If you aren’t familiar with Dogfish Head, they are a great brewery that makes kickass beer. They started small, but have grown to be one of the top craft breweries around. Their motto is “off-centered ales for off-centered people,” and they don’t disappoint. Their beers, especially their line of IPAs, are some of the best around.

For URKontinent, various Google employees joined the project basically to coordinate and organize the information gathering. Those ideas were then fed to the brewers at Dogfish Head.

Google grabbed beer ideas from their offices all across the globe, and they also received input from the rest of the online community. The project coordinators used tools like Google moderator to get suggestions and feedback from Googlers across the world.

WebProNews has received this statement from a Google spokesperson -

We encourage our employees to pursue their interests—whether they are training for a marathon, inviting their favorite author to speak, or creating the perfect cafe latte. Similarly, the project with Dogfish Head brewery was a Googler-driven project organized by a group of craftbrewery aficionados across the company. While our Googlers had fun advising on the creation of a beer recipe, we aren’t receiving any proceeds from the sale of the beer and we have no plans to enter the beer business.

According to the mini-documentary, some of the Google guys even helped brew the beer.

Here’s what you can expect from the beer:

It begins with Pilsner, Munich and Chocolate Malts and Belgian Dark Candi syrup. Then we add unique ingredients from around the world. Wattleseed from Australia imparts a chocolate, coffee, and hazelnut taste to the beer. Toasted Amaranth from South America gives it an earthy, grainy flavor and a little additional roast flavor. Green Rooibos from Africa contributes a floral aroma and slight astringency. Myrica Gale from Europe supplements the bitterness from minimal hopping. Hive Plex Honey from California adds a subtle sweetness while maintaining the dry finish

This isn’t the first time Dogfish Head has tried the worldly beer concept. One of their older brews is called Pangaea and includes ingredients from all 7 continents – water from Antarctica, Muscavado sugar from Africa and Crystallized ginger from Australia.

Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione says they are very proud of the beer. “This beer is a valentine to boot-strapping creative entrepreneurs in all kinds of industries all over the world,” he says.

The beer went on tap at the Dogfish brewpub in Rehoboth Beach on Tuesday. They say they have plans to bottle it up and distribute the brew in the coming months.

For the event, Google partnered with NASA and PBS to set up a YouTube/Google Moderator-based interview with the crew, to be emceed by Miles O’Brien in 3 days, as discussed in the video above.

The questions are already pouring in. If you’re unfamiliar with how Google Moderator works, you can submit questions and they will get either voted up or down by other users, and typically, the questions that rise to the top will be the ones asked.

There are already plenty of questions pouring. So far, as of the time of this writing, 1,906 people have submitted 1,595 questions and cast 11,788 votes.

Google has also taken the opportunity to express its love for space exploration in other ways. “To mark the occasion, we put together this video to celebrate our love for space, told with the help of products we pour our hearts into every day,” explains Google’s Tiffany Montague, going by the title Intergalactic Federation King Almighty and Commander of the Universe. “You’ll see everything from historical sky maps featured in Google Earth, to 3D buildings at Kennedy Space Center, and our salute to both the astounding achievement of the Apollo era and the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a new space race of entrepreneurial leadership.”

She also expresses the company’s aspirations to continue moving beyond Earth in its quest for data dominance. “At Google, we’re never afraid to think big, and our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful doesn’t stop at our exosphere,” she says. “The universe is full of information, and as we push the boundaries of exploration, our job will be to organize it and make it searchable.”

Perhaps a better mission statement for Google would be to “organize the Universe’s data and make it worldly accessible”.

Another side note: Google’s main campus is less than a mile away from the NASA Ames Research Center.

The Endeavour’s launch lasted a reported 12 seconds.

"For example, if you have a restaurant site, you can embed Google Moderator on your suggestions page to get input from your restaurant patrons," explains Google Software Engineering Intern Eric Hysen.

Google provides steps for how to implement this here.

Google launched Moderator back in 2008 as a tool to help presenters prioritize questions for Q&A sessions. Since then, we’ve seen it in action a number of times, often from the company itself, but also in political settings, and other democratic-style events. Earlier this year, it was added to YouTube pages.

In May, Google launched the Google Moderator API, which means that developers can build tools around it.

Google recently added template themes to Google Sites.

Individuals with YouTube or Google accounts can submit questions on the White House’s YouTube channel using Google Moderator.  The same tech then makes it possible for people to vote questions up and down, which is important since Gibbs presumably won’t have time to address every issue.

