While many of the other easter ales actually could be great christmas beers as well, the Hornbeer Påskeøl is all flowers and “yellow” in taste, a very fine easter ale. It is a bit darker than a classic, cloudy with a nice white foam. The first taste is of spice and flowers, but not heavy at all. Very fitting for spring and easter.

This beer works probably best with food. I was drinking it slowly, and while it’s getting warmer it looses its gas fairly quickly, so while this is no problem with many easter ales, you should probably drink this one fairly quick.

The etiquette is probably the best part of this beer, it’s great! Made by Gunhild Rasmussen, who makes most of the labels, called “everything has an end”.

I’ve stopped doing april fools pranks, hoaxes and jokes, since unfortunately my jokes had a tendency to become true. “Dude, we’ve got a tax-misunderstanding” led to half a year of explaining why nothing was wrong. “DHL wants us to pay a strange import fee” wasn’t fun when DHL called three days later. I talked to your boss and hear Microsoft has bought your company… a couple of days later… you get the picture.

But, that doesn’t stop me enjoying aprils fools day, my favourite came early with the EU requiring online retailers to refund their customers before getting the merchandise back. Let’s have a look at great april fools jokes and pranks:

• In 1957 a show called Panorama announced that a mild winter had increased the Swiss spaghetti harvest (see YouTube)
• The BBC had a commercial for a documentary of Antarctica’s colony of flying penguins
• In 1980, the Big Ben was reported to be switching to digital, and the clocks hands would be sold to whoever called in first
• Branson’s hot air balloon that resembled a UFO in 1989 was a great one (video below)
• What I’m sure would tame many flamewars online was also an april fools joke: the proposed law that it’d be illegal to use the Internet while drunk from 1994
• The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from ~3.14 to the Biblical value of 3.0

See these great clips:

Do you have other april fools jokes, hoaxes or pranks that are worthy to be included in this very informal all-time best list? Leave a comment

I’m “imported” to Denmark, and guess what: so is the Danish easter ale tradition. As far as I’ve understood, the tradition started at the end of the 19th century when a few pubs in Copenhagen around easter would import double-bock beer called Salvator from the German order of Paulaner. This was a beer the monks had been allowed to sell since the 1780s. Whether it was actually the beer of the Paulaner monks is somewhat of a mystery, as this brand was so strong that all the Bavarian stouts were simply called Paulaner Salvator. Serving these beers turned out to be a huge success, so in 1905, Carlsberg, the big Danish beer brewery would make their own easter ale and sell it on tap. The year after, Tuborg, their arch rival, followed with their own easter ale on tap.

Today, there are many small breweries all around Denmark, and each brewery with respect for themselves will have their own easter ale. Some will have them a pinch lighter than a christmas ale, some will have a bottle of pure summer. Speaking of christmas ale, it’s actually the easter ale tradition that has given us the christmas beer tradition, not the other way around!

Next up is an ecological beer from Ørbæk.

The first thought was that this beer aspires to be a trapist, yet isn’t as rich in the flavour. It has a pleasant darkness (I prefer dark beer), is well balanced, nice foam and it goes well with cheese (we tried that) and chocolate. It could have a bit more notes of flower and spice, it’s easter ale after all, but I get the impression this is a beer I wouldn’t mind serving guests all year around, perhaps except for christmas.

On a minus note, it has a faint metallic smell, but apart from that, this is a beer I can fully recommend, and I’ll be sure to buy a few more of. I should add that the hints of coffee were a nice plus. The label is nice, but I believe that previous years they used to have an easter bunny. In short: go bunnies!

It’s been two years since I first wrote on using SQLite for iPhone SDK. Since then, iOS has come a long way, especially when it comes to storing data. But still, much remains the same. For instance, FMDB is still a great way of accessing SQLite databases directly, and if you’re most familiar with SQL and don’t want to learn too much new stuff (learning Objective-C and Cocoa can be enough by itself), this is a great way to write your first apps.

But, with iOS 3.0 came Core Data, and I was so happy when it did. Marcus Zarra wrote a great book with PragProg that I wholeheartedly recommend: it’s easy to read and thorough at the same time. I followed his workshop at NSConf ‘09, which was great, and I understand people have enjoyed the videos he and Scotty produced over at iDeveloper TV. I use Core Data in all my projects now, and its backed by SQLite, so I get a great mapping while having the performance of the database.

It being the year of the NoQL-databases, though, a post wouldn’t be complete without saying you can now ditch SQLite all together and use CouchDB. CouchBase have made a developer preview of CouchDB for iOS that I’m looking forward to try out. CouchDB has great replication, but I still need to learn more about how to handle security and access to data so to not give all my application users the keys to the “castle”.

Happy coding