Silflay Hraka

Compiled with the assistance of Rogue’s Issaquah Brewery Bullfrog Ale


News from Mordor
The largest U.S. brewer, Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. , said Tuesday that beer sales to retailers have rebounded in May after a disappointing April.

The brewer said sales from wholesalers to retailers for the whole company, as well as just for its core beer brands including Budweiser and Bud Light, rose at a mid-single digit percentage rate.

Brew Reviews: Creemore Springs Traditional Pilsner, Russian River Damnation Ale, Browning’s Special Reserve 2006 Ol’ Shag Barley Wine, Z

Hedonist Beer Jive’s Top 25 Beers I’ve had 8. Not bad for being on the entirely opposite coast.

The $200 beer. Cheap at the price.
As any Internet search will show you, these Ballantine bottles have a well deserved reputation. Back in 1994, Steve Kemper wrote a story for BeeR the Magazine titled “Pub Crawling New York with the Beer King” detailing in evening spent in several of Manhattan’s historic barrooms with the late Alan Eames.

They finished at Bahama Mama, where Eames had a bottle of Ballantine Burton Ale delivered to the table. That particular beer had been aged in wood from 1946 until 1966 and had been in the bottle for 25 years. After Eames explained how he came to own the bottle, he said: “This is the Dom Perignon ‘55 of beers, and God sent it to me.”

Turns out it wasn’t wine at the Last Supper after all.

Should she drink the $9 beer, or should she use it to cool off her raging hot bosoms?

In The Know: Teenagers and Alcohol

You can’t buy a 12-pack in Pennsylvania? Not that any of the beer I buy now comes in 12 packs, but damn.

Beer is worth 1.88 billion to the North Carolina economy. Approximately half of that is in Natural Light shipped directly to Greenville.

Ticketed for serving Coors with a Miller Lite tap. I’m betting the Port Washington CSIs spent weeks figuring out that one.

World’s worst beer festival.

Craft beer meets cans.

At issue was not so much the integrity of the container as its image. Beer cans have been around since 1935 and today cradle almost half the beer consumed in this country. But the can has been largely unable to shed its blue-collar aura, conjuring images of John Belushi in “Animal House” crushing the empties against his forehead.

Not until a few years ago did a Canadian firm, Cask Brewing Systems Inc., market a canning machine that was small enough and inexpensive enough to interest microbrewers.

I’ve had both the Dale’s Pale Ale and the Old Chub, and both are excellent brews.

Ruination IPA nows comes in six packs.

One of the most bitter beers in America, ringing in at over 100 IBUs (International Bitterness Units), Stone Ruination IPA was first released in June of 2002 and has since become one of the best respected beers in the “Double IPA” style category. Many brewers across the nation have even argued that “San Diego (Style) Pale Ale” is a more fitting name for this category, due to the origination of the style in the San Diego County region. Stone Brewing secured its position in that legacy at the very beginning by releasing some of the very first Double IPA’s in the world: the Stone Anniversary IPAs (1998 to 2001), followed by the release of Stone Ruination IPA in 2002. These beers were an instant hit with fans, many of whom are unapologetic “hopheads” (i.e., people who enjoy very hoppy, bitter beers such as India Pale Ales.) In fact, much of the initial prompting for Stone Ruination IPA, one of the first year-round bottled double IPAs in the world, came right from the fans themselves.

Belgians invade Philadelphia.

It’s Keith Villa’s job to talk to the clueless.

Don’t miss the Lesbian Pirate Queen!

The previous carnival may be seen here.

Loggerhead nest on Wrightsville Beach.

Me put tetrodotoxin in your monkfish. (lvi)

Hong Chang Corporation of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., said it is recalling the product labeled as monkfish because it may contain tetrodotoxin, a potent toxin.

While the frozen fish imported from China was labeled monkfish, the company said it is concerned that it may be pufferfish because this toxin is usually associated with certain types of pufferfish.

I see a series of recurring posts, stretching into the future as far as the eye can see…

Caturday at AMCGLTD

And it just keeps spreading. Via Dustbury

Colorado is especially deadly this year.

Spring rains in the Front Range, after years of drought, are leading to thriving populations of mice and other rodents – carrying the rare, sometimes deadly diseases of plague, tularemia and hantavirus.

And at least two cats in southwestern Colorado have tested positive for tularemia this spring.

Me put diethylene glycol in your children’s toothpaste.

No tainted toothpaste has been found in the United States, but a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that the agency would be taking “a hard look” at whether to issue an import alert.

Toothpaste containing the toxic solvent was also found in Panama and Australia in the last week.

Why diethylene glycol.?

Mr. Hu said his company exports toothpaste, toothbrushes, glue and other goods to the United States, Europe and other regions but that his company no longer uses diethylene glycol. He said, however, that most toothpaste makers in this region use diethylene glycol because it is considered a cheap substitute for glycerin.

“You know, if you’re in the export market, the margins are small, so people use the substitute,” he said. “Even one percent or half a percent price difference can matter to people here.

David Bodanis would beg to differ. Here’s an excerpt from his Secret House

But what’s in this toothpaste?

Water mostly, 30 to 45 percent in most brands: ordinary, everyday simple tap water. It’s there because people like to have a big gob of toothpaste to spread on the brush, and water is the cheapest stuff there is when it comes to making big gobs. Dripping a fit from the tap into your brush would cost virtually nothing; whipped in with the rest of the toothpaste the manufacturers can sell it at a neat and accountant-pleasing $2 per pound of equivalent. Toothpaste manufacture is a very lucrative occupation.

Who’s at risk?

Mr. Hu at Goldcredit said that while he did not produce the toothpaste shipped to Panama, diethylene glycol had been used for years at very low levels in Chinese toothpaste as a glycerin substitute. “If diethylene glycol were poisonous,” he said, “all Chinese people would have been poisoned.”

Again, someone begs to differ. In this case the Commission on Human Rights.

To this sombre picture of the health situation in Haiti should be added the tragic affair of the contaminated syrups, which caused the deaths of almost 80 Haitian children. As soon as the deaths of the first victims were announced, the Minister of Health published a statement urging the population immediately to cease using “Afebrile” and “Valadon” syrups, and calling for their removal from all pharmacies. Most of the cases were reported in Port-au-Prince, but there were also cases in seven other areas. The ages of the victims ranged from 1 month to 13 years. Laboratory examinations, conducted with the assistance of John Hopkins University, established that death had been caused by the toxic substance, diethylene glycol.

ProMed Mail would also disagree.

It now appears as though contamination/adulteration of an expectorant syrup with diethylene glycol is considered the definitive etiology of the “acute syndrome of unexpected renal insufficiency” in Panama. The present case count is 44 with 21 associated deaths. From the background information in the newswire [1], it appears as though there had been a similar occurrence in the early 1960s, with about 15 reported deaths.