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Archives for June 2013

Hello, Is It Beer You’re Looking For?

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First Willie Nelson did ads for Taco Bell to pay his back taxes, and now Lionel Richie is apparently doing the same thing, crooning a version of his hit song “Hello, Is It Me You’re Looking For” to pay the $1.1 million he owes in back taxes to the IRS. The ad itself is pretty funny, a man in searching his refrigerator, presumably looking for a beer, when we here Richie singing his song, and then the man sees him singing through the back of the refrigerator. Cut to the inside of the icebox, and there’s Lionel Richie, dressed in white, sitting a white piano in an all-white room.
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He stops playing long enough to fill a pint glass of beer using the new Tap King dispenser from the Lion Nathan Brewery. Richie reportedly was paid $1.5 million for the ad, which should get him out of hot water with the taxman. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if he’d actually sung “hello, is it beer you’re looking for?”

If the ad won’t play (the embed code has been giving me error messages off and on), try this link here or watch it on AdWeek or Australia’s newspaper The Age.

Beer In Ads #916: Tally Ho

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Monday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1949. Part of Bud’s long-running “There’s nothing like it” series, but is odd for depicting a more traditionally English fox and hounds hunt, which I suspect was not part of ordinary life for most, if even many, Americans in late forties. More curious still, is in the text at the bottom it reads: “There’s more Budweiser now — and there will be still more as our expansion program continues.” That seems like an odd message to be telling consumers, but maybe this ad was intended for a narrower audience.

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Hop Cigars

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I’ve been known to enjoy a nice cigar after a big meal, often paired with a LBV port or a big beer. I used to have a small humidor, but after the kids came along I noticed I hardly ever sparked one up, so I got rid of it, and the cigars that were inside, a decade ago. Still, I’ve accepted a cigar from friends while out at beer events from time to time, and I confess I do enjoy the ritual of a cigar, how it slows down the pace of life and forces you into an unhurried, relaxed state. Even so, I’m not quite sure what to make of these. A cigar company is making cigars that are “seasoned” with Centennial hops. The company, Hopz, markets them as “craft beer cigars” with tobacco from the Dominican Republic.

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Ted’s Cigars carries two different sizes of Hopz cigars. The first is the “Toro”
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The second is the “Petit Corona.”
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Here’s the story about how the Hopz cigar came to be:

One evening, after a particularly lengthy “meeting” at the local pub, it occurred to Ted that he should set out to create the perfect smoker’s complement to his favorite IPA.

He experimented with dozens of craft beers, and equally as many hop varieties, until settling upon Centennial Hops, known for their robust floral aroma, to season this premium Dominican Republic Cigar. The result is the HOPZ® Craft Beer Cigar.

We use the same aromatic process that we use to season our Maker’s Mark Bourbon Cigar to give this 6×50 toro its remarkable ale-like qualities, and then seal it in a glass tube for freshness. When paired with an extra-hoppy IPA this cigar makes the already pleasurable experience of a well poured pint worth sitting down for. Ted invites you to do the same.

Hmm, I can’t decide if that sounds ideal or completely foul. The claim is that they’re perfect to pair with hoppy beers. Anybody try one? What do you think? Is this a good idea?

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American Breweries Top 2,500

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Late last week, the Brewers Association announced that the number of breweries in the United States had eclipsed 2,500. As of May 31, brewery detective Erin Fay Glass put the number of breweries in America at 2,514, which is 767 more than there were on the same date two years ago.

More from the press release:

The list includes 24 breweries we code as “large” in our database for A-B, MillerCoors and breweries named for brands of Goose Island (packaging brewery), Leinenkugel’s and Blue Moon. In addition there are 109 regional breweries, 1214 microbreweries, and 1167 brewpubs.

The number of microbreweries passed the number of brewpubs in February 2013 for the first time since 1987.

Our count of breweries-in-planning is at 1559, up from 1228 a year ago. (But we did purge a couple hundred from the roles last fall and winter.)

At the current pace, the BA expects that the number of breweries should surpass 3,000 sometime in 2014. Sheesh.

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