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Anheuser-Busch Up 2% in 2007

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Anheuser-Busch announced today that shipments were up 2% in 2007 over the previous year. While the news is presumably good for shareholders, it’s not exactly all that different from recent years when increases have been meager at best.

From the press release:

“Anheuser-Busch achieved increased shipments in 2007 due to the success of our initiatives to broaden the company’s beer portfolio, including the addition of InBev European brands,” said Busch. Wholesaler sales-to-retailers grew 1.3 percent for the full year. Acquired and import brands contributed 170 basis points of growth to shipments and 160 points to wholesaler sales-to-retailers for the full year.

For the fourth quarter 2007 wholesaler sales-to-retailers were up 1.3 percent, on a selling day adjusted basis. The fourth quarter of 2007 had one more selling day than the fourth quarter of 2006. U.S. beer shipments to wholesalers increased 3.4 percent in the same timeframe. Shipments to wholesalers are not selling day adjusted. Import brands contributed 230 basis points of growth to shipments and 180 points of growth to wholesaler sales-to-retailers for the quarter. Wholesaler inventories at year-end were approximately the same as year-end 2006.

“Our expanded beer portfolio along with our enhanced marketing and sales strategies to accelerate core beer sales position Anheuser-Busch for growth in volume and earnings in 2008,” concluded Busch.

Anheuser-Busch Cos., Inc. will announce worldwide beer volume and consolidated earnings results for the fourth quarter and full year 2007 on Jan. 31, 2008.

I’m no economist, but I confess I read economics as a hobby, and the fact that the press release keeps switching between percentages and basis points (which are 100ths of a percentage, e.g. 150 basis points = 1.5%) seems to me like they’re engaging in a bit of prestidigitation. Maybe that is standard practice, I don’t know. But just in case, let’s look at the first paragraph. “Wholesaler sales-to-retailers grew 1.3 percent” and “import brands contributed … 160 points to wholesaler sales-to-retailers.” So unless I’m mis-reading it, doesn’t that mean if imports made up 1.6%, then other products — which would have to be domestic beer, the core brands — fell by 0.3% or 30 basis points? Because if imports “contributed” more than the total, wouldn’t that have to mean the rest of the percentage came from somewhere else?

Similarly, in the next paragraph it is stated that “beer shipments to wholesalers increased 3.4 percent” and “[i]mport brands contributed 230 basis points of growth to shipments.” That would also seem to suggest that domestic beer only increased 1.1%, wouldn’t it? That would seem to contradict Busch’s statement that these numbers would cause one to “conclude” core brands will likely grow “in volume and earnings in 2008.”

Maybe I’m nitpicking, but there is a fishy looking codicil below the press release that begins:

This release contains forward-looking statements regarding the company’s expectations concerning its future operations, earnings and prospects. On the date the forward-looking statements are made, the statements represent the company’s expectations, but the company’s expectations concerning its future operations, earnings and prospects may change. The company’s expectations involve risks and uncertainties (both favorable and unfavorable) and are based on many assumptions that the company believes to be reasonable, but such assumptions may ultimately prove to be inaccurate or incomplete, in whole or in part. Accordingly, there can be no assurances that the company’s expectations and the forward-looking statements will be correct.

And that’s only about 20% (or 200 basis points) worth of the qualifying fine print. It goes on and on in soporific legalese that no one will bother to read, except perhaps the most anal-retentive among us — yes, that means me, dear readers. But what that whole exercise boils down to is this. We think we’re going to do great in 2008 … unless we don’t. Please buy or hold on to your A-B stock because 2008’s going to be great year … unless it isn’t. The political punditry calls it spin, but there are unkinder words for what it really is.

 
UPDATE 1.8: As if you needed more proof that framing, spin and propaganda works, the next day’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “[i]nvestors reacted happily to Anheuser-Busch Cos.’ announcement Monday that its beer shipments increased last year and in the most-recent quarter. Shares of the country’s biggest brewer soared nearly 5 percent, their steepest climb in more than 20 months, despite slow growth among the company’s trademark beers.” See, nobody, especially the business press, bothers to check the math or read the fine print.
 

