Shooting a movie but can’t land that lucrative product placement deal?  We’ve got your covered.  Over at The Earl Hayes Press, you can find a wide assortment of fake beer bottles, cans, and packaging until one macrobrewer drops a few thousand in your lap.

They bottles all look a little dated and clearly came from a time before craft beer packaging came alive — there’s a noticeable lack of color and creativity.

Everyone’s favorite week is coming up.  Mark your calendars — the Brewer’s Association has deemed May 14-20 as American Craft Beer Week.  So take the next few weeks and draw up a plan.  Most cities have great events, bars have unique beer specials, and there’s all sorts of celebrating to be done with your favorite six pack in your living room.

Ask Men writer Patrick Smith, in what I’m convinced is some sort of link-bait fake controversy, has called out those who like craft beer.  After all, he knows you would much rather have a Bud Light instead of a “Magic such-and-such.”  How does he know?  Because that’s what he wants, of course!

Today, you can buy high-end beers that have, like, 6-7%  alcohol and taste like turpentine. That used to be called Schlitz Malt Liquor. But at least The Bull was cold. At my neighborhood’s liquor store, strolling past row after row of lukewarm emetics with cutie-pie labels, it dawned on me: I love beer, but I hate these beers.

And so do you. You can deny it all you want, but I’ll never believe you wouldn’t rather shoot pool with a couple of Pabst Blue Ribbons than with a cedar-spiced holiday ale.

My friends think I’m the one who’s nuts. They’ll drink an India pale ale from Portland, then a weissen with notes of clove, followed by… on and on. I’m missing out, they’ll tell me. They call me a beer square.

I’ll give him the point he’s trying to make — though like a whiny baby — and simply say: good for him.  He should drink whatever he wants to drink, even if it’s just PBR until he’s blind.  But the way he makes his point, by denouncing selection and at least some attention to detail and craft while brewing, is simply ignorant.

As we’ve said before and will say again right now: craft beer should absolutely not become wine.  It shouldn’t become a place for snobbishness, exclusivity, or elitism.  As I type this, I’m drinking a Yuengling.  I picked it over bottles of Bell’s Hopslam and Troges Nugget Nectar, to say nothing of a dozen other beers, including homebrews.  Why?  Because it’s what I wanted — something simple and light while I typed.

And that’s the point.  Plenty of those who like — and even those who brew — the fancy beers he denounces enjoy the occasional American light lager.  That’s ok.  What’s not ok is holding it against them when they step outside of the marketing and brainwashing that led the American beer industry into a mass-produced, disgusting haze.

From flickr user JF Sebastian

Craft beer has turned the brewing world on its head in the last decade.  The impacts are clear when you look at market share and revenue for some of the biggest and smallest brewers across the country, but it goes further than cashflow.  Take, for example, the usefulness of a good bottle opener.

The reason for the pry-off cap’s resurgence is as elementary as the air we breathe — oxygen. Pry-offs keep it in, twist-offs do not, many experts say.

“It’s a pretty simple equation: With a screw top, you can’t get that on as securely as a pop top,” said Joe Osborne, a spokesman for Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder, Colo., a 19-year-old company that touts its “eccentric” beers and lagers. “In a nutshell, oxygen is bad for beer. It’s the ultimate enemy.”

The revival of pry-offs comes amid rising sales at craft breweries, which overwhelmingly use them. In 2010, these small-scale, independent operations grew 11 percent in production volume and 12 percent in revenue, according to the Brewers Association, a coalition with 27,000 members that includes small breweries, home brewers and retailers.

And a growing number of people brew their own beer at home and reuse glass bottles — usually with pry-off tops — to store their homemade mixture.

From Slow Boat Brewing

Beijing, China has two craft breweries, but demand far outpaces supply. Between the already-established Great Leap Brewing, and the upstart Slow Boat Brewery, Beijing residents can’t get enough.

From the Wall Street Journal:

With the recent opening of Slow Boat Brewery in Beijing, the city’s number of American-style microbreweries officially doubled — to two. But according to both brewers, there’s a growing and largely untapped market in China’s capital as disposable income rises and beer-swilling residents clamor for more variety at the pub.

Late last year, Slow Boat held an evening tasting of its beers, whose flavor resembles brews of the U.S. Pacific Northwest such as Sierra Nevada. The beer ran out in just 45 minutes, despite the brewery quadrupling its offerings to four kegs from a prior event.

“It was a little embarrassing,” said the brewery’s chief executive Chandler Jurinka, though he added that it was also an encouraging sign of demand.

The debate about ingredients between the two is fascinating, given that I’m personally working on a tea-based Pale Ale recipe myself:

Great Leap and Slow Boat take differing approaches when it comes to ingredients. Slow Boat uses nearly all imports, including malt, hops and yeast, because it’s “comforting for local Chinese to know the ingredients aren’t Chinese, because of all the food scandals,” Mr. Jurinka said.

By contrast, Great Leap uses local hops and highlights a range of Chinese ingredients, from Sichuan peppercorns and Yunnan coffee beans to organic honey from Shandong province and a variety of teas. ”You don’t have to import quality,” Mr. Setzer said. “You can have good-quality things that are made in China, using existing ingredients.”

From The White House

We wrote Friday about the White House’s choice of craft beer for President Obama’s Super Bowl party.  As it turns out, there was more than just craft beer on the menu — there was also a homebrew, an unknown style of ale brewed with White House honey.

According to ABC News..

Listed along with Hinterland Pale Ale & Amber Ale from Wisconsin and Yuengling Lager and Light from Pennsylvania was Honey Ale…from the White House.

The First Lady’s office confirms that the White House chefs made one batch of beer using about a pound of honey from the First Lady’s honey hive, on the South Lawn of the White House.

The chefs used the traditional methods to brew the beer, and the First Lady’s office confirms that the Obamas paid for the equipment.

The batch was made so that the nearly 200 Super Bowl guests – from members of Congress to celebrities like J-Lo — could sample the new beer.

I would absolutely love to see the White House homebrew setup.  Is it full grain, partial mash, or extract?  5 gallon batches?  What kind of gadgets does it include — immersion or counter-flow chiller, temperature controllers?  Which chef also serves as the official White House brewer?  Whatever the case, homebrewing has come a long way since Jimmy Carter got things started in 1979.

From flickr user macwagen

Who knew that the movie Smokey and the Bandit was about beer?  I didn’t, and neither did Boing Boing author Maggie Koerth-Baker, who, for some reason, was curious enough about the movie to find out.

Here it is…

So last night, while attempting to explain the plot of Smokey and the Bandit to my husband, it occurred to me that I didn’t really understand the back story that spawned this, one of my favorite childhood films. Why did Bandit and Snowman (and Fred) have a long way to go and a short time to get there? There was beer in most parts of Georgia by the 1970s. And even if you were trying to get booze to a dry county, why start in Texas and only give yourself 28 hours?

Thanks to Wikipedia and the very helpful Stephan Zielinski, I discovered the awful truth—Smokey and the Bandit is centered around America’s brief love affair with Coors Banquet Beer.

All that work, for Coors? It’s true. Wikipedia explained that the beer wasn’t available East of Oklahoma at the time. But I didn’t get the full extent of what was really going on until I read a 1974 Time magazine article sent to me by Zielinski. If, like me, you didn’t begin drinking until the late 1990s, this is going to come as a shock, but, once upon a time, Coors was apparently the best American breweries had to offer.

She goes on to excerpt the article from Time, which mentions that Presidents Ford and Eisenhower, along with Paul Newman, loved the stuff.  It turns out that there were real bandits, and since the unpasteurized Banquet Beer was only available in the west, near the Coors brewery in Colorado, those on the east coast who wanted it, and particularly those who wanted it in a dry county in Georgia, had to get it off a refrigerated truck.   Coors Banquet Beer, coming long before the craft beer movement, was the first of its kind.

From flickr user Krikit

We like to spread the love by not posting about the same brewery two days in a row, but Sam Adams is on an innovative streak.  Word is that you should be able to replace the boring Korbel with a Sam Adams “Infinium” this New Year, a beer intended to be a shot across the bow of the wine-and-champagne crowd, proving that no matter what the occasion, beer is just as acceptable as anything else.

Boston Beer Co Inc’s Samuel Adams is launching a champagne-like brew later this month to prove that beer can be worthy of a New Year’s toast.

The limited run beer, called Infinium, will be sold in 750-ml bottles with foil-covered cork tops, like champagne. It is gold-colored, crisp and dry, with nearly double the alcohol content of an average beer and more than some wines.

“I get a beer that sits in between a champagne, a good dessert wine and a Sam Adams Noble Pils, which is a hoppy, aromatic pilsner,” said Jim Koch, chairman and founder of Boston Beer.

This is also the first collaboration between Sam Adams and Germany’s Weihenstephan Brewery.  SAB Miller, producers of the self-proclaimed “champagne of beer” Miller High Life, is nowhere to be found.

From flickr user Lord Jim

We’ve talked before about how beer is good for you and good for society, but is it responsible for society itself?  Maybe, according to archeologists.

Some archaeologists have said that there is a possibility that beer may have helped lead to the rise of civilization.

Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains intobeer.

Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, said archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

It’s not so much the drinking that led to civilization as it is brewing.  So homebrewers take pride.

From flickr user dklimke

The Guardian recently published an article about Irish beer lovers and their decreasing love for Guinness as a craft beer movement takes hold.

Guinness remains one of Ireland’s favourite beers. While sales fell 5% in 2009, market share actually increased as the pub trade slipped deeper into a recession-fuelled slump. Anecdotally, however, Guinness drinkers belong overwhelmingly to two categories: older people and tourists. Step into a fashionable city centre bar in Dublin, Cork or Galway and you’ll see the Celtic Tiger generation – those who haven’t yet departed for Australia or Canada at any rate – relaxing not over filthy pints of the “black stuff” but coffee, imported lagers and craft brews (after years of false starts, micro-brewing is finally taking off in Ireland).

Headed to Ireland and what to find what’s causing the locals to drift from their traditional drink?  Check out Beoir, an Irish collective of beer lovers who index what’s available and where you can find it.