Six-Pack of News, Volume 14

Game 7 of the World Series is starting any minute now, but I had a full rack of stories for the news round-up, so let's get to it!

Anheuser-Busch and Otto, developers of self-driving truck technology, recently completed the first successful commercial shipment by self-driving truck when they sent a tractor-trailer full of beer on I-25 from Fort Collins, CO to Colorado Springs. The 120-plus mile trip was monitored by a truck driver observing the entire trip from inside the truck.

Vinepair likes their lists, and their latest is to consult "The Beer Goddess", nickname of a Portland-area bottle shop manager, about the 9 beers SHE likes to drink herself.

Vinepair's Nick Hines also documented the history of the Beer Mile, one of mankind's absolute best and absolute worst ideas.

In a recent interview, food personality Anthony Bourdain decided to be a little bit grumpy about the craft beer scene as a whole, and "beer snobs" in general. Bourdain insisted "(a) bar is to go to get a little bit buzzed, and pleasantly derange the senses, and have a good time...(it's) not to sit there f---ing analyzing beer." Now, I really don't see why bars can't be both, or at least fall into either category. I frequent a number of different types of bars, and some of them I specifically go to to "analyze craft beer". But there are also plenty of places where I don't want to spend a lot of money, or, to Bourdain's point, I just want to loosen up a little bit or not use my brain for awhile. I reasonably understand few bars could pull off both vibes. But I fail to understand why the "beer snob" place is not a place worth visiting. The full Bourdain interview from the website Thrillist can be found here.

I tend to not point out breweries' new releases, just due to the sheer volume of those releases. But any baseball fan will be very interested in an upcoming release from Samuel Adams. They will be honoring recently-retired Boston Red Sox designated hitter David "Big Papi" Ortiz with Big Hapi Double IPA brewed with mango. Sam Adams will release 541 bottles (matching Ortiz' career home run total) of Big Hapi on Friday.

Finally, the Great American Beer Festival recently wrapped up in Denver, Colorado, and the Huffington Post's Ryan Grenoble documented some of the oddest beers he found at the festival. Some of the more adventurous beers utilized ingredients such as pickles, birch tree sap, and scrapple (a meat-scraps delicacy most popular in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey).