|font:Courier New||B:O|From anywhere in America Online, the keywords BEER or BREWING take you to Wine and Dine Online. Once there, click on Beer & Home Brewing. Its menu, in turn, leads you to All About Beer magazine; the Message Board, Chat, and Library (with discussions about beer and home brewing); reviews of beers and brew pubs, a searchable "BrewBase" that rates beers on a scale of 50 to 100, and Beer and Brewing downloads, which offers Windows wallpaper patterned like Anchor Steam labels. You really have to be a fanatic for some of this stuff.|CR||B:1|1/5^|font:Courier New||B:O|There are also FAQs covering grains and home-brew techniques. What's a FAQ? It stands for Frequently Asked Questions, and it's a document answering them. You'll find FAQs all over the Net, most often in newsgroups, where they're posted regularly and/or stored in archives. They're probably the most valuable distillations of human expertise anywhere. Before asking something in a newsgroup, check the FAQ first (it's considered good form); chances are your question has already been answered.|CR||B:1|2/5^|font:Courier New||B:O|Venturing out to the World Wide Web, your options will depend on what browser you're using. In Netscape, for instance, you can click on the Net Search button and then select your search engine: Lycos, Webcrawler, or InfoSeek. Doing a Lycos search on the word "beer" turns up a search results page where you can choose a link to The Beer Classifieds home page (http://www. mindspring.com/~jlock/beer), a link-rich treasure lode that includes lists of beer periodicals and related resources on the Net.|CR||B:1|3/5^|font:Courier New||B:O|A Gopher search using Veronica turns up news stories relating to beer ("Miller to be brewed in China") and a whole bunch of recipes, like one for beer-cheese soup that sounds, well, hearty. It also takes you to the alt.beer FAQ, as a matter of FAQ. To find the alt.beer newsgroup from whence it came, you must venture still further.|CR|To get to alt.beer, use your newsreader to search on beer. The alt.beer newsgroup is full of raging debates over things like The Ten Worst Beers in the Universe.|CR||CR||B:1|4/5^|font:Courier New||B:O|Are there any mailing lists that cater to beer aficionados? How about subscribing to this one: JudgeNet, a beer-judging and -competition discussion list. If you're interested, you can send a request to be added to the mailing list to judge-request @synchro.com.|CR||CR||CR||CR||CR||CR||CR||B:1|5/5|CR|
