Tuesday’s ad is the first baseball-themed one, which will continue through the World Series. It’s for Hamm’s Beer, and is a newer ad, at least from the period of time when Pabst owned the brand, before selling it to Miller — 1983-99. But it’s a great use of the Hamm’s Bear playing baseball.
For many years, Coors has been the brewery obsessed with cold. But that may be changing, as Anheuser-Busch InBev is debuting their own cold-activated labels on bottles of Busch Light. ABI is calling their version of the cold-activated label an “ice-cold easy indicator.”
According to an article today by AdAge:
An “ice-cold easy indicator” thermometer turns blue when the temperature is just right, an Anheuser-Busch spokesman told Ad Age, noting that the special packaging has already hit some stores. The innovation resembles what competitor MillerCoors has done with its Coors Light bottles, which feature mountains that turn blue “when it’s as cold as the Rockies.”
“Thermochromatic ink on beer [bottles]? I’ve heard that’s been done before,” said a MillerCoors spokesman.
Coors Light is one of the few big beer brands whose sales are growing, albeit slowly, and the cold-activated bottles are a focal point of its advertising. It is unclear if A-B plans a big promotional push for its new Busch Light bottles. The sub-premium brand traditionally gets less advertising attention than Budweiser and Bud Light.
As far as I’m concerned, the only good reason to make sure either of these beers are cold enough to turn the label blue is so they’re cold enough to numb your taste buds so you can no longer taste them. But it’s that reliance on marketing gimmicks instead of making products people actually want that makes this such a bad idea to me.
Oklahoma joins the ranks of states currently considering raising the tax on beer and other alcohol due to budget shortfalls, in effect punishing alcohol companies and the vast majority of people who enjoy drinking their products responsibly. According to the Oklahoman, the heads of three state health agencies, Health Commissioner Terry Cline, Mental Health Commissioner Terri White and Howard Hendrick, director of the Department of Human Services, “urged state lawmakers to raise the alcohol tax to help address a 2012 fiscal year budget deficit that could be as large as $800 million.” This is the same nonsense going around in other states whereby lawmakers go after a convenient target, often with the help of anti-alcohol groups, that they know play well to constituents raised on temperance propaganda that demonizes alcohol as a sin. But essentially the tax hikes aimed at alcohol punish both the companies that make the products and the majority of consumers who drink them responsibly and in moderation, while doing nothing whatsoever to address the root causes of the tiny minority that do abuse alcohol and drugs. They’re not remotely fair.
I’m as sorry as the next citizen that states can’t meet their budgets, but alcohol didn’t cause the problem and shouldn’t be called upon to fix it, either. We should have learned our lesson when this was first tried, during the Civil War, but we keep looking to lifestyles that some people find morally objectionable and trying to legislate that morality to punish people for their choices that differ from the self-righteous. But the budget problems Oklahoma, and many other states, are facing were not caused by alcohol. The specious “charge for harm” notion that the Marin Institute, and other anti-alcohol groups, are pushing is a flawed idea that argues that everybody who makes and drinks alcohol has to pay for any problems caused by a tiny minority that abuses it. But it continues to gain traction because if you beat a drum long enough, and never hear another beat, people start to believe the music is good.
For example “Howard Hendrick, director of the [Oklahoma] Department of Human Services, also said the state should look at increasing the alcohol tax to help pay for treatment and medical costs associated with the use of the product.” But the “medical costs” are not “associated with the use of the product,” if anything, they’re associated with its misuse, a very different thing. The assumption is that everybody that drinks alcohol is a burden on the nation’s healthcare system, but that is not only false, but backwards. The vast majority of people who drink, and who do so responsibly and in moderation, are actually living a healthier lifestyle and are less of a burden on healthcare as a direct result of their good drinking behavior. Such people will most likely live longer than abstainers or binge drinkers.
Hendrick concludes with this tortured bit of logic:
“We’re not saying you can’t drink, we’re not going to prohibition we’re just asking you to pay your share of the cost,” Hendrick said. “We’re just trying to deter people from behaving irresponsibly with alcohol.”
