Friday’s ad is the fourth baseball-themed one, which I’ll be continuing through the World Series. The ad is from 1982 and features baseball personality Bob Uecker, who Johnny Carson dubbed “Mr. Baseball.” This was one his earliest ads for Miller Lite, when they started trying to convince men to drink a low-calorie beer. It features Uecker’s signature self-deprecating humor with the line “Great ballplayers drink Lite beer because it’s less filling. I know. I asked one.”
Thursday’s ad is the third baseball-themed one, which I’ll be continuing through the World Series. The ad is from 1962 and features baseball legend Casey Stengel, when he was managing the New York Mets. The woman in the ad is Miss Rheingold for 1962, Kathy Kersh.
Wednesday’s ad is the second baseball-themed one, which I’ll be continuing through the World Series. The ad is from 1958 and is by the now defunct trade organization for brewer’s malt, the Barley and Malt Institute. It features a number of men enjoying both beer and baseball. The text is great, too. “The goodness of Malt yours when you say , “Let’s make it beer.” It looks like beer at the ballpark in 1958 may have been $1. The man in the foreground is holding two beers, and the hand on the right appears to have just accepted two dollar bills. That, or it’s even cheaper and he just bought a round for the row.
Tuesday’s ad is the first baseball-themed one, which will continue through the World Series. It’s for Hamm’s Beer, and is a newer ad, at least from the period of time when Pabst owned the brand, before selling it to Miller — 1983-99. But it’s a great use of the Hamm’s Bear playing baseball.
Monday’s ad is for a failed brand from the Jackson Brewery in New Orleans, Louisiana — better known as Jax Brewery. In what I believe began in the late 1960s, Jax launched a brand called Fabacher and had ads with a fake “Andrew Fabacher” who supposedly looked like Andrew Jackson, which is who the brewery had been named for. The brewery was founded in 1890 by Alsatian German immigrant Lawrence Fabacher. It stayed in business during Prohibition by making root beer, other soft drinks and near beer. “By the late 1930s it was sold in all of Louisiana, and parts of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama.” In 1964, they renovated the brewery and became the “10th largest single-plant brewery in the country, brewing nearly 450,000 barrels of beer annually, [also] making it the largest independent brewery in the South” at that time. The beer ultimately failed and the brewery closed in the mid-1970s. The brewery location is today a shopping mall.
Here’s an interesting art project from the Netherlands. It’s called How To Explain It To My Parents? It’s a series by artists and directors Lernert & Sander in which five “abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about.” In Episode 1 Dutch artist Arno Coenen explains to his father about his latest project: brewing beer.
Coenen is not a commercial brewer, but it’s clear from the video that he’s been home brewing since he was in high school. He contracted two beers from the Brouwerij de Molen for his Eurotrash Brewery project.
Here’s a description of the exhibition from Coenen’s website:
The Eurotrash Brewery project presented in full effect by an Oktoberfest beertent installation at the museum for contemporary art “het Domein” in Sittard Holland last autumn,during the local beerfest! 2 special brews were made, a beer named “Red Oktoberfestbeer”, brewed with mostly Munchener malt and a big dose of Bambergerrachmalz, fermented with a spicy Belgian yeast at a modest drinkable alcohol percentage. The whole brew (500 liters) was available on draft. Especially for the ladies however a mega strong (16% alcohol!) barley wine fermented with champagne yeast, served in elegant champagne flute, called “Eurotrash Lady.” And the ladies loved it.
Both beers were masterly brewed by Menno Olivier from Hollands best brewery “de Molen” from Bodegraven.
In the beertent a altar-esque installation build up by a bar wit 2 beerpumps refridgerators filled with 75 centiliter bottles of “Eurotrash Lady” 7 HD LCD screens with Eurotrash Brewery commercial videos and animations, e.g. the great music video “stars in a circle” by my friends Alex Kloster and Johannes Malfatti from transformer di roboter.
So that’s the context as Coenen tries to explain to his Dad why what he does is art, in this case why brewing a beer is art. It’s an interesting conversation and you can feel there’s some tension between father and son. It’s in Dutch, of course, but it is subtitled.
How to explain it to my parents – Arno Coenen from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo.
Today’s art is a beautiful painting by American artist Tompkins H. Matteson. The title of the painting is Harvesting Hops and the original is at the Museum of Art for the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. Matteson was born about thirty miles from Utica, in Peterboro, New York in 1813. This painting was done in 1863 so presumably it’s depicting a hop harvest in upstate New York.
Click through the painting to see a larger image to see all the detail in it.
As one source explains, “the various stages involved in harvesting hops have been painted in meticulous detail. Buildings with chimneys typical of breweries can be seen in the background on the right, but the subject is merely the pretext to depict a highly sentimental rural scene.” But I don’t think the author of that commentary is very familiar with what breweries look like, because the buildings he’s referring to look more like hop kilns than breweries, which makes a lot more sense, too, in the context of the painting. Not to mention that the horse-drawn cart appears to laden down with hop bales.
You can see more of Tompkins Harrison Matteson’s art at American Gallery, ArtCyclopedia, AskArt. For a short biography, try Arader’s Galleries or Answers.com.
Our 39th Guinness poster by John Gilroy was undoubtedly done around the time of World War 2. It depicts a group of four Toucans flying in formation at an RAF airfield while a pair of mustachioed officers look on in surprise. They’re probably surprised because each Toucan is balancing two pint of Guinness on each of their beaks. The tagline is “Lovely day for a Guinness.”
Friday’s ad is for Schlitz from 1965 and features an ugly clown, although I pretty much hate all clowns so I find them all scary and a not a bit funny. Sad, really. And this one’s no different, with the text “What makes the clown smile? Schlitz. Greatest beer on Earth.” The ad also mentioned an upcoming circus parade later that year in Milwaukee, on July 5.
Thursday’s ad is for the Canadian beer Molson and is from 1985. It depicts an idyllic beach scene and features a bottle of Molson beer drawn into the sand between two beach blankets. The woman from the blue towel has walked over to the man on the yellow towel, saying. “Well, now that you’ve drawn my attention ….” At the bottom is the tagline, “Molson Makes It Golden.”
