Beer yoga is a yoga hybrid, created in America around 2013, in which participants practice yoga at breweries or taprooms, drinking beer during or after asana practice. It has since spread to other countries. The practice has been criticised as unhealthy and out of keeping with the spirit of classical yoga, but alcohol was sometimes used in yoga rituals in classical times. [1] [2]
Beer yoga is a yoga hybrid in which participants practice yoga at breweries or taprooms, drinking beer during or after asana practice. [3] The exact origins of beer yoga are not clear, but it is said to have appeared at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert around 2013. [4] Brooke Larson founded the American company Beer Yoga in Oklahoma City in July 2015; she states that "I took a silly picture of myself sipping beer and doing yoga in February of 2013"; [4] the response encouraged her to create the Beer Yoga Instagram page. By 2017 she was teaching Beer Yoga classes in eight states. [4]
The German BierYoga company was started by a man named Jhula in Berlin in 2015, after seeing beer yoga at the Burning Man festival; it has spread to countries such as Australia and Thailand. [5] [6] By 2017, beer yoga was described as "nearly as universal at craft breweries as IPAs" in America. [7] In England, a London pub started to offer Vinyasa Yoga classes with "ice cold beer" in 2017. [8]
Some fitness experts have criticized beer yoga as a marketing gimmick, calling it unhealthy. [9] The Guardian commented that a beer afterwards was surely preferable to a "mid-plank pilsner". [10] The behavioral neuroscientist J. Leigh Leasure states she is unsurprised by the trend, noting that people who have one alcoholic drink a day are twice as likely to exercise as non-drinkers; she doubted whether participants who only had one drink would be harming themselves. [11] The Times notes that "sipping an ice cold pint while in warrior pose" is far from the classical teachings of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. [12] However, the Indologist James Mallinson comments that yoga is "such a big multifarious tradition you can find precedence for almost anything", adding that in the 6th century alcohol was used in rituals to help advanced yogis to be "possessed" by the goddess. [1] [2]
The U.S. state of Oregon is home to more than 200 breweries and brew pubs that produce a large variety of beer.
Paulaner is a German brewery, established in 1634 in Munich by the Paulaner Order of mendicant friars. Now owned by the Schörghuber family, it is one of the six breweries which provides beer for Oktoberfest. Paulaner ranks number six among Germany's best-selling beers.
Lager is beer which has been brewed and conditioned at low temperature. Lagers can be pale, amber, or dark. Pale lager is the most widely consumed and commercially available style of beer. The term "lager" comes from the German for "storage", as the beer was stored before drinking, traditionally in the same cool caves in which it was fermented.
Paddleboard Yoga, invented by 2009, is the practice of modern yoga as exercise, and sometimes specific transitions between postures, while stand up paddleboarding, usually with the board in calm water, such as a lake. Beginners may practice this yoga hybrid on the beach or in a swimming pool to gain the strength and flexibility to maintain the balance necessary when the board is afloat. Beginners may practice a sequence of asanas either on a normal length surfboard or a specially designed stand up paddle board; some, described as "forgiving", are inflatable. Paddle board yoga is celebrated at the Wanderlust Festival in Hawaii. One of the pioneers of Paddleboard Yoga, Rachel Bråthén, lives and teaches yoga in the island of Aruba in the Caribbean Sea; she began teaching Paddleboard Yoga in 2009.
Chibuku is a commercial sorghum beer based on the traditional Umqombothi home made African beers, the main grains used are malted sorghum and maize but may also contain millet.
Tractor Brewing Company is a New Mexico-based brewery, founded in 1999 in Los Lunas and since 2014 located in Albuquerque. Tractor beers have won awards at the New Mexico State Fair Pro-Am Competition.
Small Town Brewery is a brewing company based in Wauconda, Illinois, best known for producing the Not Your Father's brand of flavored beers.
KettleHouse Brewing Company is a craft brewing company located in Missoula, Montana. Founded in 1995 by Tim O'Leary and Suzy Rizza, the company has grown from a single taproom to two taprooms in Missoula and a major production facility in Bonner, Montana on the Blackfoot River. In 2017, the company, in collaboration with Top Hat Entertainment, opened the KettleHouse Amphitheater near the new facility in Bonner.
Modern yoga is a wide range of yoga practices with differing purposes, encompassing in its various forms yoga philosophy derived from the Vedas, physical postures derived from Hatha yoga, devotional and tantra-based practices, and Hindu nation-building approaches.
Yoga as exercise is a physical activity consisting mainly of postures, often connected by flowing sequences, sometimes accompanied by breathing exercises, and frequently ending with relaxation lying down or meditation. Yoga in this form has become familiar across the world, especially in America and Europe. It is derived from medieval Haṭha yoga, which made use of similar postures, but it is generally simply called "yoga". Academics have given yoga as exercise a variety of names, including modern postural yoga and transnational anglophone yoga.
Gudrun Bühnemann is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is an Indologist whose research interests include Sanskrit language and literature, Buddhism, Hinduism, Tantrism and yoga studies. Her work has especially attracted the interest of scholars working on South Asian iconography and ritual and of scholars of the emerging discipline of Yoga Studies for her discovery of early illustrated manuscripts including the Joga Pradīpikā showing sets of 84 asanas.
Positioning Yoga: balancing acts across cultures is a 2005 book of social anthropology by Sarah Strauss about the history of modern yoga as exercise, focusing on the example of Sivananda Yoga.
Cloudwater Brew Co is an independent craft brewery based in Manchester, England. Established in 2014, the brewery began making beer the following year and quickly gained a reputation for the quality of its products. In 2017 and 2018, Cloudwater was ranked among the ten best breweries in the world by beer scoring website RateBeer, becoming the only UK brewery ever to be featured. Several Cloudwater beers have also received accolades at the same awards.
Props used in yoga include chairs, blocks, belts, mats, blankets, bolsters, and straps. They are used in postural yoga to assist with correct alignment in an asana, for ease in mindful yoga practice, to enable poses to be held for longer periods in Yin Yoga, where support may allow muscles to relax, and to enable people with movement restricted for any reason, such as stiffness, injury, or arthritis, to continue with their practice.
It's unclear where or when the idea of combining beer and yoga began, but it's rumored to have started at the Burning Man festival in Nevada over four years ago.
