White House Releases Homebrew Recipe

September 4, 2012 By Jay Brooks

white-house
I bet it must be nice for President Obama’s people to be inundated by something positive for a change. When the White House announced that the kitchen was going to be homebrewing, even using honey made by White House bees, people wanted to know what the recipe was for the two beers they were brewing. After a petition to release the recipes garnered over 12,000 signatures, the White House did release the recipes on the White House Blog and their We the People page, a Honey Ale and a Honey Porter. Here was the White House response:

Inspired by home brewers from across the country, last year President Obama bought a home brewing kit for the kitchen. After the few first drafts we landed on some great recipes that came from a local brew shop. We received some tips from a couple of home brewers who work in the White House who helped us amend it and make it our own. To be honest, we were surprised that the beer turned out so well since none of us had brewed beer before.
As far as we know the White House Honey Brown Ale is the first alcohol brewed or distilled on the White House grounds. George Washington brewed beer and distilled whiskey at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson made wine but there’s no evidence that any beer has been brewed in the White House. (Although we do know there was some drinking during prohibition…)
Since our first batch of White House Honey Brown Ale we’ve added the Honey Porter and have gone even further to add a Honey Blonde this past summer. Like many home brewers who add secret ingredients to make their beer unique, all of our brews have honey that we tapped from the first ever bee-hive on the South Lawn. The honey gives the beer a rich aroma and a nice finish but it doesn’t sweeten it.

And here’s the recipe for the Honey Ale:

wh_beer_recipe_honey_ale

The White House also created a short video about the homebrew project.

And here’s the recipe for the Honey Porter:

wh_beer_recipe_honey_porter

Wondering how the recipe might work out? Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewing expressed his opinion in the New York Times, in White House Beer: A Brewer Weighs In.

A Toast To The Moon

August 25, 2012 By Jay Brooks

moon
It’s the end of an era. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the surface of the moon passed away today at 82. I was 10 that July when the historic moon walk took place. Like most kids my age, I was deeply obsessed with the NASA space program, had many models and books, and even drank Tang. Neil Armstrong was a real hero to me as a kid and I have no less admiration for him as an adult. I’ll raise a toast tonight to Neil Armstrong, and the entire group of Apollo astronauts, along with the thousands of engineers, scientists and technicians that achieved what so many thought was impossible, that — in John F. Kennedy’s words — “of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

apollo_lager

The only question is what is the appropriate beer to toast Armstrong, and the Moon? I still have two bottles of Apollo beer from the 1990s but I’m certainly not going to open any of those. I also have a cool blue 3L bottle of Apollo Lager, which was empty since it was given to me, so that obviously won’t work.

moonshot-logo

To bad we can’t drink a Moonshot tonight. Maybe a beer brewed with Apollo hops? Sixpoint’s summer seasonal is called Apollo, and Laurelwood has a Space Stout, but I can’t either of those. There’s Blue Moon, of course though I think I’d prefer the more local Moonlight or even Half Moon Bay. What beer will you choose?

barney-spaceman

More Mid-Year Brewery Numbers

August 21, 2012 By Jay Brooks

Earlier this month the Brewers Association released the good news that Craft Beer Grows 14% In First Half Of 2012. That was through the end of June. I hate to keep crowing about the numbers, but it’s hard to ignore, especially having lived through the depressing late 90s when optimism for craft beer was at its nadir. Anyway, here’s where we are just a month later, as of July 31 of this year.

U.S. operating breweries is at 2,142, up from 2,126 at the end of June.
U.S. breweries in planning is at 1,303, up from 1,252 at the end of June.
There are 555 more breweries in planning than a year ago and 347 more operating U.S. breweries.

Crazy times.

College Drinkers Are Happier & Cooler

August 21, 2012 By Jay Brooks

humor
This has just got to cheese off Alcohol Justice and the other neo-prohibitionist wingnuts, but Time magazine is reporting the results of a recent study that found the unpleasant truth that students who binge drink in college are actually happier and enjoy higher status among their peers. In Why College Binge Drinkers Are Happier, Have High Status, they began with a bang:

College binge drinkers say they’re happier with their social lives than those who don’t indulge — but it’s probably the boost in social status, not the booze itself that lifts their mood, according to new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
“Binge drinking is a symbolic proxy for high status in college,” said study co-author Carolyn Hsu, an associate professor of sociology at Colgate University in a statement, noting that it’s what the wealthy, powerful and happy students on campus do.
The study found that rich white frat boys reported having the greatest social satisfaction at school and were considered the big men on campus by others. They were not only happier than students in low-status groups — women, minorities and people who were less financially well-off — but also more likely to binge drink. “Binge drinking then becomes associated with high status and the ‘cool’ students on campus,” said Hsu.
Low-status students in turn reported being happier if they binged than if they didn’t. Indeed, alcohol seemed to be the great social equalizer, bringing members of low-status groups to happiness levels similar to those of greater social power if they binged. “Students in all groups consistently liked college more when they participated in the campus’ binge drinking culture,” Hsu said.

The results are still preliminary, but it’s still notable for at least trying to better understand why binge drinking persists, despite endless efforts to curb it. Though to be fair, most of those efforts are misguided bludgeons like “just say no” and other ideas doomed to fail by neo-prohibitionist groups.

Other interesting tidbits included the fact that “the most stressed and highly anxious students were the least likely to binge, suggesting that the negative emotions that often drive alcoholism are not influencing many of these bingers.” And in a related study, it was found that College Men Who Post About Alcohol Have More Facebook Friends. In a way, it’s not surprising, as social status is pretty important at that age, possibly more important than at any other time. College students, often on their own for the first time in their young lives, trying to find themselves and become their own adults, have the added burden of having virtually no education regarding alcohol and having to obtain it through illegal means thanks to the anti-alcohol efforts of the past several decades. So when the study concludes “that the social advantages of binge drinking do not mitigate its negative consequences on health and academic performance,” I can only say, well, duh.

But it’s the final paragraph that contains the most important wisdom, totally lost on neo-prohibitionists and especially people who do not drink.

Surprisingly little research is conducted on the positive effects sought by drug users and what they actually achieve via their drug consumption; the assumption is that alcohol and other drugs are always bad and their users are irrational. But until more studies like this are conducted, prevention programs are unlikely to improve. We can’t prevent what we don’t understand.

Just say know.

Why Is This News? Beer Beats Wine!

August 20, 2012 By Jay Brooks

beer-vs-wine
I never quite understand why this is even considered news at all? The L.A. Times is reporting that “Beer beats out wine as Americans’ booze of choice.” Their source for this so-called news is a new Gallup Poll entitled Majority in U.S. Drink Alcohol, Averaging Four Drinks a Week. But that’s not exactly news insofar as it’s been that way since the dawn of time, or thereabouts. The gallup poll is just a survey, of course, and prone to people’s prejudices and perceptions. So when they report that “Beer edges out wine by 39% to 35% as drinkers’ beverage of choice,” it’s hard not to laugh, and even harder to take it seriously. This is what people tell pollsters, and it’s pretty divorced from reality.

If you want a truer, more accurate picture of peoples’ tastes, look at what they buy. The World Health Organization, at their website, gives the following data, collected in 2005 (though it rarely changes by much):

Alcohol Consumption By Type:

Beer: 53%
Wine: 16%
Spirits: 31%

And the Ginley USDC 2010 reports that for 2009, the volume of alcohol sold in the U.S. — 3.3 billion cases — is divided as follows, giving beer an 85 share:

Alcohol Sales By Volume:

Beer: 85%
Wine: 6%
Spirits: 9%

And by retail dollars — a total $1.89 billion — beer still has a commanding lead:

Alcohol Sales By Dollars:

Beer: 52%
Wine: 14%
Spirits: 34%

It doesn’t really matter what people tell the voice on the other end of the phone when Gallup calls asking for peoples’ preferences, this is what they really drink. And while it does fluctuate over time, it’s been roughly like this as long as anybody can remember. Trying to turn it into something newsworthy takes a certain amount of opportunistic forgetfulness, ignorance and a willingness to ignore history.

And while somewhat petty, this also struck me in a way I couldn’t ignore, like someone slapped me. The author of the L.A. Times piece, Tiffany Hsu, refers to men as floozies, when she reports. “Men tend to be the biggest floozies, downing 6.2 drinks a week on average compared with 2.2 drinks for women.” Now I assume she owns a dictionary, and I was pretty sure what the definition of a floozy was. So after checking at least six dictionaries to confirm my suspicions — like it or not — a floozy is always described as a woman. It’s an old, archaic word you rarely hear these days, but it doesn’t mean someone who drinks too much, as she appears to believe.

