Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Homebrewing Finally Legal In All 50 States

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aha-new
As Mississippi’s ban on homebrewing was lifted today, for the first time since Prohibition made brewing illegal in 1919, homebrewing is finally allowed in all fifty states. My only comment is it’s about damn time. That a supposed clerical error — a typo — made home winemaking legal after prohibition ended while keeping homebrewing illegal is the biggest anti-alcohol bullshit move of all-time, especially when you consider it took a full seventy years to correct that “typo,” at least for all states. The American Homebrewers Association released a statement this morning, as did the Brewers Association:

Unifying the United States homebrew community has long been an aspiration of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA), and we are proud to announce this goal has been achieved with the help of countless dedicated homebrewers and AHA members like you. July 1, 2013 marks the day Mississippi lifts its homebrew restriction, unifying homebrewers in all fifty states for the first time since before prohibition.

Beer history in the United States region predates the very existence of the country as we know it. Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere produced a watery maize-beer, a pre-cursor to modern American adjunct beer, and as the earliest explorers settled down in the New World, America’s contemporary brewing culture was born.

“From our nation’s founders to our current President, this country has a long and storied tradition of homebrewing,” said AHA director Gary Glass.

Even after prohibition was eradicated with the implementation of the 21st Amendment in 1933, homebrewers would still be criminals in the eyes of the federal law for over four-and-a-half decades. President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that went into effect on February 1, 1979 federally legalizing homebrewing, but it remained up to each state to determine their individual alcohol policies, including home beer production. Over the course of the next forty-six years, states adopted legislation, permitting the making of beer at home.

It’s terrific news that finally homebrewing is permitted in every state. It’s been a long time coming.

ask-me-homebrew

Binge Drinking Infographic

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binge-modern
Today’s infographic is another one filled with some questionable information, Binge Drinking. This one’s from the point of view Best Drug Rehabilitation, a company that makes money selling rehab to people with drinking or other problems, so they have a vested interest in making it sound like everybody is a binge drinker. Their definition of binge drinking, for example, is “consuming alcohol until the blood-alcohol concentration is 0.08% or more.” So just getting drunk is the same as binge drinking. Uh-huh, that makes sense.

binge-drinking
Click here to see the infographic full size.

Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol

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brain-2
I saw this yesterday in the Discovery Channel’s Curiosity.com. In answer to the question “do intelligent people drink more alcohol,” two separate answers reached the same surprising conclusion. When I say surprising, I mean it will come as a shock to the anti-alcohol wingnuts who continue to deny any positive attributes whatsoever to drinking alcohol. Because while the answer isn’t that new, or that unpredictable, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time around responsible drinkers — wets vs. drys — you probably already knew that the answer is simply yes.

Their first answer was from Ian O’Neill, Discovery News’ Space Producer, who wrote:

Surprisingly, a recent study using data from the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States indicates that intelligent people really do drink more alcohol.

By tracking the intelligence of children under the age of 16 and then revisiting them as adults, it turned out that kids who were considered “more bright” than others in their age group ended up drinking more alcohol later in life. Even after researchers canceled out marital status, parents’ education, earnings and childhood social class, smarter kids were drinking more alcohol as adults.

Why would intelligent people drink more alcohol? Some researchers suggest that as the production of alcohol is only a recent invention (within the last 10,000 years) and our ancestors had gotten their alcohol buzz from rotten fruit, the more intelligent humans would be more likely to drink modern alcoholic beverages. Although this is attractive evolutionary speculation, it’s more likely the real reasons are more complex.

The second answer was presented not by an individual, but as a group answer by Curiosity:

It’s a myth that alcohol kills individual brain cells, but drinking can cause long-term brain damage. That’s why researchers were surprised in 2010, when data from Britain and the United States revealed that more intelligent children, when grown and of legal age, tended to drink more alcohol than their less intelligent peers. The researchers were able to control for other factors that might affect a person’s propensity to drink, such as marital status and income, and the findings related to childhood intelligence held up. Researchers aren’t exactly sure why this link exists; one writer posited that drinking alcohol for pleasure is a relatively new thing, evolutionarily speaking. Intelligent people tend to try new things, so the writer argued that people who enjoy a glass of wine with dinner are actually performing a novel act when you take a long view of history.

One of the longitudinal study each answer is referring to was The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) conducted here in the U.S., while the other was part of the UK’s massive National Child Development Study in the UK. I started writing about some of the conclusions drawn from the UK study several months ago, abandoning it when I got busy with other projects, but it’s still pretty interesting. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist who writes a blog for Psychology Today entitled the Scientific Fundamentalist, wrote More Intelligent People Are More Likely to Binge Drink and Get Drunk which covered much of the same ground. Although in it Kanazawa focuses on something I strongly disagree with. “Not only are more intelligent individuals more likely to consume more alcohol more frequently, they are more likely to engage in binge drinking and to get drunk.” That propensity to “binge drink,” I’d argue, has more to do with the narrowing definition of binge drinking than any actual increase in drinking. Binge drinking used to be a defined qualitatively but over the past few decades has become quantitative, meaning it’s become defined as a specific number of drinks in a set period of time, absent any context or mitigating factors (of which there could be many). And even that nonsensical number keeps shrinking and changing.

Kanazawa wonders aloud if that should be worrying. I have to say “no, Doc, it’s not.” Here’s why. Look at this chart below. It shows the correlation between intelligence and incidence of “binge drinking,” as defined using the modern absurdity of five drinks in a row.

binge-drinking-intelligence

But what this chart really says is that the most intelligent among us have just under five drinks one and a half times a year, roughly three times every two years. The horror! Or is it?

Even “controlling for age, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, marital status, parental status, education, earnings, political attitudes, religiosity, general satisfaction with life, taking medication for stress, experience of stress without taking medication, frequency of socialization with friends, number of sex partners in the last 12 months, childhood family income, mother’s education, and father’s education,” the smarter you are as a child, the more you’ll apparently drink as an adult. Isn’t it at least possible that the intelligent people are on to something? Maybe it’s not such a terrible thing after all.

Another psychologist who also writes for Psychology Today, Stanton Peele, wrote sort of a rebuttal to Kanazawa. In Are More Intelligent People More Likely to be Alcoholics?, he ponders.

So, we can ask, is getting drunk ‘once every other month or so good, bad, or neutral? Is it harmless — even beneficial? Is it a social convention? An exploration of the universe? Fun for people who are better off and can spare the time and who can protect themselves while having a night out drinking? Or is this behavior pathological, a precursor to alcoholism? Specifically, are more intelligent people more likely to be alcoholics?

To this, he posits three possibilities.

  • Although smarter people (as measured in childhood) get drunk more, they are less likely than dull people to become alcoholics. Does that mean that they are inured against alcoholism? The dominant theory here would be that being smart is a protective life asset.
  • They are just as likely to become alcoholics. Which would still be somewhat counterintuitive, since despite getting drunk far more often than dull people, they are no more likely to succumb to alcoholism.
  • Smart people are more likely to be alcoholics. This could follow from several theories of behavior: smart people tempt fate by drinking more, and thus they are more likely to become alcoholics. Or, smart people are inherently more likely to be alcoholics — perhaps being smart makes them more acutely aware of the world’s problems, or creates other damaging emotional states.

Which, he notes, is odd, since it would seem to suggest “childhood intelligence is a risk factor for alcoholism.” Are parents putting their children at risk by sending them to good schools, making them do their homework or encouraging them to read? Peele declares this to be something of a “quandary — something most people generally value leads to a behavior of which we disapprove.” And Kanazawa concludes that since “more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to engage in binge drinking and getting drunk,” then “occasional drunkenness is incompatible with regular moderate drinking.”

