Stone and our favorite comedy It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia have combined minds to come up with Dayman, a coffee IPA that will help you fight the Nighman in your life.

Dayman Coffee IPA is a collaboration with Illinois-based Two Brothers Brewing Co. and Chicago-based Aleman, a brewing collective that first made the beer earlier in the year and won the 2012 Iron Brew homebrewing competition with it. Greg Koch of Stone was a judge at that competition, and so the partnership began.

Dayman is a recurring theme in Always Sunny. It’s first mentioned in an episode called “Sweet Dee’s Dating a Retarded Person.” Charlie writes a song called “Nightman,” which then turns into a collaborative song celebrating “Dayman,” played by Dennis. The song is reprised in an episode called “The Nightman Cometh,” about an entire musical produced by Charlie to woo the ever-fickle Waitress, the woman of his dreams. As might be surmised, the gang mangles the play, which was fraught with absurdity to begin with.

It’s Memorial Day weekend and you have nothing to do but brew, drink, and eat.  But you could make your future brewing a little more productive with the very clever — and slightly challenging — UberFridge.

Homebrewer Elco Jacobs has posted a very detailed and easy-to-follow guide on how you turn an Arduino Nano and Asus router into an internet-connected temperature controller for your fermentation needs.  Total cost?  A couple of hours and about $100-$125, assuming you have a fridge.  Not the cheapest project, but given that fermentation temperature has a major effect on the outcome of your homebrew, it’s not the worst money you could spend.

Jacobs has posted the code needed to run the whole system on Google Code, but his guide is definitely the place to start.

Remember the movie Lost in Translation?  Bill Murray plays aging American actor (and famous person) Bob Harris, stuck in Japan to do an ad for Suntory whiskey.

Well, replace the fictional famous person Bob Harris with nonfictional and aging Houston Rockets Star Tracy McGrady, and you’ve got the same basic setup here.

Sedrin (or Xeujin) beer — the “official beer of the NBA” in China — gets the Lost in Translation treatment, complete with McGrady drinking what we’re sure is a mediocre Budweiser substitute after falling into a physics-defying trap set up by some local Chinese youth.

Innovation in pint glasses tends to come in the form of shape or weight, though not much has changed in decades (save for the famous Sam Adams glass).  But clever marketers came up with a brilliant way to make you want to fill your glass with a dark beer: screen a special QR code onto the glass that can only be read when it’s up against a dark enough background.

For those who don’t know, QR codes are modern bar codes — they hold some form of data that can be read by one of dozens of different smartphone apps.  For a QR code to work, like a barcode, the scanner needs to be able to tell the basic difference between white and black to be read (or some other combination of contrasting color).  By printing a light-colored QR code onto a glass that simply can’t work with a light beer, it’s possible to provide some sort of bonus material with a dark beer.

Very clever, in the can’t-believe-I-didn’t-think-of-this-first kind of way.

Paste Magazine loves hip things, and there’s nothing hipper than craft beer and graphic design.  They picked 15 craft beer designs that they love, and we have to agree.

Included in the list is the IPA can design for our friends at West Sixth Brewing in Lexington, Kentucky, along with some of craft beer’s standard best.

Click through to see the list.

Charlie Papazian, world-famous beer lover, recently wrapped up his 2012 BeerCity USA poll.  What he ended up with was BeerCities USA, a statistical tie between Asheville, NC and Grand Rapids, MI.

From Papazian:

Voting for the annual BeerCity USA poll is over. From the start it was clear that communities from several areas of the United States intended to make a run for winning the honor of becoming 2012 BeerCity USA. Facebook, Twitter, other community networks and local media were active throughout the 13-day polling period.  With 55,926  votes cast for 31 different American cities the results clearly indicated that both Asheville, North Carolina and Grand Rapids topped the poll with a statistical tie.

We’ll be a slight voice of dissent and say 1) who cares?  Craft beer is inherently regional/local, and comparing two cities seems fairly useless.  It’s like being named the city with the most popular meteorologists — unless you live there, it doesn’t matter.  But 2) assuming you’re really trying to rank-order cities, it doesn’t seem very logical that Grand Rapids would end up tied with Asheville, which is quickly becoming the place where western breweries open their second locations.

But either way, congrats to both, and to Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Portland, and any other city that is working to develop their beer culture.

One good thing macrobrewers have done with their monstrous marketing budgets is create some very memorable and enjoyable advertising.  But over the years, the ads haven’t been quite as slick.  We pulled together 15 retro beer advertisements into this gallery to take a look back on what used to be.

As much as we like drinking beer, we like cooking with it too.  If you’re looking for a unique mustard to go with your beer brats this spring, try this beer mustard recipe.

Beer Mustard Recipe

• 1/3 cup yellow mustard seeds
• 1/4 cup brown mustard seeds
• 1/2 cup cider vinegar
• 1 cup dark beer, divided
• 3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 teaspoon Kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/8 teaspoon ground allspice