Myopic Cyclops

August 7, 2006 By Jay Brooks

In the last few days since I first saw the press release for Cyclops, the new system for categorizing the flavor of beer introduced by CAMRA (The Campaign or Real Ale), I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether this is a good idea or not. It’s generated a lot of initial press, especially throughout England, and it ranges from high praise to mild ridicule to being called “perhaps the worst idea ever.” I didn’t want to rush to judgment on this one so I’ve been taking my time trying to weigh the pros and cons.

A CAMRA promotional photo showing how coasters with the Cyclops system info might be used.

In general the goal of making beer more accessible seems like a positive step. I can only assume many people unfamiliar with the many different beer styles and nearly limitless potential flavors and aromas might feel pretty overwhelmed. Even many craft beer lovers don’t know all of the beer styles and this point was recently hammered home to me when several beer bloggers mistakenly identified Rock Bottom’s Ned Flanders Ale as defective when in fact it was an interpretation of a style — Flanders Red Ale — that was supposed to have sour flavors coupled with unusual Brettanomyces and lactobacillic elements. Sure it was an unusual style but these were people who claim some affinity for good beer and indeed have undertaken to write about it. So if they were confused, it sure suggests a real need for something like this.

The Official Position

CAMRA claims Cyclops is an “initiative that has been created to help and educate pub goers that are interested in giving real ale a try for the very first time, or have only tried a few pints and want to find out more!”

The System

Okay, let’s assume for now this is something that’s worth doing. Is the Cyclops system that CAMRA came up with a good method to educate consumers about individual beers? Not being a brewery member of CAMRA, I can only reverse engineer how the ratings are created.

Each beer has five essential pieces of information: See, Smell, Taste and then a five-point scale for bitter and sweet. Let’s look at one example to see how this would work. We’ll use Everard’s Tiger Beer.

SEE: See is a rather awkward way to say the beer’s look, it’s color. Of course, it also seems to ignore other factors when looking at a beer like head retention, head color, Brussels lace, bubble size, cloudiness, etc., but I guess the goal is to keep things simple. In the case of Tiger, the SEE is listed as: “AUBURN, CHESTNUT BROWN.” And while that easily translate to give you an idea or impression of the beer’s color from what I can tell the color assigned is arbitrary and based on the individual brewery’s decision on what to call the beer’s color. To be truly useful, it seems like they should have been tied to one of the commonly used color scales. Beer color is represented using either the SRM (Standard Reference Method) or the EBC (European Brewing Convention) color measurement. There’s also an older one known as Lovibonds, but it’s essentially the same as SRM.
Perhaps if every beer that was 9-11 Lovibonds was called “Copper” every time that would be useful and if brewers wanted to use a more romantic, evocative color descriptor then the second color name could be used for that. I can’t be 100% certain, but from a random sample of color names, it doesn’t appear to be standardized, which renders it somewhat subjective and less useful.
To illustrate this now, here’s three brewer’s SEE descriptors for their entire portfolios:
Badger Ales: dark amber, ruby brown / light amber, copper / tawny, light golden brown / pale gold
Everards: amber / auburn, chestnut brown / tawny copper / gold straw
Fuller’s: tan / light gold / tawny / auburn / deep ruby red / chestnut
Just in these three, already there’s conflicts. Everards has one beer described as “auburn, chestnut brown” and Fuller’s has one they call “auburn” and another called “chestnut.” So are the two Fuller’s beers the same color as the one from Everards? It’s not exactly clear, is it? And if the goal is to make it more accesible, then I’m not sure this does the trick very well as it only leads to more confusion.
SMELL: While perhaps less genteel than aroma, smell at least conveys exactly what this represents. But again, trying to encapsulate something so subjective and personal is all but impossible. There’s no real standards here to cling to so I’m not sure this information helps. There are a few beers that have specific signature aromas such as the coriander and orange peel in Wits or the clove and bananas in German-style hefeweizens. But for most beers, the positive aromas are not really universal. In any particular beer, some people may smell one thing, others another and no one is really wrong. Everyone’s olfactory sense is different and/or developed to a greater or lesser degree than another person’s sense. So looking again at our three brewery examples, they all read like someone’s tasting notes. And having been collating tasting notes for years, I can tell you everybody has their own method, style and personal terminology for taking notes.
TASTE: See above. For the most part, what’s true for a beer’s nose is true for the flavors, as well.
BITTER: Using a five-point scale, the idea here appears to be to give at least a range of the bitterness of a particular beer. Personally I like the International Bitterness Units (IBU) scale, but I realize it’s a little unwieldy for the general populace. It’s more useful if you know the IBU ranges of beer styles. It too, has limitations since the higher you go on the scale the less accurate the formula for figuring out IBUs becomes. But by and large, its served the industry well. I’m not sure that a bitterness scale with only a range of five (six if you use zero) gives enough information. It may be enough for the majority of English ales but if you try to go beyond that it may not work. But I suppose of all the Cyclops scales at least this one is easily understood and does give some information that may be meaningful.
SWEET: The sweetness imparted by a beer from either the malt or alcohol (or esters) is like hops, a much broader range than a five-point scale can adequately capture. The problem is, as Stan from Beer Therapy puts so well, there’s “more to hops than bitterness. And there’s certainly more to malt than sweetness.” Stan hits upon perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome in designing such a system to categorize beer, which is that a true appreciation of beer’s complexities cannot be distilled down into a simple series of numbers and universal descriptors.
OTHER FACTORS: All of the examples of the Cyclops system in use also includes the beer style, percentage of alcohol and a short sentence or two description. This is generally the same information currently available for most beers, and it does add to the overall picture, but it doesn’t exactly simplify things.

Here is three ways in which Everard’s Tiger Beer Cyclops system data might be used:

In a festival program.

As a poster.

On a coaster.

The Name: Cyclops?

According to CAMRA’s press release, the name Cyclops comes “due to the one eye, nose and mouth imagery used on the promotional material.” The Cyclops originates, of course, from Greek mythology and “is a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead.”

But as Alan writing on A Good Beer Blog points out, the most “famous Cyclops, Homer’s Polyphemus [in The Odyssey], was blinded for life by drinking strong wine and ate people. This is hardly the making of a good brand. But even when he had one good eye he saw things … like he was born with one eye in the middle of his forehead — as in without [a] particularly strong ability to see things from other perspectives.”

