The Pennsylvania law firm Komlossy Law, who has a craft beer practice area, posted a comprehensive overview of the major legal tussles that craft brewers went through last year, entitled the Year in Beer(law).
Prohibitionists Poisoning Minds With Poison Beer
The good folks at Alcohol Justice (AJ) really know where my goat is tied (as an old friend used to say) because they sure know how to piss me off. They tweeted out this morning about a CDC Report on Alcohol and Public Health: Alcohol-Related Disease Impact with the following. “In the US, what kills 88,000 people and causes $223 billion in harm annually?” It’s their usual bullshit meme about how alcohol, not people, kills and harms. But perhaps most offensive is the accompanying photo, showing beer as poison.
I know it was just for effect, but how utterly obnoxious. The most popular alcoholic beverage worldwide, and third most popular of all beverages, is poisonous? Shouldn’t we all be dead right now, then? That’s a tad extreme, and typically untruthful, especially considering that throughout history had it not been for the safer-than-water drink many of our ancestors would have perished and who knows how many of the folks working at Alcohol Justice might not even be here today were it not for beer. I guess that was then, and this is now, and they’re certainly an ungrateful bunch, unable to say a kind word about anything to do with alcohol. It’s also a slap in the face to the literally millions of people across the globe who make, sell and serve beer, and other alcoholic beverages. But insulting us is part and parcel of their mission, and is never given a second thought, as far as I can tell.
But lest I give them too much credit for creativity, it wasn’t even their photo, but was, presumably, bought from Colourbox, a company selling stock photographs. But even they knew the photo was about the “dangers of alcoholism” and not about beer being poison, which is the sense in which AJ is clearly using it.
But let’s get back to the content, first that 88,000 people are killed by alcohol. The CDC report and the accompanying chart is entitled “Alcohol-Attributable Deaths Due to Excessive Alcohol Use” (my emphasis), a qualifier conveniently left off by AJ.
The chart itself is divided into two parts, chronic and acute “causes.” Chronic is essentially a laundry list of diseases or illnesses that people presumably died of who also drank. But saying that alcohol is the single and direct cause of almost all of those is utterly absurd. There are so many factors that would account for any one of those that it’s mind-boggling that they could print that with a straight face. Some, maybe most, were no doubt exacerbated by the overuse of alcohol, but certainly there would have been additional factors, like genetics, age, other health issues, etcetera, that would have contributed to an individual contracting a specific ailment. Alcohol is not necessarily the smoking gun, but one of perhaps many factors that would have contributed.
But the acute “causes” are even more preposterous, if that’s possible, as they include such causes as “Air-space transport, Drowning, Fall injuries, Firearm injuries, Hypothermia, Suicide and Water transport,” to name a few. And those are the majority of the deaths they attribute to excessive alcohol use. Take hypothermia; if you get so drunk that you’re too foolish to come in out of the cold, it wasn’t the alcohol that did you in, it was stupidity. And suicide? The alcohol may have given you the courage to go through with it, but I can all but guarantee there were many more root causes that led someone to contemplate taking their own life, and those are far more complicated than excessive drinking.
Curiously, the CDC also has compiled a list of facts about Deaths and Mortality. Alcohol is not even listed among the top ten causes of death in the U.S. Heart disease is number one, although I must have missed the calls to ban red meat and other causes of heart problems.
The number of Americans who pass away each year is around 2,468,435, making even the almost 88,000 skewed figure a mere 3.5% of the total. But if they had used the nearly 88,000 figure, it would have been fifth. The reason it’s not there is because that number is made up of a number of different causes. Even though they refer to it as “attributable,” those are things that may contribute, along with many other factors, but they’re not necessarily the direct cause itself. The CDC report makes that clear if you take the time to look at it. Alcohol Justice does not, and uses it as alarmist propaganda.
If you switch the view of the CDC report from “Excessive Alcohol Use” to “All Alcohol Use” the number actually goes up to 106,434. So why didn’t AJ use that number since it makes the problem seem even more dire? Well, the chart toward the bottom also factors in “Beneficial Effects,” and claims positive benefits to 26,284. That gives all alcohol use a net total of 80,150, which is actually lower than the number attributable to excessive drinking. So even with the questionable numbers and reasoning, they did go with the worst numbers, of course.
As for the second number, the “$223 billion in harm,” that’s not addressed or even mentioned in the CDC report, so I think it’s safe to assume that they, as usual, just made it up. It’s probably taken from some other bullshit propaganda piece, but there’s no link to it in the tweet, so we’re left guessing, at least until the next missive from the watchdog sheriff.
Before the angry comments inevitably pile up, I’m not making light of death, any death. I fear death as much as the next person, increasingly so as I inch closer toward that light at the end of this tunnel we call life. But how, and why, people die and perhaps more importantly, how they lived, cannot be reduced to a balance sheet. It’s not a matter of tallying the good and bad we’ve done to ourselves and others, and assigning a number. Life is far more complex and complicated. So is death. Nobody’s picking up a bottle of beer and seeing a skull and crossbones on it. To put one there ignores the myriad positives that alcohol brings to most people’s lives, how it enhances and enriches them. Those intangible benefits are almost unquantifiable, although we all know they exist. It’s why beer and alcohol have been an integral part of civilization since the very beginning of recorded history. That there is a small minority of individuals who are unable or unwilling to control themselves with alcohol is not a reason to dismiss the overwhelming majority of us who can, logic apparently utterly lost on the prohibitionists.
One of the more popular toasts when drinking is L’Chiam, which in hebrew means “to life.” And that, I think, is what we drink to each and every time we raise a glass of beer to our lips. To life!
Spencer Trappist Brewery Is Bizarre?
By now you’ve probably seen the news that the Spencer Trappist Brewery, America’s first Trappist brewery is selling beer, their Spencer Trappist Ale. I didn’t feel the need to write much about it since the news is just about everywhere, from the Boston Globe to L.A. Weekly, from NPR to CBS News.
But here’s one I don’t quite get. When ABC News, specifically the affiliate station out of Fresno, California, KFSN Channel 30, covered the story, they ran the headline US monks move into Trappist beer brewing business, but used essentially the same AP Story that most news outlets are using for this story. But ABC News also tagged the story with “Massachusetts,” which makes sense, and “bizarre,” which does not. Could somebody please explain to me what’s “bizarre” about this story? Other headlines in ABC’s bizarre topics include stories about devil babies, atomic wedgies and anal probes. But monks brewing beer, something they’ve been doing since the middle ages, possibly as early as the 6th century, is lumped in with what you’d normally only find in the pages of the Weekly World News when you’re checking out at the grocery store.
Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but that seems like beer getting a slap in the face to me. It was probably just some ignorant intern who didn’t know what to do with the story and didn’t want to have to think about it very much, and so just threw it in the catch-all category. But surely this story should have been characterized differently. Is that really too much to ask?
You can also see additional photos at their Facebook page. And below is a video of the Spencer Trappist monks from St. Joseph’s Abbey.
A day in the life of a monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey from Spencer Brewery on Vimeo.
Embroidered Beer
Here’s a fun little project by the Society of Beer Advocates (SOBA), a beer appreciation organization in New Zealand — their motto” “Beer for all the right reasons.” They provide resources for consumers, breweries, bars and restaurants, just about anybody along the distribution pipeline, and define their mission with the following:
- To promote awareness of beer in all its flavour and diversity
- To protect and improve consumer rights with regards to beer and associated service
- To promote quality, choice and value for money
- To campaign for greater appreciation of traditional crafted beer
- To seek improvements in all licensed premises and throughout the brewing industry
- To act as an independent resource for both the consumer, the pub trade, and the brewing industry
Toward that end in 2012 they created a SOBA poster campaign , where they created a quartet of posters aimed at “championing finely crafted, flavourful beers and encouraging responsible enjoyment of craft beer.” A local graphics firm, Base Two, designed the four posters to look embroidered on calico fabric and they all carried the message “Champions of finely crafted flavourful beers.” How cool is that?
Hops Sweet Hops
Stop Drinking. Start Tasting.
Take Time to Smell the Hops
Slow down … Taste the Beer
Beer Film #7: The American Brew, Pt. 6
Today’s beer video is part six, and the final part, of the film The American Brew that was produced by Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s To Beer campaign in 2008. The DVD is still actually available from Amazon. Enjoy.
Federal Beer Tax Bills Compared
Motley Fool has an interesting overview and comparison of the two bills regarding the restructuring of federal beer excise taxes currently before Congress, and likely to be resolved this year. The two bills, known as the BEER Act and the Small Brew Act (which Motley Fool calls the “Small Beer Act”), are both designed to reduce federal excise taxes, but in different ways, benefitting different size breweries differently. Which bill, if any, will pass is anybody’s guess at this point, but check out Beer May Be In For a Tax Break — Why This Could Be Bad for Some Brewers for one financial website’s take on them.
Beer Film #6: The American Brew, Pt. 5
Today’s beer video is part five of the film The American Brew that was produced by Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s To Beer campaign in 2008. The DVD is still actually available from Amazon. Enjoy.
