According to yesterday’s Worcester Telegram (Massachusetts), the Sixties band The Standells are suing Anhueser-Busch for copyright infringement. Apparently A-B used their 1966 hit Dirty Water in advertising without first obtaining the band’s permission. Dirty Water is usually assosciated with the Boston Red Sox because the song is played at Fenway Park every time the Red Sox win. The Standells filed a federal lawsuit on May 31 claiming that Anheuser-Busch used their song Dirty Water “without permission in commercials to try to tap into the song’s connection to the team.”
North American Brewing Awards 2006
At the 12th annual Mountain Brewers Beer Fest, which was held in Idaho Falls, Idaho, last Saturday June 3, the 2006 North American Beer Awards were announced.
Bud Goes for Silver
Currently being test-marketed in Scotland, Anheuser-Busch, will be rolling out Bud Silver throughout the United Kingdon beginning next month. Bud Silver is a “European-style beer with a fuller premium flavor,” according to the UK trade magazine “Checkout.”
It comes in a blue and silver can and is 4.1% abv. According to A-B’s UK managing director, David Dryden, “Bud Silver represents an exciting opportunity for us to compete in a growing category.” Since the UK is Bud’s third-largest market outside the U.S. and Budweiser is the number one premium packaged lager in bars, pubs, clubs and restaurants, I’m not sure what “growing market” he’s talking about. I presume he means beer with flavor — or “fuller premium flavor,” as he put it — is the category that’s growing. But back up a second, how sad is it that marketing is so effective that Britain’s youth has abandoned the country’s rich heritage of ales and made Budweiser their number one drink? But I digress.
New Bay Area Brewfest This Saturday
This Saturday in San Mateo, a new Bay Area beer festival will take place at the County Expo Center, aptly named the Bay Area Brewfest. The Expo Center a good, centrally-located spot for a beer fesitival with plenty of parking, and the Bay Area could really use a good annual beer festival. There’s plenty of good small ones here and there but there hasn’t really been a good big one in the area since the KQED Beer & Food Festival and the Berkeley Beer Festival both stopped pouring for good several years ago. So it’s with high hopes Jeff Moses, who is also the GM for Coast Range/Farmhouse Brewing in Gilroy, has organized this new event. I’ll be there to offer my support along with fifty breweries who’ll be pouring samples of their beer from 12-6 p.m. Tickets are $25.00 at the gate and include admission, entertainment, and tastings.
Please think about coming out and supporting the festival so it can be an annual event. The first year’s turnout will go a long way to insuring future festivals.
6.10
Bay Area Brewfest (1st annual)
County Expo Center, 2495 South Delaware Street, San Mateo, California
[ website ] [ tickets online ] [ map ]
Fowl Ball?: Widmer Buys a Piece of Goose Island
Well this one certainly came out of left field. I’m not quite sure what to think about it. I really like Kurt and Rob Widmer. I like them a lot, in fact, both personally and professionally. They pioneered American-style hefeweizen, in fact invented the style. They co-founded the Oregon Brewers Festival to support and promote the craft beer industry as a whole. They brew many great beers — their potato beer is still the best of its type I’ve ever had — in many diverse styles. And they’re both very affable and down to earth people who make the beer community a better place for their having been a part of it. So I originally greeted the news of their arrangement with Anheuser-Busch somewhat suspiciously. But in the end they’ve been able to make it work for them, a trick few have been able to pull off. Which makes Widmer Brothers all the more impressive for having been able to walk that fine line between craft and business so successfully.
So does buying a minority interest in Goose Island Brewing of Chicago make sense? In some ways, yes it does. From a distribution point of view, it seems to make very good sense for both parties. If each begins making the other’s beer for their own markets, that too makes good business sense. So why does it give me pause? I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with A-B buying a 35% stake in Goose Island and then Widmer buying a presumably much smaller piece, when they themselves are are part-owned by A-B (39.5%). I can’t put my finger on what bothers me about this, perhaps it is just simple paranoia on my part. For now, I’ll try to concentrate on the positive aspects of this and try to silence that voice in the back of my head and wish Kurt, Rob and John and Greg Hall all the best.