The fallacy with both these lines of thought, I believe, is that occasional drunkenness may not be the demon the medical community has come to believe. In their zeal to quantify everything, they’ve removed the problems in problem drinking and reduced it to a simple formula that clearly doesn’t work. By their standards, I’m an undisputed binge drinker, and yet I’d warrant I’m drunk less than many people. I can state clearly and unequivocally that I’m not an alcoholic, having grown up with and around countless actual problem drinkers. And without trying to sound too egotistical, I’m not an idiot, at least. I did reasonably well in school. Maybe that’s why I drink more now? Since most of the people I know also drink a fair amount, does that means beer drinkers tend to be smarter than non-drinkers? My anecdotal evidence says yes. But then I’m very biased. Don’t we all want to believe we have smart friends? Maybe, but I’m just happy if they like good beer. Of course, that may possibly be one and the same thing.

The Ziblee Beverage Pleasure Enhancer

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salesman
Maybe it’s my own skepticism, but this is setting off all of the Amway/Infomercial/Snake Oil Salesman alarm bells. On Indiegogo — similar to Kickstarter — someone has launched a project for the Ziblee Beverage Pleasure Enhancer, which they describe as follows. “Briefly stir your favorite adult beverage with the Ziblee and be amazed at the improvement in flavor and smoothness.” Uh, huh. Sure. Convince me.

Here’s what it looks like. To me, it looks roughly like a honey dipper made out of a metal spring with an aluminum handle. But no, the spring is made from “the finest stainless steel [they] could find. Surgical grade stainless steel,” no less.

ziblee-1

But actually it’s the pitch, and the fact that there’s a special crystal inside the wand, that makes is sound like it’s coming from a snake oil salesman.

The Ziblee is an energetically-charged wand-like device that, when stirred gently for six or seven seconds in a glass of wine, spirits, coffee or juice, liberates all the flavor of the beverage and smooths the taste significantly. Just like award-winning vintners, connoisseurs and sommeliers who have used the Ziblee, you will be astounded at the difference it makes. It really does “make the cheap stuff taste like the good stuff…and the good stuff taste even better!”

Beer is conspicuously absent, but apparently every other alcohol on the planet, along with coffee and juice, will magically be improved by a few stirs. How does this “magic” work? Here’s their explanation.

The Ziblee is not an ‘aerator’ and it doesn’t have magnets. It’s a totally new technology that uses the subtle energy of frequencies. Those frequencies impact the beverage on a molecular level releasing its full flavor and smoothness. There is no chemical change in the beverage at all, nothing dissolves, nothing is added or taken away. It really is a quantum energy thing and there are only two ways to know that something wonderful has happened to your drink. The first is to look at the molecular structure of the drink under an electron microscope, which we’ve done — but honestly, it’s not that easy to do. The second is a far better option…taste it! Do a variety of taste tests. All in the name of scientific research of course! This is absolutely the most fun you can have using quantum physics!

It works through specially selected natural quartz crystal. Due to their balanced and set formation, certain crystals have the ability to tune into the vibrations of what is around them. People have known that since ancient times. Today what we’re able to do with the Ziblee is ‘tune’ the crystal with a proprietary combination of frequencies. When the super-charged Ziblee connects with your beverage it harmonizes the frequencies to gently reveal the remarkable story within every glass. It makes every sip, every drink, every conversation more pleasurable.

Dizzy yet? Toward the end of this new ageiness, they claim that it “works with all adult beverages, making them taste smooth, expensive,” but finally address beer. “With carbonated beverages like beer, soda and champagne the Ziblee tends to make them go flat, so don’t ruin your drink. We’re not sure why that happens, but it does. We dumped many a beer down the drain trying to figure it out.” It’s funny that they don’t know why it happens, suggesting to me that they don’t really know anything about their claim that it does work on non-carbonated drinks, except water.

