Hooray Beer!

My dislike for the taste of beer has changed thanks to Dos Equis, and so, in celebration of this newly acquired like for the brewed beverage, I present a belated Mother's Day blogging on beer.

Odd Beer Names:

Old Speckled Hen, Shaftebury 420 Brilliant Lager, Hell for Certain. Those are three of the ten odd beer names, with nice bottle pics, that you can find here. The people who put it together have a juvenile sense of humor, but it’s still worth checking out. “Moose drool” and "Flying dog in heat wheat" are my favorites.

Wiki "Beer", and here are just a few of the facts you’ll learn:
Beer is the world’s oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic beverage and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea....

Some of humanity’s earliest known writings refer to the production and distribution of beer: the Code of Hammurabi included laws regulating beer and beer parlours, and “The Hymn to Ninkasi,” a prayer to the Mesopotamian goddess of beer, served as both a prayer and as a method of remembering the recipe for beer in a culture with few literate people....

Less widely used starch sources [for brewing] include millet, sorghum and cassava root in Africa, potato in Brazil, and agave in Mexico, among others....

Regions have water with different mineral components; as a result, different regions were originally better suited to making certain types of beer, thus giving them a regional character. For example, Dublin has hard water well suited to making stout, such as Guinness; while Pilzen has soft water well suited to making pale lager, such as Pilsner Urquell. The waters of Burton in England contain gypsum, which benefits making pale ale to such a degree that brewers of pale ales will add gypsum to the local water in a process known as Burtonisation...

The most common method of categorising beer is by the behaviour of the yeast used in the fermentation process. In this method, beers using a fast-acting yeast which leaves behind residual sugars are termed “ales”, while beers using a slower-acting yeast, fermented at lower temperatures, which removes most of the sugars, leaving a clean, dry beer, are termed “lagers”...

Beer ranges from less than 3% alcohol by volume (abv) to almost 30% abv...

The temperature of a beer has an influence on a drinker’s experience; warmer temperatures reveal the range of flavours in a beer; however, cooler temperatures are more refreshing.