the Herne Hill district in London, which was closed due to flooding in 2013 but has yet to be reopened.
This guide of unwelcome, potentially troublesome patrons is perfectly British, pretty abusive and gangsterish too but pretty amusing all the same and I am glad someone bothered to share, reminding me of that burgeoning practise of asking customers names so they can inform you when your order is ready—one which I hope does not catch on since I rather like us being called the Englishmen or the doctors. There’s no Sodding McSodface on this list and most would require no further explanation, but Deaf Adam earned his lifelong ban for mistaking Coldplay for the Rolling Stones on the jukebox.

tonic and toil

Archaeologists and ethnographers trying to reconstruct the inaccessible past (though there are plenty of cultural references to curse and toil—like in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden) have questioned why humanity moved from a hunter-gatherer society to agriculture and division of labour and have puzzled over this apparently rash decision, as a sustenance way of life is far less taxing and obligates far less of an individual’s free-time to earn one’s daily bread, as it were.
Giving into such incursions—alienation from labour that’s unfolded down intractable paths as civilisation, does seem to be quite a harsh punishment and we’re given to wonder for what award. Such advance is certainly not something to be taken for granted in the march of progress—other models are possible and farming and herding can be as capricious as scrounging for nuts and berries and game. One does not see other primates rushing towards cultivation—and not just despoiled wheat and grapes, and deferring one’s harvest to some unknown date. Some think, however, that the compulsion and motivation, perhaps the toxic knowledge, lie in fermentation. Humans would have never entered into such a social-contract without the accidental discovery of beer and wine (succour, according to other traditions)—or however one might name the libation. This does seem like a rather thunderous, not to invoke later protestations after that support structure was already well-established, revelation that can’t be unseen like the knowledge of Good and Evil, Drunk and Sober, and demarcating that free time sacrificed. That’s a little bit of magic, with primacy over bread, manna and other crops, that could elevate one from dull cares for a little while at least, even if that comes at a very high cost with equally high returns.

5x5

camouflage: beautiful landscapes with human figures painted in

midnight oil: astronomers find a pair of super-massive black-holes fueling a very luminous quasar

vitrification: a demonstration of 3-dimensional printing with molten glass

elementary: twelve occasions where Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes crossed-over

not from concentrate: a fascinating look at the Prohibition era wine-brick that saved the vineyards, via Nag on the Lake

five-by-five

bio-pic: beautifully haunting animation style of pioneer Lotte Reiniger

phew-phew: supercut of the Foley artist sounds of Star Wars, including some effects that didn’t make the cut

zener cards: minimalist deck by Joe Doucet

tee-total: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development wants Germany to curb its drinking-habit

tiger beat: social media giant promotes snap articles to journalism industry desparate to maintain young readership

five-by-five

paper-doll: McCalls Pattern Behavior adds dialogue to the models posing for sewing block patterns

i’ve been everywhere: map pins songs mentioned in popular music

siesta: researchers found that coffee-naps are more effective than either respite, stimulus alone

you see with your hands: being endangered and against the law to touch, selfies with the very gregarious quokkas of western Australia take off

on the wagon: a look at England’s last remaining temperance bar, herbal tonic emporium