JonLowder.com

Important Beer Info: Beware the Light

If you've been drinking beer long enough you've encountered skunked beer at some point. So how does a beer get skunked? First thing you need to know is that the professionals don't call it skunked, they call it lightstruck.That's important to know because it ends up that the popular wisdom that letting a beer get hot will cause it to get skunked, er, lightstruck is incorrect:

What those researchers found is that there are two distinct pathways to getting skunky-smelling compounds in your beer. The two main actors is this tale of woe: hop alpha acids and light. Not heat. Not oxygen. Light...

All beers that have been bittered with hops can suffer skunking: As an experiment, get a draft beer poured into a clear glass and then let it sit in the sun for 10 minutes or so. Compare that beer to one fresh from the tap. You should definitely detect some skunk in the lightstruck beer. With clear, green or blue bottles, the glass doesn't filter out the ultraviolet and blue wavelengths that start the skunking reaction. Brown bottles are much better at keeping those wavelengths out of your beer...

In the end, if you want to avoid the skunk entirely, just buy a beer that has been packaged in a keg, cask or can. Those beers can (and do) develop bad flavors, but you'll never get one that has been skunked.

Duly noted.

Why My Coffee Habit is a Very Good Thing

Those of you who know me well can probably appreciate how happy this article - The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like - made me:

"What I tell patients is, if you like coffee, go ahead and drink as much as you want and can," says Dr. Peter Martin, director of the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt University. He's even developed a metric for monitoring your dosage: If you are having trouble sleeping, cut back on your last cup of the day. From there, he says, "If you drink that much, it's not going to do you any harm, and it might actually help you. A lot."

Officially, the American Medical Association recommends conservatively that "moderate tea or coffee drinking likely has no negative effect on health, as long as you live an otherwise healthy lifestyle." That is a lackluster endorsement in light of so much recent glowing research. Not only have most of coffee's purported ill effects been disproven -- the most recent review fails to link it the development of hypertension -- but we have so, so much information about its benefits. We believe they extend from preventing Alzheimer's disease to protecting the liver. What we know goes beyond small-scale studies or limited observations. The past couple of years have seen findings, that, taken together, suggest that we should embrace coffee for reasons beyond the benefits of caffeine, and that we might go so far as to consider it a nutrient.

Reading this was literally like having angels sing in my ear. Oh happy days!