THIS HAS been a bad week for beer.

First, Tour de France winner Floyd Landis is under investigation for doping, and he quickly blames the “beer or two” he had the night before.

Then, holier-than-thou actor Mel Gibson goes on an anti-Semitic rampage, and his friends and even the police blame it on the beer.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Over the years, beer has taken the rap for a lot of unfortunate affairs.

Rowdy sports fans? Blame it on beer. Unplanned pregnancies, bad health, spilled secrets, petty theft, worker absenteeism, broken promises, country music…

OK, the last one probably has some validity. But mostly beer gets blamed unfairly because it’s a convenient alibi for ninnies who don’t have the integrity to own up to their own mistakes.

“That stuff is booze talking,” one cop said, excusing Gibson.

What exactly does that mean? I hear that all the time, and I don’t buy it. If you say something offensive when you’re drunk, it’s not as if the words were chemically produced by the beer. Those ideas were already in your head; you just always had the good sense to keep your mouth shut – until you got hammered.

Gibson, at least, confessed to his diatribe, even if he denied he’s an anti-Semite.

It’s Landis that I’m most disappointed about, and it’s not because I’m a cycling enthusiast. Like most cyclists I know, Landis is a big-time beer fan – so big, in fact, at one point during the tour, he traded one of his precious yellow jerseys for a sixpack. It was worth that much to him, I presume, because beer has given him a great deal of enjoyment over the years.

But then, to suddenly turn around and – having been accused of cheating – blame it on the beloved brews he drank the night before, well, that’s unforgivable. You’re supposed to grow out of that stuff the first time your fourth-grade teacher catches you firing spitballs and you try to blame it on your best friend.

Landis is not the first one to fink on his pal, either.

When Dennis Mitchell, the Olympic bronze-medal sprinter, failed a testosterone test in 1998, he blamed it on five bottles of beer he put down the night before. (He also unwisely pointed the finger at his own wife, with whom he said he’d had four rounds of sex that same evening.)

U.S. track officials accepted the excuse and lifted a suspension.

That’s the problem – it’s so easy to blame beer because beer can’t defend itself.

Look what happened in 1989, after the infamous Eagles-Cowboys snowball game, when fans targeted Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson. Then-owner Norman Braman blamed the barrage on the beer and persuaded the mayor to ban sales at the Vet for the rest of the season.

Never mind that the city, whose management of the stadium was abysmal, might’ve prevented the fiasco by simply shoveling the snow – it was the beer’s fault! Only coach Buddy Ryan had the guts to point out the obvious: “If you’re going to have snow in the stands, they’ll throw snowballs.”

Beer is such an easy target, it even gets blamed for Nazis. Some historians, recalling the ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch, believe Hitler came to power partly because Munich was so addled on Bavarian suds.

The beer-blame game is so ingrained, it’s part of the vocabulary.

There’s “beer-goggles,” the inability to discern the obvious bad looks of tonight’s bedmate. And “beer muscles,” or false bravado.

And, of course, there’s that flab you’ve got hanging below your belt, aka the “beer belly.”

Now, study after study agrees that, consumed in moderation, beer is perfectly healthy. But we’ve got a whole nation perversely convinced that its favorite beverage is the bad guy, that it can lose that belly if only it switches from a full-flavored 200-calorie bottle to a tasteless 100-calorie glass of light.

Never mind the Big Mac and fries or the hours of sitting in front of the TV – blame it on the beer!

Everybody else does.

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ONE HUNDRED thirty years ago this month, Philadelphia kicked off “the most stupendous and successful competitive exhibition the world ever saw.”

Obviously, it did not involve the Phillies.

It was the Centennial Exposition of 1876, a six-month world’s fair on the grounds of Fairmount Park that attracted 10 million visitors. Dozens of colossal buildings were erected for the event, including the Main Exhibition Hall, a glass palace that covered as much ground as Citizens Bank Park.

This wasn’t just a celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was the first real chance for America to show itself on the world stage. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the typewriter, root beer and Heinz ketchup – they were all unveiled at the exhibition. It was the coming of age for the nation’s scientists, tradesmen, artists, farmers, manufacturers…

And, yes, brewers.

By the Centennial, there were more than 2,500 breweries operating in America (69 in Philadelphia alone). The majority of them had been opened in the previous 50 years alone, spurring huge growth in barley farming, hops production, timber, railroads and other industry.

And the suds were already among the finest in the world. German immigrants had brought centuries of beer-making know-how with them, opening breweries with names that would remain familiar a century later: Anheuser, Yuengling, Schmidt, Schlitz, Blatz.

