Baseball Season is here, and if you are not very Sporty, you might be all like: "Baseball? Big deal, I don't care about your stupid 'America's Pastime,' it's just for awful horrible stupid average people who want to Conform and be Average Americans with their Coors Light and 'Two entrees and an appetizer for $20' at Chilis, and their porky insulin-shock-at-any-moment kids and Wal-Mart—or maybe Target because it has a Starbucks now—and a minivan—or better yet a Dodge Magnum station wagon—and "relaxed fit" jeans and XXXL sleeveless "muscle" shirts from Costco and coupons for Gino's Pizza Rolls and low-fat frozen fudge bars because those are healthier and 'hey, maybe we [...]

Kidult summer trends! Unrelated but intriguing. First, all the new mens' suits are shiny all of a sudden—made of wool and silk, shiny is the new, uh, not shiny. So buy some shiny suits that will be wildly out of vogue in two years. Second, it's the summer of the "sophisticated slushie." Which, you'll be wanting one come Wednesday. You can blame Pok Pok for a lot of things—for being the most impossible no-reservations place in Brooklyn to actually eat at, for starters. (Today's New Yorker calls it "dining as sport" and "an exhausting game.") You can also blame them for the beer slushie: their "old-school, low-tech [...]

"A number of commemorative souvenirs have been produced to mark Pope Benedict XVI's four-day visit to Germany. One brewery in Berlin has gone as far as creating a special beer in his honor. But no ordinary brew would do: This beer was serenaded by Gregorian chants by the light of the new moon."

This month, the ever-metastasizing convenience-store chain 7-Eleven will roll out an in-house beer called "Game Day." This is actually the second time that 7-Eleven has tried to market a beer to go along with its sausage-shaped foodstuffs — in 2003, 7-Eleven tried to launch the Corona-"inspired" beer Santiago de Oro. But it flopped. So what's different now?

Anger in Britain, where a government plan to redesign the pint glass is coming under fire from publicans, a group normally swift to embrace change. The British Beer and Pub Association is protesting the potential move to plastic glasses, a response to figures showing that "5,500 people are attacked with glasses and bottles every year in England and Wales." A Beer and Pub spokesman expressed concerns that pub-goers will be put off by the new cups, noting that the current tankards just feel better, but designer Nick Verebelyi thinks it is possible to innovate while still keeping the steins "desirable and acceptable and cool." From this side of [...]

It is truly a testament to this nation's inability to focus on anything lacking a celebrity component that the quotidian story of a black man arrested for being surly in his own home continues to get major coverage well over a week after the initial event. As the President prepares to host Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police officer who collared him at a White House summit meeting, the press is asking the important question: What beer is he going to serve?

It’s the holidays! Time for fun and laughter and parties, parties to which you are expected to bring something or other. Can’t cook? Don’t want to be that guy that shows up with thirty McChickens? Don't have 40 dollars for a set of Laguiole cheese knives for your hostess? Bring a nice holiday beer. And for recommendations, look no further: myself and nine of my favorite lushes got together this weekend and, over fondue and with a backdrop of holiday songs, tasted sixteen of the seasonal offerings. Here we’ve selected the best and shared our tasting notes.

A party with beer snobs: Delirium Noel You will never please them, so [...]

I no longer fear death, because now that they are making iced tea-flavored beer there doesn't seem like much point in sticking around anyway.

A North Carolina brewery will introduce a beer in honor of the electronic-music pioneer Bob Moog later this month. Moog Filtered Ale is described as "an American-style pale ale with distinctive notes of caramel and pine… a very accessible beer that reflects the Moog legacy" by Asheville Brewing Company brewer Doug Riley. No word yet on whether eight-ounce "mini-Moog" bottles of the brew will be available, but here's hoping that Riley's use of the word "accessible" doesn't raise any hackles on the part of psych-rock purists. [Via]

What animals are truly most like human beings? Humpback whales, who mate for life and communicate with complex, melodic songs? The upright-walking, chronic masturbator bonobo chimps? Bears, who seem to want to inhabit our homes and drive our cars? An article in today's New York Times points to a different answer, and one that shouldn't surprise anyone who's looked in the mirror lately. As Natalie Angier reports, "Last week, an international team of biologists released the first draft sequence of the pig genome." According to team-leader Lawrence Schook of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "The pig genome compares favorably with the human genome." [...]

Henry Louis Gates' neighbors are trying to start a conversation of their own, apparently.

Pumpkin beer, like anchovies on pizza or shorts on men, can be a divisive topic: you either like it or you don't. If you don't, well, walk on by—nothing to see here. But if you are, like me, a devotee of the gourd-based brewing arts, you are well aware that not all pumpkin beers are created equal. Which one is the best? More to the point, which one is the best for you?

There are so many pumpkin beers, and so little time in which to drink them. Let me make your autumn easier—for the past two years, I've held a pumpkin beer tasting, pitting competitors head to [...]

Venturing out into difficult terrain? Don't forget to bring some beer: It just might save your life.

This video is eleven minutes and five seconds long. But it is very much worth that amount of your day. It is essentially a commercial for Dogfish Head beer, which people who like beer with strong beer flavor seem to like a lot. (I prefer beer than tastes more like water myself, but I am a philistine from New Jersey.) But the video comprises three of the my favorite things in the world: Louisville singer/songwriter Will "Bonnie Prince Billy" Oldham, footage of industrial processing plant machinery, and jokes about robots taking over the world from humans. It's pretty great, have a look.

Dude, I'm sorry, this is just fucking nasty.

Our national conversation on beer will hopefully reach its conclusion this evening at 6 P.M., when President Obama, Henry Louis Gates, and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley gather together in the White House and crack the top on an ice-cold Bud Light. The obvious political pandering in the selection of beverage ("Democratic political consultant Chris Lehane noted Bud Light traces its roots to Missouri, one of the nation's hardest fought electoral battlegrounds in recent years") has caused some controversy, in that Bud Light is neither technically American (Anheuser-Busch was acquired by Belgian-Brazilan consortium InBev last year) nor technically beer (Bud Light is a combination of frog urine [...]