It sounds like a joke, but it's true: pop rock boy band Hanson, famous in the '90s for having long blond hair and singing with high-pitched voices, are planning on making their own beer. Called 'MMMHop'.

You know, because of their classic (and annoyingly very catchy) pop ditty 'MmmBop', which back in 1997 sold an astonishing 700,000 copies and held onto the number 1 spot for three straight weeks.

The floppy-haired popsters revealed their plans to brew their own IPA at a recent visit to the Oxford Union, where they told some of Britiain's finest minds of their booze-based plans, reports ContactMusic.com.

"We of course make records, they are fundamental to what we do, but we wanted to create a brand so that our fans have a greater experience," said drummer Zac Hanson.

"What is vital is that Hanson merchandise is quality and not made solely with the purpose of profit," he added. "We have a board game and even a record player to play our last record on, but we will never make dolls, lunch boxes or toothbrushes that play our songs for example."

"It's vital our fans have trust in everything Hanson do. In fact we are soon going to be selling our own beer, I'm not even joking. MMMHop IPA anyone?"

There's a Hanson board game? Called 'Hansonopoly'? That's something everyone should own. Immediately.

There's no word on where they'll be brewing their delicious ale, but there's no doubt that it'll be popular amongst all those ale-drinking Hanson fans out there - however many that may be.

WATCH Hanson's original mega-hit 'MMMBop' below, 14 years after its original release:

Brewer SABMiller has been given regulatory approval in its A$11.5bn (£7.2bn) deal to buy Fosters, ending a five-month chase by the Anglo-South African company for its Australian peer.

The management of Fosters, which owns brands including Victoria Bitter, Carlton Draught and Pure Blonde, will remain in Australia as part of a deal with the Foreign Investment Review Board, which wanted to maintain the iconic brand's roots in the country.

The deal still needs shareholder approval at a meeting in early December, but is expected to go through by the end of the year. Buying a major brewer in a single developed market is something of a departure for the company.

SABMiller has remained solid in the face of difficult trading conditions in developed markets by investing in its emerging markets portfolio, tapping into high growth markets in Asia and Africa.

SAB has branched out into new local varieties to add to its familiar portfolio of Peroni, Miller and Grolsch. Many investors have been holding shares in the company in order to gain exposure to these fast-growing regions.

"Fosters is basically a landlocked Australian business, with the international rights having been sold some years ago to various parties," Collins Stewart analyst Eddy Hargreaves said.

"What it does give them is very strong cash-flow. Fosters' conversion of profits into cash is much better than SABMiller's at the moment. And then clearly they're optimistic about what they can do with what they find at Fosters, which I think everyone will agree has been poorly managed in recent years," Hargreaves said.

The motivation for spend big on Australia may be simply the lack of opportunities for acquisitions in those growth markets.

"Further emerging market deals are harder to find now. We've been through a decade of major consolidation in the industry, and therefore by definition further opportunities for consolidation are limited," Hargreaves said. "There aren't too many opportunities of scale out there to use their cash."

However, the deal could be a defensive one to fend off interest from Anheiser Busch InBev, he added.

Men are basically simple creatures if beer commercials are to be believed.

Give them beer, a TV, scantily clad women and they are basically happy.

But the folks at Dumb As A Blog have figured out at least 17 things that men should be thankful for this holiday season.

We've given you 10 great wine varietals to accompany your Thanksgiving dinner and shared the Thanksgiving wine picks of some top winemakers and experts, along with some recommendations for holiday digestifs, but what about beer?

To get some recommendations for special brews to take your Thanksgiving feast to another level, we sought the advice of Justin Philips of Beer Table in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. Check out his picks below and why he chose them, and follow Beer Table on Twitter to find out what beer Justin's tapping next.

Oenophiles have been looking down their noses at beer drinkers since time began. But the past few years have given grape-lovers a particularly powerful weapon against the unwashed masses of grain-supporters: health claims. A series of studies showed that red wine had life-extending health benefits, possibly because of a chemical called resveratrol, unmatched by any other alcoholic beverage.

Two recent studies, though, may turn the tables on smug wine drinkers.

The first brought the news that drinking red wine may increase women's risk of breast cancer. Women who drank more than four glasses a day -- admittedly more than previous studies had shown to be helpful -- face a 15% higher risk of the disease, according to the researchers.

