Friday’s ad is for Tuborg, from 1983. Showing “Today’s Tuborg,” which apparently is all about being “The Best of Both Worlds,” whatever that means. I only know what it doesn’t include.
No Jocks.
No Jokes.
No Cowboys.
No Horses.
No Mountains.
No Sunsets.
No Songs.
No Tricks.
No Gimmicks.
Nothing But Great Beer Taste.
Today’s infographic is an interesting look at the Difference Between Novice And Expert Beer Drinkers, created by Business Insider, using a paper from earlier this year by Stanford University computer science post-doc Julian McAuley and assistant professor Jure Leskovec. The paper outlined “how our tastes change as we consume more products and gain more expertise,” but they then took it a step father, and applied their model to the beer reviews on RateBeer.
Click here to see the graph full size.
According to the Business Insider article, here’s what else they discovered.
The figure above shows the relationship between user experience and beer preference. McAuley and Leskovec broke down the beers into lagers, mild ales, and strong ales, and then calculated each beer’s individual ranking by experience level.
The x-axis shows the average rating of products on the site (out of 5 stars), while the y-axis shows the difference between expert and novice ratings.
According to their study, while beginners and experts have similar top beers, experts tend to have stronger opinions than novice users. They explain in the study:
While a lager such as Bud Light is disliked by everybody, it is most disliked by experts; one of the most popular beers in the entire corpus, Firestone XV, is liked by everybody, but is most liked by experts.
They also found that more-experienced users gave higher ratings to almost all strong ales, illustrating that these types of beer are more of an acquired taste than traditional lagers.
Thursday’s ad is for Schaefer, from 1975. Using the curious tagline “The Number-One Draft in the East,” along with their long-running slogan, “Schaefer, when you’re having more than one.” Plus there’s that great foam comb-over.
Today’s infographic is all about Beer in India, showing several data points about India’s brewing industry and beers. It was created by Start Up Media, and I chose it for today because it’s the start of Ganesh Chaturthi, the Indian elephant god festival.
Click here to see the infographic full size.
Wednesday’s ad is for Narragansett Lager Beer, from 1963. Billing itself as “One of America’s Great Breweries,” presumably thanks to it’s “straight-from-the-barrel taste” that’s also “Light, Mild and Refreshing.” Plus there’s a beautiful shot of the brewery, though I can’t tell if that’s a photograph or a painting.
Today’s infographic, Love & Libations: America’s Drunkest Singles, was created by Howaboutwe, a dating website for singles and couples, apparently. The chart shows a breakdown of drinking patterns based on a variety of factors, such as religion, gender and education.
Click here to see the infographic full size.
Tuesday’s ad is for Rheingold Beer, from 1947, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Michaele Fallon. She’s riding a roller coaster called the “Rocket,” with her dog on her lap. I can’t imagine the dog is happy about that. There was a famous Rocket roller coaster in Ocean View Amusement Park in Norfolk, Virginia, but it was torn down in 1979, after filmmakers competed the movie “The Death of Ocean View Park.”
Today’s infographic has no title but the filename is “Handy Beer Flavor Chart.” It apparently was created by the Beer Life, a website that appears to no longer be active. While not entirely accurate, it is at least an interesting and different approach to showing the range of different kinds of beers.
Click here to see the chart full size.
Here’s a hilarious marketing development, one that would absolutely never fly in the land of the free and the home of the “think about the children” neo-prohibitionists. If you’ve been the parent of a young daughter, you’re probably already familiar with the marketing juggernaut that is Hello Kitty and her legion of cute minions from Sanrio. It’s hard to think of another character with as much licensed tie-in merchandising as Hello Kitty. She makes Disney look like amateurs. So really, it should come as no surprise then, that Sanrio has licensed Hello Kitty for a series of four fruit beers, brewed by the Taiwan Tsing Beer Co.. The four initial fruit beers include Peach, Passion Fruit, Banana and Lemon and come in 330 ml cans.
Bloomberg Businessweek referred to the announcement as Zen and the Art of Crass Marketing, which is surprising since I never really thought of the business press, or indeed the business world generally, as having high moral standards if there was a buck to be made. When you consider that it was big business that sank the country, and the world, into a global recession, then getting a bailout from us, while still collecting their bonuses, I have had time swallowing Bloomberg’s assertion that this is the line that business dare not cross, that this is the one going too far into crassness. If anything, this is pretty harmless and funny.
The ABC News Report is slightly more balanced, and reveals that these “new fruit-flavored cans mark Hello Kitty’s second entry into the world of alcohol. Previously, Hello Kitty wines were licensed in Asia, Europe and the United States.”
I can’t say any of them look particularly good, but one thing most news accounts overlooked is that the beer is actually only 2.3% a.b.v., making them session beers, and actually the opposite of the evil Bloomberg makes them out to be. Also, Kotaku, reviewing the beers, describes them as “closest to Chimay but with stronger fruit flavorings. The fruit isn’t a note or a sense in these beverages but instead the overpowering star of it all.” That’s hard to swallow, but then I haven’t actually tried them and it’s likely I won’t ever have the chance to, not that it will keep me up at night. Still, an odd and twisted development.
Monday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from May 1942. This one involves a ping pong, err … table tennis, match and was created by well-known illustrator Albert Dorne. Using the Pabst tagline about 33 to 1, that’s also the score in the game, which sparks a bit of a goofy discussion.
