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Here’s to Beer Alive and … Well, Here Comes Phase 2

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HtB
My rumors of Here’s to Beer’s demise were premature, it seems, as evidenced by some e-mails sent to me by colleagues and a call from Anheuser-Busch. I guess they were just taking a break. Brandweek is now reporting that “Phase 2” of the Here’s to Beer (HtB) campaign is about to be launched, coinciding with the warmer Spring weather that signals the beginning of beer’s big selling season (which generally continues through Halloween). When the Brandweek article begins by stating that “Skeptics and craft brewers in particular said that once Anheuser-Busch has wrung out whatever benefit it sought with ‘Here’s to Beer,’ it would drop the category-promoting campaign and move on to corporate priorities,” it would probably be presumptuous to think they meant me. Perhaps there were others, too.

But after I suggested HtB was a dead parrot, in part based on the fact that the website had not been updated since late summer of last year, A-B’s PR department gave me the opportunity to speak with Bob Lachky, the mastermind behind the Here’s to Beer campaign and the newly named Executive Vice-President for Global Industry Development. We talked for almost an hour about two weeks ago. Bob talked about the future of the HtB project with his now familiar polished enthusiasm. He characterized my criticisms as “fair” and indicated that they were in fact taking a break on the project and working behind the scenes on phase 2.

The second phase will consist of several steps. First, beer distributors and wholesalers around the country will start receiving generic materials that they can use to promote beer as a category. I haven’t seen the display pieces yet but if the distributors can manage to get them into retail stores, where consumers can see them, that might indeed be worthwhile, assuming that they do in fact have some educational value. There are many retail stores, including some large chains, that do not accept outside display materials as a matter of policy. Often these are high end stores who want to achieve a particular look that is more sophisticated than the corner liquor store. And though the high end stores are where the materials would likely find more customer willingness, any beer education at any level seems like it should be useful to the industry as a whole.

Also coming over to HtB will be Food Network chef Dave Lieberman. I don’t necessarily see anything in his bio or on his website that indicates any special affinity for pairing beer with food or cooking with beer, but at least he appears to be a prominent chef. But apparently he’ll be creating “educational videos about brew styles and food pairings” so I’d sure like to believe he knows more than having read a book or two. Then they’ll be a comedian impersonating historical persons such as Genghis Khan, Ben Franklin, Confucius, and Catherine the Great in online commercials about who you’d want to share a beer with if you could choose any person throughout history. And Chicago’s DDB advertising agency will create new spots in the continuing saga of who you’d share your beer with, including singer/songwriter Lyle Lovett and Columbian model/actress Sofia Vergara, which seems like the same old thing A-B is doing in their regular advertising.

All of these and more are now available at the new Here’s to Beer website which launched this morning. It has a decidedly green feel to it owing presumably to it being March, with St. Patrick’s Day around the corner. It’s marked Web Volume 1.01 (and further inside as Vol. 1 – March 9, 2007), so I presume content will be changing on a monthly basis. The new site reminds me a lot of A-B’s other new venture, Bud.TV. There are loads of little tiny videos at almost every part of the website. Some are introductions, some are more detailed and all are fairly short.

Sofia-Vergara
This is helpful in raising beer’s reputation and status?

So maybe it’s because I’m an old curmudgeon — and a reader — but I’m not convinced that these little video presentations are the way to reach people. Sure, it’s cutting edge technology and has that gee whiz factor but this is information we’re talking about. I can read it much more quickly, and I don’t need to be entertained every second of my day. I actually like reading and learning new things. Does that make me out of step with the modern world? Because if we use the internet as the arbiter of what people want, you’d think no one had any patience for reading but needed passive watching to amuse themselves à la television. But if I want to watch TV, I can turn mine on. If I want sound files, I can turn on the radio or fire up my iPod. In my opinion, the internet works best when it disseminates text and pictures, the other stuff is just empty bluster most of the time. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the occasional viral video as much as the next guy, but it’s not necessarily the best way to educate. Just because there is new technology doesn’t mean it has to be used. But all the big corporations — A-B is certainly not alone here — insist on using flash technology and online video to make their websites seems more modern but the end result is just that it’s less useful and there’s so much less information that you grow tired of it more quickly and move on to something with more meat in it.

The lead story in the new HtB website is “The Pen and the Pint: Pub Fiction” (the first part of which I actually floated as a potential title for the beer bloggers “The Session” project) and it’s a mere 441 words, far shorter than my average blog post and about half the size of the average short magazine article. There are also video segments such as “Fresh” and “Thirsty Artist” which, while not without some interest, have little to do with teaching people about beer. And so it feels more like entertainment and less like there’s a lot of good information about the beer. Some of it is downright distracting although there still is some basic information available. But also some of the information that was part of the original website, such as beer and industry news, the beer archives, the brewhouse and more is curiously gone.

Is the new website better than the old one? To me, that’s trickier because the new one at least promises to change more often and as such may bring people back more regularly. I think I’d still like to see a basic component of educational information that was always available there for people to learn about if they wanted to. After all, if the ultimate goal is to have more people drinking beer then we have to provide reasons why they should rather than simply entertain them and hope that’s enough persuasion.

When I spoke to Lachky, he indicated that A-B was prepared and expecting to go it alone with HtB. There were no plans to encourage industry-wide participation as a trade effort, though he certainly seemed willing to embrace cooperation if it was volunteered. With an almost 50% market share, A-B felt it was enough to help themselves and further believed that they’d be helping the industry as a whole, as well. He again used the aphorism of a rising tide lifting all boats to illustrate this point.

As he put it in Brandweek:

“We’re a 50-share market leader, we’re an American beer company primarily, so it is incumbent upon us to grow this industry here,” said Lachky. “Other brewers may not have the same mission we have. Our mission is to grow the beer category, and others may have a mission to cannibalize the category. I don’t know; you’ll have to ask them what their mission is. Does Anheuser-Busch want to grow Anheuser-Busch? Yes, but if you make the pie bigger, everybody gets a bigger slice.”

Hmm. Maybe, but only if the effort does indeed celebrate all beer and doesn’t get stuck in one company’s agenda. Since A-B maintains complete control over what is essentially presented as an industry project then only one message is being sent. Right now that’s not necessarily problematic, but it may not always remain so. Imagine if “Got Milk?” was only funded and managed by the largest dairy or if “Pork, the Other White Meat” was done solely by the largest pig farm and you have some idea of what problems could arise for everybody else.

Is it working? Bob Lachky certainly believes it is and takes at least “partial credit” for the increased amount of beer stories in the mainstream media of late. Is that even in part because of HtB’s efforts? It’s hard to say, of course, but I have a hard time accepting that theory though it’s certainly possible HtB played some role, however small. Because the big three brewers (plus Pabst) gained a mere 0.5% in 2006 over 2005 whereas craft beer was up 11.7% for the same period. To me, the resurgence of craft beer is the story and more likely the catalyst driving increasing attention in the media. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when microbreweries were new and hot, the media paid plenty of attention. Then the fledgling industry went through a shakeup and media attention dried up. But now renewed interest has sparked more coverage as well as more consumers. It’s not all been rosy, as any regular Bulletin reader can tell you, I think many of the stories have been downright injurious to the cause of raising the level of beer to where it belongs. But if you accept the theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity then yes I guess it’s all good.

Something else that struck me while I was doing some research before interviewing Lachky was that in terms of the volume of sales beer far outsells the rest followed by spirits and then wine, trailing at the end. This is exactly opposite of the attention paid to these broad categories by the mainstream media with wine getting the lion’s share of attention yet accounting for the smallest slice of the sales pie. Most newspapers have a food and wine section, making them completely out of touch with the reality of what people are really drinking. So clearly the beer industry needs to do something to reverse this situation.

Phase 2 of HtB also brings more projects outside the website, too. Happily, the Roger Sherman documentary American Brew will finally air April 7 — the anniversary not of Prohibition’s repeal, but the return of low-alcohol 3.2 beer — on A&E at 10 p.m. EST (meaning 7:00 here on the left coast). It will also be available for sale on DVD shortly at the HtB website with loads of great extras. I’ll review the film later in a separate post.