Iron City’s Solvency Plan

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Last fall the bankrupt Pittsburgh Brewing got a new Plan of Reorganization confirmed which included new investors, a settlement with creditors, a new CEO and a new name: Iron City Brewing. The new boss, Tim Hickman, today outlines his four-prong plan to increase revenues this year by a staggering 35%, certainly an audacious goal. Perhaps their biggest hurdle is that the perception of the brewery, as a direct result of the bankruptcy, has diminished and many locals assume the quality of the beer has likewise decreased. This despite the fact that the brewery was founded in 1861, making it one of the oldest breweries in America still operating today (#1 is another Pennsylvania favorite, Yuengling, which was founded in 1829).

To combat these problems, Here’s the four things Hickman hopes to accomplish:

  1. Upgrade the facility on Liberty Avenue to assure consistent production.
  2. Stop competing with beer-producing giants.
  3. Saturate the bar scene.
  4. Redesign packaging and labels.

With a modernized brewery, “Iron City expects to produce more than 233,000 barrels of beer in 2008. Last year, the brewery turned out about 172,000 barrels. The 2008 projection would be the most beer brewed at Iron City since 2004.” Sales VP Tony Ferraro has made the sensible observation that they can’t really complete on price with the bigger breweries and will be looking at themselves as a regional brewery. As a result, they’ll raise their prices slightly in line with a reasonable mark-up and will promote the beer as local, tying themselves to Pittsburgh’s 250th birthday celebration, which takes place this year. They’re also finally replacing their Hoff-Stevens kegs with new Sankey’s in an effort to get more tap handles in local bars and restaurants.

They’ll also be redesigning their packaging and labels, although apparently the iron city logo is off-limits. A new slogan will also be introduced. “The official beer of the Pittsburgh Nation.” And apparently some locals agree. A pair of Pittsburgh natives have set up Drink Iron City, “a blog about supporting the Iron City [Brewing] Company.”

Currently, Iron City Beer has a 6% market share in the greater Pittsburgh area and the plan is to shoot for 10% over the next few years. As Hickman puts it. “We’ll get there,” he said. “We have a quality product here, and we have consumer loyalty behind our brands.”

My friend and colleague, Julie Bradford, who is the editor of All About Beer magazine, agreed and is quoted in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article.

She said she approved of every step Iron City is taking, and even praised Hickman for raising prices.

“In fact, it’s a smart idea to raise prices,” she said. “That raises perceived value.”

Bradford also agreed that Iron City should concentrate on local loyalty, “because that’s what Iron City has going for them.”

 

The old Pittsburgh Brewery during better times.
 

Fine Food, Fine Wine, Bad Beer

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Roger A. Baylor, better know to the online world as the Potable Curmudgeon, is the owner of New Albanian Brewing and Rich O’s Public House, both in New Albany, Indiana. On an online forum, Louisville Hot Bytes, dedicated to Food in nearby Louisville, Kentucky (just over the Ohio River from New Albany), Baylor asked an innocent — and I think altogether reasonable — question while discussing positive and negative factors that go into a restaurant’s rating. He posited whether a fine restaurant should be dinged a half-point for carrying only industrial light lagers from the big three mega-breweries. He goes on to assert that if you’d lower a restaurant’s score for using Velveeta, Wonder Bread or putting Blue Nun on their wine list, then why not if they had only pedestrian beer, too? He suggested that it’s hypocritical to be so fastidious about using only fine ingredients or carrying upscale items but then to not apply that same logic to beer. The forum discussion ran to thirteen pages and at times turned ugly and even mean, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into the mind of ignorance, backwards thinking and the status quo. Most of the defenders of bad beer use the excuse that they are simply giving the customer what he or she asked for, despite the fact that they wouldn’t carry Blue Nun or Velveeta even if the customer wanted those, too. But they also claim no customer would ask for inferior food or wine at a fine restaurant and thus it’s not the same. But the nature and understanding of wine and food are not the same today as they were when I was a child. My parents might conceivably have asked for Blue Nun or some pedestrian food (my stepfather loved to drown his eggs in pepper and ketchup, for example) but new kinds of chefs and restaurants changed the food world and they didn’t do so by catering to the status quo, they did so by changing it, by challenging it. What the customer really wants is a fine dining experience and most people can’t or won’t see how that includes beer, too.

