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Hoppage: The Descendents are now a beer
11.02.2016
01:28 pm
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No word yet on this year’s Descendents annual Christmas sweater, but that doesn’t mean no news at all. On the heels of the band’s new album Hypercaffium Spazzinate, the band introduced a coffee of the same name for the boutique roasters Dark Matter. Now, as if to produce the ideal buzz under which to listen to their records, they’ve made a beer with that coffee. San Diego’s Mikkeller Brewing has introduced “Feel This,” which is named for a song from the new LP, and is being introduced during San Diego Beer Week festivities this Friday.

The brew is a 7.3 % coffee IPA—evidently the Descendents didn’t get the memo about deep-pocket douchebags migrating their allegiance to sour beers this year—but the news release was unclear as to whether 7.3% was the coffee content or the final brew’s ABV. Mikkeller’s brewmaster Bill Batten, an old punk himself, offered the following comment:

Having grown up in the punk rock and skate punk scene, it was an honor to be given the opportunity to create a beer for the Descendents to celebrate their recently released album. While doing this collaboration we got an opportunity to meet the Dark Matter boys and learn about their coffee process.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.02.2016
01:28 pm
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The drugs that fueled the Meat Puppets’ first five LPs
01.29.2016
09:52 am
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Meat Puppets scholar Matthew Smith-Lahrman, the author of The Meat Puppets and the Lyrics of Curt Kirkwood from Meat Puppets II to No Joke, has posted a number of his in-depth interviews with the band on his blog, Perspective. Toward the end of one such conversation with main Puppet Curt Kirkwood, the singer and guitarist breaks down which drugs the band used while recording each of their first five albums for SST:

The first album was, “Let’s do it all on acid.” We thought that our heroes did. And I always thought, “Wow, the Grateful Dead and Jimi were trippin’,” and so we did it in the studio, Meat Puppets I sounds like that because we really are on drugs. Meat Puppets II we had MDA: lots of it. Really good MDA. We just had a ball with the stuff for about four or five days and recorded the record, but nobody is going to do that again after that. It’s like, “This record depends on this.” Well, it kind of does. Up on the Sun is just a big pot and beer album. “Now this one we’re going to go smoke pot and drink beer.” Then we go do Mirage and Huevos and snort cocaine.

 

 
For the Meat Puppets fan whose response to the above paragraph is “tl;dr,” here’s the Dangerous Minds easy-reference, wallet-sized taxonomy:

Meat Puppets: acid
Meat Puppets II: MDA
Up on the Sun: pot and beer
Mirage: cocaine
Huevos: cocaine

And here’s a story from Gregg Turkington’s liner notes to the Rykodisc reissue of Meat Puppets that should help you remember which drug goes with that album:

Curt once told me a story of a night he spent in the Arizona desert under the influence of hallucinogens. Wandering around in a patch of barren desert far from town, he came upon what appeared to be a beautiful Persian rug, laid out in the sand. Under the influence as he was, he couldn’t help but lie down on the rug and attempt to commune with its cascading patterns and beautiful colors. He eventually wrapped himself up in this gorgeous rug, and drifted off to sleep. Upon awakening to the heat of a desert morning, he was instantly sobered up by the realization that the rug was in fact, an extremely dead coyote, covered in maggots and stinking like the bowels of Hell from days spent rotting in the sun. The influence of incidents like these (and there are others!) definitely gave the Meat Puppets their particular and peculiar edge.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.29.2016
09:52 am
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People testing out a beer / weed bong
03.13.2015
01:30 pm
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Here’s a video montage of New Yorkers trying out a weed / beer bong for the very first time. I honestly don’t see how this could be a good time. Alcohol and weed never work well together, IMO. It’s one or the other for me. Never both. My experience mixing them together was immediate dizzying regret and suffering a serious case of the spins. I do not recommend it.

