Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

Socialize

Harriet’s Beer For Girls

By

Harriet Easton, age 19, appears to be one ambitious and entrepreneurially-minded young lass. She’s determined to fill the void created by a continuing drop in UK pub beer sales. “Figures released last month showed beer sales in pubs at their lowest level for 70 years. Seven million fewer pints per day are now being sold, with sales down 49 per cent since they peaked in 1979.” One obvious market being neglected is the female segment. So Easton, a politics student at Newcastle University, spent a year and a half — and £35,000 — on R&D to create a beer especially for women. It’s a “light ale with extract of orange and a modest 4.2 per cent alcohol.” Easton teamed up with a local brewery, Hanby Ales of Wem in Shropshire, to create the curiously named Harry’s Beer, which will be marketed to women beginning Monday at the Salopian Bar in Shrewsbury. On hand will be, Paula Waters, chairman of CAMRA. “Waters said: ‘I applaud the inventive way Harriet has brought this product to market. She’s a sassy and savvy young woman who has recognised there are others just like her who want to drink real ale and retain their femininity.'”

But as far as I can tell, this is not her first attempt. In August of this year there was at least one story about Harriet Easton in the Shropshire Star called These Girls Are For Real. At that time, they reported Easton debuting another beer, this one called Rushing Dolls beer for girls. In that article, Rushing Dolls was described as having “a zest of lime—it’s very light and hoppy.” There Easton was quoted as having created her beer because others were — I just love this expression — too blokey. Hop Talk even did a post about it in September. The lime version was “thought to be the first ever beer for girls” and now the new orange version is being similarly touted, this time by the Publican, who say it’s the “first real ale aimed specifically at women.” This time around, Easton says:

“Real ale has typically and consistently been marketed towards men with names full of cheesy puns and innuendo, and images of buxom wenches serving up frothy jugs,” said the politics student at Newcastle university. “They can keep all that — there’s no need to move on, lads — just move over”.

Still, I can’t help but think of Virginia Slims or pink trains for girls. It seems to me either a woman will develop a taste for beer or she won’t. I know plenty of women who already love craft beer, including my wife, and it didn’t take a specially designed beer for them to like beer. Trying to make one specifically for the ladies seems like a gimmick at best. But if it brings more women into the fold, I suppose that can’t be all bad.
 

New Beer TV Show … Maybe

By

A company from Sacramento, California — The Idea Factory — was in town Monday and Tuesday shooting a pilot for a new television show about craft beer. They’ve already done several successful cable shows, and their work can currently be seen on the Garden Channel, the DIY channel and Discovery Health.

The host is brewer Jennifer Talley, who is from Squatter’s Pub in Utah. Idea Factory producer Peter Holmes saw Talley in a video she did for her brewery and thought she’d be a good host, making the show both about brewers (and brewing and beer) and by brewers, which I think may be the first time for a television show. In talking with the producer, their initial pitch will likely be made to the Food Network or similar cable channels. And I think that makes sense, as there is significant time devoted to beer with food in what they filmed already.

They started out with Talley interviewing Shaun O’Sullivan at his 21st Amendment Brewery & Restaurant. In the afternoon both O’Sullivan and Talley visited Magnolia and sat down to talk with owner Dave McLean over some food and beer. Then on Tuesday they filmed at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa. They filmed at both the new production brewery nearby and at the brewpub. Later Bruce Paton, the beer chef, cooked some food and he sat down with Talley and Russian River owners Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo to talk about the pairings while they enjoyed both the food and beer.

While it’s obviously hard to say too much until it’s been edited, the raw footage I watched seemed pretty good. Everybody I met involved with the production from the producers, the cameramen and make-up all seemed professional and did a great job. Plus, they were all very genuinely nice people. The participants seemed natural on camera and it had the feel of a conversation you’d want to listen in on. The passion that many of us feel for craft beer (and food) comes out pretty easily and this was a good illustration of that principle in action. We all love to talk about beer. The only question remaining: is the rest of America ready to listen?

I wish them luck and it would certainly be great to see a show about craft beer that’s done by people who actually know what they’re talking about. So keep your fingers crossed. I’ll post updates as I learn more, but I imagine this is a long, slow process.
 

For more photos from the beer show tv pilot shoot, visit the photo gallery.
 