The second, though, is even more surprising. A massive meta-analysis of epidemiological data on alcohol and health, conducted by Italy's Fondazione di Ricerca e Cura, showed that moderate consumption of beer decreases drinkers' risk of heart disease by 31%, just as much as moderate consumption of wine. The Italian findings were based on data from over 200,000 people's drinking habits. The study found no benefit to consumption of spirits, which may indicate that something other than ethanol consumption per se is responsible for the health boost.

Other studies have demonstrated a link between good health and beer consumption, but this one is striking in the degree of the benefit.

Before you rush out to the grocery story to buy a six-pack though, a word of caution: both studies are epidemiological in nature. As such, they rely on real-world consumption of alcohol, so they introduce biases that would not crop up in a carefully-controlled double-blind study of alcohol use, which would obviously be impossible to conduct. This is a problem because drinking often goes hand-in-hand with other behaviors that might be beneficial to health. Studies have consistently linked drinking to higher levels of education and income, for example.

Still, the two studies go some ways toward dismantling the formidable arsenal wine fans have at their disposal -- and all beer drinkers can be grateful for that.

The Caribbean is well-known for its indigenous food, with iconic dishes like jerk chicken, plantains, spiny island lobster and more. The islands also have a number of indigenous brews, some better known than others. We've undertaken the arduous task of collecting an assortment of our favorite Caribbean beers, and the iconic island cuisine they pair with the best.

Five of our favorites:

Costa Rica: Try an Imperial lager, also known as "Aguila" or "Aguilita" to the locals in reference to its "Little Eagle" logo; it goes well with the seafood platter with rice and beans at Miss Junie in Tortuguero Village.

Mexico: Sol, the Mexican "sunshine beer," was introduced in the 1980s and it's logo hasn't changed since. Drink with: Tequila fish tacos at Zamas' Que Fresco in Tulum.

Trinidad and Tobago: Carib beer is an easy-to-drink lager and the brand is iconic with this region and its culture. Enjoy with bake and shark (a delicious deep-fried dish) at Richard's on Maracas Beach.

Barbados: Banks Beer is said to be given its unique Bajan character from the local water, filtered through limestone rock. It pairs best with seafood, such as the fried flying-fish sandwich with cou-cou from Mustor's in Bridgetown.

Jamaica: Finally, no list of Caribbean beers would be complete without Red Stripe, a Jamaican lager with worldwide distribution. Pair it with Jamaican jerk chicken with roasted breadfruit and festival at Pimentos, near Montego Bay.

To see the full list, visit Caribbean Travel + Life's Best Caribbean Beer and Food gallery.

The world's largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, announced Wednesday its newest mass-market Budweiser offering since Bud Light Golden Wheat in 2009 and Bud Light Lime in 2008. Ready the Clydesdales, for come January, Bud Light Platinum will begin appearing on shelves nationwide.

The new offering will be 6% alcohol by volume (ABV), which is a significant jump from 4.2% ABV for Bud Light, the top selling beer in the country, and 5% for regular Budweiser. It will come in at 137 calories, compared to 110 for Bud Light.

Anheuser-Busch hopes Bud Light Platinum "appeals to a key group of beer drinkers and expands consumer occasions." And there likely is a key group of beer drinkers that would love a product that tastes better than Bud Light (and probably a little worse than Budweiser) with a higher alcoholic content than either of them. The premium connotations of the "Platinum" branding probably won't hurt sales either. It sure beats "Ultra."

A commentator on craft beer enthusiast site Beer Advocate notes, "this higher alcohol platinized version seems to go against the Bud Light family of low alcohol, low calories, and low carb light beers; 6-8% ABV is not 'light.' It'll be interesting to see where the final product and marketing land how it fits within the family."

HuffPost Food will let you know how it tastes when we can track some down. In the meantime, here's the label:

Don't let barley wine's name throw you for a loop: The beer style has little in common with fermented grapes -- except for an alcohol content that can hit double digits. That explains why the thick, sometimes fruity, always strong belly-warming ale has become a signature sip for cold, chilly nights. But to suss out the style's genesis, we need to turn to 18th and 19th century Britain.

Back then, many farmhouse breweries around the British Isles and Europe used a process called parti-gyle brewing to produce multiple beers from a single grain mash. (Today, one grain mash makes one beer batch.) The first running, or wort, contained the most fermentable sugars -- the fuel that yeasts require to create alcohol. The second running created "common" beer and, if there were enough residual sugars left for a third batch, "small" beer. (Fun fact: Parti-gyle brewing was also common in Belgium, creating the styles now known as tripel, dubbel and blond.)