Then in May, for Father’s Day, the slogan “give your dad something he will use.” As Lachky put it. “He will use beer.” Having worked for an alcohol retailer, I like this idea. For some reason it was virtually impossible to get people to buy dad beer for Father’s Day. Wine and spirits, yes, but beer’s bad image made it akin to buying dad a carton of smokes as a present. Years of dumbing down beer as a drink for the masses made it a poor choice to show dad how much you cared about him, even if was something he really wanted. It would be nice to see that change, but I can’t say I’m overly optimistic since I also believe it was the large breweries who created that poor image in the first place.

One last issue I have with the HtB website, though I want to stress that this has nothing to do with A-B per se, is the age verification entry to the website. Since the HtB website is purely for educational purposes, why on Earth do you have to be 21 to learn about beer? I know it’s illegal to drink beer before you’re 21, but is it likewise forbidden to read about it or learn about it? If you wanted to check out one of Michael Jackon’s beer books from the library, would you have to show I.D. to prove you were 21? I’m not just being facetious when I ask that, because it seems strange that minors are not allowed to even read about alcohol and educate themselves about it. It’s sadly consistent with America’s neo-prohibitionist and puritanical leanings, but isn’t this just one more self-fulfilling prophecy? If you don’t make it possible for kids to learn about beer then it’s a fait accompli that they’ll become ignorant binge drinkers in their late teens and early twenties. And how is that good for society or battling underage drinking as the neo-prohibitionists pretend to care about?

But it looks like HtB is back, at least, to make an effort in promoting beer. As much I embrace and encourage this idea, I also remain a skeptic and hope like hell I’ll be proven wrong in the end. And I certainly hope they stop undermining their own efforts with commercials that reinforce old stereotypes about beer. It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the coming months and whether or not they will continue to add useful and educational information to the website or if remains largely entertaining with some education thrown in. So I’ll try to reserve final judgment until we see what else the coming months will bring to the table from the in-store display pieces to the documentary American Brew. There’s so much that’s good about beer in almost all its myriad forms. Let’s hope that message comes across from Here’s to Beer and the rest of us.

Lewes Arms Boycotts Greene King

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The small town of Lewes, England (population @16,000) is located near the southern coast, due south from London in the district of East Sussex. It’s also home to Harvey’s Brewery, which has been there along the Ouse River since the late 1700s. According to an e-mail I received from Florrie, a Lewes resident, Greene King‘s Pub Company, which bought the Lewes Arms eight years ago, has dropped local brewer Harvey’s from the pub. A website has been set up by the “Friends of the Lewes Arms” to help bring back the local beer to the local pub. Here’s what the locals have to say:

The Friends of the Lewes Arms are campaigning to have Harveys beer, brewed in Lewes, restored to their local pub.

Greene King own the pub and after eight years of failing to sell their own beers in competition with Harveys defied the regulars by withdrawing Harveys completely. This was despite a 1,200-signature petition and a campaign led by the local MP, Norman Baker, and the Town Mayor, Merlin Milner.

The campaign includes a successful boycott which has cut trade to a fraction of previous levels. Volunteers maintain a vigil outside the pub at what used to be peak times.

We continue to appeal to Greene King to restore Harveys to the Lewes Arms and save the remarkably diverse group which used the pub as a communal living room.

As recently as last November, the Lewes Arms was a vibrant, quirky pub, crammed to the rafters at busy times and no doubt highly profitable.

The campaign has nothing to do with the company which brews Harveys. It has everything to do with local communities, genuine local pubs, and consumer choice and all things Greene King claims to support.

We are keen to make contact with other pubs and communities who feel they have suffered at the hands of Greene King, for whatever reason.

The Harveys Brewery in Lewes.
 

This is one of the reasons that the landscape of authentic British pubs is fast becoming a distant memory. The tied house system that exists in the UK is undermining communities and diversity. It makes perfect sense that a small town would want to support one of their local businesses by drinking their beer. Undoubtedly Harvey’s employs a number of the local residents and pours money back into the local economy. That a large corporation could care less about that is an unfortunate facet of our modern business-dominated society. One has to wonder why Greene King cannot understand the local loyalties at work here and accept that fact as a part of doing business in a town with a local brewery.

Or perhaps they can indeed understand it but ignore it in the drive for ever more growth and profits as irrelevant. But it’s this very insistence of profits before people that so undermines what’s really important in our world. I think it’s a sad fact that most people see work as a necessary evil that must be done to further more important ends, such as putting food on the table, raising and educating their children, and putting a roof over their heads. Few people, I think, truly love what they do for a living. It may be a cliche, but it’s still true that nobody ever said on their deathbed that they wished they’d spent more time at the office. Yet business increasingly sets the agenda of how are lives are shaped and managed in a bewildering array of ways.

Otherwise, how is it possible that an entire community, including the local government, can come together and make their wishes known only to have them completely ignored by a business entity wanting to business in that community? It’s not as if the pub wasn’t profitable (at least according to what I’ve read), but as far as I can tell, Greene King simply wanted to make more money by offering only their own beer instead of having to buy the Harvey’s locally. Plus, their own beer hadn’t been selling in the pub, either, which was undoubtedly costing them money in spoilage. Now a smart Publican might think the way to run a successful business is to offer the products that his customer wants. But I guess that’s not the British way and it’s certainly not the corporate way. Greene King is large enough that they could just shut down the pub rather than give in to local pressure. And the Friends of the Lewes Arms acknowledges that possibility, too. I think it says something about how askew our priorities are that Greene King’s hegemony is more important than customer happiness which leads to profitability. It simply isn’t enough that Greene King turn a profit, they have to do it the way they want to, everyone else be damned. And I’m certain Greene King is well with their legal rights, because the court system favors business, too. Corporate citizenship is as much a joke in the UK as it is here, hollow words bandied about to get positive PR whenever necessary. But the longer we forget that corporations are made up of people and hold them as accountable as we would would anyone else, the more frequently these sort of incidents will become.

The Friends of the Lewes Arms website has many suggestions on how to help them in their struggle and includes links to the many ties their plight has been chronicled by the British press.

Local residents outside their local, the Lewes Arms.

Session #1: Not Your Father’s Stout

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For our first session of Beer Blogging Friday I chose an old local favorite, San Quentin’s Breakout Stout from Marin Brewing. I must confess that it’s been at least several years since I’d tasted it and, as such, was looking very forward to finding out how much it had changed or I had changed in the intervening time. Since there are no real rules, I’ve decided to approach the Session as I would any session of drinking beer, with good conversation and camaraderie. So while the talk may be imaginary, the beer is not.

As far as the theme goes, my father never drank stouts and given that I’m now approaching fifty I’d say very few of our fathers did in fact drink stout at all. I may taking things too literally, but perhaps apart from Guinness, I feel comfortable saying our father’s generation was not one who embraced dark beer. In Dutch Wonderland — the part of eastern Pennsylvania where I grew up — folks were fiercely loyal to local brands. A wholesale distributor in the Keystone State recently quipped that Anheuser-Busch’s market share there is roughly half of what it is in other states. And as he further points out, there are more “old school” breweries and beer brands than any other place. So my father and men of his age drank Yuengling, Reading, Schmidt’s and Schaefer, light (colored) beers one and all. Yuengling did have a Porter but I don’t recall anyone ever drinking it until I was an adult.

As far as I know, the only dark beer my father — stepfather, really — ever drank was in fact a Guinness. And that’s because I brought him a bottle of it from New York City, where I discovered it, along with Bass and Pilsner Urquell, at the jazz clubs I frequented when I lived there in the late 1970s. Compared to what I’d drank in my earlier teens, these were like nothing I’d ever tasted — and I liked it.

I’d had a few ales growing up, Genesee Cream Ale, especially in that minimalist green can, was a teen favorite among my peers, and Yuengling had their Lord Chesterfield Ale. Then there was Ballantine which relatives in New Jersey seemed to prefer. But Bass and Guinness were worlds different from those and seemed positively exotic by comparison. That seems odd now, with the two imports more pedestrian among the exponentially wider field of available beers today, but it really was a different time. But enough about my father.