It was these men and others who would show off their finest ales and lagers… if they could get into the fair.

Originally, the beer-makers were to be housed in the exposition’s giant Agriculture Hall. But they were blocked because of opposition from the nation’s growing temperance movement.

Area beer historian Rich Wagner, who has researched the exhibit, notes that by the Centennial, more than 5,000 temperance chapters had formed nationwide. “They had begun to view lager beer with as much disdain as distilled spirits,” Wagner said. “The brewers defended their product as ‘healthful, nutritious and mildly stimulating.’ ”

Eventually, the brewers built their own hall, Wagner said, “but it was located downwind from the livestock displays.”

Smaller than the exhibition’s grandest buildings, Brewers Hall was still about three-quarters the length of a football field.

Wool-jacketed men and ladies with parasols entered beneath a statue of a laughing King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer.

Inside, they marveled at the latest implements of 19th-century brewing – pumps, buckets, elevators, rinsers, shovels, scales, hoses, malting equipment. Mammoth wooden vats held gallons of ale. A separate ice house kept storage temperatures in the mid-40s.

The centerpiece was a functioning 150-barrel brewery (about three times the size of Victory’s recently upgraded brewhouse in Downingtown). Nearby was a replica of William Penn’s 17th-century brewhouse at Pennsbury Manor.

Visitors sampled dozens of beers from around the world, carrying their schooners to the rooftop observatory, where they enjoyed an idyllic view of the Schuylkill.

The beer, you can only imagine, must’ve been delicious.

Wagner says the grand prize, awarded to Philadelphia’s Bergner & Engel for its Tannhaeuser Beer, “established the United States brewing industry on par – or superior to – that of Europe.”

Today, the site of Brewers Hall is a patch of woods, just east of the ball fields at Belmont Plateau. Indeed, only one major building remains from the Centennial: Memorial Hall, which housed the art gallery. (The smaller, now-abandoned Ohio state building, at States Drive and Belmont Avenue, is also standing.)

But 130 years after the exposition, we are left with two beery memories.

One is Pabst Blue Ribbon. Good, ol’ PBR gets its name because of the blue ribbons the Milwaukee brewery began tying on bottles after it won first-place for bottled beer at the exposition.

The other is about a mile away from the site of Brewer’s Hall, just in front of the Mann Music Center. There, you’ll find the Catholic Total Abstinence Fountain.

Two years in the making, the marble fountain features a larger-than-life statue of Moses atop a 16-foot-high rock that spouted water into a 60-foot basin. Among the statues surrounding the fountain is one of Father Theobald Matthew, an Irish temperance crusader who administered an anti-drinking pledge to more than 600,000 Americans in the mid-19th century.

Today, the fountain is dry, crumbling and filled with weeds.

Research help from Rich Wagner of Pennsylvania Brewery Historians and “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition 1876.”

-30-

“Rolling Rock: From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.” – The 33 words of the Rolling Rock label.

LATROBE, Pa. – No other town in America is so tightly bound to a single beer.

“You think of Latrobe,” said Steve Kittey, editorial director of the town’s daily newspaper, the Latrobe Bulletin, “you think of Rolling Rock beer.”

“It’s like Hershey and chocolate,” said Ed Maher, a Latrobe Brewing employee whose father and grandfather both worked at the town’s famed brewery. “They’re inseparable.”

Only now, Rolling Rock is leaving Latrobe.

In a deal that has soundly shaken this small western Pennsylvania town, Anheuser-Busch bought the brand, its famed “33” label, the recipe, even the “Latrobe Brewing” name, then declared Rolling Rock would be brewed at its facility in Newark, N.J.

The brewery, which was not part of the purchase, will close at the end of the month unless its owner, InBev, finds a buyer.

(The Associated Press reported that the familiar slogan will remain on the bottle, preceded by the disclaimer: “To honor the tradition of this great brand, we quote from the original pledge.”)

Around town, the day the $82 million deal was announced is known as “Black Friday.”

“It’s been so devastating to the town because the brewery has been such a source of pride,” said Kittey. “People all over Latrobe say they’ll never touch the stuff again.”

Those are strong words coming from a place where it’s not uncommon to see SUVs with No. 33 vanity plates.

Rolling Rock was a vital part of this community. It sponsored parades, it provided free cases to nearby St. Vincent’s College, its executives were members of the local chamber of commerce. Generations of families worked at the brewery; college students earned extra bucks every summer filling in for vacationing workers. Two years ago, when Latrobe celebrated its 150th birthday, Rolling Rock brewed a commemorative beer for the occasion.

And when locals traveled, they knew that when they mentioned their hometown, they’d get a friendly look of recognition.

At Frank’s Lounge on Main Street, Brian Spiller remembered visiting Savannah, Ga., a couple months ago. “I tell them I’m from Latrobe, Pa., and they say, ‘Oh sure, that’s where Arnold Palmer and Rolling Rock are from.’ But now, this old town is losing everything it’s got left.”

The governor and area politicians are hoping to convince another brewery, possibly City Brewing of Lacrosse, Wis., to buy the facility and keep its 250 employees working.

Some Latrobe backers have started petitions to keep Rolling Rock in town. But that seems unlikely; though the brewery is modern, A-B has little use for it.

The sale has been especially hard on the men and women who worked at the brewery.

“It was a very good job,” said Jay Peters, who made Rolling Rock for 22 years. “Hell, having a job at a brewery is like dying and going to heaven… ”

“We used to carry business cards that identified you as a proud employee of Rolling Rock,” said Michael Bauer, who worked there 14 years. “If you went into a store that carried Rolling Rock, you’d give them your card and tell them thanks for stocking our product…

“I was so proud to work there,” said Bauer, whose father worked there 33 years before he died. “He’s rolling over right now.”

The workers say they feel cheated, that they did everything InBev ever asked. “We met all their goals,” said Rick Ravis, who worked in the brewery’s fermenting cellars.

They noted that in recent years the company seemed to lose interest in selling Rolling Rock as it committed resources to other labels, especially Labatts and Stella Artois. Advertising was sliced from $7 million to about $1 million, the workers said, and sales plummeted. Now, they expect A-B to pump up the brand.

“What’s going to be hard for me,” said Bauer, “is two years from now, watching the Steelers in the Super Bowl and seeing a Rolling Rock commercial.”

Both the workers and the town itself seem resigned to losing its icon.

On Black Friday, Ravis left the brewery and headed for his local tavern. He’d worked 28 years at brewery, hired right out of college.

“Whenever I’d walk into the bar, the bartender would pull out a cold Green Light – that was my beer,” Ravis said, referring to Rolling Rock’s light beer. “It was sitting there for me every day.

“For 28 years, I never had to think what I was going to order,” he lamented. “But now, I didn’t know what to do. I felt horrible.”

He paused a moment and added, “I’ll never drink Rolling Rock again.”

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YOU CAN’T buy Colt 45 at the city’s newest beer store.

Under an unusual agreement aimed at keeping lowlifes off its high-priced turf, a Northern Liberties neighborhood group backed off its opposition to the Foodery takeout beer shop after the store’s owner promised not to stock Colt and other cheap malt liquors.

The agreement, which was approved by the city Zoning Commission, specifically bans the sale of popular but often-condemned 40-ounce bottles.

The Foodery, whose original location in Center City continues to sell 40s, finally opened its long-awaited second location earlier this month at 2nd and Poplar streets after months of zoning and licensing delays.

“The main reason for the agreement was the neighborhood wanted to keep the store on a higher end,” said Tony Rim, an area restaurateur who represented the Foodery’s owner during negotiations with the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association. “The neighborhood group thought carrying 40-ouncers would attract panhandlers and riffraff.”

A spokesman for the NLNA confirmed the agreement but declined to talk publicly about its contents.

The agreement is the latest maneuver in a citywide war over takeout beer sales, especially malt liquor.

In recent years, church and community groups have picketed so-called stop-and-go’s, charging that their sale of cheap beer, cigarettes and drug paraphernalia is a magnet for derelicts. Last year, stop-and-go opponents got a boost when the state Legislature enacted a measure that gave City Council veto power over takeout sales at bars, restaurants and delis.

According to a report last week by Daily News reporter Mark McDonald, Council rejected 50 of the 830 permits it reviewed.

The new law, however, was struck down earlier this month by Common Pleas judges who ruled it improperly gave council members authority to act as prosecutor, jury and judge.

Though state liquor licenses frequently contain restrictions over operating hours and other provisions, licensing attorneys told me they’d never encountered an agreement that prohibits the sale of a specific brand of beer.

In addition to Colt 45, the deal bans the sale of Crazy Horse, Old English 800, St. Ides and Silver Thunder, as well as other malt liquors in 40-ounce bottles, which it described as “nuisance beers,” that are “not consistent with an upscale image.”