In what I find truly bewildering, especially in my neck of the woods, Chez Panisse, whose famous owner Alice Waters has written books about using high quality and local ingredients, carried crap beer, and imported at that, until only very recently. And even that wasn’t Waters’ doing. My understanding is that one of her bartenders finally persuaded her to carry local beer and they now offer beer from Magnolia and Moonlight breweries. Her restaurant opened in 1971 and it took 35 years for her to apply the same logic that made her a food guru to beer? That she had to be convinced says quite a lot about how even devotees of fine, local food and wine can’t easily manage to extend their thinking to beer. I find that quite sad, and don’t really understand why so many people defend big beer when there’s so much diversity and pleasure waiting for them if they’d merely look beyond the barrage of marketing and advertising. Baylor himself gives his own answer to that question by posting a rant he wrote ten years ago on another one of his blogs, NA Confidential. It’s very well written and in it he makes several excellent points, including several I hadn’t even thought of — but will undoubtedly steal to use in the future.

 

Drinking Beer In Our DNA

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First a little good news to ring in the new year. According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, a thirst for alcohol may indeed be hardwired in our DNA. And perhaps more importantly, unlike some other mammals, we appear to be predisposed to drink it in moderation, in direct contradiction with claims of neo-prohibitionist propaganda. According to an article by Natalie Angier in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune (via the New York Times News Service), “[t]he holidays are a time of multicreedal spirituality and festivities, and alcohol has been a fixture of celebration and religious ritual since humans first learned to play and pray.”

From the Tribune article:

“As far back as we can look, humans have had a love affair with fermented beverages,” said Patrick McGovern, an archeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania. “And it’s not just humans. From fruit flies to elephants, if you give them a source of alcohol and sugar, they love it.”

McGovern and other archeologists have unearthed extensive evidence of the antiquity and ubiquity of alcoholic beverages. One of the oldest known recipes, inscribed on a Sumerian clay tablet that dates to nearly 4,000 years, is for beer. Chemical traces inside 9,000-year-old pottery from northern China indicate that the citizens of Jiahu made a wine from rice, grapes, hawthorn and honey.

Humans may have an added reason to be drawn to alcohol. Throughout antiquity, available water was likely to be polluted with cholera and other dangerous microbes, and the tavern may well have been the safest watering hole in town. Not only is alcohol a mild antiseptic, but the process of brewing alcoholic beverages often requires that the liquid be boiled or subjected to similarly sterilizing treatments. “It’s possible that people who drank fermented beverages tended to live longer and reproduce more” than did their teetotaling peers, McGovern said, “which may partly explain why people have a proclivity to drink alcohol.”

What I find most interesting about this is that for much of mankind’s history, because of poor sanitation, drinking alcoholic beverages was safer than water, which led to such labels as “liquid bread” for beer. Without understanding why, people discovered that they were better off with booze than bacteria. But even after drinking water became safe as our understanding of the world increased, people still enjoyed a pint from time to time. Of course, there’s the social lubricant aspect that remains prevalent today, which still may be an aid to reproduction. But as for promoting health, hardly a month goes by without another new claim that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol has a previously undiscovered health benefit. I find it reasonable and altogether ironic that these two reasons for or benefits from drinking, which have literally been around since the dawn of civilization, are not only still with us but are largely unchanged since we crawled out of the muck and first stood erect. As if the lessons of prohibition weren’t obvious enough, we are a species who drinks. And no amount of proselytizing or preaching can change that. To which I can only reply, cheers to that!

 

Strange Brew: My Beer Predictions for 2008

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To Beer or Not to Beer. As Strange Brew was a loose parody of Hamlet, I thought I’d again peer crazily into the skull of poor Yorick, and try to divine the future. Let’s see if anything that happened last year can be used to predict what might happen in the beer industry in 2007. Here are five things I think will happen this year. Let’s see how I do a year from now. What are your predictions?

