Believed to be 230-years-old, 30 bottles of champagne were discovered at a depth of 55 metres. Possibly from the house Veuve Clicquot, it’s thought that it was sent by France’s King Louis XVI and bound for the Russian Imperial Court.

Somewhere in the world

It’s already beer o’clock

And I am still here

A bunch of Dutch football fans were detained as suspects of ambush marketing for Dutch beer Bavaria. They appeared in orange outfits accompanied by Bavaria beer packs which probably left FIFA and official sponsor, Budweiser, red in the face. Read more here.

With the World Cup round the corner, you’ll never have to leave the TV screen to go grab a beer anymore!

The Holiday Inn Winchester, United Kingdom is the first venue in the UK to install TV screens on their beer taps! Fitted as part of the hotel’s $24 million construction, the new TVs have been a huge hit with customers. With the football World Cup fast approaching, they’re also sure to be a draw card for guests and locals, looking for somewhere to have a drink and a bite to eat, without ever missing a goal!

Well, I was flipping through the April issue of Esquire and came across this article on beer cocktails with some interesting mixes. Not sure if I’d approve some of them, why would you waste good Champagne, single malt whisky and mix it with beer? You decide…

Taken from Esquire's April edition

www.esquire.com

Thanks Aunty Chan for letting me rip out the page.

Shout out to the marrieds: Familiar scene?

I’ve always thought “probably the best job in the world” would be to work at Carlsberg and have an endless flow of free beer. But the Danish brewer recently tightened employee benefits, primarily drinking during work, by removing beer fridges that have always been located across the work space.

Instead, Carlsberg workers are now only allowed to drink during lunch hours. But truckers are exempt and they’re still allowed to carry 3 cans of beer for the road as they normally don’t have time for lunch on-site! It was no surprise that 800 employees went on strike and 250 walked off, resulting in delivery delays around Copenhagen.

While this may not have been the intentions of the originators of Oktoberfest, it sure has been fine way of chugging more beer down throats in a few weeks than any other time of the year. Every beer loving throat looks forward to this time of the year with eager anticipation because we all know that for just this “limited time only” we get to sample specially brewed Marzen which have been fermenting since March! At the Munich village alone, over 7 million litres of alcohol is consumed over a the 2 week celebration!

In Singapore, celebrations will never get to the epic proportions witnessed at Munich each year. With this in mind, plus the fact that it should be every beer lover’s mission to visit Munich, we decided to make 2009 the year of our Oktoberfest pilgrimage. We even got past convincing our wives that there was shopping and wine in Germany by mentioning fashionistas like Claudia Schiffer and Karl Lagerfeld. Unfortunately, the year’s financial crisis made us a little more prudent and we decided that our pilgrimage would have to wait another year.

Instead, we set out searching for the few microbreweries in Singapore that do make an admirable attempt to brew their own Oktoberfest beers. We started out at Brotzeit after the first practice session of the Formula One weekend. Brotzeit’s Oktoberfest Bier had come over from Paulaner Brauhaus and had a nice pale golden colour, not too hoppy but with a crisp finish. Apparently, this is actually flown in specially from Munich making this a much cheaper option than flying to Germany.

Air flown from Munich

About 15 hours later, we were at Brewerkz sampling their brewmaster’s Oktoberfest contribution. This was vastly different from what we had tried at Brotzeit the night before. Brewerkz’s brew was dark drown, full bodied, malty, almost like a dunkel. And it’s 6% alcohol! We would have had a picture of this except we have an annoying habit of not reminding each other to take a photo of the beer before we actually drink it.

Paulaner Brauhaus didn’t start serving their special brew till the first week of October. Why special? This year, their freshly brewed beer, made on premise, was made in the same way as what they had served at the Munchen festival. It was full bodied with a golden yellow colour with a hoppy malt flavour which was very delicious. They’ve made only 50hl of this, of which, we’ve consumed 2 litres in jugular fashion.

We’ve got one more brew to try and that’s of a fellow homebrewer who’s invited us over this Friday to break open his very own Oktoberfest beer. To be continued…

All in all, a well attended and fun event with lots of good company and beer. We event tried some home made wine as well as Moe’s ice wine which was a tad sweet for me but the missus would have enjoyed it. The only let down was the food – too little variety and lots of it ran out half way thru the event. Good thing there were some gourmet sausages thrown on the barbie to make up the for the slack.

Well done to Raymond and his team plus lots of volunteers and tireless homebrew fans for making this event possible. Looking forward to next year’s. I think a good idea would be to have the Coopers starter kits for sale as the event so sideline and couch brewers can get into the action without any excuses of ‘I dunno where to get one’.

It finally happened

Raymond Lee, owner of iBrew and organiser of iBrew Challenge

Where the magic gets dispensed - the beer tent. I love Moehadi's Conkerwood stout and IPA. And then there was the IPA from Tap 1 which I also adored.

Great weather - slightly overcast. Not too warm.

Fal Allen (left) of Archipelago Brewery talked about ‘Craft Beer in Asia’

Beer drinking challenge - Andre (right) sucking it down. No, his team didn't win.

Neither did my team but the speed chug left big wet beer stains on my 'To The Pub' tee shirt. What's more important is we made new friends - Tian Peng (right). Andre - what's our friend's name, the one wearing the same T-shirt as you?'Beer is the Answer. Now what was the question?'

Women beer lovers in solidarity with their male beer drinking competition team mates

...and our fairer sex were chugging it down as fast as any man there...

... and chugging it down some more...

Homebrew entries submitted for judging

Judges including Ernest Ng from RedDot BrewHouse (left) doing their thing. Ernest earlier gave a talk on brewing Weizen

Who wants more beer? ME!

How to really pick up a bartender