San Quentin’s Breakout Stout is made by friend Arne Johnson, head brewer at Marin Brewing, who’s been brewing there for a dozen years. I mention this because I’ve been thinking lately about some thoughts Alan McLeod had on “Do We Love The Beer Or Brewer?” He mentioned it in conjunction with a discussion Lew Bryson heated up over what, as writers, we owe the beer industry. And I know this may sound a bit wishy-washy, but I can see merits in both sides of this debate. Certainly we must be honest and forthright in our opinions and free to dislike a beer if we truly believe it to be inferior in some way. But — and Lew pointed this out, too — that doesn’t mean people who hate gueuze should write critically about it or that bad samples should create a bad review, especially if the sample went bad while cellared by the critic. If a brewery sends a bad sample, that’s another matter.

But back to Alan’s query, who do we love? I assume I’m not too atypical among my colleagues in having many close friends who are brewers. In such an insular and incestuous industry it’s all but inevitable that you see the same people at events, tastings, festivals, etc. over and over again. To my mind, it would be stranger still to not have brewer friends under such conditions. There are a lot of great people in this industry. Frankly, it’s one of the reasons I love my job. Among other industries I have known or worked in, brewing has perhaps the lowest ratio of assholes (let’s call in the A-Ratio) I’ve yet encountered. There are a few to be sure — you know who you are — but by and large the brewing community is one I want to be a part of and support precisely because of the people in it. I used to work in the music business once upon a time and by contrast the A-Ratio was quite high. And once you met a “rock star” who was so full of himself and a mess of a human being, it was truly hard to listen to his music in quite the same way afterward. You could still appreciate his talents and artistry, but only up to a point. Because once you knew what a wanker he was and how he treated the people around him, etc. you no longer wanted his music to be in the background of your life anymore. At least that was my reaction.

So what does that mean for brewers versus their brew? Knowing who made a beer I think does indeed influence at least our approach to a beer, even as we try to be as objective as possible. It would be naïve to believe otherwise. Think about it this way. Someone hands you a beer and says try this, it’s a new one from Russian River Brewing. Now if you like other beers you’ve had from them, you’ll likely be more inclined or predisposed to evaluate it, if not more favorably, at least with greater care and latitude than if the beer was presented as being from a brewer whose efforts you generally didn’t care for. That’s just human nature. In effect it’s Aristotle’s syllogisms occurring naturally in the real world.

It’s also the reason that we always evaluate beer in competition blindly, often double blind (meaning we don’t even know whose beers are entered). I do agree with Alan when he writes that we “have to remember that the subject matter itself is the important thing.” But unless you’re tasting it blind, I also think it’s practically impossible to separate it from outside influence, and to me that means other factors are also important to varying degrees. In quantum physics in the first half of the last century, physicists had a problem with light. Sometimes it behaved like a particle and sometimes like a wave. Eventually they figured out that light behaved as one or the other based on the kind of experiment you used to examine it. And this led to the idea that it was impossible to adopt the role of independent observer in any experiment because scientists couldn’t separate themselves from the world they were observing. They couldn’t step out of a door and be outside the universe, and that also meant that there would always be some part of any experiment that was influenced by the observer. This is known as the “observer effect,” which is defined as follows. “The observer effect refers to changes that the act of observing has on the phenomenon being observed.”

And as arcane a reference as that is, I think it also applies to tasting and evaluating beer. We could call it the “taster effect,” and define it as the influences on the act of tasting a beer changes the experience and has an effect on the beer being tasted. Does it mean objectivity is impossible? Maybe, but hopefully as professionals we can get to a very high degree of objectiveness and play down the outside influences, large and small, as best we can. I think that’s the best we can hope for, that with experience and diligent study we reach a point where our evaluations are internally consistent, that is we tend to view the same defects and positive qualities the same way regardless of the beer. You may at this point be thinking I’ve veered off track here, so let’s get back to the brewer. Do we love the brewer or the beer? I think it’s a little of both. The beer may be the primary reason we’re all here but as the creator of the stuff we all love, he or she can’t be ignored entirely either. Different brewers make their beer in different ways, of course, meaning their influence directly effects the final product. Knowing who made a beer also reveals something subtle about it. It tells us about intention, about what they were trying to make. It tells us what ingredients are more likely to have been used. It may tell us something about the water used, or any number of factors that effect the taste of the beer. If you enjoy the beers of a particular brewer then you know at least there’s a high degree of probability that you’ll also enjoy a new effort by that brewer. It’s no guarantee, obviously, but it offers you a reasonable assumption and ultimately I think changes how you approach tasting that beer. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, just something I think we should acknowledge and be aware of. Because we don’t live a vacuum, separated from the rest of the world with just our beer. The whole world conspired together to put that glass of beer in our hands at that particular moment in time. Every single preceding moment influenced what we will do next, whether it gets a good or a bad review. And for that, I love the brewer, too, because he made the beer in my hand. Of course, after I taste it, I may decide I hate him just as passionately, fickle critic that I may be.

Speaking of which, I’ve got a stout sitting here in front of me which I’m letting come up to room temperature. Arne’s stout is a beautiful murky black with a mocha-colored head. Thick Brussels lace stick and then cascade down the sides of the glass. It has the aroma of silky smooth chocolate, the kind you’d smell after the milk chocolate is melted in huge vats at the candy factory. There are whiffs of bitter coffee lying underneath, poking through to mix with the cocoa. Swirling it in my mouth, the bitter coffee dominates while his little sister chocolate cries for attention and tugs at my sides. It’s very smooth and creamy, and you only detect its strength — 7% abv — toward the end, as it’s rushing down your throat. The finish is clean, with hints of bitterness lingering pleasantly below the surface, urging you on for another sip. And I give into temptation and indulge myself.

It’s a really fine stout and I think I’m enjoying it now more than even when I’d tried it before. It’s easy to see why it’s won so many medals, at least eighteen at last count. Does it matter that the brewer is a friend. I don’t know, but I’d happily have another pint with him tomorrow.

Choosing Responsibility

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Join Together is a neo-prohibitionist group that is run by the Boston University School of Public Health. I say that, because they are funded primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and in my opinion Johnson was an extremist nut job, especially with regards to alcohol. But Join Together does a great job of collecting news reports about their cause and so I get their newsletter so I, too, can keep track. Most of the missives I get are about new studies, horrific accounts of binge drinking, essentially anything that supports the neo-prohibitionist agenda. But today’s was a little different and may represent something of a shot over the bow to reversing the trend toward another Prohibition.

John M. McCardell, Jr., the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont has founded a non-profit organization called Choose Responsibility, with the goal of educating the public about binge drinking and furthering the debate for lowering the drinking age in the U.S. from 21 to 18. McCardell, of course, saw his share of drinking on his college campus and brings a unique respectability to the debate which I think will make it harder for anti-drinking groups to dismiss out of hand, which is their usual tactic for anyone who disagrees with them.

From the Join Together news summary:

McCardell said that college officials who think that they have campus drinking under control are “delusional,” adding that most officials are politically restrained from being honest about student drinking. He said his research shows that the age-21 law has had little positive impact on student drinking, adding that trends such as declining DWI rates could just as easily be attributed to other factors. “This is by definition a very emotional issue, but what we need is an informed and dispassionate debate,” McCardell said.

McCardell said the current law makes it hard for parents and schools to teach about responsible drinking. “You either become an arm of the law, which you are not about, or a haven from the law, which poses a fundamental ethical dilemma,” he said.

“I think the 21-year-old drinking age is a disastrous failure,” he said. “Many colleges are worried that if they talk about alcohol with their freshmen, they will be charged with condoning underage drinking.”

“This is not about giving more beer to young people,” said McCardell. “This is about opening our eyes to the social reality around us.”

