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Brewers are hoping to appeal to women drinkers by offering beer in third-of-a-pint glasses. But first they tackle the belief that beer is more fattening than wine. Is it true?Stroll through the doors of a traditional British hostelry and the scene that presents itself would no doubt jar with the slogan for a new campaign by pub operators: Beautiful Beer. The sight of burly, whiskery men propping up the bar with a pint in one hand and a gravity-affirming paunch may conjure many descriptions, but "beautiful" is probably not one of them. Yet, with its campaign, the British Beer and...

Do you prefer wine or beer? Your preference may shed some insight into the rest of your diet, according to a new study. Researchers in Denmark found that people who buy wine also buy healthier food and therefore have healthier diets than people who buy beer. The findings are published in the online edition of the British Medical Journal. Studies have shown that drinking wine is associated with lower risk of death from some causes. Some studies have also suggested that wine drinkers have healthier diets than beer or spirits drinkers, and this may explain wine's beneficial effect on health....

If you weren't careful, you might end up beaten by grape thieves skulking in the darkness. A University of Cincinnati graduate student writes about the contractual obligations of vineyard guards and researchers from around the world contribute more stories from ancient times in the most recent volumes of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists (BASP)... The latest volume of BASP is the 50th in the series and the eighth to have been edited at UC. The recently published journal features 35 contributions from 26 writers from 11 countries. The previous year's volume features 44 contributions from 41 writers...

More than even Italy or France, China guzzled almost 2 billion bottles of red wine last year. Red wine consumption has skyrocketed in the country since 2007, partially because the color red signals good fortune, experts say.China has surpassed France and Italy to become the biggest consumer of red wine in the world. According to a joint report out of Vinexpo and The International Wine and Spirits Research (IWSR), Chinese oenophiles tipped back the equivalent of 1.865 billion bottles last year (or 155 million 9-liter cases).

Residues of pottery sherds from ancient Scandinavian settlements dating as far back as 1200 B.C. are the inspiration for Delaware-based brewey Dogfish Head's latest ancient ale, Kvasir. Patrick McGovern, a bioarchaeolgist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and frequent collaborator with Dogfish Head on these brews calls the drink a Nordic grog. The recipe for Kvasir, which is available in limited quantities now, involves yarrow, lingonberries, cranberries, bog myrtle, and birch syrup. Prior to Kvasir, Dogfish Head brewed Midas Touch, influenced by residues taken from 2,700-year-old pottery found in Turkey, and Chateau Jiahu, an ale that traces its history back...

Full Title: Did Beer create modern society? Ancient man developed agriculture to brew alcohol and not to bake bread, claims scientist Some scientists claim beer - not bread - is the reason early man adopted a society based on farming around 10,000 years ago, a key moment in our evolution. The cultivation of grain saw the transition away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and a widely-accepted theory is that the crops were used to bake bread, but experts claim it was the prospect of a brew that drove the desire to settle down and start a farm.

The domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on agriculture. You might think that the grains were used for bread, which today represents a basic staple. But some scientists argue that it wasn’t bread that motivated our ancestors to start grain farming. It was beer. Man, they say, chose pints over pastry. Beer has plenty to recommend it over bread. First, and most obviously, it is pleasant to drink. “Beer had all the same nutrients as bread, and it had one additional advantage,” argues Solomon...

Spanish excavations in Can Sadurní cave (Begues, Barcelona) have discovered four human skeletons dated to about 6,400 years ago. The skeletal remains of the individuals are particularly important as they are in a very good state of preservation. An archaeological campaign carried out previously identified other individuals which were not so well preserved but belong to the same stratigraphic layer. Archaeologists excavating in 1999, also discovered within the cave, evidence for the earliest European beer, which may have been included as part of the death ritual... A small landslip from the outer part of the cave must have taken place...

Digging this summer at the ruins of a 1700 B.C. Canaanite palace in northern Israel, archaeologists struck wine. Near the banquet hall where rulers of a Middle Bronze Age city-state and their guests feasted, a team of American and Israeli researchers broke through to a storage room holding the remains of 40 large ceramic jars. The vessels were broken, their liquid contents long since vanished — but not without a trace. A chemical analysis of residues left in the three-foot-tall jars detected organic traces of acids that are common components of all wine, as well as ingredients popular in ancient...

A team of three international scientists has explained the physics behind why beer in a bottle transforms into an overflowing mass of foam when the bottle receives a vertical tap on the mouth, as shown in the video. They will present their work and its applications outside of the bottle at the 66th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics. (video at link) The act is colloquially referred to as “beer tapping”: Someone hits a beer bottle on the head, often with the bottom of their own bottle, and within seconds the victim of the prank is left...

A team of archaeologists, headed by Associate Professor Aneliya Bozhkova with the National Archaeological Institute with Museum with the Bulgarian Academy of Science, and Petya Kiyashkina with the Ancient Nesebar Museum, discovered a perfectly preserved cellar with amphorae from the V BC, over the last days of the archaeological excavations in the Bulgarian coastal town of Nesebar, the press office of Nesebar Municipality announced. The research is organised under a project of the Ancient Nesebar Museum, financed by the Ministry of Culture, with the participation of experts in archaeology. The ancient amphorae warehouse was dug in deep into the ground...

