It’s very sad to me, but the truth is despite all the rhetoric we heap on our kids about bullying never working, it really is an accepted practice in adult society. It’s no wonder kids turn to bullying when they see it modeled for them in countless ways throughout society. To look at me today, you’d never know I was a skinny runt of a kid until I bulked up in junior high school, first growing what was then called “husky” and then stretching taller to lose some of the — ahem — husk. And that meant that I did have several early encounters with bullies to the point where I have essentially a zero tolerance policy for bullying. Few things work me into a lather quite like a bully. And while it would be nice to believe that those same schoolyard thugs grow to realize the error of their ways, the sad fact is that many incorporate such philosophies into their adult life. Violence, fear and threats are all around us from the macro view of governments flexing their collective muscles and going to war down to the microcosm of individuals throwing their weight around in small ways; cutting people off in traffic, ignoring people in retail lines and stepping to the front, and generally throwing their weight around knowing that they can get away with it because most people don’t like confrontation. You also see it publicly in politics, sports, college hazing, the military, the workplace and even online where a lack of face-to-face cues often allows people to write things they would never say to another human being in person.

But where I’m noticing it more and more lately is in the neo-prohibitionist community’s aggressive bullying of society and their targets, the alcohol companies themselves. It sure feels like they look at the rest of us as less than human, to be pushed around, threatened and cajoled, using fear to make us tow their line, as if we were all children who didn’t know any better. Their world seems to allow for only one opinion and woe be to anyone with a contrary one. I personally have been threatened by one of these groups with legal action.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines a bully:

Bullying is the act of intentionally causing harm to others, through verbal harassment, physical assault, or other more subtle methods of coercion such as manipulation. … Bullying is usually done to coerce others by fear or threat.

That’s certainly the tactics used recently by several neo-prohibitionist groups to stop people from raising money for pediatric cancer and also to stop MillerCoors from selling their Alcopop Sparks. And unfortunately for decent society, their bullying tactics are working. They claim to want to protect kids, of course, but what kind of message does bullying send to them? “By any means necessary” is obviously their motto but I can’t help but think that has a cost to society that they’re overlooking (or simply don’t care about).

The Marin Institute, the CSPI and Join Together is crowing about MillerCoors’ decision to stop making Sparks. They’ve also settled disputes with thirteen states attorney and the City of San Francisco. Back in September, Sparks came under fire once more when the horribly misnamed CSPI filed suit. (They’re not remotely interested in the public interest, just a narrow sliver of it that agrees with their agenda.) I wrote at the time that it was a slippery slope for the beer industry not to support MillerCoors and I continue to believe that.

Then there was the Running of the Santas, a charity event in 25 cities to raise money for kids with cancer, which both the CSPI and Join Together objected to because people dressed up in Santa Claus suits, ran two blocks and — gasp — drank alcohol. They were very concerned that kids might see Santa drunk, but apparently not concerned that money was being raised to find a cure for pediatric cancer. Priorities, I guess. But what sort of person thinks it’s more important to stop kids from the mere potential of seeing drunken Santas than to find a cure for the cancer these same kids may soon die from? Anheuser-Busch had already bowed to their bullying and withdrew their support. Now MillerCoors has reportedly done likewise, according to Join Together.

I certainly understand these decisions by MillerCoors, at least from a business perspective. They’re in business to make money. Period. They’re not in business to tackle complex social issues of morality or take on the self-righteous factions of our world. I get that.

Still, there’s a part of me that wishes they’d man up and take on the bully, because that’s the only way to stop one. Bullies count on the fear and the threats that are their stock in trade. It’s that very corporate rule that business is all that matters — legally all that really can matter — that these bullies are using as a wedge to further their agenda. They know that the alcohol companies cannot be perceived as being in favor of underage drinking or people overindulging, and so they paint a false portrait of just that, suggesting the very opposite of what is in the company’s best interests to win over public sympathy. It’s the worst kind of propaganda. Bullying is not exclusively a childhood problem, but one that lingers throughout our lives, it’s only how we deal with a bully that defines us. And that’s perhaps what is scariest of all, that bullying continues to work time and time again. And it will keep on working until we stand up to the neo-prohibitionists.