But clearly these intrepid folks aren’t gonna let me be a buzzkill… check ‘em out.

 
via BuzzFeed

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.13.2015
01:30 pm
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Li’l Lager: Baby bottles that look like beer bottles
02.26.2015
12:29 pm
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You’re probably not going to get a Parent of the Year award for this one, but fuck it, it’s funny. Introducing the Li’l Lager Baby Bottle that looks like your tiny tyke is hip to homebrew.

Li’l Lager holds 10 fluid ounces and is easily disassembled for cleaning.

Available for pre-order from Fred & Friends for $12 + shipping.

As others have suggested, there needs to be a 40oz version of this bottle. Homie baby don’t play.


 
Via Geekologie

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.26.2015
12:29 pm
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‘The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art’ AKA ‘FREE BEER’
02.05.2015
01:29 pm
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If you intend to go out drinking beer with friends tonight or over the weekend, then you are engaging in “the highest form of art,” according to California-based conceptual artist Tom Marioni. If you do it with Tom Marioni, you’ll be taking part in a piece of ongoing conceptual art that has been happening at specified times and places since 1970. He can do it anyplace he likes; all he has to do is let a gallery know that he intends to host a night of beer and art—“I send plans and they build a bar,” he says. He’s done it in places like Vienna, Paris, and Bristol, England.

Often, at these events, he draws a large circle on a blank wall, in front of which he tells a few jokes, similar to like the famous brick wall at the Improv, while his guests quaff bottles of Pacifico, which he favors “because I like the yellow label.” The full title of this expansive work of art—the events, the drinking, the conviviality, the comedy—is “The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art.” It also sometimes bears the name “FREE BEER.”

He has turned half of his studio into a piano bar, and has designated the shade of yellow, probably related to the label used by Pacifico, he likes to use “Marioni Yellow.” He first used the alcoholic beverage in his art in 1970, when he staged a beery event at the Oakland Museum of California. He invited sixteen friends to join him at the museum after hours; the curator supplied the beer, and everyone “drank and had a good time.” The empty beer bottles and the tables and chairs were left in place for the duration of the exhibition. That was a one-time thing, but since 1973 Marioni has been hosting a weekly salon, making “The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art” an ongoing artwork that is still not complete.
 

 
Marioni’s ongoing art salon/beerfest represent just a beginning of his forays into hops-fueled expression. One work, Golden Rectangle Beer, consists of seven shelves of Marioni’s beloved Pacifico beer bottles arranged in a rectangle with the “golden” 1:1.6 ratio (approximately) widely believed to represent an innately pleasing proportion for visual forms. Such was the name given to the 2000 artwork featured at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, but according to the video embedded below, that is the name he also gave to a similar artwork of a Samsung TV screen tilted on its side and displaying slushy footage of a golden, frothy substance immediately identifiable as beer. In 2004 Marioni published a manifesto of sorts bearing the insouciant title of Beer, Art, and Philosophy. In addition to everything else he is the founder of San Francisco’s Museum of Conceptual Art.
 

 
Basically, the affable Marioni has found a way to turn his life’s work, art, into an easygoing and enjoyable pursuit not without its share of high pedigree. It may be accessible and frivolous art, but that doesn’t make it not conceptual art.

Here’s an entertaining look at a typical Marioni salon event:
 


 
via Glasstire

Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.05.2015
01:29 pm
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Liquid Crack: ‘It Works Every Time!’
12.23.2014
12:38 pm
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In the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, black entertainers made considerable sums of money selling ghetto wine and malt liquor to their less fortunate brothers and sisters. “Liquid crack” was dirt cheap and fortified with alcohol and shitloads of sugar to get you higher faster. As Billy Dee Williams said in his TV pitch for Colt 45, “It works every time.”

40-ounce warriors were macho, sexy and hip…at least that’s what the commercials wanted the black community to think. The reality was much more grim. Malt liquors like Schlitz, Colt 45, Olde English 800, St. Ides, King Cobra and bum wines like Thunderbird and Wild Irish Rose were responsible for an increase in alcoholism, violence and crime in black neighborhoods. High alcohol content and the cost of a bottle being under two bucks was a deadly combination. Add to that the veneer of coolness that Kool and the Gang, Fred Williamson, Biggie Smalls and Snoop Dogg brought to the mix and you got a problem that went viral. 

