The Beer of Art.

For you art lovers who know how to appreciate beer, or you beer lovers who drink a lot of art: a few goodies today. We might even find something to hang above your fireplace. Or kegerator.

First: With an emphatic hip-hop head nod to Jay Brooks for his Art & Beer posts, meet Johann Georg Hinz. A German still-life painter who lived most of his life in Hamburg. Glasses or steins of beer often found their way into his work. The one you see here is untitled, best I can tell.

With all the mythology around Pilsner, first brewed in 1842 before it took over the world, it's common to think of it as the first truly pale, clear beer. It's also lazy and wrong. While Pilsner did take advantage of paler malts, bottom fermentation and cheaper glassware to show off its light color, it was obviously not the first bright, golden beer. Hinz was painting in the 1600s. The enlightenment of beer happened long before the Enlightenment of man.

Have you ever read about some historical beer and thought, "Damn, if only they had cameras back then, and someone snapped a photo..." Well, maybe somebody like Hinz snapped a still life. The old-school version of the geek (ahem) who snaps photos of every plate of food and frothy glass of beer.

Second: Not everyone these days uses a camera. Check out these original works out of Bend, Oregon. Some are for sale. If you have an idea or a favorite beer, you can commission it. Strange, nerdy and cool.

Third: Here's the sort of art we see nearly every day--the sort we see on the packaging that holds our beer and prevents it from spilling all over the place. So it's not just functional, but also attractive. Oh Beautiful Beer is as much for graphic design nerds as the beery sort.

Finally: Cartoon!