Liverpool boss Jürgen Klopp has signed a four-year contract to become an ambassador for the German beer brand Warsteiner.

It was only a matter of time. Due to the decline in beer sales, MillerCoors, the joint venture between Molson Coors and SABMiller, decided to close down one of its eight U.S. breweries. The decision was made public in September 2015 and will affect the Eden brewery in North Carolina, which has 520 employees. It is to shut in September 2016.

Tradition gets a boost

Since May 2014, a compact cogeneration unit produces, in addition to power and heat, also steam for production of about 370 000 hl/annum of Kölsch beer at Cölner Hofbräu P. Josef Früh KG, Cologne. The cogeneration scheme supplied by Sokratherm GmbH, Hiddenhausen, including exhaust steam boiler and housing, achieves an overall efficiency of up to 94.1 percent.

A total of 25 years working for Ziemann and, in this time, risen from trainee to managing director – Klaus Gehrig is one of the leading personalities and an important constant of the younger Ziemann history.

Predicting flavor stability –Part 1

It is of great importance to every brewery to be able to guarantee that the flavor of its beer will remain stable until at least the best before date printed on the label. Therefore, dependable and economical methods are in demand among brewers wishing to predict the flavor stability of their packaged beers. Brewers must determine in advance which analysis methods will be most useful for detecting the sensorially perceptible characteristics of beer indicative of aging. Part one examines how well flavor stability can be predicted, while the second part discusses the practicability of selected methods.

Nice beers, shame about the price

Have you ever wondered about those self-anointed restaurant critics, who leave such idiotic verdicts on TripAdvisor like “nice food, shame about the price of beer”? Goodness me, why didn’t they go to McDonald’s and ask for tap water if they thought the price of beer too high? In fact, the complaints were mostly lodged against eating places in the UK, which means those misers have seen nothing yet. They have not been to Israel.

Fortune favours the brave

Given that Belgian beer consumption has dropped almost a quarter over the past twenty years to 72 litres per capita while one in three breweries shut its doors over the past seventy years, an American delegate at the recent Beer Bloggers Conference in Brussels could be forgiven for asking pointedly: “Are we supposed to be shocked or relieved by these numbers?” He got no reply. Which is no surprise as Belgium’s 160 brewers are so used to facing strong headwinds both domestically and in their export markets that “resilience” must be their middle name.

That’s it. Bye bye SABMiller. Today, on 13 October 2015, it was announced that SABMiller has agreed to sell itself to AB-InBev for USD 104 billion, in a deal that will be the biggest takeover of a UK-listed company in history.

For fifteen years now, ever since the former FT correspondent Chrystia Freeland published her book 'Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism' (2000), the Western journalists and academics who observed and described the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all kept to the Medieval morality tale: good and evil, right and wrong, promise and betrayal. In these accounts, the question of 'cui bono' – who had benefitted from Russia's tumultuous first decade after the Fall of the Iron Curtain -, was easily answered: those villainous oligarchs.

Direct benefit for the industry

Chicago, June 2014: The American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) and the Master Brewer Association of the Americas (MBAA) are staging their second “Brewing Summit” in Chicago. Presentations are lining up, one after the other. In-between, meritorious brewers are honoured, receiving the most diverse awards. The Eric Kneen Prize of the ASBC for scientific work, the “Honorary Life” Membership of the ASBC, the Brewer Award of Excellence of the MBAA … And what have we been doing? Don’t we have any brewers that we can be proud of? Scientists who have rendered outstanding services to research?