OK, how come no one told me about this?

This morning I stumbled across what might be the coolest blog in the history of blogs about anything anywhere. Simply called Beer Haiku Daily it is exactly that - a daily haiku about beer. The fact this this blog has been going strong for three and a half years makes it not only an amazing feat but a work of art.

Kudos to Captain Hops, the proprietor and main contributor at Beer Haiku Daily. You've created an astounding thing!

Do you know of another cool beer site or blog? Leave a comment and let us know about it!

About's guide to bicycling, David Fiedler, has some thoughts about beer. Check out his blog post Best Beer for Bicyclists.

The UK division of Coors is trying to figure out why women drink far less beer than men. The easy answer that many a beer marketing department likes to fall back on is that the brews are too bitter, the calories too high and the bottles don't look enough like Barbie's dream house. And almost universally their solution is to drop another fruity, fizzy, 'low-cal' atrocity on the market in some sort of ridiculously labeled bottle - often with liberal use of pinks and pastels.

Of course that's all nonsense. And Carolyn Smagalski does an excellent job of exploding this myth in her recent article Coors UK Gender Prejudice through Project Eve. She points out that many women love lots of bitter foods including dark chocolate, black coffee and salads with bitter greens so that can't be the problem. She goes on to pick apart the other ridiculous aspects of the theory that women have to be treated like little girls with sugar addictions in order to sell them beer.

As to the point about bitterness - if the execs at Coors think that their beer is too bitter for anyone I have to wonder if they've even tried their product in a while. Bitter is most certainly not the word that I would use to describe any of the macro-lagers on the market today.

I hope that someone up the food chain at Molson-Coors or any of the other mega-brewers will read Carolyn's article. Perhaps they can borrow enough sense from it to avoid the next fruity, pink insult.

Japanese beer giant Asahi is expecting to increase sales of their lower malt beers. As you know, the traditional recipe for beer is malted barley, hops, water and yeast. Throughout history other ingredients, universally called adjuncts, have found their way into the mix.

The reasons for adding adjuncts are various. In the most pleasing of cases it is to add flavor. Fruit, spices, unusual grains and sugars like honey can all contribute to a more complex and flavorful beer. In other cases adjuncts are added to increase or maintain alcohol without adding to the flavor profile. The best known beer with this sort of adjunct is Anheuser-Busch Inbev's Budweiser. A significant portion of the grain bill for this brew is rice which adds fermentable sugar while adding very little flavor resulting in an incredibly light beer with the same alcohol as beers with more flavor.

But perhaps the most depressing reason to use adjuncts is Asahi's.

The Japanese beer tax is based on the amount of malt that goes into the brew. This is one of three ways that beer has historically been taxed. The other two are based on original gravity and the final product. Taxing malt and the original gravity can severely affect brewers' recipes as they look for ways to cut costs and remain competitive. In the UK the recipe for stout was radically altered during the Victorian era as brewers dealt with the original gravity tax.

In this case Asahi is looking to other sources of sugar such as corn or beans (Beans?!? Yes, beans) in order to produce cheaper beer. Their customers are feeling the effects of the bad economy and Asahi is responding by looking for ways to reduce the amount of malt and therefore the bottom line.