WONDERFUL RESEARCH RESULTS

Thank You to Mrs Pilsner for this latest research which shows that beer and yoga have the same health benefits. I have not included "Downward Dog" as I don't want to jeopardise the Family Rating of my blog.


Balasana
Position that brings the sensation of peace and calm.



Setu Bandha Sarvangasana
This position calms the brain and heals tired legs.




Marjayasana
Position stimulates the midirift area and the spinal comumn.




Halasana
Excelent for back pain and imsomnia.



Dolphin
Excelent for the shoulder area, thorax, legs, and arms.



Salambhasana
Great excersice to stimulate the lumbar area, legs, and arms.




Ananda Balasana
This position is great for masaging the hip area.



Malasana
This position, for ankles and back muscles.




Pigeon
Tones the body, and builds flexibility and helps get rid of 'stress'.

Cheers ... and beers
Namastaye,
Prof. Pilsner

Australia’s Favourite Beer

It’s Australia Day and the papers are full of the usual blab about “change the flag”, “the national Anthem stinks”, and “has anybody heard of the bloke they named Australian of the year?”

Here at Beer Blokes I want to talk about much more pressing issues. I’m all very excited to see which Aussie beers score a mention in The Local Taphouse Top 100 craft beer poll this year (announced later today) and even more excited to see if any of my nominations rate in the top 10 and even, even more excited to see if my entry is the one randomly chosen to score a slab of each of the top 5.
But let’s talk about Australia’s favourite beer, VB, for a minute, shall we? What’s that, Prof, I hear you say, ‘have you gone mad or something and forsaken your craft beer roots?’ Well, no, thanks for asking, I’ll explain in a minute.

Up until the last few years (and for about twenty years before that) VB – the artist formerly known as Victoria Bitter – has made up around a quarter of all beer drunk in this wide, brown land. 1 in 4. That’s a fair chunk of a pretty large market and has seen VB become an iconic brand intrinsically linked to the culture through sporting sponsorships and plenty of advertising. When CUB was trying to drive Foster’s Lager back in the early 80’s it made it an international beer while VB became, arguably, Australia’s first truly ‘national brand’.

So, as I wrote late last year, it was amusing to see the furore created by some seemingly minor changes to this much loved brew among its biggest and most loyal fans. ‘Career VB Drinkers’ as they called themselves were falling over each other to have a crack at the Big House for daring to tinker with their cherished amber nectar. Letters to the editor pages were packed with Johnnos, Blueys, Knackers’s and Shags’s willing to renounce their ‘religion’ and threaten to switch brands because CUB had ‘changed the recipe’, ‘watered it down’ and even ‘switched the beer to XXXX’ as one melon-head claimed.

So, with a little research (very, very little) and a quick e-mail to (SOURCE PROTECTED) who was once a major powerbroker for CUB, then its Craft Brewing arm and now a partner in a very nice craft brewing set-up just south of the Queensland border where lots of backpackers and hippies hang out and whose initials are JC and whose name I won’t mention – I got about three full pages of facts and figures and links to the ATO website and tables and graphs and all sorts of shit. So I’m fairly confident that what I write here is accurate and factual and can’t be argued with in any way at all whatsoever so there.

I’ll save some space here and ‘dot-point’ the facts (which (SOURCE PROTECTED) assures me are all in the public domain if you know where to look) relating to VB.
As a quick refresher, ‘Career VB Drinkers’ claimed that VB had changed noticeably due to (a) CUB trying to save money in tax by lowering the ABV of the beer, (b) By brewing it in Queensland and (c) by altering the recipe.

The VB facts.
• VB, along with many national brands are brewed in breweries all around the country and have been since the walls came down on state based brewing in the mid 80’s.

• The law regarding beer brewing states that a beer has a ‘margin’ of +/- .02% so that a VB whose label states an ABV of 4.9% might be as high as 5.1% or as low as 4.7% - allowable by law. When VB changed first to 4.8% and then to 4.6% more recently, the Career VB Drinker could have been drinking anything from 5.0% to 4.4% - and NOT NOTICED. Until he read a paper past the sports section.

