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.

From flickr user epic ever

It’s February, and Bell’s Hopslam and Troegs Nugget Nectar are hitting shelves as I type this (Troegs just rereleased Nugget Nectar in their tasting room today). As hoppy beer arms race rages on, just as it has for years, some breweries are rethinking what it means to write an IPA recipe.

From the Washington Post:

Wildeman Farmhouse IPA, from Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, is an IPA fermented with a Belgian saison yeast and seasoned with a secret spice that the brewery declines to identify. It was originally brewed for In de Wildeman, a beer bar in Amsterdam. The reintroduction of the beer, this time as a year-around brand, gives Flying Dog two Belgian-style IPAs. Raging Bitch is fruitier; Wildeman has a dry, peppery, almost tannic finish.

Widmer Brothers Brewing Co. in Portland, as part of its Rotator series, has released Spiced IPA, a collaboration with Paul Sangster and Chris Stawney of the San Diego-based homebrewers club QUAFF, Quality Ale and Fermentation Fraternity. “A year ago, we asked the members to develop a new IPA. We didn’t tell them who we were, just that it was a big national brewer,” said Widmer brewmaster Joe Casey.

The winner, chosen from among 25 recipes, includes malty Assam black tea, ginger, cinnamon, clove, star anise, black pepper and cardamom. The flavorings are blended by a Portland company called Tao of Tea. In their raw form, the ingredients are immensely fragrant, like a freshly baked fruitcake. In the beer, the ginger emerges strongly up front, the black pepper dominates the finish.

Sam Adams Tasman Red is one of the better beers in this class I’ve had. A fantastic red IPA, it takes the bucketful of hops in each bottle and pairs it with a thoughtful approach to malt. Nugget Nectar gets it right for similar reasons, even if it’s closer to an IPA than the new breed of spicy beers (though it is billed as an imperial amber).

All of this raises the question many brewers have long asked: where does one style begin and another end?

He's been drinking beer

Well, sort of.  In a study by professors at the University of California, it was revealed that the levels of silicon found in beer are good for bone health.  Take that, Sally Field.

The silicon content of the beers ranged from 6.4 mg/L to 56.5 mg/L, with an average of 30 mg/L. Two beers are the equivalent of just under a half liter, so a person could get 30 mg of the nutrient from two beers. And while there is no official recommendation for daily silicon uptake, the researchers say, in the United States, individuals consume between 20 and 50 mg of silicon each day.

Not surprisingly, beers that use heartier ingredients have more silicon…

The silicon levels of beer types, on average:

• Indian Pale Ale (IPA): 41.2 mg/L
• Ales: 32.8 mg/L
• Pale Ale: 36.5 mg/L
• Sorghum: 27.3 mg/L
• Lagers: 23.7 mg/L
• Wheat: 18.9 mg/L
• Light lagers: 17.2 mg/L
• Non Alcoholic: 16.3 mg/L

The whole article is full of random chunks of interesting data, which, if nothing else, will make you feel better about choosing beer with your cereal over milk.