That’s the chilling effect the decades of proselytizing against drinking by MADD and other neo-prohibitionist organizations has caused. I find it profoundly sad that this is a topic that people are afraid to talk about honestly. What good does it do our society when politicians, school officials charged with the care of our nation’s youth, trade organizations and companies that make alcoholic beverages are effectively muzzled from debating the neo-prohibitionist agenda? Because to these extremists you’re either with them or against them, there is no middle ground. But no topic should be off-limits for discussion, especially when the debate leads directly to public policy decisions. Imagine what would happen if any beer company came out in favor of lowering the drinking age, which clearly would be in their business interests. They’d be excoriated: charged with encouraging underage drinking, picketed and boycotted, and probably accused of clubbing baby seals. What chance at re-election would any politician have who had the temerity to even suggest looking into this issue? I’d put them at slim to none.

And that’s what I really hate about extremism, they take a position that anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy. It seems as if we’ve lost the very ability to have reasonable disagreements with others and still respect them, their opinions or even their right to hold them. We live in an almost completely polarized society, and that’s doing none of us any good.

However unpopular McCadell’s organization is bound to make him with neo-prohibitionists, he’s starting to make some waves. The Associated Press profiled the new group in a syndicated article last week. In the AP story, Choose Responsibility suggests the following.

[McCardell] said federal and state laws that raised the drinking age to 21 did little to keep young people between the ages of 18 and 21 from consuming alcohol. Instead, the laws drove drinking underground and — over the last 20 years — have helped fuel a surge in binge drinking, he said.

“We need to, I think, take our heads out of the sand and open our eyes to the reality and say to ourselves ‘Aren’t we better off trying to educate young people about alcohol and trusting them to exercise adult responsibility in the same way that we trust them when they are appointed to juries or sent to Iraq,” he said Thursday.

Unsurprisingly, MADD disagreed, pointing to the same contradictory statistics they always cling to. But like most advocacy groups, they use — and sometimes distort — only those studies that support their agenda and ignore or marginalize those that support the opposition.

Also last week, Inside Higher Ed, a blog focused on post-high school education, profiled Choose Responsibility in a piece entitled “An Honest Conversation About Alcohol.”

Choosing Responsibility has also set up a blog, Rethinking Drinking, in which they will track this issue in the media and across the web. They’re just getting started, but already there’s a lot of good information there. For example, Grace Kronenberg, Assistant to the Director at Choose Responsibility, posted the following, which gives a great foundation to the reasons and background about what they’re doing.

Ever wonder why we have a 21 year-old drinking age?

The primary reasons cited by supporters of the law:
 

  • It saves lives by preventing alcohol-related traffic fatalities among 18-20 year-olds and the rest of the population.
  • Since the developing adolescent brain is affected differently by alcohol than the adult brain, the 21 year-old drinking age protects adolescents and young adults from its potentially negative consequences.
  • It prevents adolescents from gaining access to alcohol. Some research has found that the earlier one starts to drink, the more likely he or she will experience alcohol dependence and related problems later in life.

 

Seem bold? We thought so too! Our research has shown that the arguments above are overstated:
 

  • There is no demonstrable cause and effect relationship between the 21 year-old drinking age and the decline in alcohol-related fatalities. While its proponents may claim that the 21 year-old drinking age is solely responsible, we found that many factors–increased seat belt use, development of airbag and anti-lock brake technologies, advent of the “designated driver,” and stigmatization of drunk driving to name just a few–had the effect of making our roads and vehicles safer over the past two and a half decades.
  • The claims of neurological research on alcohol and the adolescent brain have, in many cases, been overstated. Statements like MADD’s “teenagers who drink too much may lose as much as 10 percent of their brainpower” often exaggerate the findings of research findings based on data gathered from rat populations, leading to an oversimplified and alarmist approach to very complicated neurological research. Stay tuned here for more information on alcohol and the brain…
  • The context in which one first consumes alcohol is as, if not more, important as the age of initiation. Age is just a number. Scientific and anthropological data from around the world have shown that the context in which alcohol is first consumed cultural attitudes toward drinking are much more important in determining whether or not an individual will have alcohol-related problems later in life.

 

[used with permission]

And on the course they’ve set for themselves.

Why 18?

Besides the fact that much evidence cited in favor of the 21 year-old drinking age is exaggerated or misinterpreted (see above), there are several arguments against it:
 

  • The 21 year-old drinking age is an abridgment of the age of majority. By 18, Americans are legally adults and are entitled to all the rights and responsibilities that come with that role but one: the freedom to choose whether or not to consume alcohol.
  • The 21 year-old drinking age marginalizes the role of parents in the process of teaching and encouraging responsible decisions about alcohol use. There is near-consensus cross culturally that parents play an indispensable role in introducing their children to responsible alcohol use. The 21 year-old drinking age effectively eliminates this important parental role, forcing parents to either break the law by serving their under 21 year-old sons and daughters alcohol at home or to risk having their children’s first exposure to alcohol be at an unsupervised college or high-school keg party.
  • Under the 21 year-old drinking age, fewer young people are drinking, but those who choose to are drinking more. This alarming rise in the rates of binge drinking on campuses and in communities around the nation has caused a major, national public health problem. Almost daily, we are bombarded with horrific stories of heavy drinking teens and young adults. Between 1993 and 2001, 18-20 year olds showed a 56% increase in episodes of heavy drinking, the largest increase among American adults. The recent media barrage could not be more clear: the 21 year-old drinking age does not keep young people under 21 from drinking, and drinking dangerously.
  • The 21 year-old drinking age breeds disrespect for law and ethical compromises. The vast majority of people who drink in the United States began drinking before age 21, testament both to the inefficacy of the current law and of the rampant disrespect for its provisions. Because the law is inconsistently enforced and easily circumvented by underage drinkers and those who provide them with alcohol, it has created a climate that makes it all too easy for young adults to obtain and consume alcohol without realizing the legal and ethical consequences of their actions.

 

[used with permission]

Perhaps my deepest disagreement with 21 being the drinking age stems from when I was eighteen and a member of the U.S. military. We were permitted to drink alcohol on the base but the second we stepped off of it, we were treated like children once more, and were unable to even drink a beer. It was infuriating to be able to vote and die for my country but still not be able to legally drink a beer. At eighteen, we were told we were adults but not treated as such and did not realize the full benefits of adulthood for another three years.

By contrast, most other first world countries either permit their citizens to drink at a younger age or leave it to tradition, parents and local custom. Without the great taboo that exists here, most kids abroad seem to have a much healthier approach to drinking and binging is far less of a problem. When alcohol is part of the culture and not stigmatized, there is less abuse. When families learn to drink together, alcohol cannot tear them apart because those rituals are a part of them. Here, we separate drinking from family activities with, predictably, the opposite effect.

If nothing else, America is a nation of laws, which is both a good and bad thing. But we tend to create laws for everything and over time have gone completely overboard in the sheer number of laws under which we’re all expected to live. For every problem, a new law is passed. Does it actually fix the problem? Not usually, in my experience, and just as often makes it worse with some unintended consequences.

There’s an idea in Taoism which speaks to this problem. In his Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tzu says the following at chapter 57.

Conquer with Inaction

Do not control the people with laws,
Nor violence nor espionage,
But conquer them with inaction.

For:

The more morals and taboos there are,
The more cruelty afflicts people;
The more guns and knives there are,
The more factions divide people;
The more arts and skills there are,
The more change obsoletes people;
The more laws and taxes there are,
The more theft corrupts people.

Yet take no action, and the people nurture each other;
Make no laws, and the people deal fairly with each other;
Own no interest, and the people cooperate with each other;
Express no desire, and the people harmonize with each other.

Said another way, in Brian Bruya’s brilliant translation.

Therefore the Sage says:

“I take no unnecessary action, and the people change of their own accord. I am tranquil and the people are orderly of their own accord. I don’t trouble them, and the people are prosperous of their own accord. I am not greedy, and the people become simple of their own accord.”

Politicians seem to think they play some kind of special role in society, making up all kinds of rules and regulations according to their own ideas and then imposing them on everyone else. If people in power can rule through non-action, tranquility and no-desires, then there might be hope for peace in the world.

What does that mean for the debate on the drinking age? I think that by setting such an arbitrary point at which one day you’re not mature enough to handle alcohol but one day later you are is actually causing more underage drinking than it’s preventing. I drank as a minor. Almost every single person I grew up with drank as a minor, a condition which I suspect continues to this day. What damage did it do in the big picture? Generation after generation, children will continue to try whatever they are told is most forbidden. That’s just human nature. But by criminalizing it, going to such fantastic lengths to keep it from happening and making it impossible for families to choose how to teach their children about responsible drinking in the home we have created a society with a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol. And it shows, especially when you contrast us with other cultures.

Alcohol has played a vital role in humanity’s growth from hunter gatherers to gleaming skyscrapers, and quite possibly may have been the inspiration for civilization itself. But by the misguided efforts of a few who want to remake the world according to their own views, the rest of us have been saddled with the cumbersome, unwieldy system we have today that tries to regulate, restrict and, if possible, obliterate that heritage. At a very minimum, we should be able to talk about it. I’m glad that one more organization, Choose Responsibility, is entering the debate.

Bud TV Under Fire

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The first time I logged into Bud.tv, I had a heck of a time gaining access and proving that I was over 21 despite the fact that I’m more than twice as old as the age of consent. Presumably, that was because I’ve recently moved and I had to use my old information to get in. Frankly, it felt a little creepy thinking they had all of my personal information. I suspect that most people think that’s a small price to pay for keeping minors out of the website. I don’t agree, of course, and have grown weary of having to prove I’m an adult over and over and over again.

But as difficult as I — and many others it seems — found it was to register for Bud.tv, apparently it’s still not difficult enough for the attorneys general of almost half the states in the country. Here are the states who think it’s too easy for kids to get into Bud TV:

  1. Alaska
  2. Arizona
  3. Connecticut
  4. Delaware
  5. Illinois
  6. Iowa
  7. Kansas
  8. Louisiana
  9. Maine
  10. Maryland
  11. Nevada
  12. New Mexico
  13. New York
  14. North Carolina
  15. Ohio
  16. Oregon
  17. South Carolina
  18. Tennessee
  19. Vermont
  20. West Virginia
  21. Wyoming

Plus two U.S. territories:

  • District of Columbia
  • Puerto Rico

    • .

The twenty-three attorneys general have written to Anheuser-Busch requesting “better tools to make sure underaged viewers aren’t accessing its new Bud.TV site.” Apparently name, zip code and birthdate aren’t invasive enough because a clever kid could know that information about their parents or another adult. It seems they won’t be satisfied until at least people have to enter “their name and full address, or a driver’s license number, exactly as it appears on a government-issued ID.” But that’s still not enough, as they’d also like to have a postcard sent to the person’s address or have someone phone the house to insure the registrant is “legal-aged adult, and not a child below the drinking age.” The states believe that because A-B is creating the content for some reason they “have a higher responsibility to ensure that youth are not exposed to the marketing on [their] site.” Using that logic, why haven’t these states sent similar letters to every network and cable channel that creates original programming? Why not hold every media that creates its own content to the same principle? Or are only businesses that advertise as well as “creating the programming” held to a higher standard?

That seems absolutely preposterous, especially when you consider that all this effort is being proposed not to keep alcohol from falling into a minor’s hands, but merely to keep them from watching TV on the internet. To go to such great lengths to keep kids from watching the same commercials they can see by turning on the television seems ridiculous, but all too typical. Of course, there is more than just commercials on Bud.tv. There are also several inane tv-like episodic shows. From what I’ve seen so far they seem more tame than the average HBO show, and with no apparent nudity or swearing. From the descriptions of the shows, it’s possible some have mature themes but it doesn’t appear any worse than the average evening cable show.

But here’s a kicker:

Maine attorney general G. Steven Rowe, who helped to spearhead the effort along with Louisiana’s Attorney General Charles Foti, said he didn’t have any evidence that underage children are accessing the Web site, but said it’s clear that more could be done to safeguard children.

So all this strutting and puffing doesn’t even have any basis in reality. It’s just a headline-grabbing stunt to “protect the children” from a threat that doesn’t even exist.

Here’s how Media Post Publications’ “Just An Online Minute” (free subscription required) for today questioned their logic:

But, while it’s probably true that people under 21 can access Bud.tv’s content, it’s unclear why this poses such a problem for the authorities. After all, minors have been exposed to the company’s marketing for years.

Consider, in addition to advertising on programs like the Super Bowl — certainly viewed by people under 21 — Anheuser-Busch has served as official sponsor of dozens upon dozens of professional sports teams, ranging from the Chicago Bulls to the Carolina Panthers to the St. Louis Cardinals (who play their home games in Busch stadium).

It’s hard to imagine that watching a clip on Bud.tv will somehow prove more powerful with minors than the company’s myriad ads and other marketing efforts in the offline world.

There’s nothing I find particularly compelling on Bud.tv, and I’m usually no great fan of A-B’s business practices, but this political stunt by these states is yet another contemptible, shameless and public deceit pretending “it’s for the children.” Curiously, only three of the top twenty beer-producing states (as of 2005 statistics) are among the signatories, but twelve of the bottom twenty are. Coincidence? Most likely not, as following the money will rarely steer you wrong. Notice Missouri is absent from the list of complaining states, as is Wisconsin and Colorado, where the number two and three biggest breweries are located.

So no matter how you slice it, I can’t see where the problem is that all these states were so quick to complain about. First, the attorneys general admit there’s no evidence whatsoever that kids are watching Bud.tv. Second, it’s already more difficult to gain access to the website than any other free site I’ve ever visited. Third, once you make it to Bud.tv, there’s no pornographic, violent or overtly adult content that children need to be protected from. At worst, it’s the sort of stuff you’d see on cable television. If anything, these states’ stunt will probably backfire and generate more buzz and traffic to the Bud.tv website than if they’d just kept their pens in their pockets.

So I find myself in unfamiliar territory, siding with A-B when they say the following:

‘Despite these extraordinary efforts, some have urged us to make the age verification process more difficult and even more invasive of people’s privacy,’ said a company spokeswoman, Francine Katz, in a statement.

I felt the current age verification was already pretty “invasive of people’s privacy,” certainly more than I felt was appropriate or necessary. Think about it this way. The internet, in terms of parenting, is really not much different than television. It is and should be up to parents to decide what their children see and at what age or time in their lives. Trying to protect children from perceived harm is no business of the state or federal government. It’s a lazy parent that wants to turn over control of what their child can watch to the powers that be. I think these attorneys general might want to spend more time with their own kids instead of telling me how to raise mine. Perhaps then they’ll see fit to spend their time and resources more wisely, going after true criminals and others who would do the people of their states real harm, instead of some vague potential for children possibly seeing something intended for adults. Seriously, who would you rather see the top lawyer in your state prosecute; the killers, robbers and rapists or the website that your kids might hack into and watch innocuous short films on a tiny two by three inch screen?

More Children and Beer

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This month on the website “On Milwaukee” it’s Bar Month and this editorial today caught my attention because of all the recent talk regarding children and beer. The piece is by staff writer Molly Snyder Edler and is entitled “Motherfest: Kids and beer bottles.” The whole article is interesting, but I love the conclusion:

The children of vegetarians own Burger Kings, Waldorf school graduates wind up working in the media, and kids who sip their parents’ beer could become contemporary prohibitionists. As parents, all we can do is trust our gut, hope the wheel turns in our favor and remind ourselves that, in the end, it’s our job to keep therapists in business.

Edler’s whole take is refreshing in its honest and fresh approach to what is more often than not an off-limits topic. It should be something that is discussed and debated, but neo-prohibitionist proselytizing and power have made it largely a one-sided affair making people with opposite (and I believe more rational and reasonable) opinions increasingly reluctant to stand up to the growing neo-prohibitionist agenda. Unfortunately, that’s always been a recipe for disaster when good people remain quiet while a vocal minority won’t shut up about their cause, however misguided or unpopular.

Newsweek Discovers Vintage Beer

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Alright, it didn’t make the magazine, but it is a “web exclusive” on the Newsweek website. It is an article by Andrew Romano entitled Beer By the Year (thanks to Joe in Florida for sending me the link). The article is about vintage beers and the 25 of them Gramercy Tavern in New York City has added to their menu. It’s great to see Newsweek do a piece on aged beers, though the article suffers from the usual snide disbelief that beer could be worth spending money on and be something beyond a drink for the masses, or as Romano envisions it, an “equal-opportunity inebriator.”

Then there’s this dissmissive description:

This is beer we’re talking about. You know, the stuff shirtless football fans drink from a helmet. Sure, boosters might do well to take a page from wine’s playbook: according to the latest figures from the National Institutes of Health, alcohol consumption from beer (per capita) is down 6 percent since 1992, while “classier” vino is up 17 percent.

A little later in the article Romano grudgingly admits that some beers may benefit from aging but then claims that that’s true only “in theory.” He makes this claim because the final product may not necessarily turn out to be good after all. Why? One explanation is that the aging must be done properly: at the right temperature, in a dark place, etc. Here’s his other reasons.

Brewers, unlike vintners, release their beverages when they’re ready to drink, and aging is an inexact science. Given time, some bottles soar; others sour. With vintage beer, you always run the risk of liking the final draft less than the first.

This makes it sound as if he’s inferring that wine doesn’t have such issues, that aging wine is an exact science. But the exact same risks he brings up are true for wine, as well. First of all, plenty of wines are released too early but just as many are ready to drink, too. And then to age a wine properly, all the same steps involving light, temperature and so on must also be followed for the wine to have benefitted from the aging process.

Many — if not most — of the beers meant to be aged are not released when they’re green, but have in fact been aged for a period of time before being released to the public for further aging. I spoke to Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing and he confirmed that he does age many of his beers either in the tank, barrel or bottle before releasing them to the public, some for a few weeks and some for many months. He wants the flavors to be right and the taste to have mellowed or changed in a positive way before they’re out of his hands.

I don’t quite understand why the author feels the need to qualify aging beer as having unique risks. “Given time,” not every bottle of wine will age well either, so why is he making it sound like aging is a different process for wine and beer?

Happily, Romano doesn’t stick with that tone and for the most part is convinced that vintage beers are worth their higher price tag. Romano and his dinner companion try six vintage beers and like all of them, and love a couple, especially the 1992 Thomas Hardy.

According to the article, Gramercy Tavern “gave beer-by-the-year its big-league, fine-dining debut with a select 25-bottle list of vintage suds from Europe, Japan and North America. The response, says assistant beverage director Kevin Garry, has been ‘amazing’—and it could mean more mainstream acceptance to come. ‘Based on how our guests have reacted, I can totally see vintage beer catching on at other places,’” says Garry, who pairs his bottles with cheeses and desserts. ‘I’d love to see it become the next cool thing in the fine-dining world.’”

As the article ends, Romano can’t resist bad-mouthing beer one more time in his last sentence, which concludes, “[w]e stumble home shortly thereafter.” Let’s see, two men share six bottles of beer. That’s three apiece. And not all were big 750 ml bottles. Thomas Hardy bottles are 11.2 ounces. Yes, some of the beers were strong, but overall not compared to the average wines. Would a wine writer having consumed an equal amount of wine ever claim to have “stumbled” home afterwards? Not in a million years.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

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A Seattle friend sent me a link to this (thanks Craig), and, unfortunately I think the piece is more indicative of many wine drinkers’ feelings toward beer than I wish were the case. This is perhaps the most annoying and personally sad feature of the wine vs. beer debate. In my experience, most beer people (defined by me loosely as people who claim beer as their primary drink of choice) also love wine and spirits, too. But many — perhaps even a majority? — of wine people seem to think, as Mike Myers might put it, “if it ain’t wine, it’s crap.” Now this isn’t true of winemakers, who generally love beer and spirits, at least all the ones I know. But wine snobs, many of whom are wine writers, definitely seem to project a worldview in which wine is the only beverage worthy of reverence and respect.

It feels a little like the democrats vs. republicans. Republicans are the minority with all the money and power and consequently get to decide what is sophisticated (meaning whatever they like), usually wine. They are “above” the people. Many with naked ambition want to be them and so act like them and, when polled, vote with them. Then pollsters declare wine is the preferred drink, while beer still outsells it four to one. Democrats, by contrast, are “of” the people, prefer the people’s drink, beer, but are too unfocused and like so many different things that their message — if indeed there even is one beyond “enjoy all of life’s pleasures” — never gets any traction. Now for those of you with opposite tastes, simmer down, I’m only making an analogy based on gross generalizations and very broad stereotypes.

But this leads us to today’s screed, “Climbing the Liquor Ladder: Going from Beer to Wine,” by wine and cigar writer Jennifer Jordan. The piece appears on BlogCritics, subtitled “a sinister cabal of superior writers.” Jordan also is the senior editor of a website about wine, Savor Each Glass, and about cigars, What’s Knot to Love.

She begins by detailing her early, not so pleasant, experiences with beer drinking from the time she was a child through college, after which time she then trades “up” to wine and … well I’ll let her tell it.

That is why, after college, where beer was just short of flowing from dorm room faucets, I decided to climb the corporate ladder of liquor consumption, with the next rung up being wine.

Initially I made this choice because of the health benefits of wine. Unlike beer, with each pint providing more belly fat in alcohol’s version of 8-minute abs, wine possesses several things beneficial to a person’s health, with particular concern to the heart. But, health benefits aside, I took this plunge because wine is so much more than alcohol.

However, taking the plunge from beer to wine wasn’t easy. While beer is junior varsity, wine is varsity. With wine, you’re playing with the big boys and there are several rules to keep in mind for a smooth transition.

Okay, there’s plenty not to like here and enough that’s simply wrong that I could go on and on about (especially about the health benefits angle), but hang on, there’s more. She then lists her five rules for “trading up” to drinking wine and how it differs from beer drinking, to help us members of the great-unwashed mass of beer drinkers — the hop polloi? — move up the corporate drinks ladder. That’s a hoot. Sit down and strap in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

1. “Don’t Play Drinking Games.” In this, she suggests “beer was made for drinking competitions” and that “[w]ine, simply put, is not a toy.” I agree that you shouldn’t play drinking games, but that advice holds across all alcohol, no alcohol is a toy. The problem isn’t that it’s beer, as she believes, but with the age and immaturity of the people playing the games. It’s like blaming the gun for a game of Russian roulette.

2. “Wine should be sipped, not chugged.” Here she claims chugging is ideal for beer because if you hate the stuff, as she claims to do, then you’ll taste less of it. She should do marketing for the big breweries, because that is the idea behind their “ice cold” propaganda. The colder and quicker you drink, the less you’ll taste of the mass-produced beers. But she also writes that “[e]ach sip of wine should provide a new experience for your taste buds, making your beer bottles boil with increasing jealousy in the process.” Well I don’t think a bottle Rochefort Grand Cru or Westmalle Tripel would be terribly jealous of a bottle of Blue Nun or any Gallo box wine. The fact is there is crap beer and there is crap wine. But good beer is meant to be sipped every bit as much as fine wine.

3. “Enjoy the Variety.” Apparently there are only “several different types of beer” and most taste “relatively the same.” But with wine any two bottles of wine “can taste dramatically unalike.” Cork dorks are — I love this phrase, like it’s a gift from the gods — “granted with the ability to pick from a variety of years, types, and flavors.” Oh, thank you great and terrible Oz for granting me this privilege. She then says you can pick “red wine or white wine” from all over the world. Wow, red and white. That takes me back to the Blues Brothers movie. “We’ve got both kinds of music, country and western.” As I probably don’t even need to say, there are far more varieties of beer than wine and they only taste the same to someone who has an undeveloped palate. And there are, of course, several beers that are vintage dated and can be aged.

