The marketing agency BBDO New York were tasked to come up with a way to get drinkers more engaged with Guinness. Not just any beer, but the thick-headed Irish dry stout. Their solution was a QR code printed on a pint glass. That might not sound all that interesting, but if you used a beer lighter than pitch-black Guinness, the code does nothing. Once scanned, the code launches an app that broadcasts to the world where you are and what you’re drinking. It’s fiendishly clever.

Do you really need a highly sophisticated, Arduino-powered, Android tab-operated kegerator with its taps coming out of the Android mascot’s arms? Probably not. Of course you do. That’s why Paul Carff built “Besty“ the KegDroid, to fill this gaping hole in beer dispensing technology. Aside from just looking awesome, the KegDroid has some pretty useful functionality that can help prevent unauthorized imbibition of your favorite alcoholic potable.

Things are usually pretty quiet in the depths of the Geekosystem mailbag, but every now and again something wonderful emerges. Today, we received two bottles of Dogfish Head brewery’s Urkontinent beer. As careful beer-minded readers of ours will remember, we first heard about this brew way back in October of last year when the brewery partnered with Google to crowdsource a truly unique beer. Now, this Belgian-style dubbel is making its way into the wild, and we’re having a first taste.

For Homer Simpson, there is only one beer: Duff. However, Matt Groening is on the record as saying that he will never allow an officially licensed Duff beer on the grounds that it will encourage underage drinking. That surprisingly thoughtful stance has prevented an official cash-in, but that hasn’t stopped some breweries from either trying to push counterfeit Duff, or just coincidentally producing a beer with the same name. If you’re keen to drink Duff, real Duff beer, then these are the best you can get.

The history of beer is almost as old as human history, and it would be quite true to say that our love affair with the stuff has only grown with modern brewing practices. Given beer’s pervasive place in human history, it’s not surprising that the geeky pastimes of drinkers would eventually rub off on the beers themselves. The result is a veritable cornucopia of nerdy beers, from Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and a few others that fit in quite nicely with your nerdy lifestyle. Like Pizza Beer — it’s more efficient than eating both separately! So sit back, crack open a cold one, and enjoy this astounding and some times mouthwatering collection.

Speaking as Geekosystem’s resident booze snob, I love a good cocktail. However, I have a really hard time keeping recipes straight which is why this enormous chart from Pop Chart Labs would really come in handy. On it, you can find just about everything you need to know in order to make 68 drinks, all coming from 40 kinds of booze, a collection of mixers and garnishes. It even tells you the preferred glass to serve it in. The only thing this chart won’t do for you is provide the mysterious alchemical talent needed to transmogrify a good drink into a great one, but might justify the purchase of some arcane items. All the better.

A few months back, two fans of popular horse micturition beer Natural Light (aka Natty Light) realized that to date, no beer had been sent into space. After pitching their idea to the Natty Light brewery, the pair put together a weather balloon spacecraft that would carry a can of their favorite brew to new heights. Unfortunately, it worked and now Natty Light is the first beer in space. With thousands of years of brewing history, this is what we decide to send into space? People, this is like putting Andrew W.K. on the Voyager record. We can do better, I believe in us.

As a part of Red Stripe’s “Make Something Out of Nothing” campaign, Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki and Mathew Kneebone joined forces to make this crazy sound system out of 5,000 actual Red Stripe cans. As you may be aware, Red Stripe is a Jamaican beer and DIY sound systems are actually a fairly relevant part of Jamaican culture. Many reggae bands from the island don’t have the money to get a real sound system and instead cobble together something makeshift. That’s what inspired Red Stripe to commission this very Jamaican sound system made out of very Jamaican beer cans.

If you ever needed irrefutable proof that both the Muppets and professional wrestling are completely real, here you have it. In a recent match, Beaker, of the Muppets, provided wrestler Santino Marella with a Muppets’ Lab energy drink intended to give “speed, power, and agility.” While it didn’t appear to do that, it did help Marella win the match. There is now no question in my mind why people don’t take professional wrestling seriously: Because there isn’t nearly enough of this.

As if the amazing filmography of Studio Ghibli, partly founded by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, wasn’t enough reason to visit the animation studio’s museum, here’s one more: They have their own beer. Named “Kaze no Tani,” the brew’s name references the film and manga series Nausicaä of The Valley of the Wind (Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä) produced by Miyazaki. And it looks delicious.

There’s scant information as to what kind of beer it is, but judging from the imagery on the label, I’m guessing it’s a wheat beer. And such a label! Drawn in the studio’s distinctive style, it features a harvest goddess (possibly Nausicaä herself?) huffing a great wind over Mt. Fuji. Each corner has a piece of heraldry, perhaps making references to early films like My Neighbor Totoro and Castle in the Sky. If you’re hanging around Western Tokyo, be sure to stop in for a brew. It’s always a bit forced to ask readers to leave comments, but if you’ve tried this beer, I want to know how it was.