I’ll leave you with a couple of great quotes that neatly express why I feel propaganda is so pernicious and why we must stand up to the bullies who use it.

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
          —Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 1997

“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
          —Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On, 1940

If you’re not familiar with Woot!, you should be. It stands for “One Day, One Deal,” which is essentially what it is. There’s a Woot! website and each day they offer one item for sale, usually at a very reduced price. They usually only have a limited number of the item, so when it’s gone, it’s really gone. If you don’t get there early you’re just out of luck. They often do sell out, and sometimes depending on the item very early in the day. I’ve only bought a few things there, as the variety is pretty wide, though you will see more high-tech gadgets than probably anything else. There’s also two companion sites that sell a new t-shirt every day and a wine, too.

The also have a blog, on which they recently posted a list of 11 Failed Beer Styles:

1. Gruel Stout
2. Twice-Baked Lager
3. Turbo-Pilsner
4. Steam Beer That Is Still Really Hot
5. Stale Ale
6. Dry-Humped APA
7. Luxembourg Gray
8. Lambicarbonate of Soda
9. Insect Pale Ale
10. Bud Light With Brown Food Coloring Irish Stout
11. Hefvergnügen

I’m not sure they’d all qualify as “styles” per se, but it’s still a fairly funny list. What would you add to it?

The Discovery Channel TV show How Stuff Works tonight visits Charlie Papazian, as well as the Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. The Show, entitled simply Beer, airs twice tonight at 8:00 p.m. and Midnight. Check the schedule for your local airing time. There are also clips from the show on their website.

According to Charlie Papazian, President of the Brewers Association, “the producers spent a full morning and part of the afternoon with [him] this past summer. Shooting [his] hop garden, homebrew “garage,” beer stash and sampling of various brews while asking [him] to tell the story of “how beer works.” He also mentions that he believes Sam Calagione from Dogfish Head will also be featured in the show. It should be interesting, set your TiVo.

Overall, it seems like there’s definitely more general interest in beer from cable television and other video outlets recently, with many more shows being devoted to beer in development and airing. I did another show recently for a new online channel, Reason TV, which is partially funded by Drew Carey. It should air online in a few weeks. The show was devoted more to the politics of craft beer and distribution hurdles and featured a roundtable discussion with me and several Bay Area brewers. I’ll update you here when it’s ready to go live. In the meantime, watch tonight’s How Beer Works.

Jamie Smith (right), co-executive producer of the beer episode to be aired on the Discovery Channel tonight (Dec. 18), and Charlie Papazian after shooting on location at his “home” brewery earlier this summer.

The EU’s Court of First Instance ruled yesterday that in prior rulings, the European Trademark Agency had “made several errors,” when they went against Budejovicky Budvar and accepted Anheuser-Busch’s arguments over trademark issues in Europe between the two rival breweries. This effectively undoes the trademark for A-B’s “Bud” brand name in the EU’s 27 member nations.

According to the AP report, the upshot is that “Anheuser-Busch can no longer claim trademark rights for the entire EU region but must rely on separate national trademarks.”

From the AP Article:

The Czech company said it had already registered “Bud” under a 1958 agreement which protected the name as a geographical indicator of origin in France, Austria and the former Czechoslovakia.

The court ruled the trademark agency had to “take account of earlier rights” protected in member states, adding the agency had “made an error of law” in rejecting the use of the word and signs in the context of a commercial activity.

There were actually three separate judgments rendered today by the Court of First Instance over different aspects if this on-going dispute. If appealed, the case will go to the European Court of Justice.

The rulings, while each is distinct, all follow similar language, as follows.