4. “Embrace the History and the Culture.” Wine is apparently “packed with culture and history.” Does she think beer-making just sprang up last Tuesday? It’s at least as old — and possibly older — than wine with an equally rich heritage. How is it possible she doesn’t know that? She later comments that she was “merely saying that wine drinkers should embrace the history of wine” but given that it is one of her “rules” for transitioning from beer to wine it seems quite reasonable to infer that she feels beer’s history is not worthy, or at least is not as worthy as wine’s saga.

5. “Behave Yourself.” According to Jordan, “wine demands a certain sophistication that beer refutes: when drinking beer, the more barbaric the behavior the better.” This is the most pernicious propaganda in the beer hater’s arsenal. And again it comes back to context. Of course there are many people who abuse beer. But there are also homeless winos swilling wine out of a paper bag. That wine is inherently more sophisticated than beer is merely a product of our culture. It’s certainly not the case in much of the rest of the civilized world, Belgium being perhaps the best example.

In the end, she concludes that “beer and wine are on different sides of the alcohol spectrum” with beer being merely the “sippy-cup that prepares you for the real thing” — wine. I guess that makes all of us beer drinkers babies, but it’s hard to imagine a more childish, mis-informed opinion than that of Ms. Jordan.

There are a plethora of comments already over the last week (it first appeared on the 9th) and Jordan responds initially by saying her piece was meant to be “tongue in cheek” and that it’s just “opinion.” But so much of what she’s written is simply not true, that it’s hard to take the “I was just trying to funny” thing at face value. To me, it sounds more like the backpedaling of someone who suddenly realized they may have been wrong. In a later comment responding to her critics, Jordan replies. “That’s the great thing about an opinion piece: it’s an opinion. You don’t have to agree with me. I think wine is better than beer, you don’t. Who cares?” And that would be fine except that opinion should at least be based on fact, but her conclusions — which she calls opinions — flow directly from misinformation, whether deliberate or ignorant. We could prepare a laundry list of facts she’s gotten wrong from the variety of beer to the inherent lack of sophistication of beer. They are not merely opinions if they’re based on lies, in that case they’re stereotypes. It’s no different really from racial or ethnic stereotypes. And I know I’m on the fringes of opinion here, but I also believe that “opinions” like Jordan’s perpetuate the bad image that beer has today and certainly does nothing to change people’s perceptions and misconceptions about what beer is and has the potential to be. But Jordan just keeps telling all of the offended beer drinkers to relax, it’s just her opinion. It just feels like she’s still talking down to us, like she’s called us the “N” word but doesn’t think we should be upset because she’s just expressing her opinion.

She later writes that she was just being “cheeky” and that it was done “for humor.” She then expresses surprise that her piece “seemed to offend every Beer Drinker in the world (which again was not [her] intention).” How could she read what she wrote and not think beer drinkers would be offended? How is possible to re-read what she wrote and not think it would be reasonable to conclude that would be their response? It’s just baffling. But I’m still not ready to let her of the hook because it was “opinion,” was meant to be “humorous” and it wasn’t her “intention” to offend anyone. Those claims were all made after the article was published and so seem like justifications for what she wrote. But perhaps her true motives were revealed later responding to yet another critic. “Relax..this is an opinion piece with intended controversy (it’s controversy that gets traffic).” So like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, stirring up the pot with misinformation and “satire” is good for business. Facts don’t matter, but ratings do. Now that’s integrity. Whatever happened to journalistic ethics? I guess they don’t count if you call what you’re writing “opinion.”

Her persistent reliance on the “opinion” defense continues to rankle me. Perhaps our society does view it this way, but opinion shouldn’t be merely saying whatever comes into your head with no basis in reality. When you base an opinion on misinformation or ignorance, the opinion generated is likewise flawed and may properly be called wrong. I realize there are some people who can look at a photograph of our planet and still maintain that the Earth is flat, saying they’re free to hold such an opinion. And while technically they do have that freedom, who can blame the rest of us who see that opinion as misguided, ignorant or just plain wrong. As many have done in the comments to Jordan’s article, we are just as free to disagree and try to educate that person on why her “opinions” may be wrong because of the misinformation they’re based on. It almost goes without saying that Jordan is free to prefer wine to beer, but to justify her preference by arguing that wine is superior to beer is no longer mere opinion, but advocacy and a kind of unquestioning belief.

To her credit, Jordan got the approval of her boss to do a beer tasting this Friday with several beers suggested by her dissenters and there was a great deal of back and forth in the comments section coming up with the list. She supposedly will be writing up the results shortly thereafter. I don’t have high hopes for her conversion or seeing the light since she characterizes herself as “stubborn, but not unyielding.” I may be wrong — I too, am trying to keep an open mind — but she appears so strongly predisposed to her opinion that I doubt that one tasting of a sample of beer’s amazing diversity will be enough to change her mind. As we all know, prejudice is very hard to overcome. I have no problem with her preference for wine, but I — and every other beer lover — should have a problem with her prejudice against beer. Not only is it not justifiable, there’s really no reason to attack beer. I’m sure I could come up with just as many similar reasons why beer is more sophisticated than wine, but unlike a healthy percentage of wine drinkers, I believe you can lift up all available alcoholic choices without resorting to name-calling, vilification or worse. There’s simply no need to put one type down to raise the status of another. In the end, none are in fact better or worse than any other. There is just as much good and bad in all of them. It’s frustrating that wine and spirits tend to get much more positive coverage by the media than beer does, and articles like this one by Jennifer Jordan don’t help the situation, however unintentional she claims it to be. Every time I read one of these anti-beer diatribes, I continue to wonder. Why can’t we all just get along?

Nano Breweries

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Last week in the northwestern Washington Tri-City Herald there was a nice profile of a small Washington brewery, Laht Neppur Brewing, which is the last name backwards of the owners, Court and Katie Ruppenthal. The brewery is located in Waitsburg, Washington, which is in the southeastern part of the state, a little bit north of Walla Walla. The Ruppenthal’s brewery has been open a little over six months, having sold their first beer last June.

According to the article, they first thought most of their sales would be to local bars and restaurants but the brewery in their converted workshop has become a popular local hangout in its own right. Several of their popular beers sell out before they can be delivered outside the tiny brewery. But the Ruppenthal’s brewery is very laid back, with customers able to cook their own food on the grill. It’s become a community center of sorts.

Given the recent discussions about children at beer places, this passage lept out at me.

Children are welcome and even have their own toy boxes and a tiny broom to push around the broken peanut shells that litter the concrete floors. “We have a cement floor and metal furniture,” Katie said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, they’re going to break something.”

But earlier in the article, co-owner and brewer Court Ruppenthal muses that his brewery is more like a “nano brewery” than a microbrewery, which started me thinking. A microbrewery is defined as a brewery that “produces less than 15,000 barrels of beer per year.” There are a few other bits to the definition, but that’s the main distinction. Above that are regional breweries (up to 2 million barrels) and then, simply, breweries (or big or national ones, with over 2 million barrels). There are only four breweries making more than 2 million barrels per year, and 53 that produce between 15,000 and 2 million (according to the 2006 figures from Modern Brewery Age). So out of roughly 1400 U.S. breweries, only 57 are large, leaving around 1,343 microbreweries (including brewpubs, whose definition has to do with their percentage of packaged beer sold).

So it seems to me on a practical basis, the term microbrewery doesn’t seem as useful anymore, or at least seems to need some modification. The various sizes of the remaining breweries and some patterns there seem to suggest some changes to the definitions. For example, below 15,000 annual barrels there are only five that brew more than 10,000 each year. Looking at the next 5,000 barrels down shows another big drop off, with only 19 breweries producing between 5,000 and 10,000 barrels per annum. So that means there are still a whopping 1,319 breweries that make less than 5,000 barrels per year.

If we keep going, only 10 make between 4,000 and 5,000 barrels annually, 16 between 3,000 and 4,000, and 17 between 2,000 and 3,000. This means 1,276 make less than 2,000 barrels of beer each year. Fully 67 breweries make more than 1,000 barrels so that’s still approximately 1,209 below a thousand barrels per year. The reason for doing all that math is to show that the overwhelming majority of breweries make a very small amount of beer each year. This is not to take anything away from their efforts, but in terms of what’s important to their interests, I have to believe they’re different from that of the larger concerns. There’s such a wide range of sizes within the definition of microbreweries that there must be a correspondingly varied set of issues they face, as well.