North Carolina Targets Parents

By

One of my favorite things about the internet, is how cyclical and serpentine it can be. You can start out somewhere and if you follow enough tangents — something I can’t frankly help — you end up in new and wonderful places or, at a minimum, at a place you either didn’t expect to find or didn’t know was out there. I find a lot of the things I write about by happy accident. One thing leads to another and before I know it I’ve stumbled yet again on something I think worth writing about myself. A good example of this is some new laws in North Carolina that took effect December 1. I learned of these new laws through a blog, The Agitator, which I found at another blog, Coffee and Diapers, which is a parenting blog that picked up on my earlier post about Mothers For Social Drinking (which I also originally found by accident).

At any rate, the original story came from a television station in the Raleigh-Durham area, WRAL Channel 5, which is a place I actually lived for several years. I used to be, in the early 1980s, a record buyer for a large chain of stores headquartered in Durham, North Carolina and lived in both Durham and later Chapel Hill. Having grown up in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania, being in the south was a real eye-opener, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, some forty new state laws went into effect at the beginning of December and their story addressed a few of them. They started out with the alcohol-related ones for whatever reason and there’s a couple of doozies. The first one that caught my attention I’m not really against per se, but I think it’s illustrative of how oddly people think about alcohol. From the WRAL story:

One law bans devices known as “alcohol inhalers,” which convert liquor into a mist that can be inhaled by the user. Lawmakers were concerned that the devices, which were assembled and distributed by a Greensboro company, were being marketed to underage drinkers.

Okay, to be clear, I think this sounds like a bad idea and it goes against my personal philosophies on the moderate enjoyment of alcohol and also because I’ve never been a fan of anything that has to enter my body through my nose. I knew plenty of people in the 1980s who disagreed with my personal nasal entry ban (my rhinoprohibition), but I never begrudged them their day in the snow. So okay, somebody figured out a way to snort alcohol. I wouldn’t do it myself, and I can’t understand why anyone else would want to either. But here’s what I really don’t get. “Lawmakers were concerned (my emphasis) that the devices were being marketed to underage drinkers.” Huh? So they decided that an ostensibly legal product should be made illegal precisely because minors might try to buy it. Let me put that another way. As an adult, I can no longer buy a (previously) legal product because law enforcement cannot effectively keep people (minors in this case) from illegally obtaining it. So effectively because they can’t stop underage use of this product, they’re willing to take away every adult’s right to buy it. Please tell me how that makes any sense whatsoever? That is about as ridiculous a justification for making something illegal as I’ve ever heard. Fast food is marketed to kids and demonstrably terrible for their health, yet I don’t see these same lawmakers rushing to ban Big Macs, Whoppers or happy meals. Soda is even worse, yet schools allow soft drink companies to put soda vending machines in schools. Apparently, that’s okay too. I guess it’s okay for our kids to be fat and toothless but heaven forbid they might even consider snorting a mist of alcohol despite the fact that it’s already against the law for them to do so. Just the possibility of that — there do not appear to be any actual facts of underage use — makes them locate their spines to “protect the children” and take one more step toward making their state fit only for children. How noble. How absurd.

But the one that got The Agitator worked up — and I can certainly see why — is this one:

Also, as of Saturday, people can lose their driver’s licenses for providing alcohol to anyone under 21. The penalty is important because many underage drinkers get alcohol from friends or family members, said Craig Lloyd, the executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The law means that, theoretically, parents could be punished for giving a glass of wine to their 20-year-old son or daughter, even if the 20-year-old never gets behind the wheel.

Lloyd said that’s not excessive.

“It’s a zero-tolerance policy,” he said. “Breaking the law is breaking the law.”

As Radley Balko at the Agitator put it:

I know what you’re thinking. Surely authorities would never barge into someone’s home and arrest them for allowing their 18, 19, or 20-year-old son or daughter to have a beer, right?

Well, you’d think. But then, if you’d told me police might come to the home of a minor’s parents at 4 am, wake the entire family, then give the girl a breath test to see if she had been drinking at a party held hours earlier, I’d have been dubious, too.

But it’s happened. Never underestimate the absurd lengths to which the zero tolerance crowd will go to keep your kid stone-cold sober.

The link above is to an ALCU story from Michigan where apparently they’re the only state — for now, at least —where it’s “illegal for young adults and minors who are not driving to refuse a breathalyzer test when the police do not have a search warrant. Those who refuse to take tests in Michigan are guilty of a civil infraction and must pay a $100 fine.” under Mich. Comp. Laws § 436.1703(6).

