Beer

Beer connoisseurs can prepare to have their palates tested by an out-of-this-world brew from Sapporo. The Japanese brewer is launching the world’s first beer produced using malt made 100 percent from “space barley”. The barley in question is the fourth generation descendant of the Haruna Nija malting barley that was developed by the company and kept in space for five months during 2006 as part of collaborative research with the Russian Academy of Sciences and Okayama University - who obviously have their priorities straight.  Read More

Picture the scene: you’ve been trekking hard all day in the great outdoors, enjoying everything nature has to offer. You’ve set up camp and your canned cheeseburgers are bubbling gently on the fire. As you watch the sun sink slowly behind the mountains the only thing missing is a cold beer. Well… (beer aficionados, you may want to stop reading now) Katadyn, the Swiss-based company behind the Trek’n’Eat canned cheeseburger and other high-tech, freeze-dried foods, has developed a world first – powdered beer – to wash it all down with.  Read More

You know how it is … you make or buy that perfect cup of coffee or tea only to have it go cold before you’ve finished because the phone rang or your boss interrupted your break with some urgent assignment. Well, there’s great news for coffee-lovers (and tea connoisseurs). Two German scientists have put their heads together to come up with a hot drink receptacle that keeps your beverage at the perfect drinking temperature for up to 30 minutes.  Read More

There’s nothing like kicking back with a cold bottle of beer on, well, any day really. But if Beverage Pouch Group LLC has its way, you may soon be sipping your favorite artisanal ale from a plastic pouch. The BeerPaQ CarboPouch line of beverage packs looks like something astronauts might use to pack their brewskies on the International Space Station, but the manufacturer says they are an ideal container for small craft breweries and micro brewers.  Read More

All wine tastes better once it's aged, right? Wrong. In fact, wine experts say around 90% of wines are released by the winemaker tasting as good as they're ever going to get - and after 6 months of sitting in a bottle, most are deteriorating noticeably. Now, that's a great excuse to fling open your cellar doors, warm up your corkscrew and start drinking - but it's also the key idea behind a new wine storage and dispensing system called N2Wine that could start a revolution in the wine service industry. By keeping each wine completely isolated from oxygen, and at its perfect serving temperature, these racks of "wine globes" allow restaurants to serve a broad selection of their best wines by the glass, confident that even after months or years, every drop will be as fresh as it was the moment the bottle was opened. But will the market accept such a radical departure from the traditional romance of a fine bottle, opened and poured at the table?  Read More

Juggling a beer and a plate loaded with appetizers at summer barbecues can become a delicate balancing act. With both hands tied, how do you actually get the food in your mouth without burying your face in the plate? The Go Plate offers a solution by fitting over your drink to free up one hand for shoveling that food in.  Read More

January 17, 2008 The environmentally conscious Sierra Nevada Brewery in California is taking steps to become partially powered by the sun. A 1.3 megawatt solar system is being installed at the Chico plant in two phases and will provide 34% of the brewery’s power.  Read More

It's a brave new world out there, and one can easily underestimate the skills required to make full use of the internet. Here's one example that's sure to illustrate the importance of basic internet trading savvy, and tickle your sense of schadenfreude - an eBay trader who leveraged the mistake of another to make himself a tidy US $500,000 profit, for a small amount of work.  Read More

May 8, 2007 Mophie today announced the US$15 Bevy, the first product to be released from the highly successful Illuminator project. The mophie Bevy is a multifunctional case for Apple's iPod Shuffle that features a bottle opener and key chain and was designed by a 17-year-old from California. The Illuminator project at MacWorld Expo transformed mophie’s booth into a live community collaboration and creation lab where, over a four-day period, 30,000+ MacWorld attendees were invited to doodle a product concept that enhanced any of the newest Apple products. Concepts were voted on by MacWorld attendees at the show and on mophie.com. Finally, mophie designers and engineers took the winning concepts and developed prototypes in the booth.  Read More