Gibbs did promise in a short video that you can watch for yourself below, though, "I’m going to take questions directly from you right after the president is done speaking to the nation and addressing the Gulf oil spill at 8 PM Eastern Time."

YouTube announced today that it is integrating Google Moderator into channels on the site. This means that YouTube content producers will have a new and helpful way to engage with their viewers, and use that engagement to create more crowd-pleasing content.

Google Moderator lets popular items get voted up, so content producers can use the tool to see what is most in demand – what types of videos viewers would like to see more of, questions they want answered, etc.

"You set the parameters for the dialogue, including the topic, the type of submissions, and the length of the conversation," explain YouTube News Manager Olivia Ma and Moderator Product Manager Ginny Hunt. "Watch as submissions get voted up or down by your audience, and then respond to the top-voted submissions by posting a video on your channel. The platform operates in real-time, and you can remove any content that you or your audience flag as inappropriate. You can also embed the platform on your own website or blog."

YouTube users must be logged into a Google account that is linked to a YouTube account to participate in Moderator on YouTube.

"Google Moderator is used extensively within Google for meetings and to collect feedback from Googlers on events or happenings within the company," says Colby Ranger of the Google Moderator team. "It is also used at conferences and other events to organize and draw upon the collective wisdom of the participants."

Now anyone can build tools around Google Moderator, as the company has released an API for it.

Features:

- Create: You can create new series, topics, submissions, or votes on behalf of the currently authenticated user.

- Discover: You can retrieve topics in a series, or submissions in a particular topic or series. You can also track the current aggregate status of votes.

Examples of how the API have been illustrated by Google itself, and it will be interesting to see what ways developers outside of the company utilize it. It’s a pretty interesting tool with a great deal of potential, and with a mobile version (already developed in a Googler’s 20% time) it is portable as well.

Google Moderator will come into play as interested parties are supposed to use it to submit questions and/or vote on the ones other people put forward.  (Note: the window to submit and vote on questions will only remain open through 5 PM PT on April 13th.)

Then, as Mia Quagliarello, a community manager, explained in a post on the YouTube Biz Blog explained, YouTube will take the top-rated questions and "put one or more employees who can best address them on camera, to respond to you in a video which we’ll then post to the YouTube channel."

This arrangement seems more than fair, and should improve YouTube’s standing with its sometimes mutinous users.  Certain individuals, along with YouTube, may even make some money as a result if the Partner Program grows.

Anyway, Quagliarello indicated that YouTube will explore other matters in this fashion, so keep an eye out for additional Q&A opportunities in the months ahead.

A post on the YouTube Blog explains, "YouTube and Google partnered with the Politico and WJLA to give Virginian voters the opportunity to submit text or video questions for the state’s three Democratic gubernatorial candidates . . . .  Submissions took place on a new tool called Google Moderator, which allows you not only to submit questions or ideas, but also to vote on the submissions of others, moving them up or down in importance."

And the experiment seems to have been a huge success, considering that the post then continues, "Thousands of Virginians took part in the interactive interview, and last night WJLA and the Politico aired the results, in which all three candidates answered the top questions on television."

A similar project is already planned for the fall and Virginia’s general gubernatorial election, too.

"It’s no secret that small businesses play a key role in Google’s success as a company and drive the economy as a whole," says David Fischer, Google’s VP of Global Online Sales and Operations. "AdWords, AdSense, Apps – you name it – have all grown because small businesses use them. Because of that, increasing their bottom line is very important to us."

The Small Business Network is designed to promote business-friendly policies at the federal and state levels. Fischer says the company asked itself, "What can we do to help broaden the collective voice of small business both on Capitol Hill and in the states? We want to know about the issues that are important to our small business partners so that we can better invest in their goals and objectives and ultimately, their success."

While Google’s intention is to take on a variety of issues, the company is getting started right off the bat with increasing broadband access and preserving an open Internet.

The network takes full advantage of Google’s Moderator tool, which allows interested parties to share their thoughts and others to vote them up and down, creating a sense of priority among them. Google is hoping that they will be able to use the Network to help encourage lawmakers to grant funds to ISPs to create broadband access for small businesses around the U.S.

President Obama’s use of the video-sharing site should probably be explained first.  Earlier this week, he recorded a short clip asking citizens to submit questions to WhiteHouse.gov and vote on questions proposed by others.  He’ll answer some of the top-rated inquiries on Thursday.  So YouTube’s been given a key role in letting people interact with their government.