Governments have every reason to be concerned about the damaging impact of sugar on health – from people’s rotting teeth to type 2 diabetes and bulging waistlines. But the jury is still out on the question if a sugar tax is the appropriate measure to make people change their consumption habits.

A surge during the past two years has seen microbreweries opening up at rate of three every week. Figures from the British Beer and Pub Association show there are more than 1,400 breweries in the country.

Isn’t it funny that the Belgian government should announce a beer excise hike at the end of July 2015 when everybody was on holiday? The timing was impeccable. No media outcry ensued. Which must have been the whole point of the summer exercise.

They should be pleased. Heineken’s global volume was up 2 percent in the January to June 2015 period, compared to a 1.6 percent decline for AB-InBev and a 1 percent drop for SABMiller.

FlavorActiV Ltd, a UK-based sensory training company for the beverage industry, is the Official Quality Partner to London Beer City and will be promoting good sensory practices, beverage quality and professional tasting skills during the week-long festival of great British beer which takes place from 7-16 August 2015. For nearly 20 years FlavorActiV has been supporting the brewing industry through taste panel training, online proficiency and GMP flavour kits.

Are Carlsberg’s scientists really so under-employed that they had to busy themselves with inventing a men’s grooming range? In June 2015 the Danish brewer, in cooperation with cosmetics producer Urtegaarden, launched several men’s bathroom products – a shampoo, a conditioner and a body lotion.

Eat well, drink well, and solve a hilarious murder of a brewmaster. The Basle microbrewery Unser Bier is staging a murder mystery comedy show on 10th October 2015.

Diageo recently invested EUR 169 million in the world-famous home of Guinness at St James’s Gate in Dublin, Ireland. To enhance the production of Guinness Flavour Extract (GFE), which is exported all over the world to enable the local production of Guinness, Project Phoenix involved the implementation of new raw material intake and handling systems, a new brewhouse, a new cold process area as well as modifications to the existing cold process area to integrate the existing plant with new, improved utilities and expanded capacity.

If all goes according to plan, De Halve Maan brewery will start this autumn with the construction of a beer pipeline under Bruges. The craft brewer hopes to finance part of the EUR 1 million project through crowdfunding.

Like in neighbouring Germany, beer consumption in Belgium continues to decline. In the first five months of this year, the drop was 5 percent over the same period last year, the Belgian Brewers’ association reported on 19 June 2015. “This is the strongest decline in the past 15 years”, the association told local media. Fortunately, exports are compensating for some of the decline at home.