And there was at least one instance that you can just see being repeated both there and in North Carolina, as well.

Ashley Berden was 18 years old when she attended a party at a friend’s house to celebrate her graduation from Swan Valley High School. After she left the party, Thomas Township police officers arrived and found her purse which she had forgotten. They then came to Berden’s house at 4:00 a.m., woke up her family and demanded that she take a breath test. The police did not have a warrant but they informed her that would be violating the law if she refused the test. The test registered a .00% blood-alcohol level, indicating that Berden had not been drinking.

Pretty scary stuff. Especially when you consider that in societies where parents are allowed to raise their own children as they see fit, there is a much lower incidence of abuse later in life. But this new North Carolina law will make any parent who gives their own son or daughter even a taste of beer or wine to educate them a criminal. In effect, the state of North Carolina has decreed they can do a better job of raising your children than you can. Naturally, the North Carolina chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving sees the world in stark black and white whereas the rest of us can see all the shades of gray that parenting really entails. Because it seems to me that they really believe they can do a better job of raising my child than I can. They seem to have all the answers and really believe they know best. In their world an adult is no longer an adult but must live in a world where anything unsafe for children is no longer allowed for adults, either. In their world, a parent has little or no control over how and what they can teach their children about the world. That’s what zero-tolerance really means. It means tolerating only one way of life over all others. That’s as scary a world as I can imagine, a world that is the very opposite of free.

 

Costa Rica Just Says No to Swiss Beer

By

I guess it’s good to know that other country’s bureaucracies are every bit as irrational as my own, especially when dealing with the regulation of alcohol and other so-called “controlled” substances. It seems the Latin American country of Costa Rica is having issues with a Swiss beer, Hanfblute, because it contains the essence of marijuana to impart the cannabis aroma in the nose. It’s no secret, that information is listed on the label and Hanfblute has been sold in the Central American nation for four years. And, of course, marijuana is also illegal in Switzerland, too, meaning if there were any mind-altering cannabis (or THC) in it, the Swiss would have put the kibosh on the beer long ago. They do use hemp leaves and flowers in the brewing of the beer, but it contains nothing that could get you high.

Guiselle Amador, the head of the Instituto de Alcoholismo y Farmacodependencia (IAFA) — Costa Rica’s pharmaceutical and drug dependency institute — “expressed her concern for the sale of the beer in Costa Rica for its negative implications that it is good for ones health.” The IAFA is asking the health minister to investigate the importer’s permit and take the beer off the market. Despite the fact that the beer contains no marijuana whatsoever, she’s afraid it might persuade people to start smoking pot. Why, you might reasonably ask, would she think that? Apparently there’s a cannabis leaf on the label (pictured below) which she believes is a subliminal message which could entice people to begin smoking weed. I don’t know what Amador is smoking but if she thinks seeing a marijuana leaf on a beer label will lead people to fire up a spleef then clearly her country has more troubles than just this.
 

Here’s one logo:

And here’s the bottle label:

 

Clearly they’re skating on the periphery of what polite society deems acceptable with their label, but the family owned Brauerei Locher brews at least twenty different beers, of which the Hanfblute is only a small part. This is no hippie commune beer but a serious beer with a nod to a tradition that predates the use of hops in beer. Are they having a little fun with it? Sure, why not? They know the market for their beer. In my experience, hemp enthusiasts are fanatical in their love of the versatile weed. So why not market to a supportive audience?

The first hemp beer I remember was from Frederick Brewing in Maryland. I think it was called Hempen Ale and was made using hemp seeds (I’m shooting on memory here, if anybody knows for sure, let me know). I also remember shortly thereafter having a meeting with Mario Celotto (the former Oakland Raider and now former owner of Humboldt Brewing in Arcata, California) and suggesting to him that with his backyard’s reputation he should make a hemp beer. Several months later (I think around 1998?) Humboldt Hemp Beer made its debut and is still being brewed by Firestone Walker under the same label (they bought the Humboldt brand in 2003).

