Beer of the Week

The beer: Dunkel Lager

Brewed by: Tröegs Independent Brewing, Hershey, Pennsylvania

Description (from the website): "Walking the line between a refreshingly crisp pilsner and a hearty bock, this Munich Dunkel is our take on the classic dark lager. Brewed with Munich and chocolate malts and hopped with the noble and floral Hersbrucker and Tradition, this limited beer has a bread crust-like maltiness with subtle notes of caramel, nuttiness and chocolate."

Would I buy it again?: I'd say the description is pretty accurate here, in that this beer has a lot of the taste of a bock, but it's a lot easier to drink. Yeah sure, I can chug the Troegenators down, but that's not the experience most people have. This beer strikes a happy medium, and I'd definitely buy it again.

Oldest Mass-Production Brewery Discovered in Egypt

People have been drinking beer for a long time, and where there's beer, there will naturally be breweries. They kind of go together. But the brewery that was just discovered in Abydos, Egypt, sets quite a record, since it's the oldest mass-production brewery ever discovered, capable of making 22,400 liters of beer at a time. Since we don't use the metric system in this country, a more comfortable measurement would be  just under 190 barrels of beer. That's honestly not too bad, considering this is ancient Egypt we're talking about here. For reference, the Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore – a brewery of decent size, but not a regional powerhouse like Flying Dog or Troegs – has a 10,000-liter production facility, though I'm sure they have a much more efficient process and could make more in a year. Ancient beer also wasn't the most high-quality stuff in the world. Still, it's an impressive accomplishment, and it would be really cool if some enterprising brewer with plenty of money could restore the ancient brewery. I think it would be quite a tourist spot.