 
The hops and malt shortages will continue to plague the industry throughout 2008 and may even grow worse. It seems to me that the malt problem can be solved more easily than the hops problem, not that either are particularly simple. But the hop one seems as resistant as a mutated spider mite. A Hop field or yard takes three years to produce a full yield and nobody is planting new vines so once most breweries’ current hop contacts run out, then what? I’ve been joking that we’ll see more gruits in 2008, but it is going to get harder and harder for big hoppy beers to remain economically viable as hop prices triple and quadruple, especially on the spot market. Will 2008 be the year of the session beer? Perhaps not, but it may not be a good idea for brewers to make fresh hop beers for a couple of years while hops are in such short supply.

 
Beer prices will go up, that’s a fact not a prediction. The real question is whether or not beer consumers will be willing to pay more and, if so, how much more? The big beer companies can more easily afford to absorb some margin losses to keep volume up, and so I don’t think they’ll raise their prices as much as the smaller breweries will be forced to. Whether or not, or to what extent, that will effect the continued growth of craft beer remains to be seen but I believe it will slow the growth of craft beer at least until hop prices come down and availability is up. I think craft beer will continue its upward movement, but it may be closer to 8-10% this year.

 
Distributor consolidation will increase and will continue to make things difficult for small brewers trying to bring their beer to market or increase their distribution to new areas.

 
Mergers among big multi-national beer companies will continue and at least one or two big such announcements will be made in 2008.

 
Neo-Prohibitionists will continue to step up attacks on alcohol generally and to specifically and inexplicably target beer.

 

Top 10 Beer Stories of 2007

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As the year winds down yet again — didn’t we just do this a year ago? — everybody and his brother has a top ten list for the year and I’m still no different. It helps, I think, to stop and reflect on what happened over the previous year which puts the whole year in perspective and makes it easier to prepare for the coming one. So here are my choices for the top ten beer stories of 2007.
 

Irish Brewing in the Bronze Age: While seemingly a historical side note story, I think this has the potential to change how we view beer’s history in civilization, especially in Europe, where most our modern brewing heritage has its origins. If bronze age Ireland was brewing it means the impact of beer on mankind began far earlier than originally believed.

Lewes Arms Boycott Successful: I’m a sucker for the underdog and the small fry. The citizens of a small pub in the middle of nowhere took on pub giant Greene King to save their local beer being served in its home town. Greene King foolishly let it go on far longer than was prudent but eventually saw the light and relented.

Sam Adams vs. Sam Adams: The Boston Beer Company, owner of the trademarked Samuel Adams eponymous beers, went head to head in late October with a flesh and blood Sam Adams running for mayor of Portland. In a battle between a corporation’s fictional, but oddly legal, personhood and the real life variety, my money’s always on the real Sam Adams. For Boston Beer it was a public relations disaster and even their half-hearted apology seemed flat. On the plus side, Boston Beer did announce they’d be brewing at the old Rolling Rock brewery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which is good for that town. The one they were planning in Freetown, Massachusetts, on the other hand, after months of rumors, was finally canceled.

The Loss of Steve Harrison: Steve Harrison was Sierra Nevada Brewing‘s first employee and was as much responsible for its success, especially early on, as owner Ken Grossman and the rest of the crew from Chico. When he went missing under mysterious circumstances in August, it took a week of searching the area before his body turned up in the river. His passing was a huge and terrible loss to the brewing industry.

It’s Official! Double-Digit Craft Beer Growth Again!: It was another terrific year for craft beer and although there are problems in the horizon, three years of double-digit growth suggests that craft beer is on the right track. Barring some foreseen shortages, things are likely to continue to be rosy for the foreseeable future.

Widmer & Redhook Merger: Rumored since at least January, Widmer and Redhook agreed to merge in November.