Additionally, the agreement prohibits the sale of common household supplies like cat litter and breakfast cereal.

“The neighborhood association liked the concept of just selling high-end beer,” Rim said. “There was a lot of criteria to meet. They didn’t want it to be anything like a stop-and-go.”

Indeed, the new store is anything but low-end. There are no bulletproof cashier cages, no crack pipe tubes, no Philly Blunts.

Instead, like its other location at 10th and Pine streets, the Foodery carries more than 600 brands of beer, specializing in fancy microbrews and gourmet imports that cost five times the price of a standard 40. It also sells sandwiches and, soon, gelato.

The no-40s deal may be just the ticket for a trendy neighborhood grappling with vagrants and street crime. But I think it’s yet another reactionary prohibition that wrongly blames the beer, not the bad actors. If loitering, vandalism, drugs or underage drinking are the problem, enforce those laws.

But malt liquor?

It is hardly the only cheap buzz; fortified wine sold in state liquor stores packs a bigger punch at a lower cost (per alcohol content).

It is not the only cheap beer. A 32-ounce bottle of Yuengling costs about the same per ounce as a 40 of St. Ides. (All malt liquor isn’t cheap, by the way. The Dogfish Head craft brewery makes Liquor de Malt, which costs $6.99 for a 40.)

And it’s not the only strong beer. Some of those microbrews and imports actually contain two to three times the alcohol of malt liquor.

Colt 45 is a target only because of its image as a ghetto beer, as liquid crack swilled from a paper bag.

Yes, malt liquor’s marketing is aimed at young people. Yes, the 40 is a bad-ass symbol of urban hip-hop culture. But don’t kid yourself. Alcoholism, vagrancy, drug sales, beer-fueled violence… they’re still there whether malt liquor is for sale or not.

If not on your block, then right around the corner.

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YOU DON’T drink organic beer because it’s healthier for you than conventional beer.

You drink it because it makes you feel better about your choices as just another depersonalized consumer in the world’s mammoth industrialized food production chain, a system that devalues labor, rapes the environment and enriches multinational agriculture conglomerates.

Personally, anything with an adequate alcohol kick readjusts my outlook on the lumpen life, so I could live quite happily without ever wondering whether my beer contained genetically modified grains.

Still, as with all things involving my favorite pastime, I’m intrigued by what appears to be yet another emerging trend in the beer business. Which is another way of saying Anheuser-Busch – you heard it right – is test-marketing organic beer.

It’s called Wild Hop Lager, available only in California. Even if it manages to come East, we’re still talking about a micro-share of microbrewing, the proverbial drop in the bucket.

Yet A-B’s move could be a huge boon to smaller organic brewers, who often must contend with inconsistent supplies of raw materials. Though the supply line is improving, there still aren’t enough farmers willing to give up pesticides and fertilizers to produce enough grain for the consistently high-quality malts needed for production, experts say.

As Jon Cadoux, founder of Peak Organic Brewing in Burlington, Mass., noted, “If you’re a farmer, why commit if there’s no demand?”

But if America’s dominant brewer is suddenly in the market for tons of organic raw materials, you can bet plenty more farmers will make the switch.

Said Max Oswald, director of sales and marketing at Wolavers Organic Ales in Middlebury, Vermont: “The tiniest effort by Anheuser-Busch will draw more attention to organic lifestyle than the rest of us could ever accomplish.”

From a brewing standpoint, the biggest improvement might be in hops. Currently, though America is the world’s No. 1 hop producer, none are grown organically.

“Hops are the biggest challenge,” said Cadoux, “The problem is when one farmer in, say, Yakima Valley, Wash., decides to grow a few acres organically while all the other ones are using pesticides, that one farm becomes a target for all the pests.

“So what we need to do is pull together a huge chunk of land that is devoted to organic hops.”

Most organic brewers get their hops from New Zealand, where only a handful of varieties are available. That’s where some organic brewers take advantage of one of the odd loopholes in whole food rules. Under federal standards, just 95 percent of a product’s ingredients need be organic to qualify for certification.

Though hops provide much of a beer’s aroma and flavor, the flowers represent only a small fraction of the total ingredients.

So even if that beer you’re enjoying says “organic,” it might have been grown with chemical yummies, like copper oxychloride and simazine.

Though the ingredient loophole has no negative impact on flavor or health, it seems a contradiction of the strict regs that apply to the actual production of organic beer – things like cleaning regimens and storage.

