This just in from the Zythophile blog:

By itself this does not prove hops were used in beer, just “in drinks” (in potibus in Hildegard’s original Latin). But in a later chapter, on the ash tree, the abbess wrote: “If you also wish to make beer from oats without hops, but just with grusz [gruit], you should boil it after adding a very large number of ash leaves. That type of beer purges the stomach of the drinker, and renders his heart [literally ‘chest’ or ‘breast’] light and joyous.” Clearly Hildegard knew about brewing beer with hops. The passage also suggests that Hildegard knew about boiling wort, without which just adding hops is not much help in keeping away “putrefactions”.”

Read the whole piece here.

Ok, not entirely, but, according to a recent study at the University of Porto in Portugal, marinating your steak in beer for six hours before cooking it reduces the alleged cancer causing heterocyclic amines (HAs) by up to 90%.

Of course, these HAs are typically created when you cook your steak medium or well-done and I can’t think for the life of me why you would do such a terrible thing. Oh, and, in this study, they pan fried their steak and didn’t grill it, another fairly confounding decision amongst decisions. Oh, right, and also? Heterocyclic amines are such a statistically small cause of stomach cancer it’s really not even something you need to bother spending any time worrying about.

But, hey, did I mention? Beer!