archy

Friday booze blogging (a little early)
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you global warming, make cold beer.

From rising sea levels to stifling heat waves, the effects of global warming are shaping up to be a worldwide buzz kill.

But brewers in Greenland appear to be going with the flow by harnessing one of their homeland's fastest growing—but least celebrated—natural resources: melted Arctic ice.

On July 31 a team of canny entrepreneurs unveiled Greenland Beer, an ale brewed with water melted from Greenland's ice cap, at a public tasting in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Staffed by indigenous Greenlanders and located some 390 miles (625 kilometers) south of the Arctic Circle, Greenland Brewhouse is the world's first Inuit microbrewery.

And if reaction from tipplers at the tasting was any indication, the brewers may be on to something. Electrician Flemming Larsen described the ale to the Associated Press as "smooth, soft, but not bitter … different from most other beer."

"Maybe that is because it's ice-cap water," he said.

Now I'll know what to serve as a beverage the next time I fix muktuk for dinner.

This is the first brewery on Greenland (or at least since the Vikings left). A second brewery, Godthaab Bryghus, will be opening in Greenland in two weeks, so there seems to be a boom in the making. Greenland Beer has a website, but it's in Danish.