So what do you think? Magic or hokum? I’m sure it’s not that simply swirling your drink makes it taste differently. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Who would fall for that?

ziblee-2

Proving Adulthood

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old-age
As I inch closer to senior citizenship — gallop really — few things cheese me off more than continually having to prove I’m old enough to buy a drink. It’s been 33 years since I became an adult (36 really, but they changed the definition from 18 to 21 while I was in between the two). Of course, what it means to be an adult is quite the loaded question. The standard responsibilities, obligations and rights include voting, the ability to enter into contracts, marry and several others, including of course, drinking alcohol. The fact that these standards vary from nation to nation, and culture to culture, should convince you that they’re a product of each individual community, and really ought to reflect the values of the populace. And once upon a time, they did, but in my lifetime those values have been hijacked by a minority of fanatics who are committed to forcing their own values on the rest of us.

While the common sense argument that fighting for one’s country should include at least the ability to vote lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, the reverse of that argument was used to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21. People 18 to 20 could be counted on to protect our freedoms — and die for their country — but neo-prohibitionists argued that they weren’t ready to enjoy a beer. A specious argument to be sure, but they managed to tie raising the drinking age to federal highway funds, and no state could afford to remain sensible.

But for anti-alcohol fanatics even that wasn’t enough, it was just a start. And neo-prohibitionists ever since have been working tirelessly to tighten the noose on all manner of restrictions on alcohol. I remember when I was in my early 20s, signs at cash registers warned that if you look 25 or older, be prepared to show your I.D. By the time I was in my 30s, the signs had changed, too, saying roughly the same thing but making 30 the threshold. As I’ve aged, the needle keeps moving. A few years ago, Tennessee passed a law that every person, no matter how old, has to prove they’re at least 21, even if they have one foot in the grave, no exceptions.

People invariably tell me I should be flattered to look so young, and chuckle as they say it, as if I should be amused. Well, I’m not. It has nothing to do with youth. It has to do with control, and having to keep proving I’m an adult is a ridiculous indignity that grows more insulting with each passing year. We live in an increasingly Kafkaesque world where as the older I look, the more I have to prove it. As late as my 40s, I was refused service because I left my wallet at home, despite there being little doubt I was more than twice the age of majority. It’s become the modern equivalent of having to “show us your papers” (say it with a thick German accent), a sad cliche become real. Adulthood has responsibilities and obligations, of course, but it should also have a few benefits, like not having to carry our “papers” with us wherever we go.

But now Somerset, the county in southwest England, has taken this absurdity one step farther. According to a story in the This is Somerset newspaper — a Grandfather, 77, falls foul of shop’s booze rules — an elderly gentlemen was refused his purchase of beer because he was shopping with his teenage grandson. Apparently, the overzealous cashier thought the 77-year old man was buying beer for the teenager, but even after he confirmed they were related, the sale was still refused. He sent his grandson outside, but the cashier still wouldn’t budge. Commenters to the story insist that she was right to refuse the sale because that’s what the law says. And that’s probably correct, but it’s the law that’s wrong. We have to stop trying to make a perfect society through such absurd legislation. When an elderly man can’t shop with his grandchild and buy something he’s legally entitled to purchase because he could potentially turn around and do something illegal with it, that’s going too far. That’s trying to fix a perceived problem by creating a different problem for many more people than were affected by the original problem. But this is the neo-prohibitionist strategy in a nutshell. They want to make it as difficult as possible for as many people as possible. It’s using a bazooka to kill a fly. It’s about punishing everyone who drinks, not about keeping alcohol away from minors.

And so neo-prohibitionists insist that 4/5th of the adult population, or more, has to suffer on the off chance a 16-year old might get his hands on a beer. That’s not what it should mean to be an adult in any society.

Ruining Craft Beer With Hop Bombs

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hop-bomber
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past twenty-four hours, you’ve no doubt seen the provocative article on Slate, Against Hoppy Beer, The craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews, by Adrienne So. I’d been hoping to avoid taking the obvious bait, but I find myself thinking about the article itself, the way it’s gone viral and the two camps that have been set up online defending or decrying it.