For example, anti-foam emulsions that prevent spillage during boiling and fermentation are forbidden because they are synthetic. It doesn’t matter that the agents are non-toxic, don’t affect the taste and are used in infinitesimal quantities.

“We get overflows, which is a pain in the butt,” said Cadoux. “It’s a headache we have to put up with, but we believe in it.”

And that’s the essence of organic beer: It’s what some believe in. Whether you’ll go along with the trend is a matter of your own convictions.

-0-

Organic beer is far more popular on the West Coast, but more labels are beginning to show up here.

Peak Organic (made at Shipyard Brewing in Portland, Maine) makes three flavors: Pale Ale, Nut Brown Ale and Amber Ale. They’ll be available in Philadelphia shortly.

Wolavers, which has been brewing for nine years, is widely available in three styles: Pale Ale, Brown Ale and India Pale Ale. Oatmeal Stout and Belgian-style Wit are packaged seasonally.

Also look for:

• Cantillon Lambic Bio (Belgium).

• Joseph Spelt Ale and Sara Buckwheat Ale from Brasserie de Silenrieux (Belgium).

• Samuel Smith’s Organically Produced Lager (England).

• Pinkus Organic Ur Pils (Germany).

-30-

SALES ARE down, the summer doldrums are kicking in, and the single biggest beer-drinking weekend of the year is upon us.

What’s a Coors salesman to do?

Build the world’s largest beer display, of course.

That’s exactly what Rick Zinger and Ray Sefscik, a pair of energetic Coors salesmen, hope they’ve done inside Duffy’s Pop & Beer in Pleasant Hills, just outside Pittsburgh. The pair carefully stacked more than 8,000 30-packs of Coors Light, creating a 15-foot-high mountain that features a steaming locomotive riding atop wheels crafted from eight stainless steel kegs.

“We wanted people to come in and say, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of beer,’ ” said Sefscik.

As soon as I heard someone say “world’s biggest” and “beer” in the same sentence, I jumped into my car and drove 300 miles across the state to see it. Yeah, I’m a sucker for huge stacks of suds, but this is awe-inspiring: nearly a quarter-million cans (not to mention 50 pounds of fake snow, four railroad crossing signs, neons, strobes and spotlights).

Standing at the foot of this mountain, I had to agree: Wow, that’s a lot of beer.

The wow factor is so huge, even chairman of the board Pete Coors had to drop in from Golden, Colo., just to have a look.

“That was awesome,” said Zinger, after Coors signed beer cans for customers. “He told us there are some liquor stores that Coors serves that aren’t as big as this display.”

Big, bigger and biggest has always been the key to effective beer merchandising, whether it’s giant, inflatable cans or giant, inflatable breasts. The goal is to get the target audience – which is to say, guys – to drop their jaws and say, “Oh, Lord, I gotta get me some of that.”

It sounds pretty basic, but many beer distributors just don’t bother to put in the effort, said Zinger, 31, who works for Frank Fuhrer Wholesale of Pittsburgh, the nation’s second-biggest Coors wholesaler.

“Liquor sales are up and beer sales are down,” he noted. “It’s more important than ever to work hard on the retail end. If people would clean up their stores and treat beer distribution more like a retail business, they’d sell more beer.”

Instead of just stacking dirty wooden skids on the floor, Zinger said, distributors should look at how Target or, God forbid, the state liquor stores display their merchandise. “You want to sell more beer,” he said, “you’ve got to grab a broom and do some work.”

Said Sefscik: “People always say, ‘How hard is it? Everyone drinks beer.’ Well, there are pharmaceutical reps who don’t work half as hard as us. You’ve got to work hard to really sell beer.”

Over the years, Zinger has designed dozens of nifty beer displays, including a tiki hut of Zima cases and a baseball stadium of Coors Light. Once he stuck an all-terrain vehicle atop a stack of cases, a stunt that won him an actual ATV.

But those are minor league compared to the World’s Largest Beer Display. The pair originally schemed to build a replica of Pittsburgh’s skyline. But that fell through when their computerized architectural design program faltered. So they fell back to the locomotive idea, drawing on Coors’ “Love Train” theme.

It took six days for the pair – with help from four others – to build the display. It contains no fewer than 92 pallets of beer; if you stuck each can end to end, they would stretch nearly nine miles.

The reaction has been tremendous. “We’ve had a live radio spot, newspaper articles, and we were supposed to have a report on TV news, only that was the day Ben Roethlisberger got into that motorcycle wreck,” Zinger said.

Meanwhile, customers have been pouring in, snapping photographs of their kids sitting on the stack, then snatching up 30-packs at $16.99 a pop.

