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For the list of participating distributors, please visit Partnership page.
SIBA centre stage at Licensed Business Show May 21, 2007: The Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) will, for the first time, be a major exhibitor at the National Licensed Business Show (NLBS), at the NEC from September 25 to 27. More
Mystery compound in beer fights cancerSome cancers are caused by heterocyclic amines, DNA-damaging chemicals found in cooked meat and fish. When Sakae Arimoto-Kobayashi's team at Okayama University in Japan fed these chemicals to mice, the DNA damage to their liver, lungs and kidneys was reduced by up to 85% if the mice drank non-alcoholic beer instead of water. Arimoto-Kobayashi thinks as-yet unidentified compounds in lager and stout prevent the amines binding to and damaging DNA. If these compounds can be identified, brewers might be able to produce beers particularly rich in them, or they could be added to foods. Heavy alcohol consumption is blamed for around 6% of all cancers in western countries (New Scientist print edition, 18 December 2004), though moderate consumption reduces the risk of heart disease. Since the mice drank non-alcoholic beer, the findings do not show whether moderate consumption of normal beer has any anti-cancer benefits. "The total benefits and risks of beer with alcohol are still under consideration," says Arimoto-Kobayashi. Journal reference: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (DOI: 10.1021/jf049208k)
Head researchers turn their attention to beerIf you spend your day staring at the froth in a beer glass, you're liable to get a bad reputation. Such are the occupational hazards for Robert MacPherson and David Srolovitz, who are using mathematics to describe how the frothy networks of gas-filled bubbles that constitute a beer head change over time. The mathematics of how beer bubbles behave is similar to that behind how grains in metals grow. The granular structures in metals coarsen as their boundaries move, says MacPherson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Similarly, the bubbles in a beer head - separated by liquid walls moving under surface tension - merge and coarsen the foamy structure until the head is no more. Two-dimensional grain boundary mathematics was developed by the computing pioneer John von Neumann in the 1950s, but now MacPherson and Srolovitz, who is at Yeshiva University in New York, have adapted it to describe how 3D grain boundaries - such as bubble walls in a beer head - change over time (Nature, vol 446, p 1053). They discovered that the rate of change of domain volumes - the rate of beer head decay - depends on the width of the domains rather than their number of adjacent domains. By carefully controlling surface tension properties, these widths can be adjusted to order, allowing brewers a new level of head control.
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