Your daily dose of news and happenings from around the drink-o-sphere:
– Italian monks are producing craft beer—as much as 40,000 bottles of blonde and dark beer each month—to finance renovations to their 1,500 year-old monastery.
– UCLA announced its new course “A Class of Beer: An Overview of the Craft Brewing Renaissance,” an eight-week program taught by Los Angeles beer journalist Tomm Carroll.
– Beverage directors like Cosme’s Yana Volfson are encouraging customers to embrace pricey extra-añejo tequilas, which are aged for a minimum of three years in oak.
– In 2015, the Teeling Whiskey Co. opened the first operating distillery in Dublin since the 1970s, helping to pave the way for Ireland’s whiskey resurgence.
– The German city of Hamburg has banned coffee pods from state-run buildings, as the capsules continue to receive international flak for their negative environmental impact.
– A co-op of Brazilian wine growers provides a model for succession as aging winegrowers hand off their companies to the next generation.
– At the Dirty Martini in London, bartenders take a ritualistic approach to the house dry martini.
– In accordance with his wishes, the late Renato Bialetti, the man responsible for popularizing the Moka stovetop coffee pot, had his ashes interred in a slightly larger version of his life’s work.
[Photo: Flickr/Don LaVange]