What nonsense. If I, and in fact most people, drink responsibly then we’re not costing society one penny more than any other person. If anything, by our moderation, we’re burdening the healthcare system less and are in fact saving money for the system. We have no “share of the cost” to pay. Raising the cost of alcohol through higher taxes in order “to deter people from behaving irresponsibly” is incredibly insulting to the majority who do not behave irresponsibly. But such logic is pervasive and does nothing to actually stop alcohol abuse. Like any addiction, an addict will find a way to get his preferred addiction by any means necessary.
The only thing that such measures accomplish is that they damage the economy, and place a greater burden on poor people, since alcohol taxes are very regressive. The higher taxes punish primarily law-abiding responsible citizens by raising the price of alcohol even though they’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve such a punishment and in fact have done just the opposite. Lawmakers just can’t let any good deed go unpunished, especially when they’re trying to fix their own mistakes without acknowledging their own culpability or making themselves look bad. Better to blame everything on alcohol. And why not, demonizing alcohol has worked quite well for over a century. There’s no reason to let the facts get in the way of a good story now.
Buzzards Bay Brewing in Westport, Massachusetts, may have abandoned their flagship lager, but their creativity is still alive and brewing. Their latest idea is all over the labels of their new India Pale Ale, it’s a serialized mystery story told over twelve different labels, with each one containing a portion of the story. Here’s how they tell it at their new website, Just Beer:
Just beer is proud to reveal a unique collaboration between brewer and author.
“The Case of the IPA” is a hard-boiled detective farce printed chapter by chapter on 12 bottles of a newly released India Pale Ale. Each 22 ounce bottle not only has 22 ounces of brilliantly deduced IPA, but also 1 of the 12 chapters of the story. Each case has 12 bottles, which makes for the entire tale told in a case. And so, the Case of the IPA is indeed a case of the IPA.
Brewer Harry Smith proposed the idea to author Paul Goodchild and they quickly agreed on a format: a noir-ish detective serial. Smith brewed up a batch of hoppy craft brew whilst Goodchild penned the story. It’s a mystery of zany brewers and their intrigues; sure to tickle the ribs and please the belly of any fan of craft beer.
As this is a bottle by bottle mystery, Just Beer reminds all to “please read responsibly.”
You can also read all about it at the Cape Cod Times. And here’s Chapter 1 to whet your appetite and your thirst for more:
Monday’s ad is for a failed brand from the Jackson Brewery in New Orleans, Louisiana — better known as Jax Brewery. In what I believe began in the late 1960s, Jax launched a brand called Fabacher and had ads with a fake “Andrew Fabacher” who supposedly looked like Andrew Jackson, which is who the brewery had been named for. The brewery was founded in 1890 by Alsatian German immigrant Lawrence Fabacher. It stayed in business during Prohibition by making root beer, other soft drinks and near beer. “By the late 1930s it was sold in all of Louisiana, and parts of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama.” In 1964, they renovated the brewery and became the “10th largest single-plant brewery in the country, brewing nearly 450,000 barrels of beer annually, [also] making it the largest independent brewery in the South” at that time. The beer ultimately failed and the brewery closed in the mid-1970s. The brewery location is today a shopping mall.
An alert reader just forwarded me this (thanks Shaun). Today, a Starbucks coffee shop in Seattle, Washington, is test-marketing a new menu item: beer. According to an AP story the Starbucks on East Olive Way “reopened Monday [and] is the first under the Starbucks brand to offer alcohol.” The AP story continues with the following. “Craft beer and local wines go on sale after 4 p.m. The idea is to offer drinks and a wider variety of savory food that will attract customers after the morning espresso rush.”
USA Today has a fuller story about how and why the chain is testing beer, wine, cheese and other foods. Their pronouncement is that the “Starbucks of the future arrived today.” They speculate that if successful, this new model could become “the prototype for the next generation of stores for one of the world’s most influential brands.” Here’s how they describe the new look of the renovated Starbucks.
A very different kind of Starbucks is on tap. It will serve regional wine and beer. It offers an expansive plate of locally made cheeses — served on china. The barista bar is rebuilt to seat customers up close to the coffee.
Most conspicuously, the place looks less like a Starbucks and more like a cafe that’s been part of the neighborhood for years — yet that’s “green” in design and decor. This is the calling card of independent java joints that have been eating and sipping away at Starbucks’ evening business for decades. U.S. Starbucks stores get 70% of business before 2 p.m.
The corporate eyes of Starbucks — and the nation’s ultracompetitive, $15 billion chain coffee business — are laser-focused on this Starbucks store on Olive Way in Seattle’s bustling Capitol Hill area. The 10-year-old location was closed for three months to be revamped into a Starbucks that may not look or sound like any Starbucks you know. But if this location is a hit, some version of it may eventually come to a Starbucks near you.
….
Inside, the floor is stripped to highly polished concrete. Some of the chairs were salvaged from the University of Washington campus. Empty burlap sacks — once used to transport Starbucks coffee beans — hang from the walls. And an oversized table — designed for customers to share — is made from flooring salvaged from a local high school.
There’s also a video of the new Starbucks’ project to sell both beer and wine.
If you’re planning on going to either Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Stephen Colbert’s March to Keep Fear Alive on October 30 — or if you just happen to live in the Washington D.C. area — you’re most likely going to need something to do the night before. If so, have I got an event for you.
The Brickskeller in D.C. will host Sanity/Fear: A Rally for Beer on Friday night October 29, 2010. This is coincidentally the eve of A Rally for Sanity with Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) and Keep Fear Alive with Stephen Colbert (Colbert Report) on Saturday afternoon on the mall at our nation’s capitol in Washington, DC.
Join Celebrator Beer News publisher Tom Dalldorf (who’s alter ego Glenn Becks is named for a mediocre German import) as we consider Sanity in brewing and Fear of extreme beers with brewers Bill Madden, Mad Fox Brewing Company, Falls Church, VA and Jason Oliver, Devil’s Backbone Brewing Company, Roseland, VA. Several of their best efforts will be served along with some cellar treasures selected by the Brick’s Dave Alexander.
Following this will be a performance by the Rolling Boil Blues Band defying Sanity by instilling Fear via beery tunes like Hop This Town, This Beer’s For You, Homebrew Hand Jive and (sadly) many more! The band features Dave Alexander on lead guitar and Tom Dalldorf on so-called vocals. Fortunately, the beer will be flowing!
Damn, that should be a lot of fun. Wish I could be there. Additional details and tickets are available at the Brickskeller website. Tickets are $40 and can be purchased online. Here’s the info from the website:
TOM DALLDORF
Owner/Publisher of the Celebrator Beer News
Brings two brewmasters to our stage in a bearish recreation of the following days rally!
Dave’s old buddy, Rolling Boil Blues bandmate and fearless leader Tom Dalldorf, owner / publisher of Celebrator Beer Magazine returns to the Brick for a beerish re-creation of the next day’s Stewart-ish and Colbert-ish rally in a Sanity vs. Fear beer tasting! Tom always brings the bestest of the bestest beers to his events! Oh yeah don’t ya know after we gets’ em liquored up our lucky toe tapping guests will be closing their eyes screaming check please and covering their ears while me Tommy and a couple of real musicians get up on stage and start feeding back and blowing the endings to our favorite beer infused tunes!
These events will be held at
The Brickskeller
1523 22nd St NW
“Come for the Sanity. Stay for the Fear. Beer and Loathing at the Brickskeller, Washington, DC. Be there!”
Last weekend I was pleased to help judge beer for the inaugural Good Food Awards. As I remarked yesterday in a post about Blue Bottle’s Stout Coffee Cake, while the sustainable and local food community has been slow to accept beer, “things are finally changing and a growing number of self-avowed foodies are accepting craft beer as an equal to other artisanal foodstuffs.” You couldn’t ask for a better example of that than the new Good Food Awards. Started by Seedling Projects, their take on the Good Food Awards is to reward producers whose products are “delicious, authentic and responsibly produced.”
The Good Food Awards will present the best of seven different types of food: beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, coffee, pickles and preserves. Here’s the overall concept:
The Good Food Awards celebrate the kind of food we all want to eat: tasty, authentic and responsibly produced. We grant awards to outstanding American food producers and the farmers who provide their ingredients. We host an annual Awards Ceremony and Marketplace at the iconic Ferry Building in San Francisco to honor new Good Food Award recipients and also organize a month of events and tastings to support the wider community making good food.
