Meh Holiday August 7 -- International Beer Day
3The first Friday of August is International Beer Day. It used to be every August 5, but you can imagine how switching it to only be on Friday helped the gross domestic product of the world’s economies.
Beer is so significant it deserves its own holiday. Beer is the second most popular beverage in the world, second only to tea. The first historical reference to beer dates to around 6,000 BC. In the Middle Ages, monks brewing beer were allowed to drink five quarts of beer a day. English pubs sell ale by pints and quarts; when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at patrons to mind their own pints and quarts, and to calm down. Over time bartenders shortened this expression to “mind your P’s and Q’s”. British men have been found twice as likely to know the price of their beer as their partner’s bra size.
I need not ask most mehtizens how to celebrate International Beer Day, but here are a few more creative ways than the obvious.
–Take some steps toward brewing your own beer. Read up online, or order a starter kit. I suggest you do the former before doing the latter.
–Try a brand of beer you’ve never tried before. There are so many to choose from.
–Put on a mask, grab some beers, and head over to that new neighbor you have been telling yourself to welcome but putting it off.
How do YOU celebrate International Beer Day?
- 5 comments, 15 replies
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I like the tidbit about the ps and qs. Is beer and tea more popular than water?
@RiotDemon I consulted a second reference which said water is the most consumed drink, so no.
Hey you forgot to post about hang over day which proceeds this holiday. It would have made sense if “they” had beer day precede hangover day though (grin).
@Kidsandliz I agree with you and so did the person who came up with International Hangover Day. Actually, it is the day after International Beer Day.
@ThunderChicken My bad. I take it that is tomorrow then?
@Kidsandliz The decision on what to celebrate tomorrow has yet to be made. It could depend upon how much beer is consumed today.
@ThunderChicken Probably should be Monday then to account for a weekend of heavy drinking.
@Kidsandliz True.
Hooray! I’m drinking some right now!
@ELUNO
/giphy bottoms up
@Kidsandliz yes!
@ELUNO That was for you by the way. I don’t drink. (grin).
@Kidsandliz hmm… I’ll drink for you tonight!
@ELUNO Good deal. And even better you then have an excuse to drink twice as much!
@ELUNO Whew, made it by less than an hour!
Some years ago I lived in a coop while being an illegal student (eg went to class but didn’t enroll). Two of the guys in there (one was a junior engineering student and the other a chemistry PhD student) decided to brew beer using purloined chemistry lab containers. All went well until after they had bottled it and had the bottles stored in their rooms to “age” (no idea how long they planned to age it - likely the minimum possible). Anyway one evening we heard the boom of bottles exploding in their rooms. No idea what they did wrong that caused that but the other 22 of us decided they should have known better based on their majors. Not all the bottles exploded so eventually they had their beer. They did a lot of drinking once it was “done”.
The chemistry guy also decided to make home made ice cream one evening. Most of it was good except the avocado. That tasted like a freshly mowed lawn smelled. He made beer ice cream as well (using some of the beer he made in the explosion incident). No idea how that went as he didn’t share that one.
Something similar happened to a couple of work colleagues years ago. They had decided to brew wheat beers. Turns out that wheat beer yeast has a neat metabolic trick that gives it a sort of second wind when it runs out of free sugars. The fermentation kicked back on when they tried to bottle condition their wheat beer.
One guy woke up in the middle of the night to strange popping noises in his basement. He had to clean up all the beer from floor, walls and ceiling, and rebottle the ones that hadn’t popped. The caps ejected from the bottles with enough force to put little dents in the ceiling. Apparently his wife was not amused.
The other guy didn’t have his bottles explode, but his beer was hyper-carbonated and shot out of the bottle when he opened them. He brought some to an office party, and the beer fountains were a big hit. As I remember, his wife was laughing pretty hard, so I guess there was a sort of win there.
@mehcuda67 Well that probably explains what happened to the housemates’ beer except they had the lids on so tight that the bottles all exploded.
@mehcuda67 In almost 30 years of homebrewing, I’ve never had any bottles burst, but I have had a few instances of over carbonation/spewing foam. These days, I keg my beer and force carbonate with CO2, so it is not an issue.
@macromeh @mehcuda67 They had never done it before so I suspect there is a bit of a learning curve.