At first I thought perhaps cyclops might be an acronym for something but when I found out it was simply named for the promotional materials, I threw up my hands. What a terribly unthoughtful way to choose a name for something you know will be controversial and which you want to succeed. So the name has absolutely nothing to do with the program itself or what it’s trying to accomplish. It’s likely to confuse most people even more plus a cyclops doesn’t exactly conjure up a warm and fuzzy image that could be exploited by marketing efforts.

What Others Are Saying

Roger Protz explained the goal a little better in a CNN report:

Cyclops is partly aimed at raising the respectability of a drink often miscast as the cause of Britain’s social ills, namely the notorious binge-drinking culture that sees city center bars, hospitals and police stations filled with inebriated youngsters.
“Wine is seen as respectable, but to many people beer means thugs. This is completely untrue. What we’re trying to do is elevate beer to a level equal with wine, where it becomes normal to drink beer at a dinner party.
“Brewers are responding to this. Some are even producing beer in elegant wine-shaped bottles, and as most wine writers agree, beer goes much better with food than wine.”
Says Protz, while he was once ridiculed for talking floridly about lowly bitters and stouts, more people are now appreciating the finer points of blending hops, barley and malts.

The London Telegraph, on the other hands, responds to the idea of a pub “where particular ales are suggested for particular dishes” by condescendingly suggesting that “the day of the beer snob cannot be long away.” Now that’s clueless reporting. Firstly, we beer snobs have been simmering in the underground for decades and secondly, food and beer pairings are not exactly a radical idea. If you can pair one beverage with food you can pair another. The author, the aptly named Neil Tweedie, is a wine writer, which doubtless explains his disparaging tone.

Conclusion

After writing this all out and thinking about how this might be used, the inescapable conclusion is that while I applaud the attempt it’s essentially an unworkable idea, especially if you try to broaden it to include all beer styles rather than just a narrow range of English ales. It’s a shame, too, because I’m pretty anal-retentive and detail-oriented so I would love a way to categorize all beers using a single, simple method. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is it. I’m not willing to call it the worst idea ever, because however flawed it is, at least it’s attempt. It’s more than you and I have tried. In the end, I think Cyclops might need some glasses, he’s a little myopic. Pint glasses?

Beer Attacks Continue

August 6, 2006 By Jay Brooks

Less than two weeks after the newest Gallup poll showed that beer is indeed the most popular alcoholic beverage reversing last year’s poll which suggested wine was more popular, another attack on beer took place. This despite the fact that beer outsells wine 4-to-1, and has for decades if not longer. Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a story in the business section entitled Beer sales falling flat as wine, other beverages grow in popularity. Business writer Len Boselovic begins by offering that if the term “Sophisticated Beer Drinker” “leaves an oxymoronic aftertaste on your palate, you have an idea of what beer makers are up against.” That’s his knee-slapping way of acknowledging that his paper along with almost every mainstream media source in the country have been doing an embarrassingly bad job of educating their readers about beer. For some reason his little joke just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It’s like he’s saying “ha ha, we suck at covering beer and now breweries are having trouble getting people to take beer seriously. Isn’t that funny?” Not when it’s partly your fault, you sanctimonious halfwit. Yeah, I know I lack perspective on this, but I’m just sick to death of the way the media treats beer so badly time and time again and then wonders why it has a poor image.

For support for the piece’s title, Boselovic offers the following:

U.S. beer shipments last year were flatter than a stale ale, falling 0.1 percent according to the Beer Institute. The industry group says shipments to the U.S. market — which accounted for about 86 percent of overall business — declined 2.2 percent to 178.8 million barrels. The drop was offset by a 7.2 percent increase in imports and an 8 percent increase in exports.
Meanwhile, the Wine Institute reports wine consumption grew 5.2 percent in 2005 while the Distilled Spirits Council says sales rose 2.9 percent based on the volume of alcohol sold.

But Boselovic barely mentions that craft beer has shown positive growth near 10% for the past two years and appears to be on track to threepeat this year.

The article also offers the following chart:

In it the author makes the blanket statement that “brewers have been losing customers in recent years,” by which he means the big brewers. Craft brewers have not only NOT been losing customers but have been slowly building their business over the last decade. But to mainstream media, especially the bigger outlets covering national or regional areas, the craft brewers are hardly ever on their radar at all. Fourteen hundred individual brewers in countless markets making 65+ different styles of beer and they hardly even rate a mention and are not even taken into account when discussing the beer business as a whole. But notice how every little boutique winery merits a full page profile as the next “it” business and it’s no wonder I’m pulling my hair out.

Apparently so-called “marketing experts” believe the cause of big beer’s decline is “changing consumer tastes” and they say “[d]rinkers are more sophisticated, willing to try something new, and looking for different beverages that are appropriate for different occasions.” Yet the craft beer segment of the industry is literally filled with complex, sophisticated beers in dozens of distinct styles perfect for the ideal circumstance, weather, food, event, holiday, etc. But the mainstream media repeatedly ignores this fact and turns instead to wine and spirits whenever the talk turns to sophistication. So it’s no wonder people can’t connect the two.

Auburn University professor Michael R. Solomon, who specializes in “consumer behavior” trots out this old saw. “When you drink a lot of wine, you’re refined. When you drink a lot of beer, you’re just a beer drinker.” And while he correctly points out that this problem is a perceptual one, he fails to notice that it was the media itself that helped to create this perception and continues to perpetuate it today.

While it’s certainly true that advertising by the major beer companies has done much of the damage to the perception of beer over many decades, the media has certainly been in collusion through the way they’ve ignored craft beer while embracing wine. So it’s really no surprise when this article does in fact suggest that it’s beer advertising that’s at fault and it’s only now that the big breweries are realizing what craft brewers have know for twenty-five years, that consumers “don’t want to be seen as a guzzler, a dumb guy, six-pack drinker. They want to be seen as a connoisseur.”

Jim Forrest, VP of Synovate, a market research firm, states that wine and distilled spirits producers have done a good job of fashioning strategies around occasions to consume their products.” He even mentions that “craft and import beer producers have done the same” yet neither he nor the article’s author mention that the media has all but ignored these “strategies around occasions to consume” with regard to beer while scarcely a holiday goes by without being inundated with stories on the right wine pairing or spirit needed to properly celebrate.

They all show remarkable restraint at ignoring their own role in the poor perception beer has after decades of neglect by everyone but a small, loyal cadre of connoisseurs.

Toward the end of the article, things turn decidedly rife with the unintentionally funny. To wit:

The industry hopes to capitalize on more discriminating palates through its Here’s To Beer campaign, an initiative spearheaded largely by Anheuser-Busch. Advertising features Spike Lee and other famous people describing who they’d like to share a beer with.