Michael Jackson Passes Away: This was a huge and somewhat unexpected blow to the cause of better beer. Many of us who’d known Michael for a time had speculated about his health and last year he had finally publicly announced that he’d been battling Parkinson’s for at least ten years. I know I breathed a sigh of relief because I knew Parkinson’s could be treated and wasn’t the immediate threat it had once been. So when I got the news I was taken aback, as were most of us in the industry. It was news of the worst kind, especially coming on the heels of the losses of several other beer industry personalities throughout 2007: Alan Eames, Steve Harrison and John White. As I’ve said many times before, Michael’s impact on the craft beer industry here in the U.S. and better beer throughout the world cannot be overestimated. He was a singular talent that I can’t imagine being replaced. And beyond the loss to the industry, for me personally I think Michael Jackson’s death should be nearer the top because it’s doubly difficult and surprisingly emotional to lose a friend so unexpectedly.

Assaults on Beer by Neo-Prohibitionists & Wine Writers: Perhaps because of craft beers’ recent gains and renewed attention, the number of attacks on beer by both anti-alcohol groups and misguided and ignorant beverage and food journalists seemed to be on the rise with hardly a week passing without yet another egregious example. Neo-prohibitionists accused beer of all sorts of evil and wine writers blasted beer with all manner of misinformation and twisted statistics. Here’s a sample of some of the worst:

Coors & Miller to Merge U.S. Operations: In an unexpected, if not altogether surprising move, the second and third largest American beer companies decided to pool their efforts in competing against number one. What the impact will be on the rest of the industry still remains to be seen, but I, for one, am not convinced it will be all for the better or that there’s nothing to fret about.

The Hop and Malt Shortages: The shortages of hops got most of the attention but shortages of malt is just as serious. This could not have happened at a worse time for the industry as shortages quite possibly could have disastrous consequences for continuing the roll that craft beer has been on for a half-decade.

And what will next year bring? See tomorrow’s post with my predictions for the beer industry in 2008.

 

My Report Card From 2007

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Last year at this time, I made five predictions for the 2007 beer year. Let’s see how I did.

 
Craft beer growth will hit double digits for 2006 and also will continue to rise through 2007.

My Score: A+ This one wasn’t a stretch, of course, though things will likely be trickier next year.

 
Price wars among the large domestic producers and the popular import brands will heat up again beginning in spring or early summer.

My Score: B Price wars by the major players did indeed start up again after a short ceasefire, but didn’t begin until late summer, which I continue to believe is bad for the industry and the image of beer as a whole.

 
Mainstream media attention will increase and will actually begin to improve.

My Score: B While there was certainly some shoddy reporting, overall things did improve for beers’ coverage by the mainstream media, and I’m not just saying that because I started doing some writing for one of the mainstream news outlets. There weren’t nearly as many of the really horrific articles that were so common in 2006. As craft beer regained its cache, good beer again became the story and happily one that’s being told with a bit more accuracy and attention to detail.

 
A-B’s Here’s to Beer PR campaign will either quietly disappear or if the website remains up will not have any new content added now that Bob Lachky is no longer in charge of the effort.

My Score: C+ While Here’s to Beer has not disappeared, after Bob Lachky was promoted, the website did indeed lie dormant for many months but last March a new version was launched to much fanfare. But when I look now the current edition is only Vol. 3, meaning since March it has only been updated with new content twice in nine months rather than the promised monthly changing content.

 
Gluten-Free beer made for the growing number of people with Celiac disease will surprise most predictions and become a bigger niche than expected.

My Score: C This wasn’t quite as big as I anticipated, but I understand Red Bridge and the others are holding their own. It’s probably going to remain small but steady.

 

Winning Friends Resolution

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For regular Bulletin readers who recall How To Win Friends and Influence People from the beginning of the month, where a South Dakota A-B distributor’s “Contemporary Marketing Coordinator” responded to harsh criticism of one of their products — Rolling Rock — with a textbook example of poor customer relations, has apparently come to a resolution. I received word, not from E-Rokk (the original poster), but from one of his bandmates, Nick Fitt, that the issue had been resolved and he has written up the story of how and why at their Hey Stupid blog. It’s rambling and incoherent at times — Nick’s writing style is reminiscent of someone suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome and an obsessive preoccupation with pornographic imagery — yet pieces of an actual story do peek out from time to time. As far as I can tell, he called the distributor and spoke to Cassie Kimball’s boss, eventually having a conference call with both her boss and that person’s boss, too. Her fate remains vague, though he hints that they told him she “was now hauling skids in the mail room, suffering from many splinters of wood that had been treated with PCP,” whatever that means. In the end, the distributors apparently coughed up some free cases of beer to mollify the situation — Budweiser, not Rolling Rock — and the final paragraphs are spent slobberingly praising “Anheiser Bush” [sic] and their new favorite beer. I’m not sure why, but it all feels a little unsatisfying to me. Considering one of the original complaints was that A-B had sold out by altering E-Rokk’s beloved Rolling Rock, it sure feels like the hey stupid gang do likewise for a few measly cases of free Bud. C’est la vie.

