July 2, 2016

KLM to serve Heineken draught beer on flights

Filed under: Aviation,Dutch first,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 8:42 pm

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Two years ago Heineken developed the Brewlock tap system, which addresses the issue of delivering draught beer at the right level of carbonation. And if KLM is to serve beer high up in the air, it needs to be tapped properly and not spray out of the keg due to a lack of carbonation.

The system will be fitted onto a trolley for serving and will be pre-cooled before takeoff and then kept cool for a maximum of eight hours with insulating material. KLM plans to serve beer on tap on a few selected flights and then eventually roll it out.

Roll out the barrel, and we’ll have a barrel of fun – in the air.

(Link: www.telegraaf.nl, photo by Steven Straiton, some rights reserved)

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January 18, 2016

Carnival song says refugees came for the beer

Filed under: Food & Drink,Music by Orangemaster @ 12:45 pm

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Noord-Brabant student singers Grenzeloos Gek have made the news with their carnival song ‘Vluchtelingen uit Aleppo’ (‘Refugees from Aleppo’). They can’t sing on key and dance around a touchy subject, but so far they’ve not caused any actual controversy except for fueling the annual carnival lovers vs. carnival haters ping pong online.

Here’s a rough translation of the chorus:

“Refugees from Aleppo, over the mountains so high
Refugees from Aleppo, farmers, bakers and biologists
They’re coming here for four days of beer.”

It’s about a bunch of white male Dutch students drawing attention to themselves with a sub-par song using a ripped off melody and a hot topic. It’s about drinking beer and having fun and singing as flat as a carnival beer. The song amusingly implies that refugees drink beer when in fact a lot of them probably don’t and didn’t flee for their lives for a few watered down carnival beers with frat boys. I’m still wondering if this would have worked with a bunch of white Dutch girls: depending on their looks, they’d been written off or tolerated because of them.

Last year we had a few zingers. We’ll keep you posted this year.

Refugees from Aleppo is sung to the tune of the famous Dutch song ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ by George Baker Selection, better known by the younger generations for ‘Little Green Bag’.

Listen to ‘Refugees from Aleppo’ at your own risk, I couldn’t get through the video.

(Link: www.omroepbrabant.nl, Photo of Maastricht carnival 2008)

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November 15, 2015

Smugglers disguise Dutch beer as soft drinks

Filed under: Food & Drink,Music by Orangemaster @ 10:19 pm

Trying to smuggle alcohol into Saudi Arabia where it is illegal carries serious consequences if we believe the media. Smugglers have tried to disguise 48,000 cans of Heineken as Pepsi cola ones using crafty stickers. We could also flog the makers of Heineken, but that’s just a pipe dream.

Just this week an elderly British man living in Saudi Arabia was released from jail after spending one year in a cell for making homemade wine. More than 230,000 people had signed an online petition calling for the British Prime Minister to intervene to stop Mr Andree from facing 350 lashings, a punishment the man would probably not have survived after battling cancer and being asthmatic.

In the Netherlands, a song by Jaap Visser once told us that in fact ‘Heineken is a hard drug dealer’ and makes a great argument for banning it.

Heineken wrecks everything
Leidseplein, your marriage
Heineken is a hard drug dealer
The hospitals are full
With victims of alcohol
Heineken is a hard drug dealer
Don’t let yourself be cheated
Don’t let yourself be fooled
Heineken is a hard drug dealer
And if the stadium is violently destroyed
Heineken sits sanctimoniously at home
Counting his money

(Link: www.independent.co.uk)

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October 19, 2015

Women brew successful provocative beer

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 3:25 pm

Kutbier

This summer I read an American article on how misogynistic craft brew names are putting off women and surely some men, as the men making the beer think it’s hip to appeal to men not by making good beer, but by trashing women as a gender to sell it. Hint: it’s not and you’re boring.