More specifically, they included beer for the following reasons:
Good Beer is crafted by brewers who practice water recycling and resource conservation, support their local communities and seek out ingredients that are free of pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified organisms. The Good Food Awards seal will be given out in the categories of Traditional, Experimental and Collaborative brews – those made by more than one brewer working together — a growing practice that highlights the community spirit flourishing amongst craft brewers.
We judged about fifty beers from around the country, divided into broad categories: experimental and traditional. It was then further divided geographically into five regions, though the majority came from the West. We had six judges, a good mix of experience and backgrounds. Dave McLean, from Magnolia, ran the judging behind the scenes and asked me to act as judge captain, though he did manage to judge one late round, when one of the other judges had to leave early.
The beer judging table at the Good Food Awards.
We tried a lot of great beers, and the winning beers were all very impressive beers. The winners in all the categories will be announced on January 14, 2011. Two days later, beginning January 16, they’ll kick-off Good Food Month, which will last until February 20. “Each week will pair two of the food categories” judged and the final week, February 11-20, will include a partnership with our own SF Beer Week to celebrate beer in the Bay Area and beyond.
Renato Sardo and Dave McLean judging beer at the Good Food Awards.
Our 39th Guinness poster by John Gilroy was undoubtedly done around the time of World War 2. It depicts a group of four Toucans flying in formation at an RAF airfield while a pair of mustachioed officers look on in surprise. They’re probably surprised because each Toucan is balancing two pint of Guinness on each of their beaks. The tagline is “Lovely day for a Guinness.”
Back in August, I wrote about a cake made with stout at Miette’s in San Francisco and Oakland. It had been chosen by Alton Brown of the Food Network as one of the Top Ten Sweets in the United States. And while it was very tasty, I lamented the fact that it was made with Guinness stout rather than a local beer. I’ve noticed that a lot of foodies who insist on local food ingredients and even wine are completely blind to the concept of local beer. It’s a head-scratcher, with the most famous example I know is that locavore pioneer Alice Waters until very recently served soulless imported beers at her famous restaurant Chez Panisse.
The restaurant’s website describes Waters as an “American pioneer of a culinary philosophy that maintains that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest seasonal ingredients that are produced sustainably and locally. She is a passionate advocate for a food economy that is ‘good, clean, and fair.’ Over the course of nearly forty years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients.” While I don’t quibble with her influence and importance in creating the idea of how important using local ingredients is, the fact is that it took 35 years to extend that idea to beer. I find that incredibly sad and to me it says quite a lot about how slow much of the food community has been to embrace craft beer while at the same time they’ve been so quick to champion artisanal cheese, bread, chocolates, preserves, charcuterie, pickles, coffee, tea, wine and much more. Happily, things are finally changing and a growing number of self-avowed foodies are accepting craft beer as an equal to other artisanal foodstuffs.
So I was thrilled to learn that another local company, Blue Bottle Coffee, was making a pastry — in this case a coffee cake — using a local stout, Magnolia Stout of Circumstance. Dave McLean’s Magnolia Gastropub makes some great beers (and has really good food, too) so I was very keen to try the coffee cake made with his beer.
Blue Bottle Coffee has six locations in the Bay Area (five in San Francisco and one in Oakland; and there’s a seventh location in Brooklyn, too) and last week I stopped by their Kiosk location on Linden Street in San Francisco.
Waiting in line at the Linden Street Kiosk.
It turns out that the co-founder of Miette, Caitlin Williams Freeman — who made the other stout cake — sold her interest in Miette and started making pastries for her husband’s company, Blue Bottle Coffee. Her most famous pastries are the art-inspired creations she makes for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But it was the beer confections that caught my interest.
Blue Bottle Coffee’s coffee cake made with Magnolia’s stout.
The coffee cakes are sold in a small, round personal size. They’re quite tasty, with a melange of different flavors. There appear to be oats, chopped walnuts, caraway seeds and possibly dried currants in the cake. The stout brings out a nice balancing sweetness that’s treacly and molasses-like. That sweetness also balances the dry cake and makes it nice and moist so that when you bite into it you get both dry and wet sensations. I’m not actually much of a coffee drinker — I prefer tea — but I can see how this cake would be a perfect compliment to their coffee, which as I understand it are some of the best.
The Blue Bottle Coffee Cake close-up on my kitchen counter.