Beer pips Wine, Flatter and Healthier

It’s the weirdest thing. Pubs are shutting all over the place – about 40 a week at the last count – yet sales of quality beers are on the up. And it’s not just sales of bottled beer either, but keg and cask beer, too, which you drink in pubs.  I can’t work it out. My new favorite local brewer, Hepworth & Co in Horsham, is brewing around the clock in order to keep up with demand. Sales are soaring, up 18 percent on last year, according to the company’s head brewer Andy Hepsorth.

“We concentrate on making beer that a few people rave about, rather than beer that a lot of people don’t object to,” he says. “This seems to strike an chord with our customers, along with the fact that we source everything as locally as possible.

Even my wife, Marina, likes it, although commendably enough, she usually waits until lunch or at least midmorning before getting stuck in.

After all, beer comes in all manner of styles and flavors. It goes well with food, It’s fat free, cholesterol free and it has fewer calories than wine (and less alcohol), as well as being low in carbohydrates (a pint of beer has half the carbs of an apple). So what’s not to like? It’s almost as if beer was designed specifically with women in mind.

“Quite right!” exclaims Kristy Mc Cready of the Bitter Sweet Partnership, a multi million pond investment funded by Molson Coors Brewing Company to encourage more women to drink beer. “The difficulty is persuading women what a great drink it is. We drink more than26 million pints of beer every day in Britain, but only eight percent of women say that it’s their preferred drink, while 77 percent say they never touch it.”

Bitter Sweet’s research has shown that women see wine as aspirational and chic but beer as un sophisticated and unstylish. They believe beer is fattening and worry about what other women will think of them if they drink it. Apparently, women have more taste receptors than men and are more likely to enjoy the wide variety of falvours that beer offers, but are some how conditioned to think they won’t.

“Nobody likes their first taste of beer,” says McCready. “But for guys, it’s a rite of passage, a ritual, after which they’re all part of the gang. For women, there’s no such reward because all their friends will be drinking wine and they think they’ll stand out as unsophisticated and ‘chavvy’ among their peers, with the added risk of developing an unbecoming beer belly.”

The trouble is that most beer is made, advertised and sold by men for men. Women just don’t get much of a look in. Happily, though, that is starting to change as more women enter the brewing industry – and not just to pull pints in a low cut top. The head brewer at the St. Anstell Brewery is Paola Leather, who must surely be unique – a qualified female brewer from Colombia with an MBA to boot.

“Beer is my passion,” says Leather. “I never drink anything else at home and can’t understand why more women don’t do the same. There really is a beer for every occasion and I think the female market is largely untapped. Next year we’ll be bringing out our first lager specifically with women in mind.”

"HAVE A NICE WEEKEND"

Trio’s NOBEL effort to improve medicines

Two Americans and an Israeli scientist won the 2009 Noble Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday (07.10.2009) for atom by atom mapping of the protein making the factories within cells – a feat that has spurred the development of antibiotics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath’s work on ribosomes has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life.

Yonath, 70, is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the award. “I’m really, really happy,” Yonath said. “I thought it was wonderful when the discovery came. It was a series of discoveries… We still don’t’ know every, everything, but we progressed a lot.”

Ribosomes are crucial to life because they produce the proteins that control the chemistry of plants, animals and humans. Working separately, the three laureates used a method called X-ray crystallography to pinpoint the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

Their three dimensional models show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes – an understanding that has helped other researchers develop new drugs to fight bacterial infections.

“These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the academy said in its announcement.

Many of today’s antibiotics cure diseases by blocking the function of bacterial ribosomes, the citation said. “Without functional ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive. This is why ribosomes are such an important target for new antibiotics.”

The work was published in 2000. While many Nobel winners are honored for joint work, this year’s chemistry winners were competing with each other, award committee member Mans Ehrenberg said.

Their work builds on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and, more directly, on the work done by James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who won the 1962 Nobel prize in medicine for mapping DNA’s double helix, the citation said.

In 2006, Roger D Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for X-ray structures that showed how information is copied to messenger RNA molecules, which carry information from DNA to the ribosomes. “Now, one of the las pieces of the puzzles has been added – under standing how proteins are made,” said Professor Gunnar von Heijne of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.