Hilarious take on innovations in can design.

Dragon-heating a kettle probably does add something to the taste.

How-to/tech blog Lifehacker has written up a useful guide and produced a video on how to chose the right glass and make the proper pour for whatever it is your drinking.

More and more craft brewers would prefer you not use the standard pint glasses you’ve had for decades.  They want you using something that helps the aromas come alive, the carbonation expand properly, and the taste to hit your tongue in the way they intended.  Whether you believe that a particular glass can do that or not, it’s still worth a shot.  Glassware is typically not expensive — a tulip glass can be had for less than $5 if you look — and you usually only need one of each kind.  If you’re skeptical, it’s a cheap way to experiment with craft beer in a new way (plus, it will give you an excuse to buy more beer).

And just as a reminder, you can get your free Sam Adams pint glass until October 31 by following these instructions.

Every summer there seems to be a series of stories about the weird things people are frying at state fairs.  Most of them are at least a little plausible — pickles, candy bars, even a stick of butter.

But fried beer?  It’s for real, and available at the State Fair of Texas.

As the video above shows, it’s not so much deep-fried liquid (which would just evaporate), but deep-fried beer ravioli.  Bite into it, and you get a nice squirt of hot beer and oil gushing right in to your mouth.

The engineering team at Yelp has created a fantastic iPad interface for their office keg.  Building off of the existing KegBot platform, they built an iPad app that allows them to check-in with an RFID keycard, track user ratings, and track the amount of beer coming out of the keg.  It even tracks the temperature.

Sensors attached to the keg feed data into an Arduino microcontroller, which in turn communicates directly with the iPad via a serial connection. The iPad processes that data and displays it in a snazzy manner along with a description of the current brew. An RFID reader attached to the system allows users to ’swipe in’ to KegMate and keep track of how much beer they’ve had, as well as assign a star rating for the beer currently in the keg (this is Yelp, after all).

If you were going to starting from scratch, this definitely takes some understanding of circuitry, iPad app development, and a host of other technical skills.  Forunately, the team at Yelp has released everything they’ve done — the app, schematics, even part numbers — to help you put it together.  If you’ve got an extra Saturday afternoon and a little ambition, they’ve made it simple enough to be an approachable project for almost anyone.

The downside?  It requires an iPad, which is $500 alone, making this a $600+ project.  If you’re interested in a simpler version of this, you can eliminate the iPad and use an old computer with the KegBot software.

Great clip of Conan drinking beer with reviewer Michael Jackson (not the one that you first thought of).

A homebrewer pride video from Poland, with a soundtrack that sounds as if it’s from one of the Bourne movies.