An unexpected discovery awaited a team of Israeli archaeologists in a drainage canal dating from roughly 2,000 years ago: an aluminum bottlecap. From a beer bottle. No, the good people of ancient Sussita weren't producing aluminum metal. The meaning of the startling discovery is that millennia after its construction, the drainage canal was still working, centuries after the city's final destruction by earthquake. Made of aluminum and feather-light, the bottle-cap floated on rainwater that washed into the canal, says Dr. Michael Eisenberg, head of an Israeli archaeological team digging the site. This canal, or less romantically -- a sewer, passed...

Australian scientists have created an electrolyte-charged ale that hydrates three times more than regular beer and prevents symptoms related to hangovers.Sunglasses and Advil might not be the only cure for a hangover these days. Australian scientists have brewed up a hangover-free beer, allowing drinkers to keep sipping while avoiding dehydration that leads to next-day hangover symptoms. Nutrition researchers at Griffith University's Health Institute added electrolytes to two commercial beers — one regular strength and light beer — before giving it to participants who had just exercised. While researchers don't suggest drinking beer after working out, the study showed that the...

A Polish archaeologist at the Jagiellonian University Institute of Archaeology has made a 3D reconstruction of a 5,500-year-old brewing installation which was found at Tell el-Farcha, an archaeological site in Egypt dating back to approximately 3700 BC when it functioned as a centre of local Lower Egyptian Culture. The virtual reconstruction has brought to life the ancient scene in which Egyptians practiced a traditional form of beer making. The reconstruction was created based on preserved structures of similar analogous buildings at both Tell el-Farcha and other brewing centres in Upper Egypt. The Tell el-Farcha brewery, the oldest ever brewery found...

Was 0 a good year? June 21 2003 at 09:45AM Beijing - Aged wines don't get much older than this. Archaeologists in western China discovered five earthenware jars of 2 000-year-old rice wine in an ancient tomb and its bouquet was still strong enough to perk up the nose, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Saturday. Xinhua said five litres of the almost clear blue-tinged liquor was found, enough to allow researchers their best opportunity yet to study ancient distilling techniques. Archaeologist Sun Fuzhi was quoted saying the tomb dated from the early Western Han dynasty, which held sway over...

The earliest known examples of wine-making as we know it are in the regions of modern-day Iran, Georgia, and Armenia -- and researchers believe that modern winemaking slowly spread westward from there to Europe... The Etruscans, a pre-Roman civilisation in Italy, are thought to have gained wine culture from the Phoenicians -- who spread throughout the Mediterranean from the early Iron Age onward -- because they used similarly shaped amphoras... Dr McGovern's team focused on the coastal site of Lattara, near the town of Lattes south of Montpellier, where the importation of amphoras continued up until the period 525-475 BC....

Research into the dispersal of Philistine cooking methods among various populations in Israel shows that the Philistines spread their culture beyond the areas under their control... Unlike most of the peoples living in the region in the biblical era, the Philistines were not Semites... They prepared meals in a characteristic sealed pottery vessel suited to long cooking times at low heat, while most inhabitants of Canaan at the time used open pots and faster cooking methods. The bones found at the Philistine cities showed that... the Philistines ate mainly pork, with an occasional meal of dog meat. The Philistines' wine...

Beer enthusiasts are using a barn in Norway’s Akershus County to brew a special ale which has scientific pretensions and roots back to the dawn of human culture. The beer is made from einkorn wheat, a single-grain species that has followed humankind since we first started tilling the soil, but which has been neglected for the last 2,500 years. “This is fun − really thrilling. It’s hard to say whether this has ever been tried before in Norway,” says Jørn Kragtorp. He started brewing as a hobby four years ago. He represents the fourth generation on the family farm of...

Between 2007 and 2012 a team led by Dr Lindy Crewe from the University of Manchester have been excavating a Cypriot Bronze Age site at the south-western settlement of Kissonerga-Skalia near Paphos.Excavation of a malting kiln The team excavated a two by two metre domed mud-plastered structure and have now demonstrated by means of experimental archaeology and various other evidence that it was used as a kiln to dry malt for beer making three-and-a half-thousand years ago.The form of this construction suggests that the most likely function was as a drying-kiln, and that one of the primary uses of this...

Sandia researcher Ted Borek used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyze vapors produced by mild heating of pot samples. (Photo by Randy Montoya) The belief among some archeologists that Europeans introduced alcohol to the Indians of the American Southwest may be faulty. Ancient and modern pot sherds collected by New Mexico state archeologist Glenna Dean, in conjunction with analyses by Sandia National Laboratories researcher Ted Borek, open the possibility that food or beverages made from fermenting corn were consumed by native inhabitants centuries before the Spanish arrived. Dean, researching through her small business Archeobotanical Services, says, “There’s been...