• When CUB drops the ABV by just .01%, it saves tens of millions of dollars in tax allowing it to compete in the beery duopoly that is Australian mainstream brewing.

So, in conclusion, a ‘Career VB Drinker could, for the last twenty years have been drinking VB that was;
• Brewed in Abbotsford, Kent (Sydney), Fortitude Valley (Brisbane), Yatala, Matilda Bay or even Cascade. Although today it is only brewed at Abbotsford and Yatala.

• Could have been anything from 5.1% to 4.4% ABV

• May have had any of about ten slightly different labels


I’ll leave it here for now so that you can digest all these facts and figures. I’m off to have a beer (not a VB) and you might want to do the same.
I will post a follow up with the various reasons for the changes that CUB has introduced and also to look at the various theories regarding why they have done it and what the future might hold. Also, as promised, I have some VBs in the fridge waiting for the lab experiment to see if I can detect any difference in taste.

Cheers and happy Australia Day,
Prof. Pilsner

More man time?

You know how I love research, especially when it has anything to do with beer. If it has anything to do with beer AND boobies, I’m there!

According to a recent survey, Australian women believe that it is beneficial for their blokes to go out and have a beer with their mates in order to improve their romantic relationships. I haven’t had the chance to ask Mrs Pilsner if this is true in her particular case, but I’m guessing she hasn’t bought shares in the company conducting this survey. Which just happens to be Cooper’s Brewing Company. The ones who make beer.

The cynic in me might suggest that a brewer conducting a survey concerning the increased consumption of the manufacturer’s own product is, well, a bit, what’s the word ... cynical? To be fair, I think that Cooper’s might just have commissioned, rather than conducted, the survey to promote their new brew but it’s worth pondering just the same.

I’m guessing that Mrs Pilsner was in the 8% who said they thought their bloke spent enough time already drinking beer with their mates, thank you very much rather than the 78% who said they thought their romance would improve if the bloke spent some extra quality Man Time with his mates. The research doesn’t specify if the girls’ romantic improvement would occur with the same bloke she was happily sending off to the pub.

The other figure I found amusing was the one which showed that, while 78% of ladies were all for more Man Time, only 61% of blokes felt they needed more Man Time. Perhaps even more surprising was the 70% of blokes who believe beer is a key ingredient in catching up with their mates. What are the rest of you soft-chops thinkin’?

Cooper’s want to make today (Friday) “National Day of the Man Lunch” reflecting the growing trend for blokes to feel the necessity for catching up with mates for lunch and beer for a bit of good ol’ male bonding away from the women folk. After my second Beer Diva Dinner and plenty of Ale Stars gatherings, can I just suggest that some female beer company (about half of both group is girls) is not the worst thing to happen to a bloke?

Cheers
Prof. Pilsner

It’s not just me, then?

A great post over at Pete Brown’s Beer Blog that touches on some issues we have been examining here for a while.

I know sometimes I bang on about certain issues (the posts that Mrs Pilsner refers to as my ‘Redneck Rants) but I just feel at times there is a need to create some balance in the debate. Binge-drinking has long been one issue that I have railed against. By that I mean the harm of binge drinking itself and the poorly formed arguments trotted out by the media.

We’ve spoken before of things like personal responsibility, taking ownership of your actions and ‘STC’ – Suffer The Consequences – and how it gets a bit annoying when the Good Majority gets punished along with the Evil Minority. Well it seems we are not in this fight alone, Beer Brothers. And Sisters, sorry Reg.

Writing for The Publican magazine, Pete has used the release of Government generated figures which show that the overall consumption of alcohol is dropping in the UK, to highlight the distinct lack of reporting of same by the nation’s major newspapers. These would be the same papers that manage to fill page after page with regular scare-stories of binge drinking, beer-fuelled violence and negative health effects of beer.

