beer

Fall may or may not be in the air in the part of the country where you happen to live, but another aspect of the season is definitely live no matter where you call home: football. From back yards to parks to stadium parking lots, the oddly shaped ball is being tossed back and forth, and the players are sure to be working up an appetite. Luckily, there is one thing (well, in addition to beer) that is the perfect accompaniment to football games everywhere. I speak of course, of tailgating.

If you are ready for some tailgating, the Cuisinart CCG-400 Charcoal Grill-On-The-Go … Read more

This week on Crave, there's a hidden euphemism in just about everything, but you'll have to listen for the juiciest bits. The preview goes a little something like this: a liquid pencil fails to impress Eric, we hem and haw over giant people sculptures made to replace ugly electricity pylons, and a couple wheeled gadgets are getting creepy...and emotional. Also on tap--literally--a kegerator iPad app, and a curvaceous camera that gets more than a few comments from the peanut gallery. Finally, a little food porn in the form of a bacon bouquet.

We've already written about a couple of robots that fetch your beer. Now we have one that gets you information about your beer. Kegbot is a free, open-source project that turns an ordinary beer kegerator, such as a KegMate, into a computerized drink tracker.

On its own, this is a pretty cool project. Using an Arduino microcontroller together with KegBot software and the Kegbot Arduino firmware, you can track the temperature of your beer and know how much is left, view statistics on who drank what, authenticate users via RFID tags, prevent unauthorized drinking, and more.

But why stop … Read more

This week, Crave branches out onto our friendly neighborhood tech blogs to bring you a super fantastique, ultra huge, raver-friendly digital turntable thingie...and a bottle opener. Don't be too let down by that second one: it's over-priced and attaches to your bike, so it still has some cache. Also, Donald and Eric get extremely excited over a glorified statue, an electric Datsun leaves a Nissan GT-R in the dust, and a giant robot arm is put to good use. Plus, Jasmine squeals over an elephant with some monstrous dental work, and we take a look at a camera lens cleavage coffee mug.

You know, if more people in the world spent their time inventing products designed to protect and serve beer, we'd all be...well, I guess we'd all be a little more buzzed.

Why would you need to protect your beer? You know the drill: you open a bottle, take a sip, set it down, and then can't figure out which bottle is yours.

That's why you need Beersavers, the first silicone bottle cap charm for beer bottles. These stretchy bottle caps close your beer to keep it fresh and identify it amid all the other ordinary … Read more

BRENTWOOD, N.H.--Road Trip 2010 has officially covered enough miles to make it from one coast of America to the other.

Of course, that's not what's really happened. Instead, I've driven 3,000 miles up and down--and up and down, and up and down, following a truly inefficient path--the East Coast in search of great destinations to report on.

And that's what has brought me here, to this town of population 4,200 in the southeastern corner of the Granite State--that quest for great things to write about. It's not that I had … Read more

BOSTON--If it were any other day, and I was tipsy from drinking beer on the job, particularly given that it's not even noon yet, I'd probably be in serious trouble.

But today, I've got an excuse: I'm at the Samuel Adams brewery here for a behind-the-scenes tour of the famous facility. And they've got me sampling the wares.

I'm here on Road Trip 2010, which has taken me to a wildly diverse collection of places up and down the Northeast, but all I can think right now is that drinking amazingly tasty specialty beer … Read more

I'm not a T-shirt kinda guy; I feel like if I'm not wearing things with buttons, at least around the neck, then I'm in my underwear. If I did wear T-shirts, though, they'd have to be handy, like this T-shirt from ThinkGeek that opens beers for you.

The BeerBot Bottle Opening Shirt features an image of a robot inspired by Bender from the Futurama. The beerbot on the shirt has two claws, one of which is metal and is used to pop the tops off beer bottles so you don't have to use, you know, … Read more

When it's too hot to even get off your ass and stick your head in the freezer, who ya gonna call?

PR2, that's who.

Engineers at Menlo Park, Calif., robot start-up Willow Garage have hacked their PR2 humanoid platform to make it deliver fridge-fresh, cool beer straight to their desks. The droid even wields a bottle opener for easy access.

PR2 can fold towels like nobody's business. While 11 PR2s are being loaned to universities around the world as part of an open-source research project, beer-fetching chops will doubtless make them more popular.

We've seen some … Read more