Father’s Day will be here before you know it. Is your dad a beer guy? Get your shopping done early and order up Beer-Topia in our store. It’s full of stories and pieces like this one.

Beard Beer

Yeast can thrive in a lot of places on the body where it’s dark and warm. The belly button sure, but also in beards. John Maier is the head brewer at Rogue Brewery and he’s got a very long, very thick beard. He cut off nine strands, sent it to a yeast laboratory (there is such a thing) called White Labs for testing, and it came back positive. That sample was thoroughly cultivated and is now the source of the yeast used in Rogue’s Beard Beer. It’s one of the most popular offerings on tap at the brewery’s tasting room in Newport, Oregon.

Belly Button Beer

Beer only requires a precious few ingredients: water, malt, a flavoring agent like hops, and yeast, which consumes the sugar in the malt to produce alcohol (and bubbles). But that yeast can come from anywhere. Australian beer company 7 Cent Brewery got theirs from just about the last place anyone would want to get theirs: employees’ belly buttons. Belly Button Beer is “perhaps the first beer in the world fermented from yeast captured from the brewer’s belly button fluff.” After cultivating the collected yeast on agar plates, the yeast was used to make three different beers, with the “best tasting” one released to the public. (They also added orange zest and coriander seeds, so the belly button essence is reportedly difficult to really taste.)

Collagen Beer

The problem with drinking too much beer: beer gut, among other unsightly possibilities. But what if beer could improve health…or at least improve skin health? That’s what Precious, a beer from Japan’s Suntory Holdings promises to do. Each can of the lager is laced with collagen, a naturally-occurring protein in the human body that keeps skin looking fresh, but which depletes as a person ages.