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Like a Big Mac or a Coke, a Budweiser is one of the global economy’s more reliable pleasures, cheaply available almost everywhere. Historically, like the double-pattie burger and the iconic cola, the global dominance of light, fizzy, relatively bland, central European-style lager — from Budweiser to Molson and Corona — relied as much on cleanliness and consistency as it did on taste, as anyone who has tasted a Bud can tell you. In a talk to a gastronomy conference at the University of Toronto Mississauga this weekend, food historian Jeffrey Pilcher will argue that lager conquered the world, after first...

Orange-colored galls, such as these pictured in 2010, from the beech tree forests of Patagonia have been found to harbor the yeast that makes lager beer possible. Five hundred years ago, in the age of sail and when the trans-Atlantic trade was just beginning, the yeast somehow made its way from Patagonia to the caves and monastery cellars of Bavaria where the first lager beers were fermented. University of Wisconsin-Madison Genetics Professor Chris Todd Hittinger and colleagues have discovered a quick and efficient way to fuse different strains of yeast to make hybrids similar to the lager beer hybrid, an...

Genetics is often charged as providing a brave new world for science and now it seems that new research into the makeup of brewing yeasts in lager could revolutionise the very taste of beer, new research claims. In a study appearing online in the journal Genome Research, scientists from Stanford University in California say they have been able to identify the origins of Saccharomyces pastorianus yeast, a ‘hybrid’ organism used in lager. Such a breakthrough may help scientists and brewers to better understand how to manipulate the individual yeast strains that contribute to taste, colour and even aroma variation in...

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (news, bio, voting record) crashed his car near the Capitol early Thursday, and a police official said he appeared intoxicated. Kennedy said he had taken sleep medication and a prescription anti-nausea drug that can cause drowsiness. Kennedy, D-R.I., addressed the issue after a spate of news reports. His initial statement said: "I consumed no alcohol prior to the incident."'Later, however, he issued a longer statement saying the attending physician for Congress had prescribed Phenergan on Tuesday to treat Kennedy's gastroenteritis.Kennedy said he returned to his Capitol Hill home on Wednesday evening after a final series of votes...

My husband, FReeper Lager, had surgery Friday 7/23 to remove a tumor from his tailbone (sacral chordoma, a very rare slow-growing . . . I don't want to say "cancer" but apparently that's what it is). This same tumor was removed 4 years ago in a 10-hour operation but the blankety-blank thing came back. Friday's surgery was less intrusive and took only about 3 hrs but nevertheless, Scott is in a great deal of pain and depressed because he can't work. While the surgeons were in there, they not only removed most of the tumor (plum size) but they also...