Senate Votes Against Abolishing Estate Tax
I realize this is not, strictly speaking, beer news, but given the NBWA’s unrelenting efforts to help their rich members avoid paying taxes, and my diatribe about it two days ago, I wanted to update the story. Today, the Senate voted to “reject a Republican effort to abolish taxes on inherited estates during an election year with control of Congress at stake,” according today’s San Francisco Chronicle. The vote was three short of the votes needed to advance the bill.
Also from the Chronicle article:
“The estate tax is an extremely costly tax for a wealthy few that comes at the expense of every other American born and yet to be born for decades to come,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Under current law this year, the first $2 million of a person’s estate or $4 million of a couple’s, escapes taxation. The remainder can be taxed at rates up to 46 percent.
According to the most recent statistics available from the Internal Revenue Service, 1.17 percent of people who died in 2002 left a taxable estate.
“Repealing the estate tax during this time of fiscal crisis would be incredibly irresponsible and intellectually dishonest,” Sen. George Voinovich (R) of Ohio said.
Unsurprisingly, the NBWA wasted no time expressing their displeasure with the Senate vote. From their press release:
“We are disappointed about today’s vote regarding a permanent solution to the death tax which hurts small family-owned businesses. Make no mistake about it. Those Senators who previously supported death tax repeal and today opposed this effort to proceed to H.R. 8 are standing in the way of a permanent solution. Those Senators that voted “no” on cloture have essentially voted “yes” to increase the death tax to 55 percent in 2011.
“On behalf of America’s beer distributors, we will continue to work with Congress on a permanent solution to the death tax that will allow small business owners to plan for the continuation of their businesses with certainty and without fear of a looming death tax threat that could mean the death of the family business.”
Oh, those poor rich families. They may be family-owned, but small they’re not. But I guess money makes people do and say crazy things. So the spin machine is again in high gear. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this issue.
Keg Disaster Averted in San Diego
Yussef Cherney, intrepid Ballast Point brewer in San Diego, California, acted heroically yesterday to save a 100-keg batch of Ballast Point beer. In the middle of the brew, a water main broke leaving the brewery without water, according to a report by NBC San Diego. Rather then have the batch ruined, a brewery employee drove around the area and discovered the spot where the main had broken and alerted local water officials. Within hours it had been fixed and the water was flowing again to the brewery, effectively saving the brew. Way to go go guys!
House Resolution 753 Passes
After only about two months, House Resolution 753 passed unanimously, with 70 co-sponsors, including twelve house members from California. H.R. 753 was the brainchild of the Brewers Association and “commend[s] America’s craft brewers for their many and varied contributions to our nation’s communities, economy, culture and history.”
The resolution was spearheaded by Representatives Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR), and with over 70 additional Congressmen cosponsoring the measure. The following California house members co-sponsored the bill: Ken Calvert, Sam Farr, Bob Filner, Jane Harman, Mike Honda, George Miller, Linda Sanchez, Loretta Sanchez, Hilda Solis, Ellen Tauscher, Mike Thompson, and Lynn Woolsey.
From the press release:
“This is an important and significant first step in our effort to raise the profile of craft beer and brewing in Washington,” said BA president Charlie Papazian. “The amount of support we received from Members of Congress was extremely gratifying and was due in large part to the efforts of individual professional Brewers Association and American Homebrewers Association members calling and writing their Congressman to ask for their support of the resolution.”
The resolution, which also recognizes the establishment of American Craft Beer Week, was a featured element of a Capitol Hill Congressional reception held on May 16th which featured BA member beers from across the country paired with a variety of artisinal foods. At this event, Congressmen Boehlert and DeFazio were publicly recognized and thanked for their outstanding support of America’s craft brewers
From left: Brewers Association president Charlie Papazian, Representatives Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR).
Update on Latrobe Brewery
I was away this weekend camping with the family and some friends — which also meant I missed a great beer festival in Santa Rosa — and I’ve been trying to catch up on what I’ve missed. It seems there’s a lot of information flying around about what’s going on with the Latrobe Brewery sale/closing.