But I still can’t understand why people in government agencies are convinced that mere labels will corrupt people to the point where they’re afraid to allow citizens to even see something they find objectionable. It’s obviously ridiculous that seeing a cannabis leaf would make someone unable to control the urge to become a drug addict. It’s equally ridiculous that seeing Santa Claus on a label will make kids want to drink beer or seeing nudity on a label will .. well, I don’t really know what the easily offended think seeing nudity will do to harm society, that one will always be a head-scratcher to me. But we see this time and time again in the United States and — as this story makes clear — around the world, too. Most people if asked would probably say the national pastime is baseball and worldwide it has to be football (soccer). Personally, I think the true favorite pastime is trying to control other people in what they think, what they see and what they can do. Determining what is moral or good and trying to impose it on the rest of us seems to occupy a lot of a certain kind of person’s time and energy. The rest of us are just trying to enjoy ourselves and live our lives as best we can. But as long as there are people whose agenda includes stopping people from doing things that they don’t like or making decisions about how to live their lives that they disagree with, the remaining majority of us won’t be able to rest. As for marijuana, my favorite comedian, Bill Hicks, said it best:

Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally upon our planet. Doesn’t the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit… paranoid? You know what I mean? It’s nature. How do you make nature against the f#%king law? It grows everywhere. Serves a thousand different functions, all of them positive. To make marijuana against the law is like saying God made a mistake.

Which I find doubly ironic since most rabid anti-drug and anti-alcohol organizations seem religiously based or at least motivated by some weird morality that they believe is based on religion. But I also think Hicks’ argument works for beer, as well, which is likewise made from all natural ingredients growing wild on the planet. Ive said it before a million times, but if those of us who just want to be left alone and not told what to do and think, we have to remain ever-vigilant against this kind of nonsense wherever and whenever we can.

 

Van’s Ned Flanders

By

rock-bottom
John Foyston had a nice piece in the Oregonian yesterday about one of my favorite — and perhaps most underrated — beers to be poured at the Oregon Brewers Festival. It was certainly my favorite the year it appeared, 2006, and as this story attests, people are still talking about it. The beer is Ned Flanders, a sour beer based on the style Flemish Red Ale, of which Rodenbach Red and Duchesse De Bourgogne (another fave of mine) are perhaps the best known examples. I chose it as my buzz beer of the festival that year. Van Havig, then the brewer at Rock Bottom in Portland (and now a regional brewing manager) put quite a bit of effort into the beer, aging it in five different kinds of barrels and then blending it back together. Responding to a question from Foyston, Havig lays out the full story of this beer, and it’s a fascinating account filled with history and chutzpah.

van-havig ned

Will the real Ned Flanders please stand up? Van Havig and his inspiration for Ned Flanders Sour Red Ale.

Quick Chilling Beer With Dry Ice

By

The New Zealand Herald reported Tuesday that a Massey University student in Auckland has invented a novel device to quickly chill beer in a fraction of the time, potentially allowing people to leave the cooler at home. It’s one of thirty inventions being exhibited at the three-day Design Exposure 2007, which began Wednesday, at Massey University’s Auckland School of Design.

Twenty-two-year-old New Zealander Kent Hodgson came up with the idea for his device after being frustrated by warm beer at a backyard barbecue earlier this year. He calls it a “Huski,” and it’s described as using a “rapid cooling beverage process” involving dry ice.

“You have plastic cooling cells which are pressed down into the dock which houses the liquid carbon dioxide. The liquid CO2 expands and is pressurized into dry ice in the base of the cooling cells … in a moment.

“You then pop it into your drink and then proceed from there as you normally would.”

With a surface temperature of minus 78.5C, dry ice has a cooling capacity almost four times that of the same amount of regular ice.

“The cooling power is almost instant and is utilized for several minutes and it doesn’t dilute the drink like ice would,” said Mr. Hodgson.

One canister can chill a little more than a case of beer bottles for only about seven cents. But the initial cost of the device will likely be around $50, so you’ll probably have to do a lot of drinking to make it cost effective. Still, if it allows you to not have to lug a cooler around with you that could be a good thing.

The real question is whether or not the rapid cooling using dry ice will damage the beer in the process. Generally speaking, putting beer into the freezer to quick chill it will cause the beer to break down chemically causing chill haze, producing little floating particles in the beer and altering its taste (and not for the better). That’s why it’s never a good idea to put your beer in the freezer. Does dry ice do the same thing? It would logically seem that any method that chills the beer too quickly would similarly damage it, but I’m not a scientist so I can’t really say if using dry ice will cause the same problems. Until then, it’s an intriguing idea, at least.

Inventor Kent Hodgson shows off his “Huski” quick beer chilling device.

 

Forget Gatorade, Drink Beer

By

football
As reported in England’s Telegraph, a new Spanish study has concluded that the best thing you can drink after playing vigorous sports is not Gatorade, but beer. Specifically, the study found that for the dehydrated person, beer helps retain liquid better than water. Wow, finally a good reason to work out.