Judgment T-225/06 Budějovický Budvar v OHMI – Anheuser-Busch (BUD) Intellectual property

Community trade mark – Action, brought by the proprietor of the right to use the protected appellation of origin ‘BUD’ to designate beer, for the annulment of Decision R 234-2005-2 of the Second Board of Appeal of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) of 14 June 2006 dismissing the appeal against the decision of the Opposition Division which refused the opposition filed by the applicant against the application for registration of the word mark ‘BUD’ in respect of goods in Classes 32 and 33

Forbes has additional analysis on the ruling entitled AB Inbev suffers a setback in its attempt to win Europe-wide rights to the trademark the name ‘Bud.’

Their take:

Czech beer maker Budejovicky Budvar won its attempt to ban AB InBev’s application for a community trademark that would have given the Belgian brewer the exclusive right to use the word “Bud” on its beers across all 27 member states of the European Union. A firm cannot acquire region-wide rights if another company holds a separate national trademark, even if it is just in one of the states.

Budvar had used what is referred to as “appellation of origin”–used to protect a name on the basis of geographical origin–to claim trademark rights in several countries such as France and Austria. Budejovicky Budvar was founded in 1895 in the Czech city of Ceske Budejovice—an area called “Budweis” by the German-speaking people that lived there at the time, according to the Associated Press. The founders of Anheuser-Busch had thus originally picked the name “Budweiser” because it was well-known in their German homeland.

An Appeal by A-B InBev is likely, so I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this dispute, which so far is more than 100 years old.

I’m not sure where this originated or even if it’s real, but it’s pretty cool looking, at least to me. I guess I’ll have to start a list, but of the growing number of things I’ve recently admitted to being geekily obsessive, please add maps. I love maps of all kinds, though especially pictorial ones and globes. At one time, I had collected at least fifty globes but they’re the sort of things that quickly overwhelm a small house. I still collect postcards with the old-fashioned state maps on them with the small graphics on them to indicate particular features of the state. Anyway, enough rambling. This mug of beer looks eerily like Africa and Europe, with a splash of Asia in the corner.

It almost looks too good to be real, as it’s pretty damn accurate. If it’s fake, they did a great job. Of course, if you can put 100 monkeys in a room and eventually get Shakespeare, who know, maybe it’s real after all? Or perhaps if you have enough mugs of beer it starts to look real. Either, way, color me impressed.

Somehow I missed this particular Budweiser commercial, a part of the “Lager Lessons” campaign that began sometime around the Super Bowl earlier this year. The first one, which I have seen many times, starred Ron Riggle from the Daily Show. The series was created by ad agency DDB.

The new one (at least to me) that I saw today while watching the Jets beat the Bills, starred Christine Scott Bennett as a bartender. She’s also been in at least two other similar spots, also as a bartender, entitled “The Perfect Pour” and “Delivery.” This one’s called “Commitment.” Watch it below, it’s only thirty seconds long.

Here’s what Bennett as the bartender says to the three stooges who belly up to her bar. “Budweiser has stayed true to the same recipe for over 130 years, through five generations. They could have cut corners, but they didn’t. Because they won’t sacrifice quality or great taste. 130 years. Now that’s commitment.”

Commitment, eh? No, what that actually is, quite simply, is a lie. It’s not puffing, it’s not hyperbole, it’s just not true. Back at the end of April — as most of us had been speculating for many years — August Busch III finally admitted in the Wall Street Journal that they had in fact changed the recipe for both Budweiser and Bud Light several times over the years. In and of itself, that’s not a big deal. Most, if not all, breweries are constantly tweaking their recipes trying to make them better, perfect, etc. But while the rest of the industry was openly doing so, A-B stubbornly continued to insist that their recipe had never changed, not once, since 1876. Nobody with a brain believed them, but that was the message they wanted to portray to the public. And finally the truth came out.

So why would they continue to insist that they’ve never changed their recipe in an ad, even after it was revealed that they had? That’s a good question, in my opinion, but with the company in transition I doubt we’ll get an answer to that one anytime soon. Still, it’s a galling reminder of what bothered me about the management style of the old A-B. I know advertising is all about creating perceptions and not about absolute truth, but when a company doggedly insists that something is black when it’s actually white — while at the same time suing everybody under the sun when they make any similar statements — then it’s doubly dishonest when they themselves don’t tell the truth. What kind of commitment are they making with such a blatant falsehood? Presumably most of their customers aren’t regular readers of the Wall Street Journal and even if they are, they’ve no doubt already forgotten about what A-B said last year. So in my opinion they’re inadvertently calling their customers too stupid to recognize the truth and see no problem whatsoever with lying to them to make themselves appear to be a better company than their competitors.