The less-potent beers were quickly consumed, but the stronger first runnings were often stored to be sipped later, as the beers' higher ABVs kept them from spoiling. What happened next is debatable: Perhaps to better preserve their ales, or maybe to one-up fellow beer makers, British brewers kept boosting their strong beers' alcohol content. Accomplishing that required elbow grease. Since yeasts don't thrive at elevated alcohol levels, brewers would jostle them into action by occasionally rolling barrels of beer around the brewery or pump oxygen through the brew to revive the essentially drunken yeast. The longer fermentation process made barley wines mellower and more multifaceted, adding intricate layers of flavor.

In the 1800s, these potent aged brews (which were sometimes blended with weaker beers to provide complexity) went by several aliases -- strong ales, stock ales, winter warmers, old ales -- or, quite commonly, they were simply marked by three X's or K's branded into a wooden barrel. Not all were what you'd consider a barley wine, but they would knock your socks off. In fact, the term "barley wine" wasn't used commercially until 1903, when what is now Bass Brewers Limited released its Bass No. 1 Barley Wine.

An American Resurgence

Over time, barley wines in Britain were marketed more for their booziness than flavor. The style fell out of favor. In America, few beer drinkers had ever heard of barley wine until 1975, when San Francisco's Anchor Brewing released Old Foghorn Barleywine Style Ale, which was (and still is) substantially hopped with flowery Cascade hops. And there began the divide. While England offered more balanced, less liquored-up barley wines, American brewers used a heavy hand with the hops and ratcheted up the alcohol content.

For example, Rogue Ales's XS Old Crustacean boasts more than 100 IBUs and an 11.5 percent ABV; Great Divide Brewing's Old Ruffian annually offers more than 85 IBUs and 10 percent ABV. And while the namesake barley wine of Farmville, North Carolina's Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery registers 11 percent ABV, "it's not bitter enough to really be an American barley wine," says Paul Philippon, the brewery's philosopher turned founder, who brews some of America's finest dark brews. At the same time, "it's too bitter to be an English barley wine, and it uses American hops." As for a definition, he says, "I tell people that it's a Farmville-style barley wine -- and we're the only brewer in Farmville." (The burgeoning wheat wine variant incorporates a large percentage of wheat, which creates a soft, rich mouth-feel.)

That's the thing about modern-day barley wines: While it'd be nice to set them in a nice, tight box, they're as mutable as the big ol' strong beers of yore. Some are warming and a smidgen spicy, like Real Ale Brewing Company's rye-infused Sisyphus Barleywine Style Ale. By contrast, the Flying Mouflan, from Pennsylvania's Tröegs Brewing Company, is ruby-brown and IBU'd up the wazoo with Warrior, Chinook and Simcoe hops. Flying Mouflan is released in the spring, which makes sense: The brewers recommend cellaring the barley wine for four months, letting the hops and alcohol mellow, thus making it ready to serve as a toasty respite in the cold heart of winter.

You can age most barley wines, but these dark, powerful beers are also excellent fresh, which is why Duck-Rabbit's Philippon releases his in January. "We make it with the intention that it should be enjoyed right away," Philippon says. "I always feel like beer is for drinking, not saving."

This article is excerpted from Brewed Awakening: Behind the Beers and Brewers Leading the World's Craft Brewing Revolution, which will be released by Sterling Epicure November 1.

WASHINGTON -- Faithful Tune Inn patrons can heave a sigh of relief. The massive renovation following a catastrophic fire in June has turned back the clock at the decades-old Capitol Hill dive bar, returning it to its quirky best. The Tune Inn reopened its doors Friday afternoon.

With the exception of some rebuffing of the bar, the decor remains original. Most of the bar's iconic taxidermy-heavy display was unscathed by the blaze, and even the booths and tables, which sustained significant damage, were reordered in the same make and model.

The only significant changes are noncosmetic. The kitchen is entirely new with upgraded equipment, which is hopefully less fire-prone. The menu has been tweaked -- burgers are a bit bigger, and the beer selection has been improved. And new taps.

"They replaced the lines and stuff like that, but the tap system was probably 40 years old," explained weekend manager John Clark. The new system, light-years more advanced than the old, features two frozen towers kept at 32 degrees. The beer comes out a cool 36 degrees, which is "colder than we've ever had," said Clark. "It's as cold as you can get without freezing."