Zinger and Sefscik aren’t 100 percent sure this is, in fact, the world’s largest beer display, but they’ve submitted an application to the Guinness Book of World Records to authenticate their achievement. A Google search doesn’t turn up any other contenders, but I came across a 1994 report from Supermarket News about a display featuring 10,000 cases of Miller stacked in a suburban Milwaukee store.

“Hey, I know we’re definitely the largest Coors display of all time,” Zinger said. The record, though, is secondary to their original goal. “We wanted to get people in the door,” Zinger said. “That’s serving our purpose as salesmen.”

-30-

SUMMER IS HERE and, if the 90-degree temps haven’t pounded the obvious into your brain yet, allow me:

It’s beer-drinking season.

Many of you will stick with the same thing you’ve been drinking all year, and that’s a mistake. Summertime is for changing your dreary, old routine. Go barefoot, take a vacation and try something new.

Here’s six ways to shake things up this summer.

Say saison

For years, beer freaks have been griping about the quality of American-made wheat beer because many of the domestics come off like dumbed-down versions of classic European styles.

Gradually, though, U.S. craft brewers have been putting their own signatures on wheat, especially in the new raft of saison, or farmhouse-style ales. These brews offer a bit more body than the standard American wheat, with thirst-quenching, spicy flavors. Saison goes well with food; try a bottle with grilled sausage or burgers.

Because saison does not have strict style guidelines, brewers tend to experiment with the ingredients; no two are the same. This sixpack of American-made saisons offers a variety of excellent flavors:

1. Flying Fish Farmhouse Summer Ale: A classic easy-drinking beer. Down a bottle or two while mowing the lawn.
2. Sly Fox Saison Vos: Available in 25-ouncers, it’s an usually bittered saison. I’m thinking it’ll mellow with age, so buy two bottles now and hold onto one till Labor Day.
3. Victory V Saison: Another large bottle, this one is spiced with German hops.
4. Yards Saison: Not sure if you’ll like saison? You can find this one stuffed into the Kensington brewer’s variety cases.
5. Clipper City Red Sky at Night: Available in bottles, but it’s worth the effort to track it down on tap.
6. Jolly Pumpkin Bam Biere: An exceptionally spiced ale from this very hot Michigan brewery.

Crack open a can

Stuck on a boat or sunning by the swimming pool, where glass bottles are banned? You don’t have to settle for bland taste; more and more craft brewers are putting their beer in a can.

Reach for Sly Fox’s Phoenix Pale Ale and Pikeland Pils, Dale’s Pale Ale and Old Chub from the Americans; Ruddles Pub Ale, Badger Brewery Dorset Best and Young’s Double Chocolate Stout from the Brits; and Brasserie des Rocs Blonde and Bavik’s Wittekerke from the Belgies.

Look for more variety

I’ve gotta give a shout-out to the best summertime variety pack on the shelves this season: Saranac’s 12 Beers of Summer.

For as little as 15 bucks, you can score two each of F.X. Matt’s easiest-sipping beers, including: Kolsch, Hefeweizen, Belgian White, Summer Ale, Golden Pilsener and the new, fruit-and-honey-flavored Mountain Ale.

Throw a kegger

C’mon, when was the last time you tapped a keg? College?

A cold barrel in an ice bucket is party central, especially if you opt for one of the new, smaller sixtel (one-sixth) kegs of craft beer. Any decent distributor will track down a sixtel of your favorite brand in a day or two.

Unlike those big halves, a sixtel is no-sweat – it’s lighter, cheaper and quicker to kick. Just rent the tapping equipment from the distributor and you’re good to go.

Get to a beer festival

Explore the new flavors craft breweries are producing, meet fellow beer freaks and wear your loudest shirt.

You can start tomorrow at the 10th annual Garden State Craft Brewers Festival aboard the U.S.S. New Jersey on the Camden waterfront. More than 50 Jersey-fresh brews will be pouring, and the ticket lets you tour the historic battleship. $30, 866-877-6262, ext. 108.

Other summer festivals to check out:

July 8: Royal Stumble, the annual wrasslin’/beer-drinking contest at Nodding Head Brewery. $30, 215-569-9525.

July 22: Brew Expo ’06, featuring dozens of East Coast brewers, in State College, Pa. $35, 814-692-8529.

July 29: Brew at the Zoo, with Philadelphia-area breweries at the Elmwood Park Zoo, benefiting the Delaware Valley Chapter of the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. $35, 610-275-2775.