The article finishes by giving some suggestions as to how we might begin to redress the imbalance and bring some much needed sensibility to the problems faced by some in our civilised society. And here’s where we are both singing from the same hymnbook. Binge-drinking is a problem – for those who partake in the unhealthy practice, and those affected by their behaviour – but the problem is NOT as widespread as the media would have us believe.

We all need to take up ‘arms’ against the enemy. Next time the dinner party conversation comes around to this issue, pipe-up and remind those gathered that overall alcohol consumption is decreasing and bingeing is a problem for a small percentage of the population. We need to deal with it properly – but not by whipping the backs of those who are doing the right thing.

It’s not the final tap of the hammer that cracks the stone – it’s the thousands before it. Start hammering!

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

Beer Bones

Flicking through this months’ Beer Advocate magazine I smiled as I read that beer is the latest wonder food in warding off a disease. This time around osteoporosis is in its frothy sights as new research shows that moderate beer intake can help to protect against weakening of the bones.

And in further good news, beer comes out ahead of wine – again – which was found wanting in preventing brittle bones. It seems that the high levels of silicon found in beer (who knew?!) not only protect against bone breakage, it also helps to boost new bone formation. Magic!!

The study involved 1,700 women with an average age of 48 and found that women who drank beer had stronger bones than those who didn’t. Ultrasound scans of the women’s hands revealed a denser bone structure than those of the non beer drinkers. And, girls, you don’t need to go out and grab slabs of the amber medicine, either, as the tests revealed that there was no difference in the results of those who drank less than a pint a day to those who drank more. Even a little is a lot!

That’s worth raising a glass to, isn’t it? As is the fact that I get to use another of my Sexy Scientist Series!

Cheers
Prof. Pilsner

Moron VB

Sorry, I’ll read that again ... MORE ON VB.

The latest instalment of the ongoing saga regarding Australia’s highest selling beer, Victoria Bitter, is up and running.

In previous posts I discussed the reaction to ‘changes’ to VB by its brewer, Carlton & United Breweries. These changes involved dropping the alcohol by volume level of the beer from 4.9% down to 4.8% last year and then again to 4.6% earlier this year. The uproar has been deafening with a conga-line of self confessed career VB drinkers threatening to switch beers because their favourite brew has turned to something worse than water. Some have claimed the courage of their convictions and have already switched brands.

So now we hear rumours that VB has not just changed its alcoholic strength (by a ‘whopping’ .03%) but has in fact become – DAH DAH DAH ... DAAAAAH!!! – a completely different beer! They reckon it has been switched for the 4.6% ABV Fourex, the flagship brew of Queenslanders! And not just a Queensland brew, but one which is brewed by the company’s brewing rival, Lion Nathan. There may be a small flaw in your theory, there, dickheads.

I have managed to procure two stubbies of VB – one of the old 4.8% variety and one of the new 4.6% beasts. I will conduct a strictly controlled secret experiment (secret because you can imagine the damage to my reputation as a Beer Bloke if I were to be seen drinking VB!) and I will post the results.

Again, wish me luck.

Cheers
Prof. Pilsner

Beer Goggles

In this weeks instalment of Beer Blokes and Science we present a research piece from the University of Bristol in 2008 which set out to study the;

“Effects of acute alcohol consumption on ratings of attractiveness of facial stimuli: Evidence of long-term encoding,” Alcohol and Alcoholism, 43(6): 636–640.
Lycia L.C. Parker, Ian S. Penton-Voak, Angela S. Attwood, and Marcus R. Munafò.

For you and I, that means; “Is there really such a thing as Beer Goggles?”

Here is their hypothesis.

“A strongly held popular belief is that alcohol increases the perceived attractiveness of members of the opposite sex. Despite this, there are no experimental data that investigate this possibility. We therefore explored the relationship between acute alcohol consumption and ratings of attractiveness of facial stimuli.... We tested participants immediately following consumption of alcohol or placebo and one day later, in order to investigate whether any effects of alcohol persist beyond acute effects....”

And their conclusion;

“Alcohol consumption increases ratings of attractiveness of facial stimuli, and this effect is not selective for opposite-sex faces. In addition, the effects of alcohol consumption on ratings of attractiveness persist for up to 24 h after consumption, but only in male participants when rating female (i.e. opposite-sex) faces.”

This is important scientific research for three reasons.

1. It proves that beer can, in fact, make your world a little better, if only for up to 24 hours,
2. It might encourage normal, well-adjusted people to take up Sciences if they realise you can do stuff that involves drinking lots and lots of beer and then look at nice faces, and
3. It gives me another excuse to use pictures from my ‘Sexy Scientist’ folder.

The only piece of this puzzle that I can’t explain is this;
“We tested participants immediately following consumption of alcohol or placebo ..”
I’m sorry, but what’s an alcohol placebo?
“This group gets some Bavarian Lager and this group ...Hmmm? I know, give ‘em Carlton Cold!”

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

You know what I think of research

Regular readers are probably more than familiar with my general attitude towards most scientific research, but this piece brought a smile to my beer-drinking apparatus. The Brother-in-law works at a venerable Victorian place of special high learning and sent me some interesting lab based tid-bits.

Haven’t we all, at one time or another, sat with a nice beer and pondered the following; “Would it be better to be smashed over the bonce with a full glass bottle – or an empty one?” Wonder no more, Beer Blokes and Blokettes!

From the opening line which boldly states;

“Beer bottles are often used in physical disputes. If the bottles break they may give rise to sharp trauma. However, if they remain intact they may cause blunt injuries”,

You just know these guys are fairly serious about their craft. And they don’t miss a thing! They went on to conduct a series of drop tests to determine the force required to break both a full and empty 500ml glass beer bottle versus the force required to break the human skull.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking; “But Professor (Pilsner, not Skullsmasher), surely the impact zone of the bottle, the variable nature of the wall thickness and bottle curvature and its relationship to expected stability have direct implications on the results?”

Well, of course! But don’t worry, these Bar-Fight Poindexters have considered all of this – AND MORE!! What about the fact that beer is an almost uncompressible liquid? Huh? Thought of that too, didn’t they! And the fact that beer is a carbonated liquid and that any impact is likely to cause the bottle to explode if it’s full, thus rendering it a less effective Head Hitter. They thought of that, too.

I can sense that this is all getting a bit too exciting so I will cut to the Money Shot. The team from the University of Bern in Switzerland came up with the following formula and conclusion;

E = (Mn / (Mt + Mn)) x W

where E is the Energy (of course!), Mn is the Mass of the bottle and Mt is the Mass of the body part swinging the bottle i.e, the arm or the shoulder (which can be assumed to weigh 2.4 to 4 kg) and W is the work performed by the muscle.

So how did you do? The team found that through electrohydraulic experiments using human skulls (don’t ask) neurocranial fractures occurred between 14.1 and 68.5J3. Now, as empty and full glass bottles were found to break at forces of 30-40J, respectively, it is clear that both are capable of cracking the thinner parts of the human brain-holder. In addition, empty bottles were sturdier than full ones and took less energy to raise and swing. But I think we all knew that, didn’t we?

They did concede, in the last line of the conclusion that further research was recommended to assess the overall danger of bottle related head trauma. Good for them and I wish them luck!

Next week in ‘Beer and Science’ Beer Blokes will look at the age old question – Does a gutful of lager really make people of the opposite sex better looking?’ No, seriously, Chris sent me some research papers on that as well!

Cheers
Prof. Pilsner

Now I can’t wait to get old

I love surveys. And studies. Any old grant-driven scientific research, really.

Do you know why? Because it’s pure entertainment. It is all about as relevant as the fifth placed finalist in Australian Idol, as important as Paris Hilton’s latest shopping trip, or as believable as Oprah and Dr Phil combined.

“Give us some cash and we’ll give you some stunning and world-altering figures about important social issues”, they say as they extend their grubby cash-grabbing hand.

“Give us even more cash and we’ll give you some even more stunning and more world-altering figures about important social issues which contradict the first!” With hand out.

