Flour Power

Guinness, the brand that is a synonym of “the black stuff”, is entering the black lager market with a new product – Guinness Black Lager.

Pitched at a younger market, the drink will be served up in 330ml bottles and supported by a new advertising and marketing campaign. It is being trialled in Northern Ireland and will go on sale at selected pubs and off-licences, priced similar to other premium lagers.

It seems like every once in a while Guinness tries to launch a crazy new product, and has failed consistently. Examples of such flops from Dublin’s legendary St James’ Gate brewery include “white Guinness” Breo and Guinness Light. But this time they’re confident this new product will be a success, maybe because of the growing popularity of dark lagers. John Kennedy, Diageo’s managing director, said the new beer had a unique taste which is “an evolution in lager making”.

With this lager, the master brewers of Guinness have built upon 250 years of rich brewing heritage to take lager enjoyment to a new level.

(via Independent.ie)

There’s more to the 2010 Irish budget, but what most people notice is signs like these at pubs:

It’s not a major reduction. Actually, it’s just about 15-20 cents per pint, but it does feel good paying less than €4 for a Guinness.

Well, my friends, it’s all nice and fun to go out and drink “a few” beers but if you add that to the fact that I haven’t done any kind of exercise in something like half a year (and my work consists of sitting down in a chair for 8 hours), you can imagine that the abdominal area is starting to grow. Oh, and eating a lot of junk food kind of helps…

Before you start criticizing me for eating a lot of junk food let me point out that I do it because it’s very cheap at the supermarket (I can get a pizza for 2€) and I just don’t have the time to waste on cooking. For example, today’s dinner, a simple steak with rice and an egg took 1 hour to cook, eat and then wash the dishes. If I did cook frequently I would have much less time to update this blog, for example. And let’s not forget about Facebook, Twitter, reading blogs (my Google Reader counter shows a scary 1000+ blog posts unread) and watching Lost, Heroes, How I Met Your Mother, Family Guy, The Big Bang Theory, and a movie every once in a while. But I digress, let’s go back to the original subject.

So I decided to stop being lazy and start exercising. Well, at least trying to burn enough calories to counter the effect of the beer (Guinness is quite heavy on those). The plan was set in motion last week, when I bought some cheap runners and running jacket at Aldi. The plan is to do some running and also some pushups and situps.

Starting with the running, the first “jog” was yesterday. Sketched a route on Google Maps and there I went, hoping not to break halfway through it. Surprisingly, it went pretty okay, and I even managed to extend the route a little bit. And since I like statistics, here’s what MapMyRun has to say about this first run:

Date: 15/04/2009
Time Taken: 00:17:00
Total Distance: 3.06 km.
Burned: 89 (kcal)
Speed: 10.78 (km/hr) (avg)

Not so bad for a sedentary bastard, right? But quite weak otherwise. The objective now is to gradually increase the distance, while at the same time increasing the speed. And I’ll need to look into how much calories a pint has, because that 89 looks quite low.

And as you can imagine, my legs are hurting in a way that makes me limp while walking…

I mentioned in this blog how to make green beer a few days ago. And then while we were wandering around Dublin during St. Patrick’s Day we happened to enter The Church where they were actually selling it. So of course I had to try, right?

And I do mean green. The color, not the environmental-friendly thing.

Over at WikiHow there’s a tutorial on how to make green beer. All you need is some green or blue food coloring (or even “Blue Curaçao“):

1. Get a light beer. This can also be done with a dark beer, but it’ll require so much food coloring that it turns your teeth green when you drink it.
2. Pour some of the beer into a glass or mug.
3. Place 4-6 drops of green food coloring in the beer. The blue coloring and the “Blue Curaçao” also work because the beer is already yellow and mixing that with blue makes green.
4. Pour the rest of the beer. The pouring action should mix in the food coloring, but stir lightly if needed. (Stirring too much can make the beer flat.)
5. Drink!

And, of course, there are videos on Youtube to show you how it’s done:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZLqAgi11jU

Enjoy your green beer!