The Here’s to Beer campaign was, of course, solely created by Anheuser-Busch, not “spearheaded largely by” them as the article incorrectly claims. Originally, the trade organization The Beer Institute was involved but removed their support right after the initial ad ran on Super Bowl Sunday. The other brewers A-B approached about participating in the Here’s to Beer campaign all famously declined.

Judy Ramberg of Iconoculture has the following to say:

Anheuser-Busch realizes it has to grow by increasing its portfolio of specialty products, not by getting more people to drink its flagship brands. The danger is that the specialty brands will lose some of their appeal if drinkers realize who’s making them. “If beer drinkers find out they’re involved in some of these craft beers, they’ll lose all of their cachet,” says Ms. Ramberg, a Heineken drinker.

Well Judy, they’re taking your advice with many of their products, most notably their new organic beer, Wild Hop Lager, which fails to disclose it’s an A-B product on the label. But that’s also a problem for A-B since back in 1997 they stated publicly that “beer drinkers have the right to know who really brews their beer. We, along with many other traditional brewers and beer enthusiasts, object to those who mislead consumers by marketing their beers as ‘craft brewed,’ when in fact their beers are made in large breweries.” Oh, and Judy, Heineken is a terrible choice for a favorite beer. I don’t know why you volunteered that information or why the author included it, perhaps it was to show you were no shill for the domestic beer companies. People who like it generally — at least in my opinion — prefer the illusion of sophistication without going through the long, drawn-out process of actually being sophisticated enough to know how bad it is. So that’s at least in part why I have a hard time accepting your version of reality. But it’s interesting to note that their marketing campaign has worked on even a “marketing expert.”

On the other hand:

Mr. Forrest disagrees, arguing many drinkers don’t connect the dots. He says many people in the industry don’t realize Blue Moon Belgian White is made by Molson Coors, the world’s fifth-largest brewer. Protests from diehard Rolling Rock aficionados notwithstanding, the iconic brew should give Anheuser-Busch a buzz. “From a consumer standpoint, as long as they stay true to what that brand represents … they’ll still have the following,” Mr. Forrest says.

Jim, baby, I don’t know who you’re talking to but I don’t know anybody in the industry (including most beer connoisseurs) who isn’t aware that Blue Moon is a Coors product. It’s only been around for over ten years, so you must think the people in the beer industry are all pretty stupid. I’m surprised you’d condescend to speak to us lower forms of life. Oh, wait, you didn’t. You’re just sharing the results of having studied us mere mortals.

And please Jim, please, explain to me how from any point of view moving Rolling Rock’s production to New Jersey while continuing to say on the label “from the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe” yet listing the point of origin as St. Louis is staying “true to what that brand represents?” Perhaps that’s how things look in the ivory tower you’ve constructed for yourself, but here on Earth … not so much, Jimbo.

It’s pretty hard not to read these so-called “business experts” without feeling disgusted. I know market research is like the way sausage is made, the less you know the better. My skin crawls every time one of these yahoos claims some insight into the beer industry after floating a few polls or studying some data points they’ve collected. Time and time again the business press reports on beer as if they actually know what they’re talking about but, rarely, if ever, interviews actual people in the industry preferring instead to use analysts as their sources. And if this is how they report on an industry I have some familiarity with, why should I trust anything they have to say on ones I know nothing about? It’s enough to drive me to drink, if I wasn’t already sitting here with a pint of something yummy. Oh, and it’s not Blue Moon. Did you know Coors makes that?

California SB 1548: Free Beer for Everyone!

August 3, 2006 By Jay Brooks

Though it’s not been much reported, a bill before the California state senate, SB 1548 — and sponsored by Anheuser-Busch — will expand the laws regarding the tasting of alcohol to include beer. Specifically, a wholesaler, brewer or importer will be permitted to give up to 8 oz. of beer to sample in an on-premise retail setting and at no charge. No more than six tasting events per location per year can be held.

The original bill would have allowed a sample of 12 oz. in the original package unlimited times, meaning companies could have gone into bars and bought patrons a bottle or can of their beer as a promotional tool to increase business. Obviously, this would greatly benefit the larger companies with greater resources who could afford to “buy the world a drink.”

The California Small Brewers Association (CSBA) was successful in negotiating an amendment to the bill so that the amount was less than a full bottle or can and — perhaps most importantly — was not in the original packaging and could only be done six times per year in any one location. This makes it harder for companies to simply buy up the market by plying customers with a bottle of their product, but it still doesn’t really remove the impetus for abuse or the uneven way in which this would benefit the large company and further make doing business on a level playing field impossible for the small craft brewer.

The CSBA, who opposed the bill in its original form, is now taking a neutral position on the bill. If they had opposed it outright, they would not have been able to change it at all. In it’s amended form, it has now passed unanimously the first hurdle, the Assembly Government Organizational Committee, and is now on its way the Senate GO committee. After that it goes to the the House floor to be voted on, which should take place before the end of this month when their current session ends. If it passes there, then it’s over to the Governator for signature.

I certainly understand the CBSA’s removal of opposition to this bill, especially since the politics and issues make it such a complicated one. But I think there’s no doubt that their members will still be harmed when it is passed into law. The difficulty in opposing this law is that wine and spirits companies currently operate under essentially similar rules, and so do many other states. Rumor has it that A-B is, in fact, quite unhappy about opposition to this bill. Because in their mind, adding beer to the existing law for wine and spirits will simply — as they argue — “even the playing field.” There certainly are big wineries and small wineries and big spirits companies and small ones, too, so it would appear that inequities would exist there yet I know of no particular burden placed on the smaller producers with presumably smaller resources. Of course, that may be because I don’t follow those industries very closely. But my sense is that there is so much more profit built into wine and especially spirits that the difference between small and large producers — at least with respect to sampling resources — is not dramatic. Beer, on the other hand, is such a volume driven business with small per unit profits that the available resources difference between the big breweries and almost all the craft brewers is quite vast indeed. So at first blush, it may appear that this law will create a level playing field across all alcoholic beverages but I think the reality is that it will do just the opposite. I believe it will only deepen the divide between big and small breweries.

The bill’s language refers to the authorized tastings as “courses of instruction for consumers” which on its face would be a good thing except that I haven’t seen a high level of wine “instruction” in the tasting rooms of wineries across Napa and Sonoma to give me much cause for confidence that this is aimed at creating beer schools.