Nowadays, low-rent white hipsters drink the poisonous piss in order to give them some kind of street cred while hip-hop artists have moved on to Cristal and Dom. But the high-end shit hasn’t trickled down to Skid Row yet.

While the product sold was crap for sure, the ads themselves are fascinating time capsules, some sending signals that are incredibly politically incorrect: making light of drunk driving, intimating that women will give it up after a few drinks, and using racial stereotypes that border on Stepin Fetchit caricature. And Blacks weren’t the only ones denigrated—check out the East Indian guy in the “Gunga Din” Colt 45 commercial below.

There’s also an interesting clip of Johnny Cannon wielding a Colt 45 pistol and a can of Colt 45 beer. A wise combination, don’t you think? Johnny’s expression of disgust as he guzzles the malt liquor is priceless.

Then I ask a question you brother
What the fuck is you drinkin’
He don’t know but it flow
Out the bottle in a cup
He call it gettin’ fucked up
Like we ain’t fucked up already
See the man they call Crazy Eddie
Liquor man with the bottle in his hand
He give the liquor man ten to begin
Wit’ no change and he run
To get his brains rearranged
Serve it to the home they’re able
To do without a table
Beside what’s inside ain’t on the label
They drink it thinkin’ it’s good
But they don’t sell the shit in the white neighborhood

—Public Enemy, “1 Million Bottlebags”

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.23.2014
12:38 pm
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The house that’s decorated in beer cans
06.09.2014
02:42 pm
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If you’ve ever wanted an interesting way to recycle all those empty beer cans left after a weekend party, then take a tip from retired bus driver Phil Muspratt, who has clad his house in Hartlepool, England with over 75,000 of them.

Muspratt started collecting beer cans and bottles in 2005, and soon began sticking the empties to the outside of his house. It’s been thirsty work, as for every eight cans there’s a drunken man, for every 150 there’s been a party. At roughly a dollar a can, you could say Mr. Muspratt has added considerable value to his home.

The house has become a tourist attraction, but there are plans to demolish it along with over 70 other houses in the area. A campaign has been started to save the Mr. Muspratt’s art house but going by the lack of activity on the the supporter’s Facebook page, it’s unclear whether “Can House” will survive.

In 2012, first time director Maxy Neil Bianco made a documentary about Phil Muspratt’s endeavors:

The Can House is a piece of contemporary folk art, made by Phil, a man on the margins of society, a man who’s life is in freefall. This is what you come up with when you run out of nothing- the Can House is an act of defiance, a two fingers up to the hand of fate, to a world slowly degenerating and disappearing. It is a memorial to alcoholism and to wasted lives, but it is also an act of creativity that gives Phil"s life a sense of meaning, that helps it make some kind of sense.

Hartlepool is known as the city that supposedly tried and hung a monkey as a spy during the Napoleonic wars in the 1800s (though it has also been suggested this was no ape but a “powder monkey,” the name given to young boys who served on ships of war). The legend of the hanged monkey is still associated with Hartlepool, but perhaps it’s time to move on and have the city associated with something equally bizarre, like Phil Muspratt’s “Can House”?
 
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With thanks to Paul D. Brazill
 
More pictures of ‘Can House’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.09.2014
02:42 pm
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Punk-branded beer is bollocks
03.31.2014
12:14 pm
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Uggggggggh. I love beer, and I love punk rock. I understand the peanut butter and chocolate impulses we sometimes have (often when we’re drunk) to combine our favorite things, but this is just such a bummer. I get it! I sympathize with these plucky brewers! I understand that it’s difficult to brand your product—especially when it’s a product that has existed for at least 10,000 years. However, can we stop trying to squeeze the last bit of cultural capital out of a word that has long-since lost its automatic credibility? I mean there was that abominable couture show at the Met, and people are still trying to get mileage out of “punk”???

