Do you know that?
Brewery Roman is located in Oudenaarde, Belgium. Its official history begins in 1545, and the brewery has been run by the Roman family for 12 generations already.
Brewery Roman offers quite a wide range of excellent beers, among which the Ename abbey beers launched in 1990.
The Ename beer family has grown quickly and now includes Ename Blond, Ename Dubbel, Ename Tripel, and Ename Cuvée. These are all top fermentation beer undergoing refermentation in bottle.
Enjoy the delicate well-balanced palate of Brewery Romans Ename beers!
Stella Artois® crowns its 2010 World Draught Master
The 14th edition of the annual Stella Artois® World Draught Masters competition heralds the importance of the perfect pouring ritual.
This years competition saw contestants from 25 countries across the globe converge in London to compete for the coveted title and complete the brands time-honoured 9-step pouring ritual to perfection during a show that invited people to step into the Stella Artois world.
Chris Myers from Madison, Wisconsin (U.S.A.), can call himself the brand new Stella Artois World Draught Master as of today and was awarded a unique trophy celebrating the iconic Stella Artois® Chalice glass.
Australian candidate Siobhan Kathleen Mullins was the first runner-up, while the 3rd prize went to Keith Cuveele from Belgium. Marc Pronovost from Canada came in fourth.
The 9-Step Pouring Ritual consists of the following steps:
The Purification: Use clean & rinsed branded glass
The Sacrifice: Open the tap in one quick action and let the first drops of beer flow away
The Liquid Alchemy Begins: Hold the glass just under the tap without touching it at a 45° angle
The Head, although Crown would be more appropriate: Lower the glass to allow the natural formation of the foam head
The Removal: Close the tap quickly and move the glass away so beer doesnt drip into the glass
The Beheading: While the head foams up and overflows the side of the glass, smooth it gently with a head cutter
The Cleansing: Clean the bottom and sides of the glass
The Two Finger Rule: The right amount of foam is usually about 2 fingers
The Bestowal: Present the beer on a clean beer coaster with the logo facing the consumer
EU: Malting barley quality below par in several European regions
European Union beer brewers may face tight supplies of key beer ingredient malting barley in coming months following a poor harvest unless they accept lower quality grain than usual, Reuters reported on November, 2.
Grain crops in Germany and several east European and Scandinavian countries were hit by the double blow of an early summer heat wave followed by repeated harvest-time rain.
The EU 2010 barley crop which reached malting quality fell to 10.05 million tonnes from 14.45 million tonnes in 2009, French analysts Strategie Grains estimates.
Dealers said brewers and maltsters have not yet decided on what specifications they will accept for the barley they have yet to buy for the rest of the season.
“Experience shows that maltsters are able to produce, thanks to their know-how, good malt from malting barley, which may not entirely meet the malting barley quality conditions,” said Pierre-Olivier Bergeron secretary general of industry association Brewers of Europe.
Traders said brewers may have to accept animal feed barley, which they would normally reject as having low quality, as it can be used for malting.
“There is no doubt brewers and malt producers are facing significantly tighter supplies this year,” another German malting barley trader said.
“There were poor malting barley harvests in countries including Germany, the Czech Republic, Romania and Denmark. But the harvest in France was better and it looks like France will have to carry the burden of supplying the major consumers in the coming months.”
Moderate consumption of beer strengthens kidneys
Who drinks alcohol in moderation reinforces the function of kidneys. This is the conclusion of a recent study by the Berliner Charite.
The scientific team around Dr. Elke Schaeffner evaluated the American Physicians Health Study containing data on the health of 11 000 American doctors. The researchers wanted to find out what alcohol consumption makes to your kidneys.
Men who drank seven units per week had a keratinin value 30 percent lower than the teetotalers, said Dr. Elke Schaeffner from the Charite Clinic for Renal Medicine and leader of the study. Keratinin is the measurement factor for healthy kidneys.
The keratinin value for moderate drinkers was clearly better than among men with high or low alcohol consumption. The moderate drinkers had the least risk of suffering from renal disorders.