I read one forum post on the BrewBoard by a prominent (or at least active) member who took the position that Rolling Rock’s beer isn’t actually great craft beer and the Latrobe Brewery hasn’t been owned by the community for a long time now so what’s the big deal that it may be closed. It may be an unpopular position, but there is a lot of truth to it. InBev has owned the brewery for years and even my first post when the sale was announced I wrote about Rolling Rock’s faux micro status. It’s been marketed as a craft beer but generally the only people who bought that were bridge buyers and casual beer buyers. No hardcore beer geek thinks of Rolling Rock as a craft beer. But the potential closing of a an over sixty-year old brewery is another matter and erases any negative thoughts I have about the beer itself. Why? For one simple reason. I believe our brewing heritage should not disappear. I have mourned too many brewery closings in my brief lifetime. Back in the golden age of brewing — the latter quarter of the 19th Century — there were something like almost two-thousand breweries in this country. After Prohibition we lost more than half of them in one fell thirteen-year swoop. Over the subsequent half-century the number of breweries continued to steadily decrease until by the early 1980s there were only a few dozen left. If you read the Breweriana magazines you’ll quickly see how many abandoned and ruined breweries there are out there. And not all of them closed a long time ago. My wife and I visited the Olympia Brewery in Washington on our honeymoon not quite ten years ago. Olympia, of course, didn’t make a great beer but the brewery itself was beautiful and they had an unbelieveably amazing collection of beer steins. But it’s closed now. The Henry Weinhard brewery in downtown Portland — itself a beautiful brick building — was torn down only a few years ago. Now I didn’t drink either of those beers, either, but I still mourned their passing. And the same is quite appropriate for the Latrobe Brewery, too. The effort to save should be supported by all of us who love beer, regardless of personal feelings about Rolling Rock itself. It’s the history and heritage that is worth saving.
Here’s a round-up of recent news about the efforts to save the brewery:
On June 1, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, John Murtha, Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania’s 12th District, announced his intention to broker a deal for the Latrobe Brewery and Pittsburgh Brewing, itself in financial trouble. The makers of Iron City Beer have been in Chapter 11 (reorganiztion) bankruptcy since last December. Funding would likely have to come from state resources. Latrobe Mayor Tom Marflak doubted this plan out of hand.
The next day, the Tribune-Review quoted Pittsburgh Brewing president Joseph Piccirilli was willing to meet with Representative Murtha regarding the purchase of the Latrobe Brewery. Piccirilli further stated, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that “The Latrobe Brewery is a beautiful facility. I’m in the beer business and it’s practically in my back yard. We are in the midst of union negotiations and we are working very hard to turn our financial situation around. But if we can schedule something, I’ll speak with the congressman.”
Friday, June 2, a spokesperson for Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell told reporters that Renaissance Partners, LLC, of Pittsburgh, “has been contacted by the state to study the Latrobe beermaking facility. Renaissance Partners works with the Governor’s Action Team on a regular basis.”
Yesterday, Governor Rendell said “he’ll offer incentives to any company that wants to buy Latrobe Brewing,” according to WTAE Channel 4 in Pittsburgh. From their coverage:
“The commonwealth’s going to come in and sweeten the pot a little bit and give some training money and incentive money so we can keep the jobs in Latrobe,” Rendell said. “There’s no guarantee, but we’re sort of getting our battle plan together.”
Monday, the Governor had spoken to InBev — the current owners of the brewery — and they informed him that “they had some interested investors in the facility.” According to the Tribune-Review report, InBev is “supposed to get back to [the state] this week.”
Today in a news brief, Governor Rendell says he is “guardedly optimistic” that a buyer can be found for the Latrobe Brewery, “including possibly finding another brewer to take over production or convincing private investor groups to buy the facility and develop a new brand.” The Governor’s made these remarks after a speech at the United Steelworkers Building in downtown Pittsburgh yesterday.
And as of this afternoon — around Noon — almost 18,000 people had signed the online petition to save the Latrobe Brewery. That’s three times as many signatures since the petition began almost two weeks ago.
With less than two months before the deadline passes and the brewery closes, at least there’s a lot of activity going on to try to save it. I tend to be pessimistic about these things but, as they say, hope springs eternal. Let’s prepare for the worst, but strive to do whatever each of us can to support the efforts to save the brewery. We owe it to every worker who ever set foot in a brewery to preserve what we can of the heritage that has brought each of us so much enjoyment throughout our lives.