Today I read that older Australians who have up to 28 drinks a week stand a better chance of warding off dementia than those who abstain. This data comes from 15 international studies involving more than 10,000 people so it’s not like one of those narrow, pissy little studies that trumpet mind-blowing results and then pop some figures into the fine print which show they phoned ten people or spoke to all the people on a bus one day.

Folk aged 60 or over who drank between one and 28 alcoholic drinks a week were almost 30% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. This raises some very interesting questions. If I start drinking my 28 drinks per week BEFORE I’m 60, will the benefits be less – or will I just spontaneously combust? If I have 29 drinks, will the effects be reversed – or will my head just drop off? If I go one week without ANY DRINKS AT ALL will there be no ill effects at all – or will I suddenly forget my entire family as well as the ability to remember to remove my trousers before using the toilet? If I start before I turn 60 AND have more than 28 drinks will it be the same as swimming 29 minutes after eating rather than 30 minutes after eating? Will I walk into the surf and just explode?
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Either way, I’m gettin’ an early start. Why wait till I’m 60? If I start now, surely my body will be better prepared for drinking into old age. After all, you don’t prepare for running a marathon by running a marathon! You have to do SOME training. Like the warning labels say – Excessive alcohol consumption can cause memory loss – or worse, memory loss.

Cheers – and drink up before the contradictory research is released,
Prof. Pilsner

"Ahs forgot to gets me a beer - Oh well, least I ain't BLACK!!"

The Bloke is back. And he’s not happy.

After a month of rearranging or cancelling plans, sorting out babysitters and coping with lack of sleep due to the recent weather activity, I was really looking forward to the prospect of a quiet weekend spent with family and friends – and beer. And plenty of it.

So what better way to really piss me off than this; get a collection of lab-coated, clipboard-clutching Poindexters in need of more Federal Government funding to piss up against a wall and get them all to ignore all the research they had just been paid to do and come up with a new set of figures designed to really piss me off. Mission accomplished, Egg-Heads!!

You see, a little while back some group of academic pin-heads called the National Health and Medical Research Council decided that there just HAD to be a number that we could attach to the amount of booze a man or a woman could/should have before they would grow a second head, try to stop trams with their faces and cost society its innocence. They have now halved the number.

Two quick things, beer researchers;

1) Stop making up new research figures, and
2) Piss Off!!

Cheers
Prof. Pilsner

PS The lass at the top is NOT one of the lab-coated dickheads to which I referred. I'm not sure she's even a REAL scientist.

Beer and Nuts ... Yeah, Nuts.

To those of a delicate disposition, I suggest you look away now. As if this blog attracts anyone with a delicate disposition. Just n case, I thought I should be forward upfront. You know what I mean. Just in case there are any wimps, nancy-boys, wee jessies or easily offended Poindexters still hanging around;

They gone now? Good.

Bollocks. Nads. Cohones*. Plums. The Boys. Danglers (thanks Shandy). Jibbies. Balls. These are all words used to describe those manly elements that we all hold dear. Men, I mean. We hold them dear. Often in inappropriate social and work situations but that’s not for here. These are those things that never sit right when you want them to and which even the Good Lord felt so awkward looking at that he decided to hide them in some leftover elbow skin he had lying around on the workshop bench. Today we must address some distressing news.

New research suggests that a naturally occurring plant compound found in many foods is lowering men’s sperm count. It actually said men’s sperm. Hmmm. This chemical is some sort of phyto-estrogen and is found in higher levels than previously thought in foods like coffee and nuts and – horrifyingly – beer. BEER!!

Now it doesn’t specify which beer and I am sure that each of you is doing the same thing as I am and inserting your favourite ‘poofter’ beer at this point and saying stuff like; “I told you that shit was a girly drop!” but this is more serious than that. As beer drinkers we need to get proactive on this. Imagine if this report gets out and beer starts getting a bad name around town as a drink which lowers your sperm count!!!

