• Lagunitas Brewing Company Skunk Train Trip

    September 27, 2013 Author: Scott
    1 Comment

    My wife Kel recently won a trip to go to CA to visit with Lagunitas Brewing Company and join them for a weekend of camping fun and a ride on the Skunk Train.  The trip was a lot of fun, and here are the pictures, and the tale, from the trip.

  • We’re Changing Our Name

    September 26, 2013 Author: Scott
    1 Comment

    If you’re a regular reader of this site you know that we have been Indy Beers for a long time.  While I have always loved that name, too often when I talked about the site with others I would have to spell the site (it’s not Indie, Indi, Inde, etc.) and explain the concept of the site (it’s not about Indianapolis, it’s about promoting independent beers).

    Recently I went on a trip to CA to the Lagunitas Brewery for a trip on the Skunk train.  It was a weekend gig, and lots of fellow beer drinkers were around.  I was asked several times where I was going to post the pictures I was taking.  After having to spell the name and explain the purpose of site too many times, I just start saying Independent Beers instead of Indy Beers.  No need to spell it, and it seems everyone understood what the site was about.

    We have owned both domain names since day 1, and both names will continue to point to this site, but from now on, we are Independent Beers.  Of course, you can always call us Indy Beers if you want.

    –Scott
    Beer drinker, beer lover.

  • Beerporn: Editor’s Choice

    September 24, 2013 Author: Scott
    1 Comment

    Tuesday is Editor’s Choice award day on http://hashtagbeerporn.com.  We are giving out an Editor’s Choice Award each week to the picture we think best represents beerporn during that week.  As an ongoing feature on Indy Beers each week I’ll be posting the Editor’s Choice winner from #Beerporn.  Remember, anyone can join and post pictures of beer to http://hashtagbeerporn.com.

    This week’s winner is Scott.  With Fall here, it’s time for some Fall beers.

    http://hashtagbeerporn.com/2013/09/22/weihenstephaner-oktoberfestbier/

    SavedPicture-201392211599

  • Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut

    September 20, 2013 Author: Scott
    Comments Off

    Beer Belly

    A man who would get drunk out of the blue without drinking beer?  Here is how it happened.

    This medical case may give a whole new meaning to the phrase “beer gut.”

     

    A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man’s blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.

     

    There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol that day.

     

    “He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime,” says Barabara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. “His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer.”

    Other medical professionals chalked up the man’s problem to “closet drinking.” But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.

     

    So the team searched the man’s belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.

     

    Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer’s yeast in his gut.

     

    That’s right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man’s intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.

     

    The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of “auto-brewery syndrome” a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.

     

    When we first read the case study, we were more than a little skeptical. It sounded crazy, a phenomenon akin to spontaneous combustion. I mean, come on: Could a person’s gut really generate that much ethanol?

     

    Brewer’s yeast is in a whole host of foods, including breads, wine and, of course, beer (hence, the name). The critters usually don’t do any harm. They just flow right through us. Some people even take Saccharomyces as a probiotic supplement.

     

    But it turns out that in rare cases, the yeasty beasts can indeed take up long-term residency in the gut and possibly cause problems, says Dr. Joseph Heitman, a microbiologist at Duke University.

     

    “Researchers have shown unequivocally that Saccharomyces can grow in the intestinal tract,” Heitman tells The Salt. “But it’s still unclear whether it’s associated with any disease” — or whether it could make someone drunk from the gut up.

     

    We dug around the scant literature on auto-brewery syndrome and uncovered a handful of cases similar to the one in Texas. Some reports in Japan date back to the 1970s. In most instances, the infections occurred after a person took antibiotics — which can wipe out the bacteria in the gut, making room for fungi like yeast to flourish — or had another illness that suppresses their immune system.

     

    Still, such case reports remain extremely rare. Heitman says he had never heard of auto-brewery syndrome until we called him up. “It sounds interesting,” he says. But he’s also cautious.

     

    “The problem with a case report,” he notes, “is that it’s just one person. It’s not a controlled clinical study.

  • Beerporn: Editor’s Choice

    September 17, 2013 Author: Scott
    1 Comment

    Tuesday is Editor’s Choice award day on http://hashtagbeerporn.com.  We are giving out an Editor’s Choice Award each week to the picture we think best represents beerporn during that week.  As an ongoing feature on Indy Beers each week I’ll be posting the Editor’s Choice winner from #Beerporn.  Remember, anyone can join and post pictures of beer to http://hashtagbeerporn.com.

    This week’s winner is Vampkel.  She was just in California for a Lagunitas event, and this bit of joy was just the tip of the iceberg.

    http://hashtagbeerporn.com/2013/09/13/lagunitas-little-sumpin-sumpin-on-da-bus/

    SavedPicture-2013913141032

  • How to Make Beer

    September 13, 2013 Author: Scott
    1 Comment

    Beer Ingredients

    This is an animated short on how to make beer.

  • Beerporn: Editor’s Choice

    September 10, 2013 Author: Scott
    1 Comment

    Tuesday is Editor’s Choice award day on http://hashtagbeerporn.com.  We are giving out an Editor’s Choice Award each week to the picture we think best represents beerporn during that week.  As an ongoing feature on Indy Beers each week I’ll be posting the Editor’s Choice winner from #Beerporn.  Remember, anyone can join and post pictures of beer to http://hashtagbeerporn.com.

    This week’s winner is Vampkel.   I love seeing the bottle/can and the beer in a glass.

    http://hashtagbeerporn.com/2013/09/02/brouwerij-huyghe-fruli-strawberry-victoriagpub/

    SavedPicture-201392181812

  • Craft Beer Makes a Movie

    September 4, 2013 Author: Scott
    Comments Off
    4.Olivia Wilde in DRINKING BUDDIES, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

    Olivia Wilde in DRINKING BUDDIES, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

     

    It was the movie Beer Wars that partially helped in igniting my desire to start this website, and now there is another movie coming out about craft beer.  Drinking Buddies will be coming out August 23rd, 2013 and while the movie isn’t completely about craft beer, it is the backdrop for a story of a group of friends.  This one, if for the craft beer alone, is on my list to go see.

    Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) work together at a craft brewery. They have one of those friendships that feels like it could be something more. But Kate is with Chris (Ron Livingston), and Luke is with Jill (Anna Kendrick). And Jill wants to know if Luke is ready to talk about marriage. The answer to that question becomes crystal clear when Luke and Kate unexpectedly find themselves alone for a weekend.  DRINKING BUDDIES is written and directed by Joe Swanberg and stars Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick, and Ron Livingston.

     

    Q&A WITH DIRECTOR JOE SWANBERG

    7.Joe Swanberg, director of DRINKING BUDDIES, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

    Joe Swanberg, director of DRINKING BUDDIES, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

     

    What was the inspiration for this project?

    The inspiration originally came from two places: The first was studio comedies of the early 1970’s, specifically BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE and Elaine May’s THE HEARTBREAK KID, which were both mainstream films (and big hits!) that portrayed complicated, interesting characters and adult points-of-view.  The most important lesson I took from these films is that they never forgot to be funny, which earned them the space to also be complex and challenging.

    The second inspiration was the craft beer world.  Craft beer is the most exciting business in America right now, if you ask me, and I wanted to get inside a world that I love.  I’m a home brewer and a craft beer advocate, and as the years passed, I realized that nobody was making a movie about it.

    I started talking to a friend of mine, Kate Thomas, who works for Half Acre Brewing in Chicago.  She told me about her job, and about being a woman in a very male dominated industry.  Through her stories, and other conversations with friends who work at breweries, I started to form the Kate character, who has learned to thrive in her surroundings.  The other main character, Luke, and his girlfriend, Jill, are modeled after my wife and I at a certain point in our relationship before we were married, when we were still trying to figure things out.

    As with all of my films, once I had the cast in place we started to work on the characters and the story together.  Olivia had great ideas about Kate, and brought a lot of her own life to it.  Jake Johnson and Anna Kendrick shared their own relationship experiences with me so that we could blend them with mine to make Luke and Jill as relatable as possible.  Once we all started talking about these issues, we realized how universal they are.  Everyone struggles to balance relationships and platonic friendships with the opposite sex.  Everyone has doubts and questions about whether they’re with the right person, or whether they could be happier with someone else.  We had fun throughout the shoot talking about these subjects and working our ideas into the film.

     

    How did you work with the actors?

    Working with actors remains the most inspiring part of the filmmaking process for me, and DRINKING BUDDIES allowed me to devote most of my energy to this.  I was lucky to have a few days with Olivia and Jake before we started shooting, and I used this time to familiarize them with the Chicago craft beer world.  We brewed beer together in my basement, so they could see how it’s made, and then we took a trip to the Three Floyd’s brewery, where my friend Andrew Mason, who brews there, showed them around.  I knew I wasn’t going to turn either of them into beer experts in 2 days, but I wanted them to soak up the atmosphere and get a sense of the people who work in a brewery.  During this beer boot camp, we were also discussing the characters and the story and finding ways to plug Olivia and Jake’s experiences into the story.

  • Beerporn: Editor’s Choice

    September 3, 2013 Author: Scott
    Comments Off

    Tuesday is Editor’s Choice award day on http://hashtagbeerporn.com.  We are giving out an Editor’s Choice Award each week to the picture we think best represents beerporn during that week.  As an ongoing feature on Indy Beers each week I’ll be posting the Editor’s Choice winner from #Beerporn.  Remember, anyone can join and post pictures of beer to http://hashtagbeerporn.com.

    This week’s winner is Husar.  Good depth of shot.

    http://hashtagbeerporn.com/2013/09/01/mirror-pond-pale-ale/

    20130901-194916