What if we just picked another genre? What about New Wave beer? Deep Chicago House Ale? Freak Folk Lager? I sincerely doubt those movements would inspire such a cringe-inducing marketing campaign as this one:

Welcome to a post Punk apocalyptic mother fucker of a pale ale.

A beer that spent its formative years Blitzkrieg bopping around India and the sub continent. Quintessential Empire with an anarchic twist.

God save the Queen and all who sail in her. Raising a Stiff Little Finger to IPAs that have come before and those it is yet to meet.

Turn up the volume Pay the man. Embrace the punked up, fucked up outlaw elite.

Never Mind the Bollocks this is the real shit.

Fuck you.

If I ever drink another craft brew IPA again, it will be too soon (I used to live in the midwest—lotta’ hobby brewers in the hinterlands). This beer does seem to be pretty delicious, at least according to this charmingly eccentric German beer connoisseur. And hey, if you can’t trust charmingly eccentric German beer connoisseurs, society is truly bereft of authenticity. 
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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03.31.2014
12:14 pm
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In epic prank, man’s taps and shower serve up cold, delicious draft beer
09.17.2013
11:22 am
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Epic beer prank
 
This is a must-see.

In New Zealand, they don’t just have the best accents in the world, they also do the awesomest pranks. It seems that in the past this guy Russell Brown has perpetrated his share of pranks on his buddies, so they teamed up to get sweet revenge in a spectacular style. They got in touch with a local brewery called Tui and arranged to plumb beer throughout all of the pipes in Russell’s Auckland home. All the taps—even the showers—ran the pure hoppy elixir for at least that day.

Russell and his mates all had a good laugh, although apparently Russell’s wife was a bit put out.

The first video is the condensed version; find the longer version (only 7 minutes) after the jump. Jimmy Kimmel, thus far at least, hasn’t stepped into frame…
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.17.2013
11:22 am
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‘Die Hard’ and ‘8 Mile’ (even ‘24’) revealed to be remakes of pretentious French art films!
08.22.2013
11:37 am
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Dial Hard
 
In 2009, as part of its “Smooth Originals” campaign, Belgian beer purveyor Stella Artois released three short “classic French movies” that had secretly served as the inspiration for the 1988 classic Die Hard (or actually 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance), the 2002 hip-hop drama film 8 Mile, and the Bush-era TV series 24, respectively.

The tagline is “The films Hollywood didn’t want you to see.” The idea’s supposed to be that all good things were really French first—or Belgian! We aren’t really sure. The movies are a lot of fun though, and have been executed brilliantly, in the manner of dudes like Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, and so on. It’s quite a bit as if the people behind Italian Spiderman had decided to turn their attention to skewering Godard’s Breathless (although perhaps after taking some Quaaludes).

8 Mile is transformed into 8 Kilomètres (purportedly une Séléction Officielle at the 1961 Côte d’Azur Film Festival), but instead of a bunch of Detroit homeys swapping rhymes, it’s two affected French beatnik types playing the dozens in a smoky Monte Carlo jazz bistro. The best of the bunch might be Vingt-Quatre Heures (Séléction Officielle, 1964 Côte d’Azur Film Festival), in which the Jack Bauer substitute is a sleepy fellow named Jacques who, informed that “millions of people are going to die” within 24 hours, prefers to peruse Camus’ L’Étranger in his bathrobe rather than save them, because after all, “sauvez le monde, c’est tellement ... bourgeois” (”... saving the world, it’s so ... bourgeois”).

In Dial Hard (Séléction Officielle at the 1963 Festival de Monte Carlo), a foxy chick named “Simone” leads suave “Inspector MeQlain” all over town with telephoned riddles in a deadly game of “Simone Says” (this is the plot of Die Hard with a Vengeance), but the ever-capable MeQlain, who can finish both a novel and a chess game within the same two minutes, decides to make a play for her instead. 
 