 

Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished

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I confess at the outset that this story has nothing to do with beer, but is about bourbon … sort of. But it is also about the assault on alcohol — and to some extent civil liberty — a subject I find myself writing about more and more these days, so that’s why I decided to write this. I certainly didn’t set out to make the neo-prohibitionists my cause célèbre, but I find that few things get me as worked up and angry than people whose sole mission appears to be telling the rest of us how to live. I guess that makes me an anti-control freak, or something.

At any rate, the story involved a St. Petersburg, Florida man named Evan Preston who local authorities have dubbed the “Woodstock Santa.” He’s been given this epithet by local authorities, and especially city council member Bill Foster, who hopes to stop Preston from giving gifts to the homeless. Now lest I paint Foster as a complete Scrooge, he’s apparently okay with giving them blankets or a warm bowl of soup. What he doesn’t like is that Foster gives the homeless what they really want: booze.

The eccentric Evan Preston (at left in the long gray beard), age 72, owns a well-known jewelry and art store and has in the past helped the local community raise money for a variety of causes by donating artwork.

He’s apparently helped his town’s Make-A-Wish Foundation and also nearby Tampa’s Big Cat Rescue. Four years ago, he decided he wanted to do something for St. Petersburg’s growing homeless population that congregate around the downtown Williams Park, near his business. So for a few years now, he and several friends and colleagues pass out 100 bottles of bourbon and cigars to the homeless.

Here, let’s pick up the story from Tampa’s Creative Loafing website:

“At first, I thought it would be interesting to give out a six-pack and a cigar,” he says over a glass of homemade sangria in his kitchen. “When I saw the excitement in their faces, it was inspirational.”

After a few outings to various homeless enclaves around the city, he says, St. Pete’s homeless began to recognize him. When he pulled up in his Bentley, they would run at him, jump on the car and hug him tightly.

Preston became the homeless’ Santa Claus, a 6-foot-2 bearded Samaritan in a T-shirt and jeans who gave all the good street men and women what they really wanted for Christmas.

“Last time, a man came up and said, ‘Thank you, this is so much better than a warm blanket,'” he recalls. “It’s shocking how much everybody loves it.”

“There is no motive to what we do,” he says. “It’s a gesture of goodwill.”

Well, you just know something like that will not be permitted for very long, not without somebody trying to put a stop to it. And right on cue, Foster is appalled that someone might give alcohol to alcoholics. Part of his reasoning is that alcohol is what put them on the street in the first place. While that may be true in some cases, he really doesn’t know that with any certainty whatsoever. But the idea that not giving a homeless person that alcohol is somehow going to cure them or make their life any better seems ridiculous at best, and uncharitable and obnoxiously self-righteous at worst.

Apparently there’s already a local ordinance in force that prohibits passing out alcohol in public parks — which seems weird enough, why would that be a problem? — but the code does not apply to city streets or right of ways, a loophole that Foster is trying to close. He’s sent a memo to the mayor and other city council members urging them to make it illegal to hand out alcohol in essentially any public space. If you want to give your neighbor a bottle of wine this Christmas, you better be careful not to hand it to him on the sidewalk. Stay on your own property if you don’t want to break the law. Apparently it doesn’t matter that alcohol is legal for adults and giving gifts is likewise not a crime, but don’t put those two things together in Florida. Yeah, that seems reasonable.