The idea of a large brewery sponsoring in effect a “free beer night” at bar after bar is a truly frightening one. Radical neo-prohibitionists would have a field day with that one but that could actually help in defeating this bill, along with possible opposition by law enforcement groups. And let’s not forget this is an election year.

It will probably do no good, but I think this bill should be opposed. Personally, I’d like to see a competing bill that would allow educational sampling along lines that make sense and don’t give a huge advantage to the big breweries. Why not 2 oz. samples? That’s enough for most educational purposes, especially if you’re tasting multiple beers. Most beer festivals and judging events don’t require much more than that to get enough of a sample to give you an idea of the beer.

The current bill allows for sampling “up to 8 oz.,” meaning you could give customers four samples of 2 oz. each. That’s probably what craft brewers would be likely to do, but I can’t see the big breweries taking that approach. And make it an 8 oz. sample and I can easily predict we’ll start seeing the big companies making 8 oz. logo tasting glasses for the bars who cooperate (and who wouldn’t?) to serve. Undoubtedly if the bars “buy” the glasses then they’ll be used instead of pint glasses for promotional “pint nights” where when you buy a beer, you keep the glass. If the brewery buys the customer the beer through this new law, and they also get a free tasting glass then you’ve got a system ripe for abuse.

It feels weird arguing that the status quo is adequate but in this case the current laws do provide something of a level playing field with regard to tasting. No one currently has any particular advantage, small, medium or large. This law will, of course, undo that and it’s hard to argue that it won’t give an advantage to the businesses with the most money. There has been a separation of the brewers and distributors from the retailer and this has mostly served the industry well to date. It has kept at least a semblance of distance between the two. If the curtain is occasionally parted by unsavory practices, at least it was there in the first place. Bringing it down now will only serve to move us closer to the end of the second act, by which I mean the rise of craft beer. Because anyone paying real attention to what’s been going on has to conclude that A-B — and perhaps all the big players — are doing their level best to eradicate craft beer and especially the regional breweries, as they did before several decades ago.

If you live in California, please consider contacting your elected officials and asking them to oppose SB 1548. It may sound alarmist, but the very future of craft beer may depend on it. Because if this passes, it will be the first of many legislative changes that will take us down a slippery slope back to the time when good beer was almost impossible to find. And I for one, don’t want to see that world ever again.

Here’s the current language of the bill:

25503.55. (a) A beer manufacturer, a licensed beer and wine importer general or a licensed beer and wine wholesaler may instruct consumers or conduct courses of instruction for consumers, on the subject of beer, including but not limited to, the history, nature, values, and characteristics of beer, and the methods of presenting and serving beer. A beer manufacturer, a beer importer general licensee or a licensed beer and wine wholesaler may conduct such instructions at the premises of a retail on-sale licensee authorized to sell beer.
(b) The instruction of consumers regarding beer may include the furnishing of tastes of beer to an individual of legal drinking age. Beer tastes at any individual course of instruction shall not exceed 8 ounces of beer per person per day. The tasting portion of a course of instruction shall not exceed one hour at any individual licensed retail premises. Tastes of beer may not be served to a consumer in their original container but must be served in an individual glass or cup.
(c) All tastes of beer served to a consumer as authorized in subdivision (b) shall be served only as part of the course of instruction and shall be served to the consumer by an employee of the on-sale retail licensee.
(d) A beer manufacturer, licensed beer and wine importer general or a licensed beer and wine wholesaler may not hold more than 6 courses of instruction per calendar year at any individual on-sale retail licensed premises if the course of instructions includes consumer tastes of beer.
(e) A representative of a beer manufacturer, licensed beer and wine importer general and/or a licensed beer and wine wholesaler must be present and authorize any tastes of beer conducted at an on-sale retail licensed premises pursuant to this section. The representative shall be responsible for paying the retailer for the tastes of beer served at any course of instruction. Such payment shall not exceed the retail price of the beer. For purposes of this section, a licensed beer and wine wholesaler cannot be the representative of a beer manufacturer or a licensed beer and wine importer general.
(f) No on-sale retail licensee shall require one or more courses of instruction pursuant to this section as a requirement to carry a brand or brands of any beer manufacturer or beer and wine wholesaler.
(g) No premium, gift, free goods, or other thing of value may be given away in connection with an authorized course of instruction which includes beer tastes except as authorized by this division. Failure to comply with the provisions of this section shall be presumed to be a violation of section 25500.
(h) A retail licensee may advertise the instructional tasting event using interior signs visible inside the establishment.
(i) A beer manufacturer, a licensed beer and wine importer general and a beer and wine wholesaler shall maintain an individual record of each course of instruction involving tastes of beer for three years. Records shall include the date of the tasting, the name and address of the retail licensee, and the brand, quantity and payments made for beer furnished by the beer manufacturer, the licensed beer and wine importer general or a licensed beer and wine wholesaler.

Protecting Minors by Separating Families

August 2, 2006 By Jay Brooks

Neo-Prohibitionists often get help from the authorities, who themselves are increasingly likely to be neo-prohibitionists. Because they’ve learned that one of the most effective ways to control others and further their agenda is to seek office in the various state alcohol control agencies. Despite taking an oath to serve the public good, they more often alter policy to do just the opposite. Witness Oregon’s “minor posting rules,” which led to seeing the following sight at this past weekend’s Oregon Brewers Festival (OBF).

That’s right, that’s not a joke, you’re seeing it correctly. It is not a trick or optical illusion. Here’s a close up of the sticker:

Parents also had to wear a similar sticker making a similar pledge to remove their minor child by 7:00 p.m. So what’s the reason for these draconian measures? According to Ken Palke, Media Relations Liaison for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC), it has to do with Oregon’s minor posting rules, where “minors are not allowed into an environment where drinking is the predominant activity. The OLCC feels that after 7, the Portland event is geared much more toward drinking, without much eating.

Here’s the OLCC regulation stating the minor posting rule’s purpose:

845-006-0340 Minor Postings
(1) Purpose. The Commission is charged with regulating the sale of alcohol in a manner which protects the safety and welfare of the citizens, and ensures that alcohol is used legally. As a policy making body, the Commission has a responsibility to send a clear message to the community and its youth that drinking alcohol is an adult activity, and that drinking environments are for adults. At the same time, the Commission recognizes the need to maximize opportunities for minors to eat at licensed premises while minimizing their exposure to drinking environments.