Two Dutch women from Noord-Brabant have gone viral brewing a beer called ‘kutbier’ (literally ‘cunt beer’), which has a different flavour of swearing than you might think. In any case, it’s not retarded enough to trash men or women as a gender to sell their beer.

‘Kut’ (‘cunt’), swear word used like ‘shit’, ‘damn’ or even ‘balls’ or ‘fuck’, but meaning ‘cunt’ and used constantly as a noun, adjective, adverb, etc. when you stub your toe or forget something important at home on your way to work. Since the New Kids films, the word is associated with the province of Noord-Brabant, but in the case of this beer, it’s alluding to the women brewing it.

Brewers Janneke Pieters and Mary-Jane Snelders of the Boegbeeld brewery in Den Bosch claim to brew an ode to the real Den Bosch woman. Their first run of 1000 bottles sold out in six days and has overwhelmed the pair. It’s a blond beer with prunes and some coriander seeds, which took them six months to perfect. In December they’ll be making more of it, which stands to be just as popular if not more.

We want some too, kut.

(Link and photo: www.omroepbrabant.nl)

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September 16, 2015

Flashing boobs for beer at an Amsterdam cafe

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 4:53 pm

In a stunt claiming to support breast cancer but mainly getting some excellent free publicity, Café Ruig in Amsterdam will be the first café in the world to accept ‘Titcoins’, the digital coin of the porno world.

Women can soon go to Cafe Ruig, flash their boobs, let the bar staff take a picture that will be uploaded to the Titcoins site and will get a beer in return. The bar will eventually get real money for their Titcoins and part of the money is said to be going to Pink Ribbon to support breast cancer research.

‘Ruig’ means rough, and yes, the story seems a bit rough. The owner thinks tourists will go for it, but has no clue if it will be a success. He does have enough beer just in case. However, Pink Ribbon claims it is unaware of the stunt and has said it will not accept the money, but didn’t give a reason.

There’s so much wrong with this idea although it is funny. The idea of bar personnel, surely a barman – I doubt a woman would be up to doing this – having pictures of random racks on his mobile phone bothers me quite a bit. I’d rather just pay for my beer the old fashioned way.

(Link: at5.nl)

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August 6, 2015

Children play beer pong on makeshift beach

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:39 pm

For two weeks now Amsterdam Central Station has has a beach with sand left over from the World Cup Beach Volleyball that took place on Dam Square in front of the Palace down the street.

The beach features activities for children, and today it’s about beer pong or as the Dutch put it #kiddybeerpong. The activity has elicited responses that include WTF, kids shouldn’t be encouraged to drink beer and it looks like it’s being promoted by a beer company although it’s not.

The organisers assure us that they will use 0% beer, which is still very questionable and that we should get over the beer part and see it as a game and an excuse to discuss drinking alcohol, the latter sounding like someone who doesn’t have young children.

I wouldn’t want a child chugging any kind of soft drink, juice or fake beer in the sun for a game that is meant to get practice for drinking alcohol in college. If you take away the drinking, I could be OK with it, but I feel this is in bad taste.

(Link: www.at5.nl, Photo of the sea at Katwijk by Michael Brys, some rights reserved)

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March 5, 2015

American Heineken film loaded with mistakes

Filed under: Film,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 1:36 pm

Colbert-report

‘Kidnapping Mr. Heineken’, a 2015 American film about the kidnapping of Dutch beer tycoon Freddy Heineken, is not only getting bad reviews from the international and Dutch press, but is also has enough mistakes to keep everybody busy.

Maarten Treurniet directed the 2011 Dutch film ‘De Heineken ontvoering’ (‘The Heineken Kidnapping’), staring a cast of actual Dutch people including Rutger Hauer, while Kidnapping Mr. Heineken apparently couldn’t be bothered with authenticity and casted mostly British and other non-Dutch actors. While the Dutch film set in 1983 Amsterdam has many anachronistic items from the 1990s and a few references to 1984, the American film messed up big time by showing the wrong coloured beer bottles, which should be brown instead of green.

NU.nl says that, “it is a weird mistake because the makers were attentive to very small details, even the police cars are from 1983.” The mistake was easy to make because Heineken has always exported its beer in green bottles, but in the Netherlands domestic bottles were brown, a ‘stupid mistake’. Even Dutch crime journalist and author Peter R. de Vries whose book was used to script the film was so displeased with the final product he couldn’t be arsed to go to the film’s premiere in the US.

If you like your Heineken humour on the absurd side, find out why a Dutch beer brand was a good choice for celebrating February’s Black History Month in the US a few years back.

(Link: www.nu.nl, Screenshot of The Colbert Report)

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December 11, 2014

Doctor Zhivago inspired beer brewed in Amsterdam

Filed under: Film,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 10:38 am

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Two Amsterdam film directors, Finbarr Wilbrink and Roelof Jan Minneboo, are brewing beer as a tribute to British filmmaker David Lean and his major work, Doctor Zhivago. The beer will be presented locally on 19 December after which it will be sold in stores, and we’ll try it out for you. These creations are known as the Cinema Brewers.

The Zhivago beer will brewed from ginger and English hops for that bittersweet taste that goes with the story of Doctor Zhivago. I wonder if the beer will have a long, drawn-out finish like the movie as well.

Earlier this year Wilbrink and Minneboo also made an ‘À bout de souffle’ (‘Breathless’) beer made from French and American hops and lavender, as that seemed like a nice fit, and a Big Lebowski beer made from American hops, lemongrass and coriander, symbolising the friendship between The Dude and Walter Sobchak.

(Links: www.nieuws.nl, www.parool.nl, www.pzc.nl)

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May 13, 2014

Another world cup, another women’s fashion controversy

Filed under: Fashion,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 8:15 am

Back in 2010 Bavaria beer was caught up in controversy during the World Cup in South Africa because of its Dutch orange dresses. The dresses were seen as advertising another beer brand than the main sponsor and some good looking, thin blondes wearing the dresses got arrested, which turned out to be a great marketing stunt if ever there was one.

And now, some shop in Noord-Brabant that sells clothes for bigger women has managed to secure its own bit of free marketing by claiming that this year’s ‘HolánDress’ (cost:12,99 euro), which comes in sizes 34-40 (XS, X, M and L), excludes bigger women when such a garment should be bringing us all together. Apparently, the average Dutch woman weighs 80 kilos and wears size 42, which still means that a whole lot of women and girls will fit into that dress.

The dress is a marketing stunt, a knick-knack. They’ll be more of them as well in the future and they won’t get bigger unless someone makes it a stunt of making one for ‘big gals’. Then there might be whining about being singled out as a fat person from some shop somewhere, mark my words.

How’s about taking the bullshit by the horns and wear a nice orange dress or top (or even a blue, red and white ensemble) that suits you instead? How low on self-esteem does one have to be to want to follow a beer brewer’s fashion statement? Get proactive and shut up. Nobody gives a rat’s ass what you’re wearing in front of the telly. And you can always get off the couch and lose some weight if your life’s ambition is fitting into cheap stunt dresses.

(Link: www.elsevier.nl)

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May 11, 2014

Netherlands has second best beer-to-income ratio

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 4:39 pm

beer-income-reddit-adiluReddit user Adilu made this fun map of Europe which shows how many beers the legal monthly minimum wage buys you in Europe.

It turns out the well-paying beer-loving countries are the Germanic ones—no surprises there. The minimum wage of a Belgian buys you 1028 pints of beer, whereas the Dutch can purchase at least 761 pints with their monthly salary. Germany comes in third with only 521 beers.

Adilu based their pint prices on a crowd-sourced database aptly called pintprice.com, according to PolicyMic, which has a thing or two to say about purchasing power and minimum wage if you’re interested.

(Illustration: Reddit user Adilu)

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