Statistics Damned Statistics
Somehow I missed this little tidbit in last Sunday’s paper — oh, yeah, I was out of town for Memorial weekend — but I feel compelled to address it now. The S.F. Chronicle quotes a statistic from a survey by Merrill Research of San Francisco that a “survey of 1,398 wine consumers shows that between 2000 and 2005, the U.S. wine drinking population increased by 31 percent among adults in households with income greater than $35,000.” This is cited to support the statement that “[w]ine continues to steal drinkers’ attention from beer and spirits.”
Okay, let’s break that down. It’s a survey of “wine drinkers,” that is people who already drink wine rather than other alcoholic beverages. Does that strike anyone else as odd to use in an article comparing the rate of consumption of different drinks? Essentially the way I read it people who already prefer wine drank more of it over a five year period. Hooray! So what? Not exactly ground breaking, is it? Am I missing something? Plus, it further narrows the study by restricting it to households that make more that $35K, which is almost twice the amount where the poverty line is drawn and falls somewhere in between the second and third fifths of median income nationwide. So basically the study further says that people in the middle-class or upper middle-class (depending on where you draw that line) and up to and including the über-rich are the only people whose opinions were counted in determining wine drinking was up. So what was everybody whose income was below $35,000 drinking? Apparently is doesn’t matter, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say perhaps beer might be involved.
Of course, this number manipulation skews the results and thus the conclusions being drawn therefrom. We all know statistics lie, so why bother? I think the reason is twofold. First, it may be simply that people only read headlines and maybe the first paragraph or so and they tend to look for support for their beliefs and so would be expected to read this much less critically than I would. After all, this article was part of the newspaper’s wine section. Where is the newspaper’s beer section? Don’t ask. Second, putting statistics out there in print, even false or misleading ones, gives them a kind of legitimacy. One thing I learned as a Billboard reporter in the 1980s when I ran a record store was that people are often sheep. They want to be seen doing whatever is popular which is why sales charts, popularity contests, etc. are so useful to business. There’s a kind of snowball effect when something is perceived to be popular, that very fact makes it more popular as people jump on the bandwagon to be “with it” or whatever. So just by saying something is more popular and saying it with statistics, even questionable ones, can go a long way to making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But the Chronicle article isn’t finished mangling things:
“Wine continues to steal drinkers’ attention from beer and spirits, according to a recent survey, with three varietals proving particularly enticing to novices. Consumers who are decreasing their beer and spirits consumption but increasing their wine consumption are drinking more Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah/Shiraz and Pinot Grigio than the rest of the wine-drinking population.”
I’m not sure what the point of this is, and the study mentioned is never cited but I don’t think it’s the same study that began the article. The article continues. ” At the same time, the percentage of U.S. adults who drink beer and spirits but not wine declined by 25 percent.” Again, where is this data coming from? It appears on the small amount of information and citations used that these conclusions are drawn from comparing two and possibly three different studies, a fool’s game if ever there was one.
But when you look at the dollars involved, the numbers paint a different picture. In 2004, for example, American consumers spent $82 billion on beer, $49 billion on spirits and only $23 billion on wine. And the price of many wine bottles exceeds, and in some cases greatly exceeds, that of the average six-pack. This suggests to me that the actual number of beer purchases vs. wine purchases is even greater than the disparity in total sales indicates. There are all sorts of reasons to suggest that people answer poll questions with a certain bias. As a result, sales figures seem far more accurate a measure to me.
Given wine’s incessant snob appeal, I’m not really sure why they’re trying to use statistics to turn it into the people’s drink. Perhaps the media is trying to justify its pathetic coverage of beer. And I guess stories that buck conventional wisdom, and indeed logic and the real unvarnished statistics, are deemed more interesting. After all, that’s why famously nobody wants to read a story about a dog biting a man but vice versa it’s front page news. Everyone already knows beer is the second most consumed manufactured (meaning not water) beverage in the world (tea is number one) so anything that throws that into question is likely to become news because it goes against conventional wisdom. Plus — and this may be a California thing — alcohol law differences between beer, wine and spirits make it very difficult for beer to spend money on advertising but frighteningly easy for wine and spirits. Thus, wine and spirits advertising spending greatly outnumbers beer and newspapers are keenly aware of who pays the bills. No matter how you slice it, beer seems to be perpetually on the losing end of of our media’s coverage.