According to the OLCC’s “licensing people, the OLCC did not require that stickers of any kind be put onto minors during the beer festival.” But as Art Larrance, Director of the OBF, points out, the OLCC tacitly approved it by signing off on the procedure the festival used in the voluminous application process the OBF is required to go through in order to put on the festival. “The OLCC did not want any minors at the festival,” Larrance told me, and the procedure we came up with was to placate their concerns and comply with the minor posting rules. They also suggested prohibiting minors ages 14-20 entirely and the arguments Larrance made fell on deaf ears. According to him, he tried to explain how such rules would split family participation and keep many people from being able to attend and the OLCC “just sat there and didn’t say anything.”

Such behavior, I think, is consistent with the intractable and inflexible position that the neo-prohibitionist movements have taken in their efforts to remove alcohol from society. The OLCC’s notion that “drinking alcohol is an adult activity” and the so-called clear message they’re sending is that children should not be present during adult activities. Taken to its extreme, or its logical conclusion depending on your point of view, this will ultimately split society into two: one society which is adults only and one which is kid-friendly with no adult activities whatsoever, lest our youth be corrupted. And there it is again, the ubiquitous “it’s for the children” argument that invariably is used by neo-prohibitionist groups to push their agenda.

If parents wish to bring their children with them to a beer festival, what business is that of the state? Restricting parental authority in this method sends not the message they intend, but that parents cannot be trusted with their own children’s welfare and upbringing. How dare the OLCC presume to tell anyone how to raise their children. That is not their responsibility as they claim, but is the duty and responsibility of each parent. All they’ve done is wrested control from parents and used it to further the goal of prohibition. They’ve certainly perverted the idea of protecting society from itself.

It seems quite obvious to me that if you want to raise children who will become responsible adults, capable of reasonably enjoying what the OLCC calls “adult activities,” they need to witness the example of their parents and other adults doing just that. Keeping minors from ever seeing adults drinking will only serve to make it more of a taboo — thus making abuse more attractive as prohibited activities are always more desirable — and give kids no lessons to learn on “how” drinking responsibly is accomplished. Underage drinking — and especially abuse — is, of course, much less common in nations where alcohol is seamlessly part of the society and in which children are included in all aspects of the adult world. England’s pub culture has, for example, created family gathering spots for entire neighborhoods without managing to corrupt its youth. In fact, almost everywhere alcohol is not restricted but embraced as a part of everyday life, society seems healthier as a result. The frat party alcohol abuses are peculiarly restricted to the U.S., where drinking is such a ridiculous taboo that kids who lack any positive examples of alcohol act irresponsibly in the vacuum of information created by neo-prohibitionist proselytizing.

Ironically, the OLCC’s director, Teresa L. Kaiser, resigned in May of this year after being arrested “on suspicion of driving under the influence and reckless driving.” Following a two-car crash on the west end of Portland’s Sellwood Bridge, “police said a breath test showed her blood-alcohol level was 0.16, twice the legal limit for adults.” She probably never attended a beer festival with her parents to learn how to enjoy alcohol responsibly. But at least she’s gotten that infant alcoholism epidemic under control.

This problem sadly is not, of course, unique to Oregon. Neo-prohibitionists in communites all across America are trying to remove alcohol from public events such as county fairs, outdoor concerts and festivals of all kinds. When such puritanical ideas — like Oregon’s keeping minors away from almost any event involving alcohol — work their way into our laws, it’s the very children such laws claim to protect along with society as a whole that are being harmed. And we should do everything in our power to oppose them. I, for one, will continue to take my kids, Porter and Alice, to as many beer festivals as possible.

Beerfest is Coming: Run, Hide & Disavow

August 1, 2006 By Jay Brooks

Listed at the bottom of the poster for the upcoming film, Beerfest, is the tagline From the Comic Geniuses Who Brought You the Phenomenon “Super Troopers.” Super Troopers was a phenomenon? That’s a scary thought. If they treat beer the same way Super Troopers did the police, it’s hard to be enthusiastic for this movie’s release on August 25.

Based on the poster alone, the film seems to be aimed at the same people who enjoy beer commercials about frogs, twins, frat boys, catfights and girls in bikinis. I imagine I’m going to feel about this film the way Canadians must have felt about Bob and Doug McKenzie‘s Strange Brew.

A promotional tour for the Warner Brothers’ movie was in Portland on Sunday, the last day of the Oregon Brewers Festival. Throughout the festival, many people were talking about the film, but nobody had anything good to say about it, and I can’t say I blame them. All of the promotional material, the trailer and the bad puns seem to suggest an embarrasing — at least to those of us who think beer is worthy of respect — cinematic disaster.

This is the plot:

When American brothers Todd and Jan Wolfhouse travel to Germany to spread their grandfather’s ashes at Oktoberfest, they stumble upon a super-secret, centuries old, underground beer games competition – “Beerfest,” the secret Olympics of beer drinking. The brothers receive a less than warm welcome from their German cousins, the Von Wolfhausens, who humiliate Todd and Jan, slander their relatives, and finally cast them out of the event. Vowing to return in a year to defend their country and their family’s honor, The Wolfhouse boys assemble a ragtag dream team of beer drinkers and gamers: Barry Badrinath, the consummate skills player with a dark past; Phil Krundle (AKA Landfill), a one-man chugging machine; and Steve “Fink” Finklestein, the lab tech with a PhD in All Things Beer. This Magnificent Five train relentlessly, using their hearts, minds and livers to drink faster, smarter and harder than they ever have before. But first they must battle their own demons… as well as a bunch of big, blond, German jerks who want to destroy the team before they can even make it back to Munich. Revenge, like beer, is best served cold.

I generally disdain criticism of movies by people who haven’t seen a movie, but here I am doing it myself. That’s because everything I’ve seen so far about this comedy makes it appear that it can only further damage the image of beer in America. There’s some support for that in the write-up at the website Worst Previews. At the end of the trailer itself there is a mock disclaimer saying “no Germans were harmed” and that you should “treat all women with respect.” If you have to tell people to treat women respectfully, that probably signals that the film will do just the opposite, and the trailer does seem to bear that out. Unlike Oregon’s Brewers Summer Games where industry professionals compete in events that have some relation to their jobs, the Beerfest ones appear to be nothing more than juvenile drinking games. These are the sort of games played on college campuses and high school parties with the only goal being to get drunk, and often as fast as possible. I’m sure plenty of people will find that hilarious, because many people seem to enjoy comedies that drag them down to the below slapstick level that appeals to five-year olds and the blissfully uneducated teens and early twenty-somethings. I realize I’m sounding like that old curmudgeon whining about “these kids today,” but I do enjoy the ocassional low-brow teen comedy, especially ones that are smart and witty.