GfK Roper Youth Report Examines Influences on Youth Decisions about Drinking
I mentioned this recent study in another post, but it’s worth highlighting all on its own, especially because it contradicts much of the prohibitionist propaganda about how awful it is for kids to see alcohol advertising and how it corrupts their immature little minds, turning them into raging alcoholics. GfK Roper Consulting, which characterizes itself as “one of the world’s leading research companies,” recently released its annual Youth Report, Influences on Youth Decisions about Drinking. Having conducted the same survey since 1991, they note that parents have the most influence on whether or not kids drink before they’re 21. And not only has that been the case for over twenty years, but it’s actually been increasing steadily since that time, up 33% (one-third). During that entire time, advertising has been at or near the bottom the entire time, and is currently at a mere 1%, down 80% from when it was 5% in 1991. This while at the same time, prohibitionists have been complaining about the danger of underage minors just seeing advertisements for alcohol, and doing everything in their power to limit them to the supposed times when kids won’t see them, which is, of course, never.
Parents, as has been the case since they began conducting the survey, are the biggest influence by a wide margin. But prohibitionists have even managed to make it illegal in some states for parents to educate their own kids about alcohol, believing that they can do a better job with such programs, in California at least, as Red Ribbon Days and making up scenarios in high schools where one of their fellow students has been killed in order to scare them into not drinking, putting them through the very real emotional pain of dealing with a killed friend.
Second only to parents are best friends, but even their influence plummeted beginning in 2008, and is now only about 8%. So even peer pressure is waning. Third used to be teachers, but they’ve dropped below all media (defined as TV, radio, magazines, and Internet). In fact, all influence other than parents and friends are 2% or less, making them almost statistically irrelevant.
Going on all during this same time period from 1991 to the present, has been a slow but steady decline in the overall amount of alcohol people are drinking. So not only has the advertising become less effective, especially as younger generations are more media savvy, but people and kids are drinking less and less. But it’s harder to raise money from donations if things are improving from these anti-alcohol organizations’ point of view. So what should be good news like this is virtually ignored by them. Good luck trying to find anything about this survey on their websites. If they really cared about stopping underage drinking or keeping drunks off the road you’d think they’d be arming parents with the tools they need to educate their children about responsible alcohol consumption, but actions speak much louder than words, and their actions are all about sounding alarm bells and raising money.
Ivory Tower Thinking
The proverbial ivory tower of academia, where some intellectuals live and work in an insulated world separate from the real world, was never more on display than in this “study” about which alcohol brands are mentioned most often in popular songs. Conducted by Boston University and Johns Hopkins, their survey of popular music, Alcohol Brand References in U.S. Popular Music, 2009–2011, was published in the December issue of the journal Substance Use & Misuse. The researchers looked at the Billboard charts in four music types — Urban, Pop, Country, and Rock. Here’s the abstract:
This study aimed to assess the prevalence and context of alcohol brand references in popular music. Billboard Magazine year-end charts from 2009 to 2011 were used to identify the most popular songs in four genres: Urban, Pop, Country, and Rock. Of the 720 songs, 23% included an alcohol mention, and 6.4% included an alcohol brand mention. Songs classified as Urban had the highest percentage of alcohol mentions and alcohol brand mentions. The context associated with alcohol brand mentions was almost uniformly positive or neutral. Public health efforts may be necessary to reduce youth exposure to these positive messages about alcohol use.
Because most journals require you to pay large sums to read them (or be an academic yourself), most of the information about this one comes from an article about the study, Music Artists Love to Sing About These 4 Alcohol Brands, which appeared on Futurity, a website covering “research news from top universities.” In it, the researchers reveal how out-of-touch they are with their subject. Of the more than one-thousand alcohol labels sold today, they noted, “only four brands show up often in the lyrics of popular songs.” Those four were Hennessy, Grey Goose, Jack Daniel’s and Patron; a cognac, vodka, tequila and whiskey. “They accounted for more than half of the alcohol brands named in songs from Billboard’s most popular song lists in 2009, 2010, and 2011.” Here’s the insights from one of the researchers.
“You would expect there would be hundreds of brands that are randomly mentioned,” says Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “But we found that those top four accounted for 52 percent of all the brand mentions. That can’t be coincidental.”
Are you sure?
Apparently, they also found that “alcohol use was portrayed as overwhelmingly positive in lyrics, with negative consequences almost never referred to.” I don’t think they listened to enough country music which, traditionally at least, was all about the consequences of drinking too much. But all kidding aside, why would a singer sing about any negative aspects of drinking? They’re not PSAs. The goal of pop music is to entertain, period. It’s not to educate or warn kids about the dangers of overindulging. They also seem worried because — gasp — kids also listen to the same music as adults, which the researchers found “alarming” because in their mind that meant the music was “promoting” drinking.