The German study thereby confirms several international investigations that state that moderate beer consumption is good for the digestive organs. Thus, for instance, was the conclusion of the National Health Institute in Helsinki** back in 1999: one bottle of beer a day reduces the risk of kidney stones by40 percent.
The expression moderate beer consumption means: one liter of beer a day for men; for women, around half a litre, since it takes them longer to eliminate alcohol.
Did thirst for beer lead to civilization?
Some archaeologists have said that there is a possibility that beer may have helped lead to the rise of civilization.
Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains into beer.
Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, said archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
“Beer is sacred stuff in most traditional societies,” Live Science quoted Hayden, as saying.
The advent of agriculture began in the Neolithic Period of the Stone Age about 11,500 years ago. Once-nomadic groups of people had settled down and were coming into contact with each other more often, spurring the establishment of more complex social customs that set the foundation of more-intricate communities.
The Neolithic peoples living in the large area of Southwest Asia called the Levant developed from the Natufian culture, pioneers in the use of wild cereals, which would evolve into true farming and more settled behavior. The most obvious explanation for such cultivation is that it was done in order to eat.
Archaeological evidence suggests that until the Neolithic, cereals such as barley and rice constituted only a minor element of diets, most likely because they require so much labor to get anything edible from them – one typically has to gather, winnow, husk and grind them, all very time-consuming tasks.
However, sites in Syria suggest that people nevertheless went to unusual lengths at times just to procure cereal grains – up to 40 to 60 miles (60 to 100 km). One might speculate, Hayden said, that the labor associated with grains could have made them attractive in feasts in which guests would be offered foods that were difficult or expensive to prepare, and beer could have been a key reason to procure the grains used to make them.
“It’s not that drinking and brewing by itself helped start cultivation, it’s this context of feasts that links beer and the emergence of complex societies,” Hayden said.
Feasts would have been more than simple get-togethers – such ceremonies have held vital social significance for millennia, from the Last Supper to the first Thanksgiving.
“Feasts are essential in traditional societies for creating debts, for creating factions, for creating bonds between people, for creating political power, for creating support networks, and all of this is essential for developing more complex kinds of societies,” Hayden explained.
“In traditional feasts throughout the world, there are three ingredients that are almost universally present,” he said. “One is meat. The second is some kind of cereal grain, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, in the form of breads or porridge or the like. The third is alcohol, and because you need surplus grain to put into it, as well as time and effort, it’s produced almost only in traditional societies for special occasions to impress guests, make them happy, and alter their attitudes favorably toward hosts.”
The brewing of alcohol seems to have been a very early development linked with initial domestication, seen during Neolithic times in China, the Sudan, the first pottery in Greece and possibly with the first use of maize. Hayden said circumstantial evidence for brewing has been seen in the Natufian, in that all the technology needed to make it is there – cultivated yeast, grindstones, vessels for brewing and fire-cracked rocks as signs of the heating needed to prepare the mash.
“We still don’t have the smoking gun for brewing in the Natufian, with beer residues in the bottom of stone cups or anything like that,” Hayden said.
“But hopefully people will start looking for that-people haven’t yet.”
Hayden is planning to submit research on the origins of beer to the journal Current Anthropology.
Chocolate aroma improves mood
According to recent studies from the Human Olfaction Laboratory, Middlesex University, chocolate aroma may play a part in helping people relax. Neil Martin, reader in psychology at the university, found that the aroma of chocolate really does make people less stressed and anxious, and more relaxed.
The studies involved analyzing the effect of chocolate aromas on brain activity, using electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain waves as subjects took in aromas emanating from the laboratorys AromaCube, a device that warms odorants and distributes them throughout the room.
We presented people with a range of smells, some artificial food odors and some real food odors, with both samples including chocolate, said Martin. EEG data found that chocolate aromas affected a reduction in theta levels, brain activity apparently connected to attentiveness.
Other aroma-centric studies showed people demonstrate inferior cognitive performance and report more symptoms of ill health in the presence of a bad aroma; orange scents reduced anxiety in women while waiting for the dentist; and subjects playing a driving video game were consistently able to brake more safely and appropriately in the presence of the lemon scent, noted Martin, positing that dangling a lemon-smelling air freshener in the car could make you a better driver.
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