 
The full videos and posters for Vingt-Quatre Heures and 8 Kilomètres after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.22.2013
11:37 am
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Pizza-flavored beer: Are you not at least intrigued?
01.30.2013
02:18 pm
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It’s exactly what it sounds like!

My fascination with this-flavored-thats is well-documented, but what makes pizza-flavored beer so awesome is the nature of its novelty. It’s not the result of cultural difference, like cola chicken potato chips in China. And its not self-aware irony, like kitschy, retro bacon-flavored toothepaste.

I don’t even get the impression its reveling in absurdism, à la bacon-flavored sexual lubricant. No, these are just two people who simply thought pizza-flavored beer sounded delicious.

The goal was to create a beer that would pair with a wide variety of foods, especially our favorite, Pizza! In the end, we were pleasantly surprised that this “mess” turned out to be the best thing since the guy with chocolate that bumped into Ralph Mouth & mixed up the chocolate with the peanut butter! Indeed, the world will love “Pizza Beer”.

Facing a difficult task, we immediately did an internet search to gather information on using the “oddball” ingredients in creating a beer. Certainly someone had published such a recipe! We found beer made with garlic, hemp seed, coriander, hot peppers, maple syrup, honey, citrus peels & more. But what about tomatoes & the possibility of combining all of our favorite flavors into this beer? We then grabbed our favorite book written by a fellow Chicago Beer Society member, Randy Mosher. He wrote a book called “Radical Brewing” which has been read cover to cover a few times. Randy mentions a lot weirder stuff than pizza spices. He talks about mushrooms, hot rocks & stuff that is really radical! In a quandary, we called one of our best friends & creative brewmasters in the world, Kris Kalav. We told him of our quest to make this really cool brew & wanted to know if he had any experience brewing with tomatoes. After he stopped laughing, we bounced a few ideas around and Voila! “Pizza Beer” was on it’s way to fame. To our knowledge, our home brewed concoction is the “World’s First Culinary Beer.”

Now, being homebrewers, we enjoy the freedom to create whatever we want. We usually refer to a book by Ray Daniels called “Designing Great Beers” when creating a style of beer that we intend on submitting to a contest. We usually concoct the recipe by memory & measure ingredients the way your grandmother did, pinch of this, smidgen of that. Something happened that day. We figured if this really turned out like we want it to, we better be able to duplicate it! Lo and behold, the amazing “Pizza Beer” was born.

Look at that website! Look at the comic sans! And the animation! And the graphics! You wouldn’t troll me with false earnestness, would you, Tom and Athena Seefurth, of Campton Township, Illinois?

Would I still want to drink this if it was sold in some bar in Williamsburg? Of course! I can easily disregard atmospheric pretension in favor of carnal pleasures. But is my heart warmed at the eccentricity of this couple’s innovation? I’m not made of stone!

Posted by Amber Frost
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01.30.2013
02:18 pm
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Titties -n- Beer
11.24.2010
07:31 pm
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image
 

 
Nope, Frank Zappa, has got nothing to do with this one… You may or may not be aware of ten-year-old Wendy Cerveza, the little Peruvian girl who took Latin America by storm with her (ironic? un-ironic?) song “La Tetita” (The Tit). I was vaguely aware of this (it’s had around 4 million YouTube views) but not speaking Spanish, I didn’t investigate further. Now the fine folks at Bad Ass Digest have translated the lyrics into English and they are mind-boggling.

But how do you follow up a paean to titty?

What about a ditty about… beer?
 

 

Via Bad Ass Digest

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.24.2010
07:31 pm
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Billboard coupons: visual pollution that earns you beer money
08.15.2010
05:14 am
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James Ready Beer has created one very cool ad campaign. In an effort to save their customers money so they can afford to buy more James Ready Beer the brewery created billboard coupons.

By partnering with local retailers, we created a program that allowed people to take a picture of our billboard, show the picture to the corresponding retailer and receive savings on selected products and services. Saving money meant more beer money.

 
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Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.15.2010
05:14 am
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