Today’s beer video is an old one, and although it claims to be from 1930, according to one source it may be from a decade earlier, possibly the 1920s. Either way, it’s a peek inside a working German brewery in the first half of the last century. Entitled VISIT A GERMAN BEER FACTORY 1930, it’s a silent movie with rousing classical music and a mix of live action and simple animation. It helps to know some German, but if you already know the basics of brewing you can probably work it out.
Beer In Film #28: Drone Beer Deliveries
Today’s beer video has the potential to be a game changer. Imagine if beer could be delivered straight to your door! Well, now it can. Lakemaid Beer, which as far as I can tell is contract-brewed at Stevens Point Brewing and is distributed in seven states in the midwest. But now they’ve added delivery by drone to their distribution channels. According to Field & Stream, “the North country brewer is testing beer delivery to ice anglers via drones. Okay, so maybe this is just a publicity stunt by a beer company that knows smart marketing, but I don’t think it’s that farfetched to think drones will be delivering all sorts of things in the near future. If not beer, maybe at least we’ll be able to get a hot pepperoni pizza delivered to our ice shacks soon.” From Lakemaid’s press release:
“Inspired by Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, which has been testing the drone delivery of its products, Lakemaid Beer has been testing a new drone delivery system on some of the top ice fishing lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
“Amazon faces a lot of obstacles,” said Lakemaid Beer Company’s president, Jack Supple. “Dense urban locations present a host of problems to drone delivery. But our tests are on vast, wide-open frozen lakes free of trees and power lines. Our drone can fly as the crow flies, straight to our target, based on GPS coordinates provided by an ice angler. Fish houses are very uniform in height, so we can fly lower than FAA limits, too.”
“It’s the perfect proving ground for drone delivery,” said Supple, “Our initial tests on several mid-size lakes have been very successful. We’re looking forward to testing the range of our drones on larger lakes.”
Who knows, maybe this will really — forgive the pub — take off.
Beer In Film #26: The Streets Of San Francisco
Today’s beer video is, of all things, an episode of an old television show, The Streets of San Francisco, which was on the air for five seasons, from 1972 to 1977. Tonight’s shows, as always “a Quinn-Martin Production,” was from the last season — Season 5, Episode 20 — and is entitled “Dead Lift.” During its run, many guests stars appeared on the show, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s in tonight’s episode, playing a body builder whose bad temper leads to …. wait for it murder. But he’s not the reason I posted it. What’s cool about this episode is that Schwarzenegger’s character, Josef Schmidt, works at Anchor Brewery, and the brewery can be seen in one of the scenes. At 9:43 we see a close-up of the bottling line, which pulls back to a wider shot where we see Schwarzenegger walking through the brewery with a keg on his shoulder. But after being told he’s working too hard, he goes a little crazy and starts throwing kegs around, and they fire him. Unfortunately, that’s the only scene in the brewery, and there’s no Michael Douglas either, as this was near the end of the show’s run and he’d already left for greener pastures.
Beer In Film #23: SABMiller Brewing Process
Today’s beer video is a great little isometric motion graphic animated film of the SABMiller Brewing Process, told in about three and a half minutes.
Beer In Film #21: Prohibition: The Forgotten Crusade
Today’s beer video is a short film about prohibition and its effects. Entitled Prohibition: The Forgotten Crusade, it was created by Jared K. Productions. They originally uploaded it in 2007 but because it uses old footage, it looks much older than that, so when it was actually produced I can’t say.
ABI To Buy Back Korea’s OB
In a strange turn of events, Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) has agreed to buy back the South Korean Oriental Brewery (OB) for $5.8 billion, about three times the $1.8 billion that they sold it for in 2008. OB is South Korea’s largest brewery with approximately 60% of the market.
From the press release:
KKR and Affinity Equity Partners (“Affinity”) today announced that an agreement has been entered into whereby AB InBev will reacquire Oriental Brewery (“OB”), the leading brewer in South Korea, from KKR and Affinity for 5.8 billion USD.