Sam to Sam: “Sorry About That”

By

sam-adams-new
Okay, it’s not exactly a full-blown apology, but the words “for that we apologize” do appear in a statement released today by the Boston Beer Co. regarding what they characterize as “clarification” of “what really happened in Portland, Oregon.”

The statement begins:

The Boston Beer Company, brewer of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, wishes Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams the best of luck in his pursuit of higher office. And guess what – Samuel Adams Beer has in no way ever suggested that Sam Adams the candidate cannot use his own name. But, according to recent stories in the media, it sure hasn’t looked that way.

Which I guess is their way of saying Intellectual Property Manager Helen Bornemann never said “she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites “probably for the length of the time the election is being held,” as was reported by the Associated Press. It sure looks like a direct quote. It would nice to have a more definitive answer about that statement, because frankly that’s the one that stuck in my craw. She either said it or she didn’t. Which is it?

Boston Beer continues:

A little history: last week The Boston Beer Company learned that an individual named Dave Anderson of Portland, Oregon had registered two domain names that featured the name Sam Adams. Not knowing his intent, we sent him a letter asking him not to use these sites. Next thing we knew, we had a call from the legal department at broadcasting conglomerate, Clear Channel, at which point we learned that Dave Anderson is a DJ at Clear Channel’s KEX radio and that a man named Sam Adams was indeed running for Mayor of Portland. We wish we had learned a little more about Portland’s race for mayor before sending out that initial letter, and for that we apologize.

Notice how in the statement they use the passive phrase “asking him not to use these sites.” Reread the original letter again and see if that sounds like they’re just “asking?”

The only thing they really admit to in the letter is that they “wish [they] had learned a little more about Portland’s race for mayor before sending out that initial letter.” Amen, that is the problem in a nutshell. And that’s the only thing they’re apologizing for, that they wish they’d “learned a little more.” I hate to keep beating a dead horse, especially over a company I generally like a great deal, but that sure seems like a pretty half-hearted apology. Notice that they’re not actually apologizing for sending the letter, making threats or not using a more measured approach or even for Bornemann’s statement that “she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites ‘probably for the length of the time the election is being held.'”

They go on to say that they reacted so swiftly because they’ve had bad experiences in the past and characterize themselves as “a small company.” Technically that’s correct because the federal standard for a brewery business to qualify as a small business it must have less than 500 employees. According to Google Finance, Boston Beer has approximately 433. Certainly they’re smaller than Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors and even Pabst, but with total revenues last year exceeding $285 million they are the biggest microbrewery in the country, and by a pretty wide margin. The next closest brewery is Yuengling, and while they’re privately held so I don’t know their revenue, I do know they have only 185 employees and are not distributed nationwide. With numbers so much larger than a majority of their peers, calling them small seems a little hard to swallow. I doubt they talk about themselves that way to investors. But if you’re trying to garner a little sympathy, the underdog card is always a good one to play.

They go on to explain their actions:

Why did we ask Clear Channel and Dave Anderson not to use those domain names? In the past we have experienced times when individuals and organizations have tried to use our brand name for commercial purposes or to disparage our good name. We have learned that, as a small company, we need to protect our identity. At the least we wanted to prevent a situation where people looking for our Web site end up linked to a radio station promotional site.

On the other hand, there have been occasions over the years when individuals actually named “Sam Adams” have registered domain names that included the words Sam Adams, and we have had no quarrel with that.

Those are, of course, all legitimate reasons and any company should protect its intellectual property. But as they say, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. When you use a bludgeon, you should expect things might go awry. Would it have mattered if Bornemann had waited another day or even a few hours to send the letter, giving her ample time to figure out the true nature of the situation she was facing? Would such a modest delay have weakened her case? Could she not have called her company’s local field representatives and/or the distributors of Samuel Adams beer working in the Portland area soliciting what they knew? Could she not have looked up the website of the radio station or the name “Sam Adams” along with the modifier “mayor?” I think any of these actions might have been quite revealing and saved her company much grief.

