Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Heineken Amnesia

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I came across this on Ad Punch, a blog about advertising. The post is about a new ad campaign by Heineken in India with fake news stories pasted to Heineken bottles about the supposed lengths people would go to actually drink Heineken beer. It still amazes me how powerful advertising is when it creates the perception that something as awful tasting as Heineken is considered a premium beer. So the first ad in the series really cracked me up. Here it is below.
 

 

Because in my opinion you’d have to have amnesia to drink Heineken willingly. Perhaps after drinking one it might give you amnesia. I certainly can’t remember any good reasons why anyone with or without amnesia would have one. There are other ads as well, which you can see on Ad Punch, but this one had me in stitches.

The Lego Beer Song

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A friend just sent me this. I’d heard the song before but hadn’t seen the video, which is done with legos in a stop-motion way. The song may be a little too celebratory of binge drinking but with the video is still pretty funny.

Ancient Beer Bottles Found

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From today’s Publican, a number of old beer bottles were found in the vaults of Worthington’s White Shield brewery in Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, now owned by Molson Coors. Some of the bottles are over 130 years old. The oldest bottle is 137-years old, bottled in 1869. That beer is Harry Ratcliff’s Ale and was brewed to commemorate a son being born into the Ratcliff family, which was later part of the Bass, Ratcliff & Gretton breweries in the late 1800s.

Above, Worthington White Shield’s head brewer, Steve Wellington. “It was always rumoured that there were some vintage beers on site but uncovering such an interesting collection is fantastic. I believe this is one of the most exciting and unique discoveries ever made in British brewing.”
 

 

From the Publican:

Dr George Philliskirk, beer expert and Chief Executive of the Beer Academy comments: “This discovery is remarkable, especially as the oldest beer of all dates back to 1869 and tastes so fresh, and with such attractive ripe plum and honeyed flavours. This demonstrates the potential for vintage beers to be taken seriously – maybe even being worthy of a special section in wine lists at Britain’s top restaurants.”

As a result of this find, Worthington’s in conjuction with CAMRA, is sponsoring a contest to find the oldest unopened bottle of beer in the U.K. The winner “will be invited to the White Shield Brewery in Burton upon Trent to brew their very own vintage.”

Below are some more photos of the bottles found in Worthington’s cellars:

 

 

World Series Beer Collectibles

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This will give you some idea how much I don’t follow baseball. Until I read this press release from Anheuser-Busch, I had no idea who won this year’s world series. Apparently it was the St. Louis Cardinals and A-B is doing a commemorative can and magnum bottle.

From the press release:

The commemorative 46.5-ounce magnum bottle features the Cardinals 2006 World Series Champions logo on the front, with a summary of the World Series on the back label. The World Series magnum is sold individually in a red and blue box featuring the Cardinals and World Series Champions logos. The 16-ounce Budweiser aluminum bottle features the Cardinals 2006 World Series Champions logo and lists the years of each of the Cardinals 10 titles. The aluminum bottle is sold in 15-packs of specially labeled Budweiser cases featuring images of the Cardinals World Series bottles.

Both will be available in liquor, grocery and convenience stores in the greater St. Louis metro area — the magnum bottle as early as this weekend, and the aluminum bottle starting mid-next week. Both bottles will be reintroduced in March, when they will be more widely available as the city gears up for the 2007 Major League baseball season.

And an AP story added:

A 46.5-ounce magnum bottle will include the Cardinals 2006 World Series Champions logo on the front and a summary of the World Series on the back. Also available is a 16-ounce aluminum bottle featuring the championship logo and a list of the 10 championship years for the Cardinals. Among all baseball teams, only the New York Yankees have won more World Series titles.

The Cardinals won only 83 regular-season games but won the World Series in five games over Detroit. It was their first championship in 24 years.

Though Anheuser-Busch sold the Cardinals to the current ownership group more than a decade ago, the brewery and the team remain closely connected. The new ballpark that opened this year is named Busch Stadium thanks to a naming-rights agreement. The old advertising jingle “Here Comes the King” still stirs the crowd during rallies.

Unfortunately, just like their Millennium magnum and other collectible bottles, inside will still be just Budweiser and not a special brew made for the occasion.

This Is Belgium

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Each year the Belgian Post Office does a series of commemorative stamps celebrating some aspect of Belgian society or heritage called “This is Belgium.” This year’s set honors the food and drink of Belgium.

As you can see, of the ten stamps in the series, two are beers: Orval and 3 Fonteinen Gueuze.

And here’s a larger look at the Orval stamp:

McFarland Nabs Second Writing Award

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British writer Ben McFarland won the coveted “Beer Writer of the Year” award from the British Guild of Beer Writers for 2006. This is the second time he’s won this award, having also been given the honor in 2004. McFarland writes for various trade and national press in the UK, including the Publican, the Guardian and the Independent. Congratulations to Ben.