As far as the drink selection goes, the standards are all still there: Miller Light, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Yuengling and Sierra Nevada. But there are new additions: Fat Tire, Flying Dog Amber, Abita and Flying Dog Hefeweizen.

Clark would never call the fire a blessing, but it had a silver lining. "In the long run, it all is a good thing," he said about the upgrades, "but for the four months we were closed, it was a living hell."

Patrons are in agreement. "We really, really missed the Tune," said Louise Fenner on the morning of the reopening.

Fenner, a Capitol Hill resident and longtime State Department staffer, said she's been a devoted patron since she arrived in D.C. around 1980. "It looks the same. That's what I'm really, really glad about," she noted, adding that since the change in ownership at the nearby Hawk n' Dove, the Tune Inn has become even more important.

"They're changing the Hawk so much, which is terrible," Fenner lamented. "It's for tourists, it's not for the neighborhood anymore. ... So we got the Tune, and it is for the neighborhood. I know we're really going to patronize it and show our appreciation for it. I know we are. We need it."

SEE the renovated-but-still-the-same-old Tune Inn in this slideshow:

WATCH "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" at the Tune Inn:

Though digital beer apps are hardly new, the conversation surrounding their merit is just beginning. With apps like Tap Hunter, Untappd, Pintley and Taplister (not to mention hundreds of others), the world of digital beer is booming. These apps have been met with equal parts backing and backlash and the conversation surrounding them brings up bigger questions than simple surface squabbles. Indeed, it requires that we evaluate how we interact with beer and how we interact with each other.

The main debates about beer's Internet makeover center on alienation. To the technology lover, the regimen of posting up at the bar, whipping out an iPhone, checking into bars rating beers is simply part of the experience in today's digital world. For those who feel technology is a wedge between us, each other and our experience, the thought of a group of friends sitting at a bar silently tapping away on their screens is an aberration of human interaction. However, digital beer technology doesn't push us away from each other; it pulls us closer.

Before a real conversation about beer and digital technology can occur, a basic understanding of their function is necessary. Most of these apps have been diversifying of late. While they mostly started with one main function (updating tap lists, offering users the ability to rate beers they try, alerting others of special beers near them or creating a compendium of users' taste history) the big players have added those functions which they did not originally include in order to stay competitive. Most of these apps are location-based and involve a sort of leaderboard type standing system. They all maintain one goal -- to make beer more social in an internet age.

Some argue that beer is already as social as it needs to be. Sharing a real beer in real time with other people is the end game, they argue. Indeed, their value is well-placed, as there is likely nary a brewer who would argue that beer is only meant to be enjoyed alone. The experience of shared, real-time beer can indeed be transcendental: an experience in which problems are solved, connections are made and friendships strengthened. By this standard, those who oppose and those who support beer technology are closer to agreeing than they think. You can't always share a beer in real time with someone you care about. Digital beer apps offer the next best thing.

In our modern times, our friends remain more far-flung than ever. With interactions online stretching across the world, we can see beer technology as the means by which we share a real, meaningful experience in a global society. If I sit in the Tap Room and enjoy a nice pint with a friend and I then hop online, rate the beer and tag my friends in the as I do so, I offer them an opportunity to link into that valuable experience. While the online interaction may not be the real deal, it does allow us to tether to those experiences we deem important, meaningful and valuable. Our actions over social beer apps may be holograms of the real thing, but they do offer the chance to globalize our pint -- to share it with someone across the room or across the world.

To those naysayers, I understand where you're coming from. Digital beer apps are often seen as a needless wedge, a muddying nuisance in an overwrought world obsessed with the technological. However, it is this very technology that can help us broaden our experience to include those with whom we cannot be in real time. Digital beer apps don't call us to abandon the pub -- they call us to invite all our friends.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Molson Coors Brewing Co.'s third-quarter profit tumbled 23 percent as high costs and high unemployment among its core customers continued to take a toll on the brewer.

Molson Coors and other major beer makers have struggled in the down economy as young American men have faced particularly high levels of unemployment. The company, which makes products like Miller Lite, Coors Lite and Carling, also saw lower-than-expected sales in the U.K. And the industry is seeing consumers overall shift toward more craft beers, wines and spirits.

Thousands of beer lovers flocked to Munich, Germany to take part in the yearly tradition of heavy beer consumption.

To see more great photography visit HuffPost Exposure.

Vegans might think they're safe at bars as long as they don't order anything containing cream, honey or egg whites. (That means no Grasshoppers, no Black Russians, no Drambuie, Brandy Alexanders, no Pisco Sours and no eggnog.) Actually, it's not that easy.

Vegans are, after all, special-needs drinkers.

A key ingredient in Bloody Marys is Worcestershire sauce, and a key ingredient in Worcestershire sauce is anchovies. The sauce sneaks into other cocktails, too -- such as Prairie Oysters, which contain no b but do include what amounts to fish sauce.

Most conventional white sugar is refined using "bone char" -- that is, charred animal bone. This puts a lot of liqueurs, rums, simple syrups, gommes and other sugar-based options out of vegan bounds.

Honey is the main ingredient in several beverages, including Yukon Jack and Irish Mist. Other beverages, such as Benedictine, include small quantities of honey -- but for vegans, even a little is too much. Honey itself is an ingredient in such cocktails as the Zoom and the Brooklynite. Lots of liqueurs -- such as Cointreau, Chartreuse, and Grand Marnier -- are made from secret recipes that probably include conventional (thus bone-refined) sugar -- and who knows what else?

Wine is traditionally processed with egg whites. Japanese sake is traditionally filtered with gelatin. Beer and ale are traditionally clarified -- "fined," in industry parlance -- with isinglass, a gluey substance made from fish bladders. Red beverages -- including Campari and Tropicana Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice -- are often colored with cochineal, aka carmine, a dye derived from insects.

How could beer not be vegan? Here's how: Beverages made through the fermentation of plant products must be filtered to remove tiny bits of plant matter. This filtering, aka fining, is typically performed with fish-bladder isinglass or egg whites, although some companies now choose vegan alternatives such as bentonite clay, silica gel, diatomaceous earth and Irish moss, a seaweed product also known as carrageenan.

When customers started demanding vegan drinks at Revival Bar + Kitchen (depicted above) in Berkeley, California, bar manager Nat Harry knew she was in for some serious research. Her first stop was Barnivore.com.

"The more you look into this, the more you think: Uh oh," Harry said.

To be on the safe side, and in keeping with its own craft-bar principles, Revival makes its own carmine-free grenadine and simple syrups using char-free Florida Crystals organic sugar. Harry stocks many vegan-safe spirits including Willett Kentucky bourbon and Absolut vodkas.

When Joel Baker first became bar manager at San Francisco's century-old Crescent Hotel, whose brick-walled, velvet-couched Burritt Room (depicted below) is one of the city's most romantic film noiresque hideaways, he learned the hard way that vegan cocktails aren't as easy as they seem when a customer sadly handed back to him a glorious herb-inspired concoction he had devised that contained honey.

"I can't drink this," she said. So he whipped up something else. The Burritt Room, too, stocks a wide retinue of vegan-safe spirits such as Dolin vermouth and Square One organic vodkas.

It's a learning process -- which more and more bar managers are now undertaking.

Finding safe components "is a brand-by-brand specific process," said Alicia C. Simpson, author of Quick and Easy Vegan Celebrations.

"Many people assume that vegans don't drink. They don't understand veganism as an ethical choice but think it is more of a health-conscious way to eat -- so oftentimes people are surprised that vegans drink at all," Simpson says.

"Most vegans already have their preference for a particular brand or type of alcohol just as omnivores do and will politely decline if they are presented with a cocktail that contains an ingredient they don't drink. If you're looking to find a substitute for milk in a cocktail recipe -- a White Russian, for example -- any non-dairy milk works well. Try soy, almond, or rice milk."

Images courtesy of Anneli Rufus and Kristan Lawson.

Residents from Burton-on-Trent look away now because a perfume has made in honour of the Staffordshire town - and it stinks.

Perfumer and businesswoman Victoria Brookes has created a perfume inspired by the smells in the town using an interesting mix of Marmite, beer hops, leather and Branston Pickle scents.

Despite the seemingly unflattering perfume tribute, the fragrance actually represents the history and the roots of Burton-on-Trent.

"It is made up of Gourmand, representing Marmite and Branston Pickle, which were invented in Burton," Victoria told the Daily Mail.

"It also has leather, representing the boots and footballs used at Burton Albion, and Ambra, inspired by amber nectar, the beer which made Burton famous worldwide."

The perfume is set to be a big seller for Christmas and costs £35.60.; "It's more of a novelty item for die hard Burtonians who might want to give their loved ones something a bit different in the run up to Christmas."

Yesterday we asked if you would try the oral perfume pill and today we are wondering if you'd be brave enough to try these unsavoury perfumes?