I think what bothers me about everything I know about this film so far is that it appears to be a two-hour beer commercial with all the worst elements that have skewed people’s perceptions of what beer is over the last several decades. Glorifying over consumption, pandering to male sexual urges, misinformation such as the “ice cold” idea or that low-calorie beer has any additional health benefits. The official website even has flying frogs holding a banner.

I realize people can be entertained by all manner of things, and certainly have the right to laugh at whatever they want. I’m sure Warner Brothers knows its audience. They’ve been doing this successfully for a long time now. But I just can’t abide the idea that beer will once again be dragged through the mud in the name of entertainment. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to lift up beer and get it the respect I believe it so richly deserves. A film like this has the potential to undo so much of what so many of us have been trying to do for good beer that I just want to sit down and cry.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I take these things too seriously. Maybe I’m a lone nut shouting at the wind. Maybe this is what America wants, is yearning for. After all, my finger is so rarely on the pulse of America’s tastes. But to me this just has disaster for the beer industry written all over it.

If you want to see the trailer for yourself, here it is in a variety of formats and sizes:

Quicktime:

Super Hi-Res
Hi-Res
Med-Res
Lo-Res

Windows Media Player:

Super Hi-Res
Hi-Res
Med-Res
Lo-Res

Beer Remains on Top — This Year Gallup Agrees

July 25, 2006 By Jay Brooks

According to a press release from Anheuser-Busch, a recent Gallup Poll indicates that people were more truthful this year about their favorite alcoholic beverage. Last year’s poll appeared to indicate that wine was overtaking beer, despite the fact that beer outsells wine by an almost 4-to-1 ratio, and has for many years. I never believed last year’s poll and this year’s, having put beer once more on top, seems to confirm my earlier suspicions.

Speculation last year ranged from people giving the answer wine as their favorite because of its perception of greater sophistication to problems with the sample taken, such as the one earlier this year by Merrill Research. In other words, asking people what their favorite is may not always produce highly accurate results since the subject itself is so subjective. Sales figures, on the other hand, are more reliable and they have shown beer far in the lead for years and years.

From the press release:

Findings from Gallup’s annual poll on Americans’ alcohol and drinking habits demonstrate adult consumer consumption of wine has decreased, while consumption of beer has increased five percentage points since July 2005.
Of those Americans who drink alcohol, 41 percent most often drink beer. Beer is the largest segment in the alcohol beverage category in both volume and dollar sales, and accounts for nearly 60 percent of all alcohol beverage servings.

A-B also used the press release to tacitly suggest that their Here’s to Beer campaign was responsible for the turnaround by including information about it directly following the Gallup Poll story.

From the Glass-Lined Tanks of Old … St. Louis?

July 20, 2006 By Jay Brooks

Now that Anheuser-Busch will be brewing Rolling Rock at their facility in Newark, New Jersey, I expected they’d have to change some of the packaging. But in a press release from last Friday, A-B announced their intention to not change almost anything. I suppose that’s not too much of a surprise since their stated goal is to “produce the same beer and maintain its traditional taste,” according to Doug Muhleman, chief brewmaster of Anheuser-Busch.

Andy Goeler, vice president, Import, Craft and Specialty Group, Anheuser- Busch, Inc. said “[o]ur priority is to honor the Rolling Rock brand and its traditions. One way we’re doing this is through our packaging. The Rolling Rock pledge is an historic part of this brand, along with the mysterious ’33’ and the label’s other features. We wanted to take all steps possible to honor this tradition, so we plan to quote the pledge on the label in a tribute to this rich, proud history.”

Next month, when the beer will begin being brewed in New Jersey, the label will continue to read:

“From the glass-lined tanks of old Latrobe,
we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment,
as a tribute to your good taste.
It comes from the mountain springs to you.”

Other items printed on the bottle, including the steeplechase, horse and mysterious “33” will also remain unchanged.

Now is it just me or won’t it be pretty hard to claim that the beer is “from the glass-lined tanks of old Latrobe” when it’s brewed in Newark? Does that kind of announced deception spun as “honoring tradition” bother anyone else? It’s one thing to quietly keep the label intact, but to shout that you’re paying “tribute to this rich, proud history” while not, in fact, doing so seems arrogant in the extreme to me. If A-B had really cared about the tradition of this beer, they would have bought the brewery and continued making it in Latrobe. That would have honored the tradition and paid tribute to its history. This is spin and propaganda at its most openly brash. Curiously, this press release does not appear, at least as far as I can tell, on their corporate website where their other press releases reside. Instead, it came through PR Newswire, an online service that disseminates press releases to journalists and other industry watchers. Draw your own conclusions for that, but it seems at least a little odd.

Also from the press release:

Rolling Rock bottles will continue to have a two-color painted label on green glass from the same supplier in Pennsylvania. The front label will continue to recognize Latrobe Brewing Co., along with a required geographic designation. Anheuser-Busch will first brew Rolling Rock in the northeast, but expansion to other locations is expected. Therefore, the company is opting to place its St. Louis headquarters on the bottle.

Well that seems reasonable. A-B will be making Rolling Rock in Newark, New Jersey, stating on the bottle that it’s “from the glass-lined tanks of old Latrobe” (Pennsylvania) and listing its origin as St. Louis, Missouri. Let’s review once more the letter A-B sent to All About Beer magazine in response to some labeling criticisms beer writer Fred Eckhardt had made in a 1997 article.

We don’t take issue with contract brewing — we just think beer drinkers have the right to know who really brews their beer. We, along with many other traditional brewers and beer enthusiasts, object to those who mislead consumers by marketing their beers as “craft brewed,” when in fact their beers are made in large breweries.

It may not be a perfect fit, but it still shows the King has an arbitrary sense of moral righteousness and some curious notions of right and wrong, very much in the mold of Louis XIV and other Old World royalty. It’s wrong if they do it but when we do it we’re just “honoring tradition.” Uh-huh. We are not amused.

Coors DWI: A Different Take

July 19, 2006 By Jay Brooks

Pete Coors, family scion of Coors Brewing Co. (now Molson Coors) was famously arrested on a drunk driving charge in late May for which his license has now been revoked. I’m sure much will be made of this by the neo-prohibitionist movement, especially since Pete had personally overseen Coors’ “21 Means 21” responsible driving program. Coors himself has said. “I made a mistake. I should have planned ahead for a ride.” But did he really make a mistake?