From Slate’s point of view, it’s a massive success. As of this morning, almost 1500 people have left a comment, nearly 4,000 shared it on Facebook, and it’s currently one of the most read and shared articles on Slate. That’s eyeballs on the page; that’s money in the bank. But the article itself, though there are a few deep flaws, isn’t itself that inflammatory. It’s that headline, or as Stan points out: headlines. Because while the page itself displays Against Hoppy Beer, The craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews, e-mailing it changes the headline to Hops Enthusiasts Are Ruining Craft Beer for the Rest of Us and bookmarking it saves the headline Hoppy beer is awful — or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation. If you look in your browser bar where the URL you’re at is displayed, you’ll see that’s what it’s titled online in the address. To me, that suggests that the last one was Slate’s original online title and the plan from the beginning was to pull people in with intentionally inflammatory, and somewhat misleading, headlines. It’s certainly not the first time, for them, or many other websites. I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s a rare article of mine that has the same title when I started as what ends up printed on the page or displayed online.

To me, that’s the ticking hop bomb, not necessarily the article itself, that discourse so often happens online in response to something incendiary rather than just as a desire to have a discussion or to address issues important to us a loosely defined group.

hop-bomb

Because the issue of balance in beer is certainly a worthy one. Or as Stan Hieronymus muses.

It’s good to call for balance in beer, and too bitter is too bitter. Although perhaps there could have been a little more, well, balance. Maybe more about why there’s more to “hoppy” than bitterness.

But if the transition from bland, flavorless macro beer to a craft beer landscape should have taught us anything, it’s that there’s plenty of room for lots of kinds of beer: hoppy, malty, sour, dark, light, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That hoppy beers have been in ascendency for a few years now is certainly true, but so what? All flavorful beer is selling more and more each day.

So admits that “[n]ot all craft beer is hoppy. There are many craft breweries that seek to create balanced, drinkable beers that aren’t very bitter at all.” How could she not? She blames Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for starting it all, perhaps forgetting Anchor Liberty Ale was the first beer to use Cascade hops and was considered very hoppy in its even earlier day. But as Jeff Alworth correctly points out, it wasn’t so much that those beers introduced imbalance, they re-introduced a new mix of flavors, ones which emphasized a bit more hop character than a majority of Americans were familiar with in the 1970s. I was alive, and drinking then, and can tell you there were not a lot of hoppy beers to compare these with. As Alworth puts it. “That was shocking because we’d slowly leached all hop character from hops and told customers that bitterness was the enemy. THIS was the bizarre position.”

Maybe it’s the bubble of Portland that has given So the impression that hoppy beers are the big sellers, but again, as Alworth points out. “When you look at the best-selling craft beers, they’re not hoppy: Fat Tire, SN Pale, Boston Lager, Blue Moon, Widmer Hef. Those five beers account for at least four million barrels—something like a fifth or a quarter of the market.” For several years, IPAs have been the fastest growing category in mainstream grocery stores, as reported by Nielsen and IRI, but you have to remember that’s from a very small base, and is not representative of the market as a whole. But even that aside, breweries are at heart, businesses. If their hoppy beers were not selling, they’d stop making them. Which raises the question. How can something that’s selling, and selling, be ruining a market that continues to keep growing? I’ve heard brewers tell me that they feel like they have to have at least one hoppy beer in their line-up, because customers expect it, and want it. Does that sound like a situation in which hoppy beers are alienating the customer? Or ruining the market?

Whenever I hear the canard that people don’t like bitter flavors, one word leaps to my mind: coffee. Please tell me again how people won’t drink something bitter? Go ahead, I’ll wait until after you’ve had your morning cup of joe, or even your Earl Grey tea. Even if you’re adding milk or sugar, it’s still a bitter concoction to some degree. Bitter is one of the basic tastes humans experience, and is present in virtually everything we eat and drink. Are there times when it’s too much? Of course, just as there are beers I find to be too sweet, or display too much oak character in a barrel-aged stout. Balance is the key, but sometimes even balance can be overrated, if done well. If every beer was balanced in the exact same way, they’d all taste the same again. And we all know what happened to American beer when that was the case. There’s room in the beer world for all manner of beers on the continuum of possible flavors, and if you want something that’s not overly hoppy, there are many, many choices available. So concludes by suggesting what she believes everyone who loves, or is obsessed, with hops should do now. “Give it a rest.” To which I can only reply, in the words of the great Marcel Marceau, who spoke the only word in Mel Brooks’ film Silent Movie. “No.”

What I’d really like to see given a rest is the attention-getting, inflammatory headline in which the article that follows can rarely back up its provocative premise. It’s the schoolyard equivalent of “look at me, look at me!” It’s like saying hoppy beers are ruining craft beer, or they’re just awful or that they’re alienating people. Those are just headline grabbing stunts to lure people in. And, sadly, it works. But it doesn’t seem to do anything to further what might otherwise be a valuable discussion about the changing nature of peoples’ tastes, preferences and the marketplace. And now I think it’s time to go to the refrigerator and grab a Pliny. After all this, I sure hope it still tastes good.

UPDATE: And while I was writing this, Jeff Alworth also posted his own response, Hops Are Not A Problem, which is worth taking a look at, too. As he nicely points out, bitterness is relative, hoppiness isn’t just bitterness and different regions have different styles.

State Beer Excise Tax Rates

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beer-tax
Today’s infographic is a map of the State Beer Excise Tax Rates for each of the fifty states as of January 1, 2013. It was created by the Tax Foundation as one of their weekly maps. It’s just the state excise taxes brewers must pay, and doesn’t include either federal excise taxes or any local excise taxes. Tennessee has the highest state excise taxes and Wyoming has the lowest, a fact that the anti-alcohol folks like to exploit and whine about as often as they can whenever these maps show up online, never discussing context or the total taxes each state brewer pays. Not surprisingly, since oftentimes these are also referred to as sin taxes, six out of the highest ten states are in the south, with Florida at #11 and Mississippi at #13. California’s near the middle.

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Click here to see the map full size.

UNICEF Study Of Underage Drinking Yields Surprising Results

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unicef
Actually, the results are only surprising if you’re a neo-prohibitionist or you’ve gotten all your information from them about underage drinking in the form of their relentless propaganda, posturing and fund-raising scare tactics. What a new study by UNICEF found was that the U.S. has the least number, or percentage, of kids drinking underage compared with nearly thirty developed countries. They looked at the drinking patterns of people 11, 13 and 15 years of age.

The study, Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, showed that overall the U.S. is in the bottom third, coming in number 26 of 29. Sad, really, but not terribly surprising if you’ve been paying attention. They looked at a variety of factors, and in Dimension 4 they tackled “risk behaviors,” including alcohol. Here’s how the 29 countries stacked up.

alchol-chart

Other findings that contradict the standard anti-alcohol agenda and how they tend to frame the state of underage drinking include the following.

  • More than three-quarters of the 21 countries also saw declines in alcohol use by young people – as measured by the proportion of 11-, 13- and 15-year olds who report having been drunk on at least two occasions.
  • The biggest falls were again recorded in Germany (where the alcohol abuse rate fell from 18% to under 12%) and in the United Kingdom (which saw a decline from 30% to just under 20%).