This agreement returns OB to the AB InBev portfolio, after AB InBev sold the company in July 2009, following the combination of InBev and Anheuser-Busch, in support of the company’s deleveraging target. AB InBev will reacquire OB earlier than July 2014, as it was originally entitled to under the 2009 transaction.
Since KKR and Affinity entered into partnership with OB in 2009, OB has grown to become the largest brewer in South Korea, driven by strong growth of the Cass brand. OB and AB InBev also remained long-term partners through OB’s exclusive license to distribute select AB InBev brands in South Korea such as Budweiser, Corona and Hoegaarden.
Carlos Brito, Chief Executive Officer of AB InBev, said, “We are excited to invest in South Korea and to be working with the Oriental Brewery team again. OB will strengthen our position in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region and will become a significant contributor to our Asia Pacific Zone.
Bloomberg Businessweek also has more on the story.
Beer In Film #20: Is Beer In Your Career?
Today’s beer video is an hour long panel discussion at UC San Diego last April, part of their Career Channel programming for UCTV, University of California Television. Entitled Is Beer In Your Career?, and panelists include Stone Brewing’s Greg Koch, Lost Abbey’s Tomme Arthur, Ballast Point’s Yuseff Cherney, and White Lab’s Chris White. They talk about “why San Diego has become such a nationally renowned region for craft beer production, and where the professional brewing industry is headed” during the hour-long discussion.
An Overview Of 2013 In Beer Law
The Pennsylvania law firm Komlossy Law, who has a craft beer practice area, posted a comprehensive overview of the major legal tussles that craft brewers went through last year, entitled the Year in Beer(law).
Hamm’s In San Francisco
A friend and regular reader sent me this old photograph of the Hamm’s brewery sign at night, taken in San Francisco around 1954, the year the Hamm’s Brewery opened. It’s a nighttime shot of the iconic Hamm’s sign on the roof of the brewery that was located at 1550 Bryant Street. When it was built, “it was the largest commercial sign on the West Coast.” The brewery closed in 1972, and sign taken down three years later, in 1975. According to Wikipedia, it was a “20-by-80 foot sign, with a 3-dimensional 13-foot beer chalice on top, [and] appeared in the first Dirty Harry film. In the early 1980s, the beer vats were first squatted and then rented out to punk rock bands. Known as “The Vats,” the brewery was a center of San Francisco punk rock culture with about 200 bands using individual vats as music studios. The building was renovated in the mid 1980s and converted into offices and showroom space.” In 2012, the Chronicle did a piece about the sign’s fate, What happened to the Hamm’s Brewery sign?, that included additional photos taken during the day, but the sign looks most impressive at night, and it was even animated, with neon rings of beer turning on and off in sequence, so the glass of beer looked like it was emptying and then filling up again.
Spencer Trappist Brewery Is Bizarre?
By now you’ve probably seen the news that the Spencer Trappist Brewery, America’s first Trappist brewery is selling beer, their Spencer Trappist Ale. I didn’t feel the need to write much about it since the news is just about everywhere, from the Boston Globe to L.A. Weekly, from NPR to CBS News.
But here’s one I don’t quite get. When ABC News, specifically the affiliate station out of Fresno, California, KFSN Channel 30, covered the story, they ran the headline US monks move into Trappist beer brewing business, but used essentially the same AP Story that most news outlets are using for this story. But ABC News also tagged the story with “Massachusetts,” which makes sense, and “bizarre,” which does not. Could somebody please explain to me what’s “bizarre” about this story? Other headlines in ABC’s bizarre topics include stories about devil babies, atomic wedgies and anal probes. But monks brewing beer, something they’ve been doing since the middle ages, possibly as early as the 6th century, is lumped in with what you’d normally only find in the pages of the Weekly World News when you’re checking out at the grocery store.
Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but that seems like beer getting a slap in the face to me. It was probably just some ignorant intern who didn’t know what to do with the story and didn’t want to have to think about it very much, and so just threw it in the catch-all category. But surely this story should have been characterized differently. Is that really too much to ask?
You can also see additional photos at their Facebook page. And below is a video of the Spencer Trappist monks from St. Joseph’s Abbey.
A day in the life of a monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey from Spencer Brewery on Vimeo.