(AP Photo/Jack Dempsey)

Predictably, because of who Pete Coors is, this has made the rounds of all the major and minor news outlets, many pointing out the irony of Coors’ responsible drinking program and this incident. But I think there’s a larger issue that needs revisiting. This is an excellent example of how far over the edge neo-prohibitionist groups have gone in their quest to remove alcohol once more from society.

According to Pete Coors’ statement, he had “consumed a beer about 30 minutes before leaving a wedding.” He then ran a stop sign one block from his home in Golden, Colorado, and police stopped him in his driveway. According to the Washington Post, “[i]n one breath test, he registered a blood alcohol level of 0.073 percent. In a second, 20 minutes later, he registered 0.088. In Colorado a blood alcohol count of 0.05 results in a driving while impaired charge, while a count of 0.08 results in driving under the influence.”

But let’s assume Pete’s statement is correct. That means an average size person isn’t able to have even one beer thirty minutes before getting into a car. And I’ll assume he was drinking a Coors beer, which isn’t exactly a strong one. If the Colorado standard is 0.05% to be considered “impaired,” then one Coors was more than enough to make virtually any person unable to have even one beer while out at a social function. It’s a wonder any bars are even open in Colorado anymore. This is an excellent illustration of just how far the pendulum has swung in favor of the neo-prohibitionists. MADD and other similar organizations have been tireless in lowering the acceptable blood alcohol level in state after state. And no politician wants to be seen as being for drunk driving, a fact these vultures prey upon. But let’s look again at what Pete did that signaled the Colorado Highway Patrol that he was a candidate for suspicion. He ran a stop sign one block from his house, and made it there safely since that’s where the police arrested him. And not even ran it, but in the words of the arresting officer, “rolled through [the] stop sign.” In many places that’s known as a “California stop.” Now who among you hasn’t ever done that, especially right by your house where you’re intimately familiar with the driving patterns. At worst, he should have been cited for the stop sign and that’s it.

But over 25 years of scare-mongering tactics have even made police more apt to assume alcohol is involved in practically everything. You could just about here the officer’s mind whirring as he read the name on the license, assuming he didn’t already know who he was pulling over. Once he knew who he had, you just know a breath test was in order. Because there’s nothing else that’s been reported that suggests there was any other probable cause to test for alcohol. Certainly not “rolling through a stop sign” automatically rises to that level and I have a very hard time believing a 59-year old man who’d had one drink thirty minutes before leaving a wedding (plus whatever his driving time home was) would have appeared very drunk at all. It’s ridiculous in the extreme.

I realize that it’s unpopular to say so, but we’ve gone too far in punishing the majority for the sins of the minority. We do it all the time. Most of our laws are based on this theme. Look at airport security for a recent example. Certainly we need security at the airport, but all that’s really happened is people are more and more inconvenienced for very little, if any, benefit to increasing actual security. Who believes you’re safer flying now due to the “heightened security” at the airport? Investigation and surveys continually prove otherwise. The fact is if a terrorist really wants to harm a plane, he’ll figure out a way, and it won’t be by putting a bomb in his shoe even though everyone now has to take off their shoes because that happened just one time. But every problem demands that politicians make some show of addressing the problem. Usually this takes the form of new laws, procedures, etc. which do no real good and serve only to get them re-elected while the measures themselves really just screw the rest of us.

And so it is with drunk driving laws. There will always be people too stupid to know when not to get behind the wheel of a car. Before MADD, I concede that society didn’t handle those problem people very well and they truly were — and are — a menace. But making it impossible for the rest of us who maybe can exercise reasonable judgment about whether to drive or not was not the only solution, and it certainly wasn’t the best solution. Personally, I hate paternalistic laws that seek to tell people how to behave. Seat belts are a good example of this. Now I agree that we should all wear seat belts, but I bristle at the idea that it’s a law. It should never have been a law. People should have been encouraged to wear them but if they were too stupid to listen that’s where it should have ended.

But by lowering the blood alcohol standards, the number of people arrested for driving drunk has predictably gone up. Are the roads safer now? The statistics at MADD don’t seem to suggest that. The ones I looked at appear to simply fan the flames of fear and intimidation. One in every 121 drivers has been arrested for driving drunk. Does that seem even remotely reasonable? Are there less alcohol-related accidents now than before 1980? It only appears everything is getting worse, which means MADD can stay in business and keep soliciting funding for years to come without really solving the problem.

By now, perhaps you think I’m advocating driving drunk. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But how we define what being drunk is and how we deal with a person who showed poor judgment by driving when he or she was in no condition to do so, is at the heart of this problem. Making the standard for being intoxicated lower and lower has not made the roads safer and has victimized thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent people. It has had a chilling effect on legitimate businesses that serve alcohol and made most Americans afraid to get behind the wheel if alcohol has touched their lips at all. Is that really the kind of society we want to live in? We should definitely punish those people who show time and time again that they cannot be trusted to make good decisions. Such people are menaces to society and they should not be allowed to drive and should be punished for any crimes they commit. And most of the crimes a person could be charged with existed before 1980, such as vehicular manslaughter, unsafe driving, etc.

So all MADD did was make more people vulnerable to prosecution. The founder of MADD, Candy Lightner, began the neo-prohibitionist movement after her 13-year old daughter was killed by a drunk driver who “had three prior drunk driving convictions and was out on bail from a hit-and-run arrest two days earlier.” I would have been pissed off, too, and I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if my son, Porter, or my daughter, Alice, was taken from me in that way. But the way to have addressed that problem was to strengthen enforcement of drunk driving as it existed. That person should never have been allowed behind the wheel two days before or after the second or third conviction. The justice system failed in that case and was definitely in need of reform. I don’t think anyone would dispute that.

But out of that incident, everyone else who lives in our society has been punished for that person’s crime. We’ve all become the victim of people’s grief run amuck. An entire industry has been stigmatized as evil because some people can’t enjoy it responsibly. We all have suffered because of those folks and they’re the ones who deserve to be punished. There’s nothing I hate worse than a bad drunk. My stepfather was one. And I know a few others, even a couple in the beer business. I hate being around them. They’re the problem, there’s no doubt of that.

