I don’t like playing favorites. I just really like beer. Especially after this weekend. But enough about me.

A couple of weeks ago, I got to chat with Tim Noetzel, the co-founder of Pintley, a Boston-based beer website that provides personalized recommendations, tasting notes, and a social community. Pintley is a participant in this year’s MassChallenge startup accelerator, and it is one of 26 companies in contention for $1 million in prizes (divided among several winners), to be awarded tonight at the program’s closing ceremony in South Boston.

So, apropos of nothing, I wanted to provide a quick sketch of Pintley’s story. Noetzel is a Tufts University grad who studied abroad in Germany during his junior year. Not too surprisingly, he fell in love with the beer culture there. When he came back to Boston, he started Pintley as a hobby with his childhood friend, Shannon Hicks. (They grew up together in the suburbs of Chicago.)

Pintley opened to the public in July 2010, as a site where consumers could sign up and rate beers and discover microbrews. The company has since rolled out an iPhone app and social features including a news feed and monthly prizes for people in the Pintley community who share recommendations with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. So, as you might guess, it’s more than just a consumer app.

In fact, Pintley is trying to change “how beer is marketed and sold,” says Noetzel (and yes, he’s a home brewer). “Consumers are demanding much more variety. They want products tailored to their tastes.” He adds, “The availability of social media means the advertising game is really changing.”

The company is working with a range of businesses, from small craft brewers up through established breweries such as Great Divide and well-known companies like Samuel Adams. The idea is to help brewers reach more customers, Noetzel says, as well as put “smaller brands on more even footing with big brands.” Pintley is trying to do this by helping brewers build word-of-mouth campaigns that take “people who love your product and make them advocates,” he says.

That’s an ambitious and popular goal, of course. There are tons of other beer sites and apps out there, ranging from local search and discovery (Tap Hunter) to recommendations and social features (BrewGene) to just plain silly but entertaining (iBeer). But if Pintley can carve out its niche and build some traction, it could gain the leverage it needs to get more paying brewers involved.

Meantime, we’ll be watching to see how Pintley and the other MassChallenge finalists do tonight. (Drync, another finalist, specializes in wine search and discovery, so there’s a mini-theme here.) Truth be told, we’ll probably be knocking back a few too, along with the rest of the startup community. Good luck to all tonight.

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A few friends have asked me how my life has changed since I moved from Boston to San Francisco to open Xconomy’s Bay Area bureau. Do you want to know the real answer? I drink more.

A lot more.

In the Silicon Valley technology startup world that I cover, there’s at least one cocktail party, private dinner, coder beerfest, pre-conference gathering, post-conference gathering, movie screening, gallery opening, or other excuse for the alcohol to flow every freaking night of the week. Usually more than one. (If you don’t believe me, just subscribe to the Silicon Valley edition of StartupDigest, a guide to startup events curated by a cool guy here named Chris McCann.)

It’s like living in an infinite Mad Men episode. Raymond Carver, the American short story writer and poet, once wrote that wine is the worst drink to get drunk on—”hangovers you don’t forget”—and I’m learning that he’s right. I should probably switch to beer. San Francisco, after all, is home to at least 11 breweries and innumerable brewpubs. But when you live so close to Napa…

All kidding aside, I think there’s a real lesson here about the differences between Silicon Valley and other major hubs of technology innovation. In a column a few weeks ago headlined The Real City of Innovation is Everywhere, I argued that the Internet and the outsourcing revolution make it possible to build a startup just about anywhere these days. And it’s true. But when you look at where the startup founders really congregate, and where the angel and venture dollars are flowing to, Northern California still dominates. There’s obviously something in the water here. And I think that something is alcohol—or, more to the point, the schmoozing that alcohol facilitates.

Laura Fitton, aka @pistachio, the founder of the Cambridge, MA-based Twitter app store Oneforty, sent me an interesting note recently. She’d just visited the Bay Area, where several of Oneforty’s investors and advisors are based, and I had commented to her that I was overwhelmed by the number of startup stories that are begging to be written here (as this peek inside my story pipeline illustrates).

“I struggle so hard with how to bring that ‘steeped in startups’ feeling back home with me every time I fly back from SF,” Fitton commented from Cambridge. “We’re just too siloed here as startup teams—makes it even lonelier and prevents a hell of a lot of product innovation…We HAVE to overcome that isolation and siloing if we’re going to be inspired and energetic and passionate, not just in our founders but our entire teams.”

I’ve heard the same lament from other Boston-area entrepreneurs. I don’t have as much data from Xconomy’s other home cities of San Diego and Detroit, but I’m guessing that the siloing feels just as bad, if not worse.

Well, here in Silicon Valley and San Francisco they have this cool invention for overcoming isolation. It’s called getting together for drinks after work. From what I hear, this invention has spread to some circles in New York City, especially the Wall Street crowd. But it has yet to catch on in Boston’s startup community, where it seems that every weeknight is still a school night.

The thing is, you don’t necessarily have to leave work to drink. The beer flows freely at Google’s TGIF, the Friday afternoon gathering where … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Alkermes is getting full commercial rights to a drug for alcohol dependence after its partner, Frazer, PA-based Cephalon, relinquished its share of the product. Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) will receive an $11 million payment from Cephalon to cover estimated losses from commercializing naltrexone for extended release injectable suspension (Vivitrol), while Alkermes will pay Cephalon about $16 million for manufacturing equipment. For fiscal 2009, Alkermes expects the drug to generate $5 million to $8 million in sales.

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