In the memo Foster claims “Mr. Preston is an affront to every business owner and resident of the downtown area, and should not be a welcomed figure in St. Petersburg.” An affront? An affront is a “deliberate act or display of disrespect,” an “intentional slight.” I don’t know who Bill Foster thinks he is, but he obviously believes people should be bowing and scraping to his delusions of grandeur. Can he really have convinced himself that Preston is giving the homeless booze to personally offend him? This is a difference of opinion at best. I don’t see how it’s the business of government to regulate where citizens can commit a legal act like gift-giving? Foster may not like what Preston’s doing but in a free society that should be the end of it. But Bill Foster apparently believes a free society is only one where people do what he likes, and apparently he’s not even the only nut job on the city council.

“Is that really the best gift you can give somebody sleeping outside—bourbon?” said Rene Flowers. “I don’t know what a bottle of bourbon goes for these days, but I’m sure that would buy some soap, a small washrag, maybe a comb, some coffee, maybe a nice, hot meal.”

Where exactly would a homeless person use a washrag and soap exactly since they probably don’t have a bathtub for them to use there in Williams Park? And while a nice dinner does sound good, why does Flowers think that private citizens have to confine their charity to what she thinks is appropriate? For all their posturing, the homeless problem itself is never addressed by the city council, only that a private citizen shouldn’t be allowed to give them a little comfort from time to time at his own expense. It really doesn’t matter if you or anyone else thinks giving alcohol to a homeless person is a bad idea, in a free society any private citizen is and ought to be allowed to choose both the scope and nature of his charity. They should be applauding the fact that’s he’s doing something, anything. But from the response of the city council, they don’t seem overly concerned about the homeless people themselves. The very fact that there is such a homeless problem in this medium-sized town (the population is just under 250,000) suggests that whatever the city council is doing, if anything, it has not alleviated the situation or the conditions that caused these people to become homeless in the first place. Maybe it’s the guilt over their own failures that makes them lash out over someone merely trying to provide a little solace and comfort to someone whose life is, I can only assume, complicated and difficult, to say the least. But please, let’s stop attacking alcohol already, shall we? I’d like to get back to talking about beer again, thank you very much.

 

If you want to hear more about this, a local Tampa television, Tampa Bay 10, station did a report that’s online. Also, a Los Angeles radio station recently did an interview with Evander Preston which you can listen to online.
 

Look Away From the Beer

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This interesting tidbit comes by way of the Fermenting Barrel via Tomme Arthur (thanks, Tomme), who knew my little crusading heart would appreciate the inanity of it all. It seems a new ordinance in the southern Utah town of Springville “requires beer displays be erected no closer than 15 feet from a store’s public entrance.” The Utah County Health Department’s Division of Substance Abuse also wanted retailers to keep all “beer 10 feet back from a store’s front windows,” too, but the City Council decided instead to just keep it away from the front doors. According to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune, “Richard Nance, substance-abuse division director, said the goal is to try to ensure that children do not get mixed messages about where the community stands on alcohol use.” What exactly is that mixed message he’s so worried about? Seriously, what is it? Anybody know? I mean, despite a huge religious influence in Utah, beer is still legal there, right? So what message is being sent by its proximity to the front door, for chrissakes?

Retailers, however, don’t appear too concerned about the new law — not that there’s much they could probably do anyway. Apparently most stores already keep their beer stock in the back of the store, which is also where most keep the milk, isn’t it? One added benefit, I suppose, is that less beer may be exposed to the light streaming through the front door, which may reduce skunking (hey, I’m looking for the silver lining here).

The Fermenting Barrel‘s take:

Tell me this, are the kids absorbing the alcohol by being in the mere vicinity of a case of beer? Can’t the kids still walk to the back of the store and *gasp* be exposed to beer? Or are the children confined to the front of the store?

In my opinion there’s way worse things kids can be exposed to right at the counter, say…pornography, cigarettes, or even junk food, candy, and soda. Last I checked diabetes was one of the worst epidemics in the US. How does it usually develop? Through obesity caused from a poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle. How about going even a little further, what about all the easy access kids have to the crap on TV, the Internet, and movies.

OK, I’m done ranting. You get my point. There’s bigger fish to fry than fretting over kids walking past a case of beer when they walk in a store. Just leave it to Utah to come up with even more insane alcohol laws. As if their laws weren’t already weird enough.

Amen, brother.