St. Patrick's Day Celebrations Bumped Up to Avoid Holy Week Conflict

For local imbibers, the situation is about as clear as a glass of green beer.

The early arrival this year of Holy Week - the seven sacred days, beginning on Palm Sunday, that lead up to Easter - has threatened to throw a wrench into St. Patrick's Day celebrations for Roman Catholics around the world.

Some American. cities have moved up their parades, and bars in places will hold their annual nights of revelry early. Normally St. Patrick's Day has been on the March break, so it's strange that this year it's not.

For those who like to hoist a glass of draft in honour of Ireland's patron saint, the situation may present a decision - go Saturday, or wait until Monday.

What will you do?

InBev and Anheuser-Busch in discussions for possible merger

Beer brewers InBev and Anheuser-Busch are in discussions that could lead to a possible merger of both the firms.

Since 2007, speculation has been rife about a merger between the two companies. Adding to this, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the dialog between the two entities assumed increased seriousness and that a deal was likely to be concluded in 2008. However, InBev and Anheuser-Busch have declined to comment anything in this regard.
 

 

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Bud joins the lime crowd
 

Anheuser-Busch will roll out Bud Light Lime in May, backing it with a $35 million marketing campaign. “We’re treating this as a big launch,” Dave Peacock, vice president of marketing at the company’s domestic beer subsidiary, said.

Last year A-B rival Miller Brewing introduced Miller Chill, a beer flavored with lime and salt. It was one of the year’s hottest beer product launches.
Miller’s “Brew Blog ” has been predicting that A-B would counter with a product like this.

The national rollout of the Bud Light brand extension is an effort to capitalize on the popularity of flavored beers.

 

Anheuser-Busch and Miller had independently concluded that flavored beers — including ones that evoke brews popular in Latino culture — can attract a wide following.

A-B’s confidence in the product is illustrated by its decision to take it directly to a national launch without testing it in regional markets. “We can’t remember a Bud family product we didn’t put into a test market,” said Peacock.

 

 

 

Anheuser-Busch profit up 12%

Anheuser-Busch, the nation's largest brewer, said that a resurgence in beer sales helped push its profit up 12 percent in the fourth quarter, despite a slower economy.

The maker of Budweiser, Bud Light and other beers earned $214 million, or 29 cents per share, in the three months ended Dec. 31, up from $191 million, or 25 cents per share, in the same period in 2006.
 

Analysts polled however, had expected earnings of 32 cents per share, but on sales of $3.65 billion. Net sales after excise taxes rose 8 percent to $3.7 billion from $3.4 billion a year ago.
 

 

Beer is Bubbling Up in Fashionable Places   
 

You pick up the glass, and after admiring the dark color of the liquid, you bring your nose to the rim and inhale. You take a sip, swirl it around, then comment to the sommelier on the full body of what you're tasting, with the hints of chocolate, espresso and oatmeal in the finish.

The belly-up-to-the-bar stuff is taking on a whiff of elegance. Restaurants host beer tastings. Beer sommeliers assist diners in choosing the right match for their meals. Chefs use beer in everything from ice pops to complex sauces.

Craft brewers experimented with flavors and styles. They traveled and tasted beers from around the world. As a result, the range of flavors and quality grew.
 

Beer's new prominence also has raised the question of how to pair it with food—and even an argument that beer is better at it than wine. "Beer does a lot of things that wine has trouble with," says Jim Koch, founder of Samuel Adams. "Wine has trouble with spicy foods. You need the malt body of beer to balance them. Wine has trouble with fat and oil. The carbonation in beer cleans the tongue.
 

 

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Molson Coors profit blows past forecasts

By: Cody Crawford 

 

The University of King’s College is incorporating every student’s favorite pastime into study-time by turning beer and its history into a university course.

This month the university is trying something new — for the first time it is offering a course on beer.

Consequently, the university’s new course, coined “Brewing Science: The History, Culture, and Science of Beer” might sound like a dream course for some students.

This is a serious course, said Gordon McOuat, the man behind the course. McOuat said it will be taught for only one year as a kind of experiment.

“It’s a one-off offering, that is we’re offering it only once as a kind of experimental encounter with the possibility of teaching a course that broadly and deeply intertwines cultural history along with the history of science, centered around a particular social and technological development, that is, brewing beer,” he said.

“I happened to have some of the oldest brewing manuals from the early modern period in my rare book collection, and with a lot of congruence [...] of different interests, the students were bugging me for a couple of years to put on a course on the meaning of brewing from the ancient world to the modern, and since I had a spot open this year, and the lobbying was pretty intense, I decided to offer it this year.”

Although the course is unprecedented, McOuat said he had little difficulty getting the program approved.

McOuat said many local microbreweries have been extremely supportive of the class as well, offering to give tours and help set up the experiments the class will conduct to recreate the original conditions of breweries of years past.