I'm trying to decide which is more awesome: That a Danish beer company once had a laboratory that did research in protein chemistry and funded independent scientists ... or that said beer company gave Niels Bohr an unlimited, in-home beer supply as a gift in honor of Bohr winning the Nobel Prize. (Via Charlie Papazian)

  • Nash Rambler

    Sure, you get the admiration of your colleagues and peers with the Nobel Prize, but at the end of the day, free beer is free beer.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Skulryk Matt Zimmermann

    Something related that I recently found out: The Student’s t-distribution, a widely used probability distribution, was derived by William Sealy Gosset while he worked at the Guinness Brewery. He had to publish under the pseudonym of ‘Student’ because Guinness was concerned about trade secrets being published. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset

  • zuludaddy

    I’d thought that the Carlsberg brewery was at least partially under the control of the Crown, if not wholly so, making this the very best kind of hono(u)r… 

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/James-Agenbroad/100002463876063 James Agenbroad

    somehow I’m imagining a bar ad with the tag line “Laureates drink free!”

  • http://twitter.com/rvitelli Romeo Vitelli

    I can see modern Nobel laureates sending this page to local brewers and dropping hints…

  • xzzy

    There’s gotta be some conspiracy behind this, you don’t just give a guy free beer for life. That is.. unless you’re trying to get him to avoid saying or doing something.

    I wonder what he discovered that a brewery wants kept out of the public eye! 

    Marijuana beer maybe? Bacon beer? Baconijuana Beer?

    • Vnend

      Yeah, unless it was caffeinated beer, they weren’t doing the world any favors.

      (Well, OK, I suppose it could have been beer that went well with coffee…)

    • Snig

       Oil companies.  He was close to figuring out infinite free energy.  Mysterious death at a prominent point in his research would have raised questions.  They bought a brewery, installed infinite free beer in his house, and his research did not so much fly as plummet. 

  • Vnend

    As far as comparisons of awesomeness, the two can be different sets of the same cardinality.

  • fidel_funk

    Deal still in effect, the little lovely villa is still given, free of charge to promising scientists (and their families). But limits have been made, think you can live there for a max of five years now, Niels Bohr stayed for 30 or 35…
    …Know because I went on a (drinking) Tour of the old brewery recently….

  • bolamig

    Not just free beer but a direct pipeline between his house and the brewery!

  • jhertzli

    They obviously subsidized quantum mechanics in order to drive physics students to drink.

  • http://www.facebook.com/roland.dorau Roland Dorau

    Then running around a lantern and is playing hydrogen.

  • http://twitter.com/spockosbrain Spocko

    I really think this would drive more inner city and rural youths into science if the knew this.

  • fidel_funk

    Pipeline no longer works, think they get a ration of two crates – a month, kinda boring.

  • arthur slotoff

    Free beer for life – this is very good, but free vodka for life – most better.

  • http://www.facebook.com/daen.de.leon Daen de Leon

    There’s a reason the yeast used in brewing lager has the synonym Saccharomyces carlsbergensis, y’know …

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces_pastorianus