The Medical Research Council in Cambridge did this study and found high levels of this infertility causing chemical in red wine, brazil nuts and peanuts as well as beer, so we can’t even enjoy some of our favourite beer snacks, nor can we think about switching to wine! Not that we would anyway. We need to get on the front foot to tackle this threat to our beer drinking and I think I have some helpful tactics. We can tell our ladies that we need to actually increase our beer intake as we are involved n important scientific research conducted in order to determine if phyto-estrogens really do lower sperm count. We could explain our increased consumption as being the control group involved in disproving the same theory. Or, when the missus asks if you ‘have protection’, tell her; “yes, dear, a six pack full!”

And lastly, the research also found these phyto-thingies occur in high levels in soya. We can just keep drinking our beer and smile knowing that this research explains a lot about that tie-dye t-shirt wearing, whale saving, mung bean farming, tree hugging, unwashed, commune reject bloke who works in the health food shop and swears he isn’t gay.

Go out now and pick up some ‘research materials’ – at the very least we can all get lagered up, father a few offspring each and disprove science. Yay for Beer!!!!

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner

*I don’t know if I should have spelled this one ‘cohones’ or ‘cojones’ – both might be acceptable (though rarely either in polite, Spanish or papal company) but when I tried spell check it just said ‘don’t ask me’ and when I Googled it the child lock on the laptop kicked in and I couldn’t post for two days.

P.S. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES do I recommend you get together with your mates to 'check each other' for levels as these Spanish football-ticklers are doing.

Staggering research

Staggering research is under way to try to stop drunks falling victim to violence. This is the first line of a piece featuring in the Melbourne Herald Sun and it had me thinking that the ‘staggering’ referred to the enormity of the research or the massive cost of the research or the humungous intellect of the eminent scientists conducting the study. But, no, it is a bit of research looking at staggering. As in the wobbly walk conducted by people when they have been out on a lager frenzy.

This piece of research was conduced by a Welsh team (I can’t help thinking of Daffyd from ‘Little Britain’ in a white vinyl lab coat with the arse cheeks cut out) to produce a mathematical model that they hope will cut down alcohol related harm that drunks tend to bring on themselves.

Maths and being pissed? Hmmm. The best bit of this piece was not the fact that someone thought it necessary to calculate the probability of a pissed idiot walking into either a lamp post, another pissed idiot or his own shadow, but the unexpected facts that they uncovered.

First, temperatures of -6C and torrential rain at 3am were said to contribute to the difficulty of data collection. Fair enough, though not surprising for Wales at that time of year? Funnier still was the quote from the leader of the research operation, Dr Simon Moore who said, “The biggest problem with surveying drunks is that alcohol seems to make some people think they are the funniest people on earth.” And funnier still, ... “and that we, the surveyors, would be very interested in hearing all their really interesting stories.”

Researchers also fond that the drunker people were, the more willing they were to take part in the survey! A lesson there for telemarketers, Jehovah’s Witnesses and those people who stop you to ask market research questions about washing powder at shopping centres when you’ve got fourteen shopping bags, three kids and a deadline hanging off you.

The sober people were, not surprisingly, more interested in getting to the pub!

And the results? Well, strap yourselves in blokes, this is groundbreaking stuff! A blood alcohol reading of .22% was the point at which the ‘staggers’ set in. Good. Around 25% of those surveyed had found their way to this level. It found that sober pedestrians moved in an orderly ‘follow the leader’ pattern where pissed idiots movements were, wait for it, “more unpredictable” !!!!

Further, when 20% of the foot traffic was pissed idiots the flow was slowed by 9%. When EVERYBODY in the crowd was stonkered the traffic slowed by an ‘irritating’ 38%. But I guess if they were all pissed, nobody would notic. At least I’m sure nobody was able to get out a calculator and determine whether they were above or below industry standards.

They could have saved themselves, and us, a lot of time by A) Not stating the obvious, B) Staying indoors and looking out at pissed idiots, C) Making up all the numbers and percentages, we still would have been impressed and D) Suggesting that the best way to prevent injury to pissed idiots was to make all the lampposts, dustbins and footpaths out of the stuff they make Nerf balls from.

Staggering research

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner