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Entries in Beer (10)

Why I love the Spanish

It's Better To Drink Beer After Exercise Than Water

Submitted by Julie on November 2, 2007 - 8:47pm.

Researchers at Granada University in Spain have come across a discovery that will undoubtedly please athletes and sports enthusiasts - a pint of beer post-workout or match is better at rehydrating the human body than water.

Professor Manuel Garzon, a member of Granada's medical faculty, made the finding after tests on 25 students over several months. Researchers believe that it is the sugars, salts, and bubbles in a beer that may help people absorb fluids more quickly.

The subjects in the study were asked to run on a treadmill at temperatures of 104F (40C) until they were close to exhaustion. Once they had reached the point of giving up, researchers measured their hydration levels, motor skills, and concentration ability.

Read the whole article here….

You're Invited! Corey wants you to drink beer.

Yes, indeed cross fans! You, yes YOU have been invited by my main man Corey C to his casa for a beer an BBQ party....after you of course have popped your 2008 'cross cherry by racing the Colorado Springs race this Saturday. His invitation to you follows!

Post Race BBQ!

Saturday, September 13th (After Pikes Peak Supercross #1)

Where's the party: 1304 E. St Vrain, Colorado Springs, CO 80909 or click Here!


GREG K NOTE: it is ALWAYS great to see a truck outside your house being loaded with a Beer Cooler on Google Maps Street View. Party attendees are sure to enjoy!


Come and get your beer and 'Q on and talk cross with your compadres!

Come on over after the race and ruin some of that hard work and training you’ve put into this year’s cyclocross season the good old fashioned way with some beer, brats, and burgers.

Starts after the race, finishes when everyone is gone.

Mmm. Protein.

Beer, Fat Tires and High Heart Rates

It appears that the good people of New Belgium Brewery amongst a slew of other co-sponsors are throwing themselves a short track series on Tuesday nights starting in May. $5 bucks!! There is a God. And there is a reason I drink 1554 and Abby Ales religiously.

Note the goat heads, so don't be rolling your Dugast Rhino 45's. Also, bring your A-game cause Kerkove's gonna want to own this!

New Belgium Brewery loves cyclists and we love their beer. Maybe too much.

NOT your Father's Chimay

Holy crap on a poop stick. I've found it...and all this time it's existed so near me...in the form of a dear friend who's SO PASSIONATE about making it! I can barely type as I type this. The beeer si tooo gud, and a wee bit alkeehawlik. My boy Hix gave me a Christmas present in the form of his home brewed "No Room at the Inn" Christmas style Blegian Ale. I just got around to opening it. In Hix's words:

It's a belgian christmas ale, so think affligem noel or st. bernardus noel.

Dark, caramel, a little sweetness, some spice, lots of "warming" alkyhawl. i didn't think it was going to be quite ready in time for christmas, but the one i opened last night was pretty danged tasty.

It will have a short-lived head and won't be terribly carbonated (high aklyhawl). i'm going to set aside some of it for 6+ months from now.

Verdict: ALL TRUE.

This is a man who Rides now a Ridley X-Night and MADE THIS BEER. I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!

Thank you my friend.

(And, no, I am not operating heavy machinery whilst imbibing).

(Yes this helps my recovery you weenies.)

Maredsous

Beer alert! Beer alert!

Oh dear, I think I've found perfection in a bottle. The Maredsous 8 Dubbel. God. Monks. History. Tradition. Beer. I love their slogan.

Anywhoo, the 8 Dubble is like a mouth orgasm so it must be sampled by you, the Belgian wannabe crosser. Like me.

Beer hoarding

So first Vantornout (the kid I LOVED and pegged last year as making his mark this year) starts flapping his lips on how it woudl have been an insult if Page won Worlds last year and now THIS! The Belgians are conspiring against us even though we saved their asses in the Ardennes in '44. Ingrates.

Thanks Dave for forwarding this incredibly important WSJ article.
Trappist Command:
Thou Shalt Not Buy Too Much of Our Beer

Monks at St. Sixtus Battle
Resellers of Prized Brew;
Brother Joris Plays Hardball

By JOHN W. MILLER
November 29, 2007; Page A1

WESTVLETEREN, Belgium -- The Trappist monks at St. Sixtus monastery have taken vows against riches, sex and eating red meat. They speak only when necessary. But you can call them on their beer phone.

[westvleteren beer]

Cassandra Vinograd

Monks have been brewing Westvleteren beer at this remote spot near the French border since 1839. Their brew, offered in strengths up to 10.2% alcohol by volume, is among the most highly prized in the world. In bars from Brussels to Boston, and online, it sells for more than $15 for an 11-ounce bottle -- 10 times what the monks ask -- if you can get it.

For the 26 monks at St. Sixtus, however, success has brought a spiritual hangover as they fight to keep an insatiable market in tune with their life of contemplation.

The monks are doing their best to resist getting bigger. They don't advertise and don't put labels on their bottles. They haven't increased production since 1946. They sell only from their front gate. You have to make an appointment and there's a limit: two, 24-bottle cases a month. Because scarcity has created a high-priced gray market online, the monks search the net for resellers and try to get them to stop.

"We sell beer to live, and not vice versa," says Brother Joris, the white-robed brewery director. Beer lovers, however, seem to live for Westvleteren.

When Jill Nachtman, an American living in Zurich, wanted a taste recently, she called the hot line everybody calls the beer phone. After an hour of busy signals, she finally got through and booked a time. She drove 16 hours to pick up her beer. "If you factor in gas, hotel -- and the beer -- I spent $20 a bottle," she says.

Until the monks installed a new switchboard and set up a system for appointments two years ago, the local phone network would sometimes crash under the weight of calls for Westvleteren. Cars lined up for miles along the flat one-lane country road that leads to the red brick monastery, as people waited to pick up their beer.

"This beer is addictive, like chocolate," said Luc Lannoo, an unemployed, 36-year-old Belgian from Ghent, about an hour away, as he loaded two cases of Westvleteren into his car at the St. Sixtus gate one morning. "I have to come every month."

Two American Web sites, Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, rank the strongest of Westvleteren's three products, a dark creamy beer known as "the 12," best in the world, ahead of beers including Sweden's Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter and Minnesota's Surly Darkness. "No question, it is the holy grail of beers," says Remi Johnson, manager of the Publick House, a Boston bar that has Westvleteren on its menu but rarely in stock.

Some beer lovers say the excitement over Westvleteren is hype born of scarcity. "It's a very good beer," says Jef van den Steen, a brewer and author of a book on Trappist monks and their beer published in French and Dutch. "But it reminds me of the movie star you want to sleep with because she's inaccessible, even if your wife looks just as good."

WSJ's John Miller travels through Belgium in a quest for a small-batch brew made by Trappist monks that's considered by some the best beer in the world.

Thanks to the beer phone, there are no more lines of cars outside the monastery now. But production remains just 60,000 cases per year, while demand is as high as ever. Westvleteren has become almost impossible to find, even in the specialist beer bars of Brussels and local joints around the monastery.

"I keep on asking for beer," says Christophe Colpaert, manager of "Café De Sportsfriend," a bar down the road from the monks. "They barely want to talk to me." On a recent day, a recorded message on the beer phone said St. Sixtus wasn't currently making appointments; the monks were fresh out of beer.

Increasing production is not an option, according to the 47-year-old Brother Joris, who says he abandoned a stressful career in Brussels for St. Sixtus 14 years ago. "It would interfere with our job of being a monk," he says.

Belgian monasteries like St. Sixtus started making beer in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which ended in 1799. The revolt's anti-Catholic purge had destroyed churches and abbeys in France and Belgium. The monks needed cash to rebuild, and beer was lucrative.

Trappist is a nickname for the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, who set up their own order in La Trappe, France, in the 1660s because they thought Cistercian monasteries were becoming too lax. The monks at St. Sixtus sleep in a dormitory and stay silent in the cloisters, though they speak if they need to. Today, though, Trappists are increasingly famous for making good beer.

Seven monasteries (six are Belgian, one, La Trappe, is Dutch) are allowed to label their beer as Trappist. In 1996, they set up an alliance to protect their brand. They retain lawyers in Washington and Brussels ready to sue brewers who try use the word Trappist. Every few months, Brother Joris puts on street clothes and takes the train to Brussels to meet with fellow monks to share sales and business data, and plot strategy.

The monks know their beer has become big business. That's fine with the brothers at Scourmont, the monastery in southern Belgium that makes the Chimay brand found in stores and bars in Europe and the U.S. They've endorsed advertising and exports, and have sales exceeding $50 million a year. They say the jobs they create locally make the business worthy. Other monasteries, which brew names familiar to beer lovers such as Orval, Westmalle and Rochefort, also are happy their businesses are growing to meet demand.

[tk Joris]

Not so at St. Sixtus. Brother Joris and his fellow monks brew only a few days a month, using a recipe they've kept to themselves for around 170 years.

Two monks handle the brewing. After morning prayer, they mix hot water with malt. They add hops and sugar at noon. After boiling, the mix, sufficient to fill roughly 21,000 bottles, is fermented for up to seven days in a sterilized room. From there the beer is pumped to closed tanks in the basement where it rests for between five weeks and three months. Finally, it is bottled and moved along a conveyor belt into waiting cases. Monks at St. Sixtus used to brew by hand, but nothing in the rules of the order discourages technology, so they've plowed profits into productivity-enhancing equipment. St. Sixtus built its current brewhouse in 1989 with expert advice from the company then known as Artois Breweries.

In the 1980s, the monks even debated whether they should continue making something from which people can get drunk. "There is no dishonor in brewing beer for a living. We are monks of the West: moderation is a key word in our asceticism," says Brother Joris in a separate, email interview. "We decided to stick to our traditional skills instead of breeding rabbits."

The result is a brew with a slightly sweet, heavily alcoholic, fruity aftertaste.

One day recently, the wiry, sandy-haired Brother Joris returned to his office in the monastery after evening prayers. He flipped on his computer and went online to hunt for resellers and ask them to desist. "Most of the time, they agree to withdraw their offer," he says. Last year, St. Sixtus filed a complaint with the government against two companies that refused -- BelgianFood.com, a Web site that sells beer, cheese, chocolate and other niche products, and Beermania, a Brussels beer shop that also sells online. Both offer Westvleteren at around $18 a bottle.

"I'm not making a lot of money and I pay my taxes," says BelgianFood.com owner Bruno Dourcy. "You can only buy two cases at once, you know." Mr. Dourcy makes monthly two-hour car trips from his home in eastern Belgium.

"Seek the Kingdom of God first, and all these things will be given to you," counters Brother Joris, quoting from the Bible, adding that it refers only to things you really need. "So if you can't have it, possibly you do not really need it."

Timmy, this one's for you

Sleep has never been better.

Neun und Zwanzig'er

Javolt. The crew in the Bay Area hooked UP the beers and laughs for our family's homecoming. We haven't been back as a family unit since we left in 04 and it was just awesome. Robbie and Joanie hooked up a mad 'que for us to say whatup to all our friends. Thanks R & J!! We rented this awesome little place in the hills around Fairfax (a.k.a. Boulder-West) It was great to see everyone. Miguel came all the way from the 408 to see us. He brought the 29'er frame in tow and it was capital S sick. It is in the process of getting painted (black with some new graphics). Gonna have to pool together some fundage to get this thing together. Looking forward to riding it and giving Mike some feedback.

Mike DID bring me a special surprise though. The single most awesome invention for all mankind:The WiseCracker. Buy one, here or through QBP.

Like butta. "Because Beer can't open itself."

Oh my God, I'm coming home.

7 months and counting until the mud and the following liquid beauty is tasted in my mouth in the Mother land of Belgium. Hix, begin salivation:

I blew it....

Could not hold out to CX States. Had to pop the top on this after today's debacle to drown my sorrows. The pain was wiped clear. God Bless you Boulder Beer: