Techdirt. Stories filed under "alcohol"

DailyDirt: Beer Googling

Michael Ho — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 17:00:00 PST

Beer has been around for centuries, and it's arguably responsible for the development of civilization and the prevention of waterborne illnesses. Beer is still evolving and improving as food scientists play around with the yeasts and the ingredients that go into making modern beers. Before you head off to happy hour, check out a few of these beer-related factoids.

Microbiologists are engineering beer foam that lasts longer by identifying a gene in yeast for producing proteins with better bubble stability. But will nose grease still work to get rid of the foam? [url]
It looks like beer and tastes like beer, but it's not beer. It's a soft drink. Is there a point to non-alcoholic beverages that taste like their more potent relatives? Has Star Trek trademarked Synthohol yet? [url]
Drinking some beer (or wine) could enhance creative problem solving. Being too focused on a problem might blind a person to outside-the-box solutions, so alcohol's effects on the brain might provide a certain amount of distraction to allow more free-thinking creativity. [url]

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DailyDirt: Uses For Wine (Besides Drinking It)

Michael Ho — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Drinking wine on special occasions is a popular tradition all over the world, but it seems like more people would like some other excuses for drinking wine, too. Red wine had gotten a lot of publicity for various health benefits, but if you want to drink some wine, maybe you should be asking yourself why you need so many different reasons. Here are just a few interesting links about wine to go with your favorite beverage.

There's a persistent statistic that wine drinkers tend to live longer than teetotalers or people who drink other forms of alcohol. But according to a recent study, those wine drinkers also correlate highly with people who possess healthier habits in general. So wine could merely be the drink of the healthier -- and not some magic elixir for longer life. [url]
Some Australian researchers have developed a process to turn wine into clothing -- and it also works with other forms of alcohol. Bacteria are used to ferment the alcohol into a formable fabric, and the garments retain characteristic odors of their original beverage. So if you really like the smell of beer, there's a perfect shirt for you.... [url]
There's a possible "miracle molecule" in red wine called resveratrol -- and it seems to give older mice some improved mobility. Consuming more red wine might seem like the easy answer for older people to gain mobility improvements, but the study also suggested that a 150lb human would have to drink 700 4-ounce glasses of red wine a day to see an effect. Good luck with that! [url]

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DailyDirt: Red, Red Wine...

Michael Ho — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Alcoholic beverages have been part of human culture for thousands of years. But what do we really know about these drinks? Red wine goes with red meats, and white wine goes with fish... Liquor before beer, you're in the clear... Here are just a few more interesting tidbits of information regarding ethyl alcohol.

A group of Japanese physicists discovered that red wine could induce superconductivity in an iron telluride -- so they tried a bunch of other alcoholic beverages like sake, beer and white wine to try to figure out what was going on. The researchers found that more tartaric acid in red wine correlated well with the superconductive state, but the alcohol also played some role. With just a bit more study, red wine will solve all of our energy problems and allow us to live forever.... [url]
University of Connecticut wine researcher Dr. Dipak K. Das published fake data on the benefits of resveratrol, so there's some doubt that this component of red wine has as many magical health benefits as some have reported. Still, the anecdotal evidence behind the "French Paradox" makes people think red wine has more than a correlation with a lower incidence of heart disease (even if there's no causal relationship). [url]
The 'drunken monkey hypothesis' proposes that humans like alcohol because our primate ancestors were highly dependent on fruits in their diet... and ethanol can be found in overripe fruits. But did those drunken monkeys exhibit superior Kung Fu skills? [url]
You might think that wine experts can tell the difference between an expensive French wine and a much cheaper wine from New Jersey, but you'd be mostly wrong. Wine tasting is hard. Sometimes experts can't even tell the difference between red and white wines -- and the perception of wine can be influenced significantly by the label on the bottle. [url]

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DailyDirt: Pass Me A Cold One...

Michael Ho — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Beer has shaped civilization for centuries. It's one of the oldest alcoholic beverages, and it comes in countless varieties for just about every taste. The progress of beer is unstoppable, and here are just a few more advances in the field of beer.

Frozen beer foam looks like the new way to chill your favorite beverage without adding ice. For those out there who prefer room temperature beer, this stuff is also a possible dessert, serving as kind of a beer-flavored sorbet. [url]
The next James Bond movie will ditch a shaken martini for a sip of a Heineken. Rumor: The secret agent's nifty gadgets will soon be provided by Best Buy's Geek Squad instead of Q's labs. [url]
The German institute for pure beer (DIRB) is trying to get Germany's 16th-century beer purity law listed by the UN as one of the world's cultural treasures. For context, UNESCO already includes activities such as flamenco dancing and wrestling in oil. [url]
To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

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How Drunk Would You Need To Be To Confuse Jack Daniel's With Cayman Jack?

