I found a good beer travel blog this week that I wanted to share with you - TheBeerGeek.com, which is all about seeing the world, one pint at a time.  They visit pubs, breweries, microbreweries, and beer pubs, and their objective is not to tell you which places to visit or which beers to drink, but to instill a sense of adventure in you so that you’ll go out and have interesting beer explorations of your own.

They recently added BeerGeekTV, where you can take part in their beer adventures via streaming video.  In 2008 they embarked upon The Year in Beer, where they traveled to a different beer festival or destination every month.

If you love beer and you love to travel, TheBeerGeek deserves a spot on your Favorites list.

Did you know that last week marked the 50th anniversary of the aluminum beer can?  According to this Packaging Digest article (never thought I’d be referring to Packaging Digest on a booze blog), William Coors, president of Adolph Coors Brewing Company in 1957, sent his engineers to work researching a recyclable aluminum can.  At the time, their beer was packaged in tin cans, but people complained about the aftertaste, and tin was not environmentally friendly.

After much trial and error, the researchers found success with a seamless aluminum beer can similar to the ones sold today.  The can was introduced January 22, 1959, 50 years ago last week.

So pop open a can (and pour it in a Mid-South Alcoholic Supply beer glass) to celebrate its 50th.

Okay, flowers in your hair aren’t strictly necessary, because the ’60s are over.  However, if you go to San Francisco between February 6 and 15, you’ll want to take a beer mug or two from Mid-South Alcoholic Supply.

More than 100 San Francisco pubs and breweries are organizing SF Beer Week in February to celebrate the recent craft beer renaissance.  There will be over 150 events spotlighting the Bay Area as a hotbed for artisan beers.  These will include beer dinners, beer and cheese pairing events, homebrew demos, meet-the-brewer events, and several large festivals, including the Bistro Double IPA Festival, the Toronado Barleywine Festival, and the Bay Area Beer Festival.

If you work for a national company, it may be time to start hinting around that you need to be sent to San Francisco on a business trip in early February… plenty to see and do, and more importantly, to taste, out there.

WikiHow recently posted an article on how to choose natural beers, beers that aren’t loaded with artificial preservatives and chemicals.  Among their pieces of advice:  Select beer that has been brewed according to German purity laws, avoid beer packaged in clear bottles, look for beer that contains living yeast, and choose beer that is brewed in archaic breweries with old equipment.  Click on the link to read about these and six more tips for finding natural beers.

Once you’ve selected a natural beer, be sure to enjoy it in one of Mid-South Alcoholic Supply’s many fine beer glasses.

One of my favorite sites, LifeHacker, posted a video showing how to make a lit Christmas tree from 1,050 empty bottles of beer.  Here’s the link. I think the best part of building this kind of Christmas tree would be accumulating the needed supplies.  1,050 bottles?  That’s almost three beers a day for an entire year.

Be sure to pour all those beers into your choice of the many fine beer mugs available at Mid-South Alcoholic Supply.

Want to learn about pairing beer with food for the holidays?  Check out this Flash application on the Kalamazoo Gazette’s website.  It’ll teach you about seasonal beers that pair up well with a variety of holiday dishes.  It also has advice from some of the area’s prominent home brewers, chefs, and “beerevangelists.”

The recommended beers will taste great in one of Mid-South Alcoholic Supply’s many beer glasses.  Nearly two thousand to choose from.

If you brew beer and have a dog, you need to read this Beer Examiner article.  Used hops, or “spent hops” as they’re called in the brewing world, are often added to compost.  However, if the compost is not properly dug into the ground, dogs can be attracted to the sweet smell.  Consumption of the spent hops can result in rapid increases in body temperature, panting, restlessness, pain, and often death.

So, if you brew, be sure to dispose of your hops in a way that keeps man’s best friend safe.

Also be sure to enjoy your freshly brewed beer in one of our many fine pint glasses.

If you Twitter, and you love beer, you should check out this North Colorado Beer Examiner article, which will give you a list of the top 10 craft beer enthusiasts to follow on Twitter.  Twitter is a Web 2.0 service that lets you share 140-character messages, or “tweets,” with people who choose to follow what you have to say.  Lately it’s been rivaling blogging as a way to get the word out.

The article’s author points out that if you start out with these 10, you’ll quickly meet hundreds of other beer enthusiasts.  Great way to stay connected to the latest news on beer.

Japanese company Bandai plans to release a beer shampoo on December 1.  The concept is simple, according to this Inventors’ Spot article: “Pour a beer over your head (or your friend’s head) and get dirty and clean at the same time.”  According to the press release, the shampoo isn’t pressurized and won’t spray out of the bottle when opened; for maximum effect, you’ll need to add water and shake to get the beer shampoo foam to spray out.

Yet another brilliant idea.  Alcoholics make ingenious inventors.

We have a variety of hot beverages available to keep us warm and toasty on cold winter nights.  There are coffee and tea, of course, as well as hot apple cider and hot chocolate.  But, beer?

Turns out it is possible to serve beer as a hot beverage.  This wikiHow article will teach you how to make a sweet, creamy beverage called hot mulled beer.  To make it, you’ll need eggs, sugar, honey, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and of course, beer.  The article recommends you use an ale, but a lager will work too if that’s all you have on hand.

Be sure to enjoy your hot mulled beer in one of our many fine beer glasses.