Eat your beer

Chefs, summertime is your moment to shine at the grill, and I don’t just mean sweating over your Weber.

Give that beer-can chicken recipe a try. All you need is a decent-flavored can of beer and some peppery barbecue spices. Shove the (open) can into the bird’s cavity and the beer’ll baste those great flavors right into the moistened meat.

For dessert, try this one I discovered while trying the new Ben & Jerry’s Black & Tan ice cream: stout floats. Just plunk a scoop or two of your favorite ice cream into a half-pint of Stoudt’s Black Dog oatmeal imperial stout. The ale’s bitterness perfectly complements the sugary ice cream.

-30-

LEO, MY GODSON, just turned 10, so I thought it was about time for him to learn a little about beer.

I bought him some shares of Anheuser-Busch, figuring it’d teach something about brewing, about business and finance; when he’s old enough to cash it in, he can invest the money in something responsible.

Like a case of imperial stout.

In the meantime, I’m pointing him to page 10 of A-B’s 2005 annual report, where in one short paragraph he’ll learn everything he needs to know about the suds biz:

“Today’s contemporary adult consumers… crave variety more than ever before. To meet these changing tastes, Anheuser-Busch introduced more than 30 new products and encouraged consumers to experiment with new flavors and different ways to enjoy beer.”

Thirty new products! Who knew? Granted, some of them are spiked fruit juices, shooters and other alcohol delivery devices that bear no resemblance to malt and hops. But that’s not the point. This is a company that has grown to dominate the American beer scene by spending millions to market a line of vapid yellow lagers. Now it’s spewing new versions quicker ‘n’ Microsoft.

What in the name of Adolphus Busch is going on?

It’s a question that the craft beer world is asking this week in the wake of a deal that will give Seattle’s Widmer Brothers Brewing, which is partly owned by A-B, a sizable stake in Goose Island, a tiny Chicago brewery.

Goose Island president John Hall said the deal is mostly about wholesale distribution. The agreement puts his beers into hundreds of new outlets throughout Illinois.

“Good beer doesn’t do you any good if you can’t get it,” Hall reasoned.

Some craft brewers, though, are understandably worried about what they see as an incursion onto their small but carefully maintained turf – especially as it outperforms the rest of the alcoholic drinks sector.

In April, Dogfish Head Brewing’s Sam Calagione used his keynote speech at the annual Brewers Association conference to urge small brewers to be wary of big-wallet suitors.

“As big breweries and big distributors court our reinvigorated growth,” Calagione warned, “we need to be careful that any alliance we make doesn’t compromise the unique terroirs we have worked so hard to develop.” (He was using the French term that describes the sense of place and specialness of a homegrown product.)

This week, Calagione was shaking his head over the Goose Island deal.

“In five years, if A-B really [cares] about craft beer, then I’ll stand corrected,” he said. “But every early indication is that their motivation is no different than it was in the 1990s, the last time we were experiencing big growth.”

Ten years ago, A-B scoffed at the craftsmanship of small breweries, then cynically hopped on the bandwagon with its phony Red Wolf label. It bought a share of Seattle’s Red Hook brewery only, in the view of many, to dumb down Red Hook’s product line. The damage was deep, as many consumers wrote off microbrewing as a passing fad.

Calagione grumbled, “We are market share. They want to buy us, then indoctrinate us.”

Greg Koch of Stone Brewing in San Diego agreed. “Of course it’s an opportunistic foray by St. Louis. All business moves are opportunistic forays, save those driven by passion. And while I can’t speak for St. Louis, I don’t suspect that the latter is the case.”

I can’t speak for A-B, either, but I keep going back to those 30 new products.

As Benj Steinman, publisher of Beer Marketers INSIGHTS, noted, wholesalers are frustrated by flat-lined sales of A-B’s mainstream products like Bud and Bud Light.

“There’s been a huge outcry for more high-end brands. Anheuser-Busch is trying to address it in several ways,” Steinman said, pointing to baffling new boozy drinks like chocolate-flavored Spykes.

Forget about being assimilated by the Borgs. Craft brewers have more to worry about: their terroirs are at risk of being swamped by a miasma of bottled alcoholic products, each marketed solely to satisfy the bean-counters.

That’s why, for his 11th birthday, I’m getting Leo a case of hand-crafted imperial stout. It’ll age well in the next decade; he can crack it open when he turns 21 and learn all he needs to know about the tradition and craftsmanship that make his favorite adult beverage (I hope!) more than just another alcohol-delivery device.