But there’s one more thing I think would make all of this go away, and that’s perhaps the hardest thing for any modern company or person, for that matter, to do: and that would be giving an unqualified apology or just saying a blanket “I’m sorry.” I’m not sure why that’s so difficult for people these days, but it does seem spin always gets in the way. You almost never hear people just simply say they’re sorry. Instead they “regret,” or “wish it had been different” or some other similar device so it sounds like they’re apologizing without actually doing so. There’s a great phrase used in a song by one of my favorite songwriter/singers, John Wesley Harding, and the line is “naked as a true apology.” And I think that nicely captures people’s feelings today about apologizing, that it somehow makes them vulnerable or open to attack. But sometimes it really is the best thing to do, right or wrong. I’ll even start the ball rolling. To all of the people I’ve met over the years and who are my friends at the Boston Beer Co., I’m sorry for having been so hard on the company over the last couple of days.

 

San Diego Wet Hop Festival Postponed

By

I just got word that the Wet Hop Festival originally scheduled to take place this weekend at Tom Nickel’s place, O’Brien’s Pub, in San Diego, California has been postponed one week due to the fires raging through southern California.

From the press release:

I am going to postpone the Wet Hop Festival until next weekend, November 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I will have some wet hop beers on tap this weekend. Right now we have several from Sierra Nevada including Harvest Ale, 20th Street Fresh Hop Ale and the ESP — Extra Special Pale, which is the pale ale with wet hops added. I should also have the Port Brewing High Tide IPA on tap this weekend. I am still expecting about 25 beers for next weekend and we will have the Harvest and Riptide casks on tap on Friday, November 2nd.

Other word on the street is both Stone Brewing and Ballast Point are open again after being evacuated earlier this week.

 

 

Sam Adams: Patriot, Brewer, Bully

By

I want to be clear from the start. There are people who have been bashing the Boston Beer Co. for a long time for a variety of reasons. I’m not one of those people. I like Jim Koch and think he’s done more good than harm to promote better beer to an ever-widening audience of consumers. I think Samuel Adams Boston Lager is a fine-tasting, if somewhat unremarkable, beer. When choices are thin, I’ll happily drink one, which is something I won’t do with several other high-profile popular beer brands. And the specialty beers Jim has made include some really terrific beers that have truly stretched the imagination and the very definition of what beer is.

That being said, I think Jim Koch is getting some awfully bad advice. First there was the ill-conceived radio talk show stunt that Boston Beer was involved with which challenged a couple to have sex in a church. Many were not amused — though personally I could have cared less — and there was some public relations fallout from the incident. Now there’s a new flap that’s not doing Jim Koch any favors and I think the blame rests squarely with his advisors and their poor handling of it.

The story concerns Portland, Oregon’s new candidate for mayor: Sam Adams. No, not the long-dead patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence. And not the historical brewer personage that the Boston Beer Co. appropriated for their own use in 1984. No, this Sam Adams has been around since 1963, or at least 21 years before the beer brand was trademarked. This Sam Adams is running for the mayor of beertown, Portland, Oregon. When current mayor, Tom Potter, who’s led the Oregon Brewers Festival Parade two years in a row, announced he would not be running again, popular City Commissioner Adams stepped up and announced his candidacy to be the city’s next mayor.

Two DJs from KEX News Radio 1190 in Portland, Dave Anderson and Mark Mason, registered the domain names www.samadamsformayor.com and www.mayorsamadams.com on behalf of the candidate and promised to give them to Adams provided he went on their show to discuss politics, which he subsequently did.

In the meantime, Boston Beer’s Intellectual Property Manager, Helen Bornemann, got wind of the web addresses and fired off a boilerplate cease and desist letter without, apparently, doing any research whatsoever or even picking up a phone to ask anyone about the domain names. I’m no lawyer, though I did work in a law office for eight years and I’m also married to one, but that strikes me as a pretty sloppy way to react. I know IP is something companies take very seriously and often vigorously protect, but a little fact-checking might have gone a long way toward keeping them from placing their foot so deeply in their mouth. The letter is up on the radio station’s website for all the world to see.

In the letter, she announced that they’ve been using the trademarks since 1984, to which the bemused mayoral candidate quipped. “I’ve been using it since 1963.” But Sam Adams the candidate is also concerned and his staff is talking with attorneys, too. Adams is already using the campaign slogan “Sam Adams for Portland Mayor” on his own website and it will likely appear on signs and bumper stickers. too.

