...And how he can get his name on a Sly Fox beer.

Spring brings one of the areas most cherished festivals. Year after year, people come by the busload to drink mugs of bocks, eat brats, listen to traditional umpa bands, and race goats. Yes, race goats. The Sly Fox Bock Fest & Goat Race is an annual tradition that has surely reached the not to be missed status. Each year, Sly Fox puts out an array of their different bock style beers and people bring their prized goats out to be raced. The races are for more than just fun, as there is quite the acclaimed prize on the line. Sly Fox brews a special, unique Maibock each year for this event and when the races come to an end, they tap the initial firkin and name the beer after the winning goat. Having a delicious Sly Fox named after your goat seems to be a pretty awesome honor to us, and because of this we have decided to bring you a guide to raising your own goat, so that you too may have a chance to win this honor. I’m no pro on raising a goat, but I have had a pet goat (the one pictured wearing diapers and suspenders) and consider it one of my favorite pets to have owned. Hopefully, this guide will help you raise your own winning goat.

Supposedly in the South, this is the oldest trick in the book.

Let’s say you have some buddies over and you run out of cold beers in the fridge. What’s a guy to do? You have half a case (or like some people, several cases) of beer sitting at warmer than preferred temperatures in the garage or you can run out and pick up a cold 6-pack. Now, if you’re anything like me, running out of cold beer in the fridge probably means you shouldn’t be driving. But, at the same time I’m not about to drink a warm beer either.

Before I could not even spell Hop Rhizomes -now I write about how to grow them!

If you've got a green thumb and love craft beer, help your favorite home brewer start a Hop Garden. It's time to pay him back for all of his beer you've drank.

A fun gift for your girlfriend on Valentine's Day.

Have you ever got stuck in a jam where you just can’t figure out what to get your girl for Valentine’s Day? Or maybe you just forgot about the holiday all together? Well, if she’s a beer lover, we have the perfect, easy, do-it-yourself gift that she’ll be sure to love: Beerrings.

Bill Drew of Craggie Brewing Co. shows us the process of brewing coffee is very similar to brewing beer. To see the original article in it’s entirety, visit www.allaboutbeer.com.

This article originally appeared in All About Beer Magazine, Vol. 23, #5 in November, 2002. Special Thanks to Bill Drew of Craggie Brewing Co., and Julie Johnson, Editor of All About Beer Magazine)

American Oktoberfests continue into the early October weeks and you may find at these festivals or local German bars and restaurants a beer glass that looks oddly like a boot. Or you may already be familiar with this from seeing Broken Lizard’s 2006 film, Beerfest where “Das Boot” was a humorous plot point.

Here’s a little bit of fun for you home brewers out there? The Hash Back.

Much like Dogfish Head’s Randall Filter, our friends Kent Fletcher and Drew Beechum from the Maltose Falcons Home Brew Club (www.maltosefalcons.com) sat down and built their own Randall Filter, without ever seeing Dogfish Head’s model. What they ended up with is a great little device to dry hop some beer. Hell, you can put whatever you want in this filter. A little Bacon Stout? Go for it. A Mojito Wheat Beer? Stuff it with fruit and some fresh mint leaves. Your Hash Back and keg are your canvas.

We all know that traditional lawn darts are now illegal. Backyard BBQ + Beer + Large, Pointy, Flying Darts = Someone Losing an Eye.

So instead of the bloody mess, they now sell heavy, weighted lawn darts. This is a much better idea. Rather than someone losing an eye, their skull gets crushed instead. We will teach you how to make your own set of weighted lawn darts using aluminum beer bottles. It adds a unique twist to the game since they are an awkward shape. It’s pretty tough to master the way they roll and bounce, making this quite a challenging and fun backyard game. Follow these instructions to make your own set, and get creative. Being the diehard Phillies fans that we are, we chose to paint ours in an old school Phillies motif. If you are a Mets fan, I suggest you paint yours a lovely shade of go-fuck-yourself.