We found a simple, good beer-tasting guide on-line. Here.

Here's an interesting site we stumbled across a while back: www.ratebeer.com. Essentially, it's an online community that you can join to rate beers and chat. They claim to have thousands of members. Their overall ratings are good, but slanted toward American ales. Not surprising, considering the overwhelming majority of the members are Americans, and the membership is heavily slanted toward Californians, which might explain California's big showing in the rankings. That said, individual reviews are heartfelt and earnest. A tip of the frosty mug goes out to the reviewers!

NEW YORK. There's an apparent truce between Czech-owned Ceske Budejovice's Budvar and Anheuser-Busch. After years of fighting over the trademark rights to the name "Budweiser," they've inked a deal which will have Anheuser-Busch distributing Budvar in the U.S. "Budweiser," a light-yellowish, beer-like soft drink, accounts for almost half of the beer sold in the U.S. The Czech beer will be distributed under the name it's been using in the States: Czechvar. For those who don't know, Anheuser-Busch says that it's been using the trademark since 1876, almost twenty years before the Budvar brewery was established. Budvar, on the other hand, argues that the beer is named after the town it's from ("Budweis" is the German name for Ceske Budejovice), which pre-exists Anheuser-Busch by several centuries (AD 1265). In 2006, Budvar once again won (9th time) the gold medal for best beer in Beer Courier magazine; it won a silver at the Brewers Association World Beer Cup competition in Seattle (over 540 breweries from 56 countries); and it won the Belgian International Institute for Quality's gold medal. But Anheuser-Busch is the volume ruler, producing 143 times the beer volume of Budvar.

NYC. Czech brewer Budejovicky Budvar (aka Budweiser) just announced that the European Community Trademark Office rejected Anheuser-Busch's 1999 trademark registration for the word "Budweiser."

Success would have meant that A-B could use "Budweiser" in all European markets. But success was not to be had by A-B this time.

Now, Budvar already has the trademark in individual countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Portugal, and A-B has it registered in Denmark and other countries. So, the battlefields are many. So far, the score: Budvar 69 : A-B 12 with 5 ties.