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FORGET Cascades hops. The newest beer craze is Simcoe.

Cascades, of course, is the classic West Coast hop, the small, vine-grown bud that gives beer its aroma, its bitterness, its spice. For 20 years, the fresh, aromatic, grapefruit-like Cascades virtually defined American-made craft beer, and it still reigns as one of the biggest sellers.

But six years ago, agriculture scientists in Washington State introduced a hybrid called Simcoe, and brewers have been boiling it big time ever since.

Yards Brewing, in Kensington, used it in its reformulated Philly Pale Ale recipe, and watched sales rocket. Troegs Brewing, in Harrisburg, adds it to Nugget Nectar Ale. In Delaware, Dogfish Head Brewing’s Sam Calagione said his brewers were using Simcoe before it even had a name, when it was known only as “Experimental Hop No. 555.” Today, he said, Dogfish Head tosses a “load” of it into 90 Minute IPA.

Even savvy homebrewers are onto Simcoe. “There’s a latent buzz around it,” said Jason Harris, of Keystone Homebrew Supply in Montgomeryville. “Simcoe’s made a huge impact.”

Simcoe is so hot, Weyerbacher Brewing in Easton just named its newest beer after the plant: Simcoe Double IPA.

What attracts brewers – and drinkers – to the variety is a distinctive citrus aroma combined with a high alpha-acid content that imparts a strong but pleasurable bitterness.

Because of those qualities, it’s an especially popular ingredient in the new wave of extra-hoppy ales known as Imperial India Pale Ales. It provides a nice kick without a harsh slap to the palate.

“It probably got the most fire going with it three or four years ago when it showed up in some of the lively hop monsters from the West Coast,” said Jim Boyd, general manager of the craft-brewing program at Yakima Chief, the Washington-based hops conglomerate that distributes Simcoe. “Almost every single one of them is using Simcoe.”

Indeed, you’d think that Simcoe was created especially for these hop-happy ales. But in fact it’s the big, bland lagers that drove its development.

The factory breweries that produce these beers don’t much care about the variety of hops they use. Sean McGree, vice president of the hop division at Brewers Supply, another hops producer in Yakima, Wash., said: “To them, hops aren’t flowers, they’re a commodity. They use computers to dose hop extract into brewing kettles. So they’re really just buying kilos of alpha acid… Often, the types of hops they use is a decision made by accountants, not brewers.”

The goal, then, was to develop a hop variety with high alpha-acid content to reduce the acreage needed to grow the fast-spreading vines. The problem, though, was that once they’re boiled in the beer-making process, high-alpha hops often produce harsh flavors.

Scientists at Select Botanicals, the Washington firm that propagated Simcoe, solved that problem by developing a variety with lower cohumulone, the acid responsible for the astringency of hops.

Jason Perrault, the company’s vice president of research and development, said it took 10 years of pollination, crop development, harvesting and analysis till Simcoe was ready to be released in 2000.

Perrault said the company is still waiting for interest to grow among the big brewers. But he’s heartened by the early acceptance by small brewers. “We’ve found that craft brewers are so much more willing to try something new, to give it a shot, to be a trend-setter,” he said.

Mostly, brewers use Simcoe in combination with other hop varieties.

Dan Weirback, of Weyerbacher Brewing, said he first used Simcoe when his brewery sought to reformulate its Hop Infusion Ale, a beer with seven different hops.

“Simcoe had this wonderful flavor of West Coast hops. It’s almost like a Cascades hop on steroids – it totally blew us away when we used it,” Weirback said. “We thought, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be great to make a beer that would be dominated by Simcoe?’ ”

That was the start of Simcoe Double IPA.

Naming it after the hop variety was a no-brainer, said Weirback, because Simcoe is already recognizable among savvy craft-beer drinkers.

And it may just be the start of a new trend. After all, winemakers commonly label wines with their grape variety (e.g., Chardonnay, Merlot). So why shouldn’t a brewer name his beer after its hops variety?

Especially when it’s something as flavorful as Simcoe hops.

A sampling of Simcoe

Want a taste of Simcoe hops? Here’s a sixpack of other beers that feature the distinctive flavor:

1. Philly Pale Ale, Yards Brewing, Philadelphia.
2. Pliny the Elder, Russian River Brewing, California.
3. Big Fish Barleywine, Flying Fish, New Jersey.
4. Dreadnaught, Three Floyds Brewing, Indiana.
5. The Maharaja, Avery Brewing, Colorado.
6. Titan IPA, Great Divide Brewing, Colorado.

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