According to an AP story, “Boston Beer’s Helen Bornemann said she didn’t know there was a real Sam Adams running for mayor when she sent the letter.” But she sent it anyway without bothering to find out. To me that’s a bully’s arrogance. It’s saying I must be right and you have to prove me wrong … or else. She further tries to excuse her behavior by claiming that “she feared someone was copying the advertisements” that Boston Beer Co. ran years ago, a marketing campaign called “Sam Adams for President.” Feared, but again didn’t try to find out any facts to support those fears.

So okay, she made a mistake. I could almost excuse her behavior up to this point as being over zealous in trying to protect her client’s or her company’s interests (it’s not clear if she’s a lawyer but if not she’s clearly consulted with one and cites specific law in her letter to the radio DJs). But then she pours gasoline on the fire with this statement, again from the AP story. “Bornemann said she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites ‘probably for the length of the time the election is being held.'”

Oh, really. She’s “willing,” is she, to talk about whether Sam Adams should be allowed to use his own freaking name in his own campaign website as he runs for mayor of a prominent American city? How magnanimous. How insulting. Oh, and after the election she may not allow him to be able to continue using his own name? This is an excellent example of how to get yourself some very negative PR. I don’t think it’s even about a strict interpretation of law, it comes down to how the public — your potential customers — view your actions. And the city of Portland is not amused.

If you didn’t know, the state of Oregon has already had a somewhat tenuous relationship with the Boston Beer Co., ever since they had another contract brand that they marketed under the name Oregon Beer Co. in the mid-1990s To be fair, I really liked the Blackberry Porter they made, but Oregonians were not particularly thrilled with having their own beer prestige co-opted by a beer that — and somebody correct me if I’m not remembering this correctly — wasn’t even brewed in Oregon. Boston Beer had, of course, a legal right to use the name but it struck many people at the time as somewhat dishonest.

There’s already a backlash and calls to boycott Samuel Adams beer over this latest gaffe. In addition to the AP story that’s been picked up all over the place, such as in the Washington Post, there’s also been local coverage in the Oregonian and Willamette Week. Naturally, it’s Portland bloggers who are setting the tone and calling for boycotts, such as Rusty’s Blog, who’s following it day by day. Today, for example, his post is called Sam Adams Post, Day 3. Others include Beervana, Blue Oregon, The Champagne of Blogs, Jack Bog’s Blog, Metroblogging Portland, Witigonen and the ZehnKatzen Times. But my favorite take on all this is from Isaac Laquedem’s blog, who advances the novel theory that Boston Beer Co. may be in violation of local election laws (as set forth in ORS 260.695). The way the election laws are written it’s possible to interpret them so that if they continue to sell the Samuel Adams brand people could confuse the bottles as a political endorsement for the candidate. Hilarious.

I think when all the dust settles, this will be remembered and perhaps even taught in business schools as a stellar example of how and why not to react to a potential IP threat in a kneejerk fashion. Yes, Bornemann will cling to the excuse that she was just doing her job and perhaps she even has a leg to stand on, legal-wise (though I sort of doubt it), but had she exercised even a modicum of common sense and tried to learn something about the true nature of what she perceived as a threat to her company’s trademark, she could have avoided creating a PR nightmare that will doubtless continue to haunt her company for years to come, especially in Portland, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. How much ill will has been created and how much business will Boston Beer ultimately lose over that simple failure to investigate and the bullying tactics of their IP Manager? Obviously, that’s hard to say, but I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes come performance review time.

 
UPDATE: Yesterday the Wall Street Journal Law Blog dubbed this issue the Trademark Dispute Of the Day: Sam Adams v. Sam Adams. Apparently they’ve received a call from a spokeswoman for Boston Beer claiming “they never had an issue with the mayoral candidate using his name but they do have an issue with the radio station using Sam Adams for its own business purposes.” Hmm. That’s new. Sounds like revisionist backpedaling to me. Let’s not forget that Boston Beer’s IP Manager, Helen “Bornemann said she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites ‘probably for the length of the time the election is being held.'” That certainly goes beyond the scope of merely having an “issue with the radio station using Sam Adams for its own business purposes.” And while we’re at it, what exactly would be the “business purposes” that Boston Beer is so worried about? Given that the word “mayor” is in both domain names and there really is a person named “Sam Adams” who’s running for and quite possibly will be elected mayor (and I’ve got to believe all this publicity will give Adams a big assist in getting votes) it’s hard for me to understand their concerns. Wouldn’t a reasonable person conclude that the first domain name would be used by the mayoral candidate and the second by mayor Adams (assuming he’s elected) and not for any nefarious “business purposes.”