The Washington Post reported these findings, but curiously spun the story as sort of a win for the neo-prohibitionists. The author, Max Fisher, suggests that because the U.S. is the country least likely to have kids drinking it “lends a bit of credence to the U.S.’s relatively late and well-enforced drinking age, unusual in the Western world.” Of course, there’s no causal link for such a statement whatsoever, but such is the power of decades of propaganda. As the Post’s foreign affairs blogger, he should probably stick to what he knows. He continues, saying that the U.S. is “joined by the tee-totaling kids of Iceland, the Netherlands and, believe it or not, Italy.” Iceland’s minium age is 20 (although “possession or consumption of alcohol by minors is not an offense”), the Netherlands is 16 (for alcohol that’s under 15% a.b.v., 18 if over) and Italy is 16. So there’s no real pattern that can be gleaned from the countries with the lowest reported underage drinking. And in fact the rest of the top ten are either 16, 18 or even have no minimum age, so trying to link a higher minimum drinking age with lower consumption is misleading at best, a little obnoxiously anti-alcohol at worst.

In the next paragraph he then contradicts himself. “Despite the strong wine cultures in Italy, France and Spain – or maybe because of them, given the degree to which it cultivates drinking “to enjoy,” as I’ve heard many French say – children in those countries are among the least likely to get drunk.” So in those “drinking cultures,” the kids aren’t as likely to get drunk for cultural reasons, but in our drinking culture it’s due to more stringent laws? With that attitude, no wonder he was surprised by the results of UNICEF’s study.

But in two of the countries with the most vocal anti-alcohol organizations, Great Britain and the U.S., not only are both countries lower than the propaganda might suggest, both nations have falling rates of this measure, too. In the U.S., we dropped from 12% to 6%, half of what it was just eight years before, And in the UK, it dropped from 30% to below 20%, falling more than a third. But as we’re learning, for many anti-alcohol organizations it’s not about results or the mission, it’s about punishment or profit for themselves. Even as rates of underage drinking continue to fall, their rhetoric increasingly gets turned up, becoming more radicalized and intransigent as they try to squeeze the last dollars out of their followers. It probably won’t surprise you to find out that not one of the usual neo-prohibitionist groups whose websites I checked even mentioned this study, despite it having been published over a week ago. If the results had been different, it would have been on their respective homepages immediately.

child-drinking

Sweden Forbids Lust

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sweden
I tend to think that the U.S. has a lock on the provincial, puritanical thinking that forbids so many odd features of everyday life, often anything to do with sex, while at the same time allowing violence with nary a sideways glance. I’ve never understood that, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, apparently Sweden is similarly off the deep end on sex, something I would never have expected. A Danish brewer, Amager Bryghus, created a series of seven beers based on the seven deadly sins, with a different beer, and label, for each. They call them the Sinners Series.

Amager-sinner-series

Take a look at the seven labels below and see if you can guess which one Sweden decided had to be censored?

If you answered Lust, you’re correct. Here’s what the label looks like outside of Sweden.

lust-1

And here’s what it looks like inside Sweden.

lust-3

According to The Local, an English-language news website covering Sweden, the problem was that “Danish beer bottles ‘too sexy’ for Sweden.” Like some U.S. states and Canadian provinces, Sweden has government-run liquor stores, and they make the decisions as to what’s acceptable.

Sweden’s state-run liquor retailer has decided that the picture on the Lust bottle, which contains a sweet Belgian ale with a 9.2 percent alcohol content, doesn’t abide by Sweden’s alcohol etiquette.

“We can’t accept the label, it’s against Sweden’s alcohol laws,” Systembolaget spokesman Lennart Agén told The Local.

“It’s quite a sexual label.”

As a result, Systembolaget has told the brewers to remove or edit the picture if the beer is to be sold in Sweden. The brewers responded by simply blacking out the entire label so neither the woman nor the bath is visible at all.

But it wasn’t an easy process, according to the brewers.

“We had to go through ten attempts before they’d accept it,” Henrik Papsø, head of communications at the brewery, told The Local.

Still, it seems awfully weird that a cartoon woman that’s only suggestive at best tripped up the censors. And I though we were prudes.

Amager-lust