Leigh Beadon — Fri, 6 Apr 2012 14:41:00 PDT

Apparently JDPI, the company behind Jack Daniel's whiskey, has no trademark inhibitions. Through LexisNexis we learn that Mark Anthony International, another alcohol company, has filed a lawsuit (pdf and embedded below) seeking declaratory judgement that they can obtain and use the trademark "Cayman Jack", after JDPI disputed their trademark application and sent them a legal threat.

Quick, look at these two bottles:

How hurried and moronic would you have to be to get them mixed up? Yes, they both use the name "Jack". If a customer is drunk enough to confuse the world's best selling whiskey with a "margarita-flavored malt beverage", they are probably well past the point of distinguishing individual words, let alone of thinking, "Wow, this clearly Jack Daniels-endorsed luxury liquor certainly changes my opinion of that brand". If such a person does exist, they must get pretty confused sometimes, since as Mark Anthony points out in its filing, the liquor store has no shortage of Jacks:

The [trademark] application was examined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") and found to be entitled to registration and published in the Official Gazette on March 9, 2010.

The fact that the USPTO believed CAYMAN JACK to be entitled to registration is wholly unsurprising given the prevalence of other "Jack" named drinks in the marketplace. The JACK DANIEL'S mark already coexists with other "Jack" named alcoholic beverages, including PANAMA JACK and CALICO JACK for rums; CACTUS JACK for tequila; PAPA JAC for alcoholic cocktails; YUKON JACK for liqueur; SCRUMPY JACK for cider; DEADEYE JACK, THIRSTY JACK, BLACK JACK STOUT, JACK RABBIT PALE ALE and JACK'S PUMPKIN SPICE ALE for malt beverages; HONEYJACK for mead and hydromel; and BLACKJACK PASTURE, JUMPIN JACK and BLACKJACK WINES for wines.

The lawsuit gets into a lot more detail, showing how the products are marketed in different ways to entirely different audiences, and walking through the entire brand development process for Cayman Jack to demonstrate that it had nothing to do with Jack Daniels. Hopefully the court sees that there's no chance of confusion here and grants them their declaratory judgement—but as we've seen in similar cases, some judges prefer to feed the ownership culture by granting companies total control over simple symbols and words.

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DailyDirt: Just Add Alcohol...

Michael Ho — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:00:00 PST

The new year is just around the corner, and the New Year's Eve parties wouldn't be complete without a few alcoholic beverages. But if you want to try something a little different, here are some other ways to imbibe ethanol.

Making alcoholic ice cream isn't as simple as it might sound because the freezing point of alcohol is much lower than water. Add some gelatin to your concoction, and you can get a full cup of 80-proof alcohol into a quart of ice cream. [url]
Bartenders are catching on to the molecular gastronomy fad with canisters of nitrous oxide and rotary evaporators. The laughing gas is not to be inhaled but used in flavor extraction processes... [url]
Add vodka to gummi bears, refrigerate and wait. Eat. Repeat. That's a pretty simple recipe for getting some people drunk. [url]
To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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DailyDirt: Do You Want To Sell Sugar Water For The Rest Of Your Life?

Michael Ho — Wed, 6 Jul 2011 17:00:00 PDT

The famous Pepsi Challenge was reportedly introduced by John Sculley, but despite the conclusion that more people prefer Pepsi, Coke still seems to outsell Pepsi in most (not all!) parts of the world. The original formulas for both colas seem to be in the public domain, but copycat colas haven't exactly caught on. Here are a few other drinks that have a long way to go before getting into a cola war.

A moonlighting chemist makes some unique soda flavors when he's not developing prescription drugs. Sounds more legit than developing recreational drugs in his spare time... [url]
Dr. Pepper doesn't want you to drink Dr. Pepper with real sugar in it. No more Dublin Dr Pepper if it wins its lawsuit. [url]
There may be a new category of beverage that is not quite hard or soft -- containing synthetic alcohol. And it won't be reserved just for Starfleet officers anymore. [url]
To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Is France Going To Ban Mentioning Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne And Cognac Online?

Mike Masnick — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:48:00 PDT

You can understand why countries might have certain restrictions on alcohol advertising, but it would appear that France has gone a bit overboard. Based on existing laws (which pre-dated the internet) and recent court rulings, it's more or less illegal to mention alcohol brands online. That means if you're in France, you can't even visit the websites of certain wineries or beer companies, as they're afraid of getting targeted under the law. Heineken lost a lawsuit over this and had to block access to its website in France. A newspaper even got in trouble for (seriously) running an editorial about champagne. And sporting events with alcoholic sponsors are impossible. Logos of alcoholic brands are being removed from the uniforms of sports players, and even the rugby union's Heineken Cup is being referred to as the European Rugby trophy in France. The article notes that this ridiculous situation has some French comedians joking about how you won't be allowed to mention or visit such popular French regions as Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and Cognac.

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