Friday’s holiday ad is for Rhode Island’s Narragansett Beer, which has made a come back in recent years. It originally “appeared in the December 23, 1945 issue of The Boston Herald.” Offering “Holiday Greetings from Narragansett,” and also featured a wonderful painting of an idyllic winter scene.
According to Narragansett’s blog, the “painting is titled, ‘On The Post Road,’ and was created by artist, Harold Breut.”
I kept forgetting to post this nice piece about King Hammurabi, the Babylonian ruler responsible for mankind’s first set of laws, known as the Hammurabi Code. It ran in the San Francisco magazine Drink Me, in their October 2011 issue. The article, Hammurabi: The King Of Beers, goes into some deatil about the laws in the Hammurabi Code dealing with beer:
The Code contains dozens of edicts concerning the growing, harvesting, and sale of grain. Thus it pertains to beer, since grain had been domesticated and farmed for only two reasons:beer and bread. But the laws which deal specifically with those happy suds are numbers 108 through 111.
Law 108 reads as follows: “if a tavern-keeper (female) does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.” There are a couple of important things to clarify here. First, it is of interest that the regulation goes out of its way to specify that the hypothetical tavern-keeper is female.
In ancient Babylon, almost all tavern-keepers (not to mention brewers, generally) were women.
Men hunted and made war; women grew food and made beer. And second, “shall be… thrown into the water” does not mean that the offending tavern-keeper was merely tossed in the nearest river and left to sputter. It meant that the guilty party was thrown into the nearest river and held there until she stopped sputtering. Additions to Babylonian law made after Hammurabi’s death did away with the drowning of offending barkeeps and replaced it with mutilation of the woman’s breasts. Sheesh…
Like most despotic rulers, Hammurabi was seriously paranoid that his subjects were plotting against his authority. One of the central meeting places for average citizens in Babylon was the beer hall. These were, or were thought to be, hotbeds of sedition, which inevitably led to the creation of Law 109: “if conspirators meet in the house of a tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court the tavern-keeper shall be put to death.” The method of execution favored here was to drown the wrongdoer in a barrel of her own beer. Given the amount of political sniping that goes on in our bars today, we can be thankful (I think) that Law 109 has gone the way of the dodo bird.
And then there were the nuns. Called “sisters of god,” they were holy women dedicated to one of the numerous gods that populated Babylonian mythology. The nuns were expected to behave according to a quite rigid set of moral protocols, and the punishments for failing to do so were, to say the least, horrifying. As an example we need look no further than Law 110: “if a sister of a god open a tavern, or enter a tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned to death.” Given that the Law specifically prohibits the sisters from not only drinking in a beer house, but going into business as a beer entrepreneur, we can only imagine that these actions were routinely undertaken by Babylon’s holy ladies. And the menfolk must have really hated them for breaking with the norm. Burning a woman alive for having a drink? Wow.
The final Law governing alcohol is 111, and it reads thusly: “if an inn-keeper furnish sixty ka [a unit of measure similar to a bushel] of drink to the city, she shall receive fifty ka of corn at the harvest.” It is a rather dull little edict; Babylonian capitalism in action. But at least no one gets drowned or burned.
This is pretty cool, despite the Corona bottles. According to the musician who made the video, BoTLpLayA, “[he] play[s] Carol of the Bells on perfectly tuned corona bottles (they make the best sound), by “plucking” them with [his] finger.” Hmm, not sure that makes sense, but who am I to argue with the results. Enjoy!
Thursday’s holiday ad is for Stag Beer, from 1958. Maybe it’s just me, but a treasured stag traditions doesn’t sound too wholesome to me, especially when the ad shows a comely lass standing under the mistletoe holding a beer in her hand. So if I understand this scene correctly, a beautiful woman is offering me a beer, and by taking it I’ll be under the mistletoe, so I’ll also have to kiss her, as well. Okay, I take it all back; now that is a treasured tradition.
Wednesday’s holiday ad is for Falstaff, from 1914. Nice to see that after Santa came down the chimney, he had something other than milk and cookies waiting for him.
Today’s comic strip Pearls Before Swine, written by former San Francisco attorney Stephan Pastis, took a funny swipe at Anheuser-Busch InBev. [Thanks to Motor for sending me the strip.]
Tuesday’s holiday ad is for the Canadian beer Dow Ale, which until around 1966, was the most popular beer in Quebec. This ad looks to be a little earlier, probably in the 1950s. Given that red is he only color (apart from black, of course) in the ad, it’s curious that they didn’t make Santa’s suit red, too, but I suppose they wanted to keep the focus on the beer. “Look what they’ve left me me!” I hope every home didn’t leave Santa a case. He’d never get to all the houses in one night, or he’d probably get pulled over by the air force for flying erratically.
Monday’s holiday ad is for Miller High Life showing an idyllic country scene complete with newly fallen snow, a barn and silo, with a small chapel in the distance, as a horse and sleigh pulls two couples through the white landscape. Ah, Christmas like it never was.
A couple of years ago, shortly after Anat Baron released her film Beer Wars, people kept asking her which big beer companies owned which beer brands. In December 2009, she put together a list of Who owns what? That inspired to me took take a closer look myself, and that produced my own list, The Bigs Brewers’ Brands. At the time, I had hoped to keep it current, but that’s proved too time-consuming a task and it hasn’t been updated since December 4, 2009.
Now Philip H. Howard, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, in the Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies, has created an infographic on the Concentration in the US Beer Industry. The bubble chart seeks to show the major companies selling beer in the U.S. — domestic and imports — and also uses different lines to show arrangements of distribution and partial ownership, where applicable.
You can see more detail on the full size image, which can be seen here. You can also zoom in using Zoom.It. Howards also notes “that the graphic above focuses on the top 13 firms, and excludes varieties of malt liquor and non-alcoholic beers.”
His write-up also includes the following:
AB InBev owns, co-owns or distributes more than 36 brands, for example, while MillerCoors controls at least 24 more. MillerCoors also brews Metropoulos & Company’s products under contract (thus the company that controls Pabst and 21 other brands is a “virtual” beer company).
Increasing Concentration after World War II
In 1959 the 10th largest brewery in the country (Pabst) acquired the 18th largest brewery (Blatz), resulting in a combined national market share of 4.5%. Seven years later the US Supreme Court reversed the merger, noting that:
If not stopped, this decline in the number of separate competitors and this rise in the share of the market controlled by the larger beer manufacturers are bound to lead to greater and greater concentration of the beer industry into fewer and fewer hands. [Justice Hugo Black in U.S. v. PABST BREWING CO., 384 U.S. 546 (1966)].
Today, just two firms control more than three-quarters of all sales.
Howard also quotes Stephen G. Hannaford, writing in 2007, in Market Domination!: The Impact of Industry Consolidation on Competition, Innovation and Consumer Choice. “The beer industry is not only dominated by two firms, it is dominated by a small number of varieties — just six account for more than half of all sales. The result is an ‘oligopoly within the oligopoly'” Howard demonstrates this relationship with another chart.
You can also explore this one better by using Zoom.It.
The Economist has an interesting article in their latest issue on Belgian beer entitled Brewed Force, How a small, unremarkable country came to dominate the world of beermaking.