A Columbia business-school professor and two MIT business professors — Shane Frederick and Dan Ariely — tested how people react when you put a few drops of balsamic vinegar (Trader Joe’s) in their beer (Sam Adams). Vinegar, the authors explain, is “a beer flavoring that most participants find conceptually offensive, but that does not, at this concentration, degrade the beer’s flavor (in fact, it slightly improves it).” Asked in the abstract what they think of the idea, some 80 percent of participants in one survey said, basically, Yuck. That’s what you would expect. But when the professors administered a blind taste test, 59 percent of the participants actually preferred the beer with vinegar to an unadulterated glass of Sam Adams. (During the test, the scholars dubbed the augmented drink “MIT brew.”)

Nigeria has overtaken Ireland as the second-largest market for Guinness as Diageo pushes the black stuff internationally. Although the world’s biggest drinks company did not reveal precise numbers, it said net sales of Guinness in the year ending June 30 were up 18% in Nigeria.

Ho Chi Minh City is home to a handful of European-style microbreweries, most of which are centrally located in District 1 and some of which claim to brew their beer according to the Bavarian purity law known as the Reinheitsgebot. This trend took off in 2001 when Hoa Vien, which had previously been importing Pilsner Urquell, built a Euro-style brewery inside the restaurant with the help of experts from the Czech Republic. Other breweries followed, trying to tap into a domestic beer culture that stretches back at least to the 1890s (that’s when the Habeco brewery, now state run, was founded by French colonialists), was revitalized during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and currently produces more than 2 billion liters of beer a year.