Thursday’s ad is for Coors. It’s an old advertising lithograph from around the 1890s. I love these kind of old ads that are merely showing off the industrial beauty of old breweries. This is, in a sense, vintage brewery porn. I attended a Coors event earlier tonight (more about that later) and so this seemed an appropriate ad to showcase today.
Wednesday’s ad is for McEwan’s from the 1950s. The ad uses their “Everybody’s Choice” tagline showing an idyllic scene from history, a cartoon version of the laughing cavalier, McEwan’s logo based on the painting by Frans Hals.
Tuesday’s ad is for Budweiser from the 1950s. The ad is positioning Budweiser as a food friendly beer. The dish in the center reads. “Age Old Partners — Fine Beer and Fine Food.” All the other dishes depict some of the foods they believe Bud will pair well with: pheasant, turkey, duck, beef, lobster, deer and fish. Having been to several beer dinners put on by Anheuser-Busch, I can’t say that Bud is a versatile as they suggest, and is frankly overwhelmed by most of those dishes. But it’s interesting to see them try to position it as an all-purpose food beer.
Monday’s ad is another oldie, from 1905. It’s for Weisbrod & Hess, a.k.a. Oriental Brewery of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It’s a complex and beautifully illustrated poster.
Our seventeenth Guinness poster by John Gilroy is part of the “My Goodness, My Guinness” series, showing a Pelican with his mouth filled with bottles of Guinness and, in the background, a table of zookeepers looking around, wondering what happened to their beer.
Friday’s ad is for the new pop top bottle that Schlitz debuted in the early 1960s. It’s their stubbie bottle — I just love the look of the stubbie bottle — showing how easy it twists off. And then there’s that tagline. :Now a beer bottle you can open with your bare hands.”
Thursday’s ad is one of the oldest I’ve come across. It’s from 1877 and is, I believe, for a Baltimore brewery, an F. Klemm. The lithograph was created by a Baltimore firm, A. Hoen & Co. I chose it because today in 1851, an ice machine was patented so brewers no longer needed to go all the way to the north pole for their ice. Still, it’s pretty funny seeing the polar bears take to beer so completely. To the left, you can see one smoking a cigar, but my favorite is on the right where a, presumably, mama bear is giving her cub a sip of her beer.
Wednesday’s ad is from Life Magazine, and ran in the April 17, 1950 issue. The Budweiser ads shows a couple gardening, with the tagline “There’s nothing like it … absolutely nothing.” But it’s the text that I really love, comparing mother nature to their beer.
No one works more tirelessly to give you the good things of life than Mother Nature. It is she, by the way, who brings you BUDWEISER. We supply her with the choicest of ingredients and the most perfect of working conditions and … slowly … slowly she matures every flavorful, sparkling drop of the world’s most famous beer.
Live life, every golden minute of it. Enjoy BUDWEISER, every golden drop of it.
Now that’s beautiful copy-writing.
Tuesday’s ad is, I believe, one featuring King Gambrinus, entitled Biere Allary by Jean D’Ylen. I chose it because it was today in 1294 that Jan Primus, a.k.a. John I, Duke of Brabant, and possibly the inspiration for King Gambrinus died. The ad is from 1925 in France.
“This Jean D’ylen image is another example of how his teacher, Cappiello, influenced his work. This poster is a cartone — it is set onto cardboard and would have then been placed above a display of the beer or set somewhere as an advertising tool inside the store. It was never made into a full-sized poster.”
You can see more posters by D’Ylen at art.com.
Monday’s ad is another modern series by Budějovický Budvar — one of two original Budweisers — known in the U.S. as Czechvar. The ad campaign features four simple ads, one for each of the primary ingredients of beer: barley, hops, water and yeast. I don’t know what any of the text says, but I love the simplicity of them.
