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On Beer Spas And How To Be A “Savvy Girl” Sommelier In 5 Hours Or Less!

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by Treve Ring | Looking to up your brunch game? The world’s priciest pancake includes Dom Perignon Rosé Champagne hollandaise sauce and sells for £800.

It turns out that the hippest winery in Mexico is made of recycled boats.

The email below was edited marginally because it exceeded the exclamation point allowance for this column…

Becoming a Sommelier Overnight With Savvy Girl

Hi! Hope all is well. I wanted to reach out to see if you’d be interested in featuring my newest client, Savvy Girl: A Guide to Wine in an upcoming feature!

With a passion for learning and desire to be savvy, author and entrepreneur, Brittany would crave the knowledge how-to books promised to offer, but found them painful to complete… Savvy Girl produces beautiful 100-page guidebooks that readers can finish in 5 hours or less… Savvy Girl believes in cutting through the clutter by delivering guidebooks that help women get savvy and get back to their fabulous life… even throw out words like “terroir” and “tannin” like WineSpeak is your first language.

Damn. If I had only known about this before! I could have saved years of study and thousands of dollars!

Unlike the parties at your house, this bathtub full of beer is actually therapeutic. The Schloss Starkenberger brewery in Tyrol, Austria is reputed to be the world’s only beer-based spa, located in its 700-year-old castle brewery’s underground vaults. Here in the old fermentation room, guests can immerse themselves in a bath of warm water and Biergeläger (translation: beer making leftovers). The only benefit/drawback? Guests are advised not to drink from the pools. Yeah, that’s probably good advice for every pool.

Meanwhile, in Canada: Uberfist. A Canadian-based company is “revolutionizing the drinking experience” with their invention of Uberfist, a cup holder with “unique thermal properties” inside a giant Hulk-like foam hand, allowing fans to “cheer on their favourite team while simultaneously supporting their beverage. What more could a sports fan want?” I am left answerless.

Meanwhile, in the USA, powdered alcohol is now for sale. Here you go kiddies – kool aid, pop rocks and Palcohol. Previous versions of the Palcohol website reported that the flavoured powder could also be snorted.

Because New Orleans doesn’t have anything else to worry about right now, the debate continues about allowing booze in ice cream.

If spring’s sunshine has you tuning up your bike, you might want to consider these accessories.

An Australian news example of turning lemons into limoncello, Adelaide Now reports that commuters were “treated to the bouquet of expensive white wine” after a truck carrying 11 tonnes of wine collided with a car, sending $500,000 worth of wine down the road. Also, much later in the story, no one was injured.

Leave it to Lithuania to make it hard for me to refute that Beaujolais Nouveau tastes like paint thinner with this new packaging.

Beer Brief, Vol. 70

It's back (and brief-er)! A bulleted briefing of beer news and imminent events, mapped for your crawling pleasure by Thalia Stopa.

The Coolest New Bars to Score a Cocktail in Vancouver Right Now

There are a whack of new bars to check out if you're looking for somewhere to grab a cocktail in Vancouver right now.

Picking Grapes with Jayton Paul

We put our Picking Grapes questions to the Wine Director for Boxset Collective (Published on Main, Bar Susu, Novella, Twin Sails).

Picking Grapes with Ryan Mellor

One look at the extensive Gotham wine list - broken down by region, sub-region, appellation, varietal, rating and more - left us with no doubts that the restaurant's Wine Director was the perfect person to field our Picking Grapes questions...