Contrast that with mobile phone use in an automobile, which has been shown to impair a person’s driving as much as or in some cases more than that of a drunk person. Where is the outrage toward phone companies that breweries face? Why aren’t phones stigmitized as harmful to society? Why is restricting phone users from getting behind the wheel of a car any different if the potential for harm is at least the same? Where are the websites and non-profit organizations to combat this growing problem on our nation’s highways? Why isn’t AT&T being picketed for putting our youth in danger on the road? I think this very disparity points to the unspoken agenda lurking beneath the surface with many neo-prohibitionists: alcohol is a moral issue and they’re using it to tell you and me how we should live our lives, which is to say like they want to live their own.

I think it’s time to say that. It’s time to stand up and say our alcohol laws have become ridiculous in the extreme and have gotten in the way of how we live our lives. In my opinion, laws should be nothing more than a balance of competing interests that produce the greatest good for the most people. People who put themselves and others at risk by getting behind the wheel of a car when they’ve had too much to drink should be punished. But we’ve gone so far out of whack in defining what that means that literally no one can use their own prudence or good judgment because having even one beer makes us all criminals. So because of a few, the many can no longer responsibly enjoy themselves with a reasonable amount of alcohol.

I realize Pete Coors must show deference to the law because of his position and because of his business. But I think the rest of us should use this incident to let our politicians know that our alcohol laws have gone too far and we must reform them in such a way that they’re fair and reasonable. People should be able to enjoy the legal pleasures of a free society without fear and without being treated like criminals. Otherwise, we will no longer have a free society at all in which to enjoy that beer.

“It’s For the Kids”

July 13, 2006 By Jay Brooks

The neo-prohibitionist organization Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) released a statement yesterday claiming that beer logos on cars, toys and at the NASCAR track “Confuse Young Kids About Drinking and Driving.” Boy these organizations think kids are pretty stupid, don’t they.

Now I’m not a fan of car racing. I follow some sports, but it’s just not a huge part of my life. I have nothing against them per se although I do think our obsession with sports in general distracts people from more important issues, but that’s probably just me. And the strange thing is I don’t really like the big beer companies sponsoring sports and the attendant ads very much, but on wholly different grounds. For me it’s about the message they’re sending about what beer is and how it should be consumed where I believe most of their advertising perpetuates false and misleading information about beer itself. And I think this has done great harm to beer’s image over the last several decades making it harder for craft brewers to compete.

But the one sport I hate with a passion even more is using kids as an excuse to further an agenda. It’s a time-honored strategy and neo-prohibitionists have honed it to a fine art. Don’t like something other people are doing? Claim it’s bad for the kids. It’s always about the freaking kids. This just so frys my bacon. I have kids. Many, if not most, of the hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of people whose livelihoods depend on beer from brewers to distributors to salesman to truck drivers to the ad agency people who come up with the ads have kids, too. I don’t see them coming unglued because a toy car has a Budweiser logo on it. Now I wouldn’t buy my son a Bud car because I don’t like Bud. But he does have a Radeberger Pilsner truck I bought him in Germany. And he has some trucks with craft brewer logos on them and some with other import beers like Murphy’s (before Heineken bought them). Do I think he’s going to be harmed because of this? Of course not. Only someone uninvolved with their children could come to that conclusion. There are plenty of real threats I’m worried about in raising my children. Even just talking about this one is a waste of my time.

But the neo-prohibitionists are serious. They really think this is the problem that needs addressing. Anything, anything that has to do with adults enjoying alcohol must be stopped. It must not be allowed. If anyone can abuse it, then none of us are safe until alcohol is once again outlawed. And we all now how well that worked out the last time we tried it. In fact, it’s never worked out when any body’s tried it. They may dress it up as concern for the kids and even for the public at large but this is just a grubby little attempt at controlling the lives of all Americans in a way the majority of Americans don’t want. That’s supposed to matter in a democracy, what the majority of people want. But minority opinions are increasingly pushing their way to the front of the line with misinformation, propaganda and deep pockets.

And while I’m ranting, how about euphemistic names that neo-prohibitionists use to obfuscate their true purpose. This one cracks me up: “Science for the Public Interest.” Science? Their press release is just anecdotal hogwash with no scientific basis whatsoever. It’s pure opinion, and that would be fine as long as they said so. And who’s public interest are they representing. Not mine. Not the thousands and thousands of brewery and related industry workers and their families. Their mission statement claims they “represent the citizen’s interests” but are all citizen’s interests the same? How could they be? So they’re really pushing a particular, if unstated, agenda. But if they want truth in advertising isn’t it only right that they should begin with their own name? If their very name is misleading and doesn’t really convey their true purpose why should we believe anything they have to say? I have a hard time giving credence to any organization who claims a higher moral ground but can’t even manage honesty in their own name.

A couple of my son Porter’s toy trucks. Radeberger, who makes a fantastic pilsner and Anderson Valley Brewing, an environmentally friendly brewery that is a huge part of its local economy. And the problem with these is …? Let’s see, global warming, no universal health care, a war in Iraq, record deficit, secret spying on Americans by our own government, the Patriot Act, AIDS in Africa, the growing scarcity of oil and water, and on and on but no, this is the big problem. Could we please get some perspective?

Old Contradictions

July 12, 2006 By Jay Brooks

I have to give credit for this to Randy Bishop of idDream, who posted it on his blog as an update to a piece he wrote regarding Anheuser-Busch’s foray into the organic beer market with Wild Hop Lager and Stone Mill Pale Ale. He uncovered a letter I’d read before but had forgotten about regarding an article written by Fred Eckhardt for the March 1997 issue of All About Beer magazine. The article concerned the long-standing feud between Anheuser-Busch and Boston Beer Co. Fred wrote about the contradictions A-B argued about with regard to contract brewing. A-B responded to Fred’s article with a lengthy response of their own. In that response, A-B said the following:

We don’t take issue with contract brewing — we just think beer drinkers have the right to know who really brews their beer. We, along with many other traditional brewers and beer enthusiasts, object to those who mislead consumers by marketing their beers as “craft brewed,” when in fact their beers are made in large breweries.

Fast forward nine years to the release of Wild Hop Lager, which revealed its origin only to the beer cogniscenti who when they read “Fairfield, CA” on a beer label knew something most people wouldn’t realize. Ironically, the argument expressed in their letter to Fred is the same one I made in my original post about this back in March, Wild Hop Lager: A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing. Several months after its initial release the website now acknowledges that it’s a A-B product but the packaging in the stores still does not. Perhaps when they move through the existing packaging the new labels and carriers will reveal its true ownership Until then, I think they’ll be doing exactly what they accused Samuel Adams of in 1997: misleading consumers.

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