So I had never heard of The United Nations of Beer until Google dropped it at my feet a few weeks ago. The site's pretty cool and it looks like their new Colorado Delegate Lucia Novara has been busy hitting the lodo scene.

I think this is unfair ;-) She probably gets free drinks all the time. Now, who's going to buy a married web/beer geek like me drinks? Boo-hoo.

Four breweries from Colorado are sending their beer Down Under to compete in the 2007 Australian International Beer Awards:

• Flying Dog Brewery, Denver
• Great Divide Brewing, Denver
• Left Hand Brewing, Longmont
• Odell Brewing, Fort Collins

According to the site, the AIBA is the second largest beer competition of it's type in the world. Judging takes place in March in Melbourne with winners announced April 19.

If you can't get enough of reading about what some guys think about beer, check out BeerHeart.com's entry on Oskar Blue's Old Chub and the Big Beers & Beyond post on New Belgium's Abbey.

Man, I love this state! 

Check out the new and somewhat improved Colorado Beer Map !. It's still a work in progress, but this time around you can help make it the best map of Colorado Breweries in the state!

Thanks to the folks over at fmatlas.com anyone can add points on the map. You can also add images, links, or ay other information you want to any of the existing points. I'm still working on some functionalty but it's pretty cool.

According to this article on probrewer.com Coors has applied for label approval of a new Blue Moon branded beer. The beer will be called Blue Moon Spring Ale.

"According to the application, the beer is an amber wheat ale with kieffer lime leaves and lime peel," Probrewer's article stated.

The article also talks about how Coors has distanced itself from the Blue Moon brand, letting drinkers think it's an independent brewery. Although I'm pretty sure that they mention Blue Moon on the Coors tour. And the back of the bottle lists a Golden, CO address, so they're not trying to fool anyone.  

So last weekend I brewed what I thought was going to be a Valentine's Day Chocolate Mint Stout. I spent hours reading about styles and what ingredients would make the best choice for the chocolate and mint flavors.

I bought all the ingredients on Saturday afternoon and started brewing first thing in the morning on Sunday. I'm in the process of converting from extract to all-grain brewing. The thing that is holding me back is that I'm building a Mash Tun out of a big picnic cooler (like the ones that the players use to dump water over the coach's head). So there's a couple of parts that I need to buy before I can finish that.

OK. I have no idea if Bristol's trying to out-stout DogFish Head, but check this out from Bristol's e-newsletter:

I realized last night when I was at one of my local liquor stores that there a number of things that really put a damper on my beer selection. The first is this blog. I almost feel guilty when I buy a beer like Sierra Nevada, Bridgeport, or Sam Adams. I guess I know that if I buy a beer from a Colorado brewer, I can at least mention it in this blog.

But that wouldn't really be a problem if I wasn't so lazy and unorganized. Am I really talking about being lazy and unorganized when it comes to my beer buying habits? Wow.

You know, I get the Rocky Mountain News (I can't stand the broadsheet format of the Post) so I miss out on Mr. Beer Dick Kreck's Beer of the week columns. But thankfully the wonders of the web let me go and read a whole bunch overy once in a while. 

This week he writes about Odells Imperial Stout and last week he wrote about Flying Dog K-9 Cruiser. Check it out at www.denverpost.com/mrbeer 

Forgive me if you've already heard this story. It's a couple weeks old, but I just stumbled upon it.

Apparently a couple of hikers in California found a case of Coors that survived a train wreck 50 years ago. They opened one of the cans (which had been through 50 hot summers and cold winters) and said the beer was the color of cough syrup and smells like a combination of fermented wine and dirt. You mean they didn't taste it? Wimps.