Here’s a fun piece he did for the Publican that includes a quiz to determine what kind of beer snob you are.
 

Canadian Brewery to Donate Beer to Compatriots in Afghanistan

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The Steam Whistle Brewery, of Toronto, Canada, has announced its employees have decided to send a week’s worth of their beer rations, an employee benefit, to Candian soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. The company has stated that they’ll match the employee donations. According to the The Canadian Press, “troops are allowed to have liquor on the base three times during the year, including Christmas,” even though as a Muslim nation beer is hard to come by.
 

Canadian troops will receive limited edition Steam Whistle pilsner holiday twelve-packs like the one pictured here.

Be a Beer Tycoon

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I’m generally not one for video games, but this one could be interesting. According to GameShout, an online resource focused on computer gaming, the British company Virtual Playground has just released a new game called Beer Tycoon. According to the company’s website the game is described like this:

In Beer Tycoon you build, staff and manage your very own brewery. Invent new beer recipes from dozens of available ingredients, set them into production, create market leading brands and distribute them to your customers.

Starting with limited funds, build a micro-brewery and learn the craft of the brewer from the ground up in one of three European countries; Germany, the UK or Belgium. Eventually you’ll be confident enough to run a high tech industrial scale brewery on a truly massive scale.

 

 

As GameShout describes it, “the game offers the opportunity to enter the beer business as head of a micro brewery or a medium sized suburban brewery, or even enter the global competition managing a full-blown big brewery. These companies can consist of up to 21 different brewery building types. There are 50 ingredients one can brew the beer from, including various kinds of hops and malts, and even specialities like chili and chocolate.”

Now that could be a game I might enjoy playing. Unfortunately it appears to be only for Windows users right now, so us Macheads are left wanting, as usual.

A screen capture of one of the types of breweries you could build for your virtual brewing company.

Christgau on Beer

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Here’s a fun little piece of history I stumbled upon yesterday while searching for something wholly unrelated. If you’ve followed music with any seriousness, I probably don’t have to tell you who Robert Christgau is. Christgau has been the rock critic at the Village Voice for over thirty years and has published several books of his music criticism over the years. His column was de rigueur when I lived in New York City (and was a musician) in the late ’70s. According to his new website, he — and over half a dozen others — were fired from the Voice at the end of August when new owners took over management of the paper. Christgau will soon be contributing to Rolling Stone and NPR’s All Things Considered, and has put up most of his writing from over the past 37 years at his website. In addition to his writing about music, Christgau also has written on other topics including, surprisingly, beer. In 1975, he co-wrote a piece, with Carola Dibbell, entitled “The Great Gulp: A Consumer’s Guide to Beer.” It was published in the April 1975 edition of Oui magazine, a men’s magazine that was owned by Playboy until 1981.

It’s a fascinating little time capsule as the pair write about almost fifty domestic beers, many of which are no longer around, along with a a dozen popular imports The piece starts out with a short history of beer and an explanation of the methodology they used to rate the beers. Written two years before Michael Jackson’s ground-breaking first beer book, it’s a surprisingly earnest attempt at writing seriously about beer.

Here, for example, is their review of Anchor Steam Beer:

ANCHOR STEAM BEER (San Francisco, California) This product is the last example of America’s only indigenous brewing process. The main feature of the invention is air-temperature fermentation and its mother was an ice scarcity during San Francisco Gold Rush days. The beer also contains four times the usual amount of hops, the flower that gives beer its bitterness. “Steam” just means carbonation. Our bohemian friends found it winy, but we found it one more instance of San Francisco’s chronic confusion of eccentricity with quality. B

Check it out. It’s interesting to compare how they were writing about the beer versus today. Notice, for example, the way they discuss hops. Hops are not written about lovingly, the way we might but always if the hops are perceivable, it’s considered a negative. A very interesting look back.

 

I say “yes” to writing about beer, they say “oui!”
This is the April 1975 issue, in which Christgau’s
beer article originally appeared.

Fifty-Year Old Coors Found in California Dessert

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This was an odd little story out of Tennessee about some hikers who found a case of Coors that’s fifty-years old in the California dessert near San Diego, at the scene of a famous train wreck known as the “Coors Wreck.” The television station’s website, WBIR Channel 10, includes a link to a video report. In the report they show them opening and pouring out the contents of the beer. It’s interesting to see how it looks after being exposed to harsh temperatures for a half century. One odd thing in the story, however, is the interviewee seems to imply that the find was not made all that recently so I’m not exactly sure what made it news now. Anyway, it’s still fun to see it opened.

A fifty-year old can of Coors.