So I’m not quite sure where you’d draw the line, though at either 2,000 or 1,000 seems prudent. Those breweries, I think, we should define as nano breweries. Technically, the prefix “nano” means one billionth but more colloquially simply is used to denote the very small (as in nanotechnology). Fittingly, the Jargon File says the following about nano:

– pref. [SI: the next quantifier below micro-; meaning *10^(-9)] Smaller than micro-, and used in the same rather loose and connotative way. Thus, one has nanotechnology (coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with `microtechnology’; and a few machine architectures have a `nanocode’ level below `microcode’.

So in computer or math parlance, nano is directly below micro in terms of size. Next below nano is actually “pico,” technically meaning one-trillionth, but at some point it might also be useful to have microbreweries, nanobreweries and picobreweries.

But for now I’d argue for dividing the current definition of micros into two, with micros being breweries that produce between more than either 1,000 or 2,000 barrels per year and nanos being breweries that produce less than 1,000 or 2,000 each year, along with all of the other current parts of the definition. And since there are so few breweries between 10,000 and 15,000 barrles per year, perhaps the upper microbrewery/lower regional boundary should be changed to 10,000. The reason for doing this, I think, is in terms of not just size but the way in which these different size breweries function, are organized and approach the market, which I believe is radically different between all of the divisions. Thus it would make sense to start talking about them as separate parts of the beer industry, in much the same way we do now with the big breweries, regional breweries and microbreweries.

Anybody else have any thoughts or comments to add?

Chilling Out

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I know marketing is necessary to sell things, to build awareness and demand. But I have this old-fashioned, almost quaint notion that the product should come first. I think brewers should come up with the best beer they can and from there the marketers step in and figure out the best way to sell it. There’s nothing wrong with looking around the marketplace and looking for a hole to fill, of course, that makes perfect sense to me. Or taking something people already like and tweaking it a bit, such as adding more hops to an IPA to create Imperial IPAs. But these days, increasingly the big company’s new products are being created by marketing and then the brewers create something to fit the marketing plan.

I realize that’s how the modern commerce-driven world works, but it’s not always the best way to create a beer. Committees aren’t the best way to do everything. Last year, Coors’ “frost brew lined” cans put a blue film inside the can, with the potential to effect the taste of the beer, but the marketing plan trumped those concerns. Anheuser-Busch has taken a scatter-shot approach in which they test literally dozens of new products each year in the hopes some will stick, but because there’s so may they can’t really get behind any of them. It’s also the reason that over the years we’ve been subjected to “dry” beers, “ice” beers, “light (low-calorie)” beers, “low-carb” beers, tequila-infused beer, and other fad beers.

As the late, great Bill Hicks was fond of saying. “If you’re in marketing in advertising … kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there’s no rationalization for what you do and you are the ruiner of all things good, seriously.” Perhaps an extreme view? There was also this great episode (the Competition) of the animated Dilbert series in which Dilbert goes to work for a rival company, Nirvana Co., that is a dream company to work for. It’s a company with bosses who listen, employees that treat one another with respect and best of all — no marketing department. After Dilbert suggests they might want a marketing department to sell a new product they’re launching, they add one … and all hell breaks loose. Within days (or is it hours) the headquarters is destroyed and the company is bankrupt. It’s a hilarious critique on what happens when marketing calls the shots and goes too far.

The newest example of a marketing-driven beer is Miller’s new Chill, a beer based on a Mexican drink — a chelada — and apparently aimed at Hispanic drinkers. For some reason that strikes me as odd, like making a malt liquor for African-Americans or a Sake-based beer for Asian-Americans. It’s one thing to create a product that you reasonably believe will appeal to a specific customer, but to so unabashedly go after an ethnic or cultural group just seems so, well, tacky. Most of the news reports about Miller’s new release used the AP opening. “Se habla Miller? Miller Brewing Co. is hoping Hispanics speak its name next month when the company introduces a beer flavored with lime and salt in Latino areas.” The initial test markets will be Arizona, southern California, Florida, New Mexico and Texas.

Miller is calling it an “American take on a Mexican classic,” which may be good propaganda but that’s about it. Anytime we — and by “we” I mean America as a whole — do “our” version of something we tend to ruin it. Americanization is not always a good thing, especially when it happens to the stuff we eat and drink. Think what Taco Bell did for Mexican food, or Olive Garden for Italian, or American-light lager for an authentic pilsner.

Chelada is essentially a drink you create at a bar, and one definition is a “cerveza that has been poured into a glass with a salted rim containing lime juice and ice.” So essentially that makes a chelada a drink that is prepared at the bar, like a black and tan or a shandy. And while there are pre-packaged versions of both of those, I’ve never liked the idea of pre-made cocktails. There’s just something about the process of them being create in front of you (or making one yourself) that can’t be duplicated by the pre-made variety. Maybe it’s the fresh ingredients. Maybe it’s something else — but whatever it is — they definitely taste different.

From the AP report:

The low-calorie beer will compete with mainstream light beers, such as top selling Bud Light and competitor Coors Light, Marino said. It’ll be priced slightly higher than Miller Lite to compete with premium beers such as Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser, he said.

“It’s a different beer,” Marino said. “It’s a different take on light beer than what consumers are used to.”

The lime green bottles feature green and silver modular designs reminiscent of Aztec art, with the word “Chill” in bold black letters across the front and “Chelada style” below. A television advertising campaign with the slogan “Se habla Chill” will air in the test markets, Marino said.

And, of course, a light green bottle is a bad choice because it will allow beer photooxidation, meaning the beer can easily become lightstruck. This will make it taste skunky after even minimal exposure to light, especially direct sunlight. This is Heineken’s biggest problem. But again, marketing the green bottles is more important than what the beer tastes like because Heineken could obviously switch to brown glass any time they wanted to. It would throw off all their marketing and advertising and brand awareness, and that’s why they don’t and aren’t likely to change any time soon. It is interesting to note that in the Netherlands and indeed much of the rest of the world, Heineken does come in a brown bottle. (As an aside, actually brown isn’t the best, either, as it does allow some UV rays in. But brown bottles offer the best protection for the money. Dark red would be best, but red glass is prohibitively expensive. That’s the reason photographer’s dark rooms use red bulbs when working with photo paper and manually developing photographs.)

Miller has been putting several of their beers in clear glass for many years, but to a certain extent have solved the lightstruck problem by using pre-isomerized hop extracts, which don’t oxidize. The culprit is 3-methyl-2-butene thiol (from iso-alpha-acid hops) combined with another thiol radical (from compounds in malt) that form prenyl mercaptans. Lew Bryson, in his piece “How to Ruin a Beer,” explains it like this.

Miller Brewing takes a further step. They take the iso-alpha acids and hydrogenate them, much like is done at refineries, by forcing hydrogen through the oils at extremely high pressures. This produces rho-iso-alpha acids, also known as tetralones. These tetralones have intensified bitterness, increase foam stability and retention, and offer a better resistance to sunlight. They would be ideal, only they do not maintain the precise flavor of fresh hops. Hopping rates in mainstream American beers being what they are, this isn’t a serious problem as long as the bitterness is right.

There’s no word whether or not Chill is manufactured in this way or not, though I presume it must be. Unless, of course, Miller sees Chill’s main competition as Corona. Since Corona is another popular beer that comes in clear glass, it too is more often than not lightstruck. It may be the reason they market it with a lime in it in the first place, to mask the inherent skunkiness. But strange as it seems, it’s possible Chill could be marketed with the same defect customers have come to expect in their Corona, making switching to Miller Chill that much easier. After all, it’s the marketing that sells Corona, not it’s taste. For the big beer companies, it’s always about the marketing and rarely about the beer. Perhaps that’s why I have such a hard time chilling out.