There’s also other findings in the Gallup Poll results, part of their annual Consumption Habits poll, and some are interesting, if not altogether showing anything particularly novel or new. But toward the end of Gallup’s press release, they make this obnoxious statement in the conclusion, which they title “The Bottom Line.”

With drinking comes overdrinking, and despite possible reluctance by some respondents to admit problems, one in five drinkers — representing 14% of all U.S. adults — say they sometimes drink too much.

Okay, first of all, WTF! “With drinking comes overdrinking?” No it doesn’t. It’s hardly a fait accompli. Even by their own numbers, that’s twisted logic. 86% of the people polled say they don’t drink too much so one clearly does not follow from the other, now does it? And how about this for twisting; “one in five” is 20%, not even close to 14%. You can’t even say that’s rounding, it’s simply inflating the numbers. So much for even the illusion of accuracy.

And just the idea that one alcoholic beverage has “beat” the other is annoying, too. I may prefer beer, but as a cross-drinker — like most people, frankly — I don’t feel that they’re competing in an us vs. them kind of way. It seems only news outlets hungry for headlines pit the two against one another. The first sentence of the article is “Score one for beer.” What was the contest?

There are plenty of positive stories from the world of beer that mainstream media could be covering. As Garrett Oliver recently wrote in Food & Wine magazine, one of the Crimes Against Beer is its continuing lack of media coverage. Oliver writes. “The public is yearning for more knowledge about beer, and nobody’s giving it to them. Even though craft beer is more popular than wine in the US, every major newspaper has a wine column, and almost nobody has a beer column. What’s wrong with this picture?”

What’s wrong, indeed.

UPDATE: An interesting side discussion came out of my linking Garrett Oliver’s piece, Crimes Against Beer, in which he casually mentions that “craft beer is more popular than wine in the US.” I confess that when I first read that, I thought it couldn’t be correct, but since it wasn’t relevant to the broader point I was trying to make in this post, I didn’t dwell on it. Alan, from A Good Beer Blog, however, did, and used it as a launching point for his own post, Is All That Made Up Stuff A Problem With The Dialogue?. He also did a little digging this morning to get at the actual numbers, and between the two of us, here’s what we found. Alan looked at statistics gathered by the Brewers Association and the Wine Institute. He found that in 2011, there were 347 million cases of wine and 11,468,152 barrels of craft beer sold in the U.S. From that he concluded that craft beer volume is roughly one-third of wine. Being lazier than Alan, I looked at retail dollars from the same sources and saw that there was an “estimated $8.7 billion” in craft beer sales and $32.5 billion in U.S. wine sales. That works out to craft beer selling about 26.8% — just over one-quarter — of wine sales. So no matter how you slice it, craft beer sales are nowhere near that of wine sold in America. That number could be slightly higher, as my one quibble with this is that the Brewers Association definition of what it means to be a craft beer is fine for their purposes (which is membership-based) but is not practical in the real world where what makes a beer crafty is, to my mind at least, how it’s made and how it tastes. I do, for example, consider Blue Moon a craft beer. And that would change the numbers to some degree, but I suspect not enough to alter the fact that wine still outsells craft beer, at least for now.

“Craft Beer” Added To Webster’s Dictionary

August 14, 2012 By Jay Brooks

webster
The interwebs are all abuzz with the news this morning that the term “craft beer” has been added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. I know very few people who are happy with the term already, so this is probably not going to help. The definition they chose doesn’t seem to quite work. I know they were trying to generalize a term that itself has struggled to be defined, and there are already many differences of opinion about what the term means, so it was no easy task. Even so, it seems like a fail. It will apparently be in the next print edition of the dictionary, but has already been added online. Here’s the entry:

craft beer noun
Definition of CRAFT BEER
: a specialty beer produced in limited quantities : MICROBREW
First Known Use of CRAFT BEER
1986

That definition suffers from the vagueness of what it means to be “a specialty beer” — which itself needs to be defined — and that it includes only beers that are brewed “in limited quantities.” As opposed to those beers in unlimited quantities? Does that mean year-round beers cannot be considered “craft beer?” Probably not, but my point is this is a pretty inelegant attempt at defining craft beer. It’s simple, at least, but hanging what it means to be a craft beer on it being “special” and “in limited quantities” is not exactly doing anybody any favors.

But other dictionaries have also tackled “craft beer” with mostly the same uninspired results. Here’s a few others.

American Heritage Dictionary: A distinctively flavored beer that is brewed and distributed regionally. Also called craft brew, microbrew.

Dictionary.com: an all-malt or nearly all-malt specialty beer usually brewed in a small, regional brewery.

Oxford English Dictionary: a beer with a distinctive flavour, produced and distributed in a particular region.

Stan had a post a couple of years ago about Craft beer: The 1986 definition that explores its origins. A lot of terms have come and gone, picked up and fallen out of favor, and there’s a twitter discussion swirling about what the next term will be, with Ray Daniels suggesting “Artisan Brewer” as the “next big thing.” Here are a few that have been, and continue to be, used to describe beer that’s not “good old macrobrew made in vats the size of Rhode Island” (however we define that, too), and at least one suggested this morning just in jest:

Artisan Beer
Authentic Beer
Boutique Brewer
Cool Brewer
Cottage Brewery
Craft Beer
Craft Brew
Flavor Beer
Hand-Crafted Beer
Handmade Beer
Microbrewery
Nanobrewery
Picobrewery
Real Beer
Regional Brewery
Small Batch Beer
Small Brewer
Specialty Beer
True Beer

Did I miss any? Are there any you think should be added for consideration? What do you think we should call this stuff we all love? Maybe just call it “beer” and be done with it?

Anderson Valley Teams With Wild Turkey To Make Bourbon Barrel Beers

August 14, 2012 By Jay Brooks

avbc-new-2
Boonville’s Anderson Valley Brewing announced today that they’re partnering with the bourbon maker Wild Turkey to develop bourbon barrel-aged beers. The first will be made using their Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout.

0612 Fal Jimmy Eddie Kettles
Fal Allen, with Jimmy and Eddie Russell at Anderson Valley’s brew kettles.

From the press release:

As part of an exclusive partnership and licensing agreement, the Anderson Valley Brewing Company and the famed bourbon brand Wild Turkey® announced today that they will be teaming to facilitate the brewing of world-class Bourbon-barrel aged craft beers using repurposed American oak barrels from the Wild Turkey Distillery in Kentucky.
“I’ve been familiar with Anderson Valley Brewing for some time, and I’ve always admired the pride and care they take in crafting and brewing their beer,” said Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey Master Distiller. “It’s similar to the approach we take with our bourbon, which made this partnership such a natural fit. Now I finally have a good excuse to drink a great craft beer!”
“The opportunity to partner with the Bourbon Hall of Fame Russell family and Wild Turkey is tremendously exciting,” said Trey White, Anderson Valley owner and CEO. “We have done some trial brews with a limited number of Wild Turkey barrels over the past several months and the beers to date have been awesome. We cannot wait to create some truly special craft beers with hundreds rather than a handful of barrels. The relationship with Wild Turkey provides Anderson Valley with a world class, consistent source of barrelage rather than randomly sourced barrelage in limited quantities. Anderson Valley, working with the Russell’s, will explore new frontiers in barrel aged craft beer.”
The initial production from this first-of-its-kind collaboration will be a Bourbon barrel aged Stout featuring Anderson Valley’s award-winning Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout. Aged for three months, the resulting beer will be deep ebony in hue with a beautiful mahogany head, an aroma of fresh-baked bread, toffee, and espresso mingling with the woody vanilla notes of Bourbon whiskey and the rich roasted flavors wrapped with Bourbon.
“We chose to work with Wild Turkey not only because their whiskey is so outstanding — they are also the only major Bourbon producer to use a #4 “alligator” char on their barrels. This helps to introduce way more flavor to the Bourbon, and therefore way more flavor to our famous Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout,” continued White.
This draft-only production will be released in the fall and will be followed by packaged products in early 2013. Anderson Valley and Wild Turkey personnel will work jointly in the coming months on a variety of exciting promotional opportunities both on and off premise to expose their respective consumers to the quality and authenticity of Bourbon barrel aged products.

So that should be interesting. Autumn has always been my favorite season, now there’s one more reason to look forward to it.

0612 hops bbl

Guess What The Next Session Will Be?

August 13, 2012 By Jay Brooks

For our 67th Session, our host, Derrick Peterman, who writes Ramblings of a Beer Runner, has chosen a topic that requires you to take out your crystal ball and gaze five years into the future and make some beery predictions. Among many other unknown questions about what the future of the brewing industry holds, predict How Many Breweries [There Will Be] in 2017?. Here’s how to think about your immediate future (at least as far forward as Friday, September 7, when this next Session will take place):

There’s been much cheering and fanfare reverberating throughout the brewing community about the latest brewery numbers recently released from the Brewer’s Association, who counted exactly 2,126 breweries in the United States. To put that into context, you have to go way back to 1887 when the United States had that many breweries. It’s an astonishing 47% increase from just five years ago in 2007 when the tally was a mere 1,449, despite the United States slowly recovering from a serious recession over this period. And according to the Brewers Association, another whopping 1,252 breweries are in the planning stages.
Where is it all going? The growth shows no sign of stopping and the biggest problem most breweries have is that they can’t brew beer fast enough. But can the market really absorb all these new breweries? Are we headed for a cataclysmic brewing bubble where legions of brewers, their big dreams busted, are left to contemplate selling insurance? Or is brewing reaching a critical mass, only to explode even more intensely in a thermo-nuclear frenzy of fermentation?
Now you have a chance to weigh in on these questions. For this month’s Session, tell us how many breweries the Brewer’s Association will count five years from now in 2017, and why you think it will be that number.

So grab your crystal beer glasses, and start peering into them, or better yet start pouring something into them. Then start predicting.

beer-prediction

Hopefully, you’ll have figured it all out and you can say with unwavering certainty where we’ll be in five years by Friday, September 7. And here’s one more more incentive, from this Session’s host. “If five years from now your prediction is the most accurate one, in addition to enjoying beer blogger bragging rights, I will personally buy you a beer.” So you’d have that going for you … which is nice.

How Neo-Prohibitionists Target Alcohol

August 11, 2012 By Jay Brooks

target-alcohol
Mark Twain is generally credited with popularizing the phrase: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” He attributed it to British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, though most historians now dispute that. So even when speaking about lying, there were lies. Today’s neo-prohibitionists would be proud, lying with statistics is something they’ve finely honed into its own kind of science. If you haven’t read How To Lie With Statistics or the more recent Trust Us, We’re Experts!, they both provide great insights into just how it’s been done over the years, and continues to be done with alarming frequency.

Thanks to Jason K. for alerting me to this one, which in the news is being portrayed with the intentionally misleading How Alcohol Ads Target Kids. The story concerns a study sponsored by CAMY (the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth) — itself a bit of an anti-alcohol organization who receives funding from the king of the neo’s, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — that examined alcohol advertising in eleven magazines over a five-year period. The study itself was recently published in The Journal of Adolescent Health with the much less misleading title Risky Messages in Alcohol Advertising, 2003–2007: Results From Content Analysis.

When CAMY released a press release about the study, they re-titled it Alcohol Advertising Standards Violations Most Common in Magazines with Youthful Audiences — also not exactly accurate — and by the time it got to the media (who love alarming headlines) it became How Alcohol Ads Target Kids, which was picked up by such high profile websites as Yahoo News, Live Science and Business News Daily.

All of the news stories rely on the CAMY press release and not the study itself, which seems at least a little strange. So here’s the Abstract:

Purpose
To assess the content of alcohol advertising in youth-oriented U.S. magazines, with specific attention to subject matter pertaining to risk and sexual connotations and to youth exposure to these ads.
Methods
This study consisted of a content analysis of a census of 1,261 unique alcohol advertisements (“creatives”) recurring 2,638 times (“occurrences”) in 11 U.S. magazines with disproportionately youthful readerships between 2003 and 2007. Advertisements were assessed for content relevant to injury, overconsumption, addiction, and violations of industry guidelines (termed “risk” codes), as well as for sexism and sexual activity.
Results
During the 5-year study period, more than one-quarter of occurrences contained content pertaining to risk, sexism, or sexual activity. Problematic content was concentrated in a minority of brands, mainly beer and spirits brands. Those brands with higher youth-to-adult viewership ratios were significantly more likely to have a higher percentage of occurrences with addiction content and violations of industry guidelines. Ads with violations of industry guidelines were more likely to be found in magazines with higher youth readerships.
Conclusions
The prevalence of problematic content in magazine alcohol advertisements is concentrated in advertising for beer and spirits brands, and violations of industry guidelines and addiction content appear to increase with the size of youth readerships, suggesting that individuals aged <21 years may be more likely to see such problematic content than adults.

There’s a lot gobbledygook and psychobabble jargon in that, but happily the news reports picked up the additional information in the press release to help out those of us who can’t afford to pay to see the full article. The so-called “study” is not exactly scientific, despite the academic journal publication and pedigree, but suffers greatly from how it’s defined and how the ads were characterized — how those “risk codes” were applied. As the study was sponsored by a particular organization with an agenda, it’s hardly a surprise that the conclusions would support that agenda. After all, they bought and paid for it.

One of the premises is that the 11 magazines they examined were ones with a “substantial youth readership,” which is important since they’re claiming that alcohol companies are targeting kids and/or violating advertising standards. I’d love to know which magazines they targeted, but that information has not been made readily available, even though you’d think that with such a dire problem they’d want to warn parents which magazines not to let their impressionable young children read. Should we wonder why that is? What it really comes down to is how they define “substantial youth readership?” For the study, that meant at least 15% of the readership was estimated to be underage, which is presumably what they mean by “youth.” I think most people would be hard pressed to consider 15% of anything “substantial.” So right from the get go, the study seems flawed; unless of course your goal is to manufacture a particular conclusion.

They further claim that these ads “frequently showed alcohol being consumed in an irresponsible manner.” First of all, how you define what “irresponsible” means is at best very subjective and certainly prone to be interpreted differently by different people. One of the examples of what they mean is “showing alcohol consumption near or on bodies of water.” Since when is that the hallmark of irresponsible behavior? Beer can’t be consumed responsibly, or safely, if there’s water nearby? Seriously, WTF?

Other examples they give include “encouraging overconsumption and providing messages supportive of alcohol addiction.” But those are both so vague as to be almost meaningless, and very open to interpretation. They further suggest that “sexual connotations or sexual objectification” were seen in “nearly one in five ad occurrences.” Again, pretty vague and subjective, but beyond that, so what? Isn’t “sex sells” the number one rule of advertising? Even if true, is alcohol advertising the only group using sex to sell their product? Or is that tactic literally everywhere. I remember being shown in an advertising class during college how the word “sex” could be found in the hair of the colonel in Kentucky Friend Chicken advertising. Sex is everywhere. Shock, surprise? Hardly. It’s the reason we’re all here. If you go looking for it, you’re going to find it. And frankly, under the circumstances, finding less than 20% of the alcohol ads with sexual content seems positively rock bottom, and something that they should see as a positive, wouldn’t you think?

But despite such vagueness, CAMY is undaunted, and finds exactly what they’re looking for. CAMY director and study co-author David Jernigan makes this claim. “The bottom line here is that youth are getting hit repeatedly by ads for spirits and beer in magazines geared towards their age demographic.” He goes on. “As at least 14 studies have found that the more young people are exposed to alcohol advertising and marketing, the more likely they are to drink, or if already drinking, to drink more, this report should serve as a wake-up call to parents and everyone else concerned about the health of young people.”

But another similar study by CAMY done in 2010 found that Less Alcohol Advertising Makes No Difference. In that study — covering nearly the same period of time — they found that youth exposure to alcohol advertising in magazines fell by 48 percent, alcohol advertising placed in publications with under 21 audiences greater than 30 percent fell to almost nothing by 2008, and youth exposure in magazines with youth age 12-to-20 audience composition above 15 percent declined by 48.4 percent. So apparently with that no longer a problem, they instead turned their attention to magazines with a youth readership of less than 15%. That must be the problem. There has to be a problem, after all. Without problems, there can be no fund raising. There can be no clarion call to arms against the heathen drinkers and alcohol companies.

This is the modern era of non-profits. There always has to be a problem. Now matter how much progress their organization makes against whatever problem they believe exists — and they will crow about that progress — the problem persists ad infinitum. It has to. But this particular problem has already been disproved. In 2003, a “‘Federal Trade Commission report to Congress indicate[d] that its comprehensive investigation’ found no evidence of targeting underage consumers.” See Alcohol Ads Target Youth? for the full story. The media may call this “How Alcohol Ads Target Kids,” but I can’t help but see it as just the opposite. When you look closer, it seems to me more like “How Neo-Prohibitionists Target Alcohol.”

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