But after all that fretting, professor Michael Siegel admits that no “causal connection” was found between the music actual consumption, stating “further research is needed.” He also mentions that they also found that some of the artists — gasp — had sponsorship deals with some of the alcohol brands. To the researchers, that means that listeners are being marketed to, because in the ivory tower that simply has “to be recognized as marketing, not random chance.”
This so-called “study” examined (really, examined? They just listened to some music, didn’t they?) 720 songs. Of those, less than one-quarter (23.2%, or 167) mentioned alcohol. And just 6.4% (or 46 songs) dropped the name of a specific brand of alcohol, of which 51.6% mentioned one of the top four brands; Hennessy, Grey Goose, Jack Daniel’s and Patron. Of the four music genres they surveyed, alcohol was mentioned most often in “so-called urban songs (rap, hip-hop, and R&B, with 37.7 percent), followed by country (21.8 percent), and pop (14.9 percent).” They further discovered that “Tequila, cognac, vodka, and champagne brands appeared more prevalently in urban music (R&B, hip-hop, and rap), while whiskey and beer brands were more common in country or pop music. Surprisingly, there was no alcohol referred to in the rock-genre music examined.” Maybe that was Christian rock, because I can name more than a few rock and roll songs about beer alone, but maybe they’re not popular right now.
Is anyone not living in the clouds surprised by that? But let’s take a closer look at reality regarding these brands. Hennessey is hands down the best-selling brand of cognac in not just the U.S., but worldwide. Likewise, Grey Goose is the best-selling vodka. Jack Daniel’s is the best-selling American whiskey worldwide, too. At this point, you probably won’t be too shocked to learn that Patrón is the biggest selling ultra-premium tequila in the US. So when the researchers say it “can’t be coincidental” that “those top four accounted for 52 percent of all the brand mentions,” it’s not, but it’s not a conspiracy, either. They’re each the most popular brands of their type, which is the more logical reason why they’re the ones most often mentioned in songs. You don’t need a slide rule to figure that out.
As long ago as when I worked for BevMo, and saw sales figures for spirits on occasion, those were popular brands, especially among the same demographic as might listen to urban music. The brands were, and most likely still are, status symbols in some communities, which would also account for their popularity in song lyrics. That’s the reason these companies are looking for sponsorship opportunities with musicians and music events, not the other way around.
The researchers, showing just how biased their thinking is, claim that their concern over advertising stems from a belief that “[a]t least 14 long-term studies have found that exposure to alcohol marketing in the mass media increases the likelihood that young people will start drinking, or if already drinking, consume more.” And yet a recent GfK Roper Youth Report on the Influences on Youth Decisions about Drinking clearly shows that since at least 1991, advertising is at the very bottom of the reasons that influence kids to drink, age 13-20, accounting for just 1%, though for all media (defined as a including TV, radio, magazines, and Internet) it’s twice that, but of course that’s still only 2%. It’s hardly the scourge that the prohibitionists continue to insist it is.
It’s hard to see this as anything more than researchers out of touch with the real world of music or alcohol, making pronouncements from their ivory tower without really understanding the context of what they’re commenting on, mis-analyzing the results as a consequence. For example, professor Siegel suggests that “[o]ne intervention would be to teach young people ‘media literacy skills’ that would educate them about marketing techniques.” That’s rich, considering most young people are probably far more media savvy than the average college professor.
But beyond that, the idea that music made by and for adults, but also listened to by children, is rarely, if ever, the danger it’s believed to be. Or that adults singing about adult situations, in this case alcohol, for adults to listen to should not be permitted to do so on the off-chance that kids might hear it too. But that’s typical of the ridiculous lengths and logic to which the prohibitionists will go in promoting their agenda with junk science. This type of thinking suggests that they believe there should be two worlds, one that’s exclusively adult, walled off completely lest the kiddies be corrupted by seeing and hearing adult entertainment. That advertising is so often the bogeyman, despite it having so little actual influence, has more to do with the strategy that prohibitionists have employed since the day after prohibition was repealed. Every generation, they claim, is being corrupted and ruined by alcohol advertising. And yet, each generation seems to turn out just fine, don’t they? Those same youth from the previous generation grew up to become among the next generation of researchers claiming how this next group of kids will be ruined by being advertised to by alcohol companies, and each time they miss the irony that they, too, grew up seeing alcohol advertising, as well. Maybe it’s the air up in their ivory tower that makes them so forgetful, that along with being detached from reality. Can I assume Michael Bolton, Kenny G and Barry Manilow are playing on the radio?
Beer Film #5: The American Brew, Pt. 4
Today’s beer video is part four of the film The American Brew that was produced by Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s To Beer campaign in 2008. The DVD is still actually available from Amazon. Enjoy.