I certainly feel for the many good people who are losing heir jobs this month as InBev reduces costs so they can pay the high costs of acquisition. But this lingering lager lie is a final reminder to me that A-B was the bully of beer industry schoolyard.

My friend Brian Hunt from Moonlight Brewing sent me this fun little item. Thanks Brian. It seems someone in the Netherlands built a beer bar bicycle that they call Het Foute Fietcafe.

It appears there is one cyclist who sits in the middle and five on each side of the bar who have to pedal sideways.

There’s a barrel at the front but I don’t think it actually holds any beer.

Someone in Minneapolis has imported one from the Netherlands, though they call their bicycle bar a Pedal Pub, and it’s available for rent, too. They even went so far as to have the Minnesota law changed, effective May 16, 2008, that now “allows passengers aboard the PedalPub to consume alcohol while aboard the PedalPub.” Does this mean you can now work off the calories from your beer at the exact same time you’re consuming them?

I’m surprised New Belgium doesn’t have one these given their love of all things bicycly, not to mention their Tour de Fat.

Jeremiah McWilliams, writing in his St. Louis Post Dispatch’s online presence Lager Heads, revealed on Friday that things are not going too smoothly for the current and soon-to-be former employees of Anheuser-Busch. In Rough times at Anheuser-Busch he details what anonymous insiders are saying the mood is like at One Busch Place, and it doesn’t look pretty. Having lived through mass layoffs at a former company, I know how anxiety-inducing and unpleasant it can be, and it must be doubly so in this case while employees are waiting to find out what kind of Christmas it’s going to be this year. I know business is business, but really; can InBev be blind to the fact that Christmas is less than two weeks away? Can this honestly be the best way to swoop in take care of business from a public relations point of view, or do they figure they’re already so vilified that they may as well play the part?

Ah, the “good old days.”

Add to the list of things about which I’m a self-avowed geek, Comic Books, which I read as a kid, of course, but started reading again as an adult about thirty years ago when I was living in North Carolina. I was one of the music buyers for a chain of record stores headquartered there called Record Bar (now defunct) and as a result got virtually every new release LP (remember albums?). After I listened to them, the ones I didn’t keep or give to co-workers I traded in at a local used book store to feed my reading habit. The store also carried comic books, which were just coming back into vogue with independent publishers that produced more mature and adult-themed story lines, and it reignited my passion for graphic storytelling. I still read a few titles today, and there are some wonderful writers that every bit the equal of print, such as Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Scott McCloud and Terry Moore, to name just a few.

Of course, some comic books, especially those in the 1960s and 70s, just plain sucked — bad writing, hokey plots, bad drawing and even worse publishing on cheap newsprint quality paper. There was a whole genre at that time (perhaps there still is) of comics books with “messages” for young people trying to use a child’s medium to teach them life lessons. I guess the idea was that they would want to read a comic book no matter what its content or quality and would fall for getting it’s message, be it stay off drugs, STDs or other “health” issues. Many used fake superheroes made up just for the message comic. There’s a great archive of these in Canada called Comics With Problems. Some of them are just hilarious, and they all remind me of Reefer Madness-style propaganda in comic form. But one stood out, and that was the exploits of Captain Al Cohol. Capt. Al Cohol, or “Al” to his friends, was produced in 1973 by the Canadian government of the Northwest Territories and targeted the Inuit (or Eskimo) people to teach them the dangers of alcoholism. It’s typical of genre, and unintentionally hilarious in places where it’s not supposed to be. Whether or not it was effective it doubtful, in my opinion.

That’s not to make light of the very serious alcoholism that was common with Native Americans since we invaded their shores and our ancestors committed genocide. There’s actually a recent theory to explain why alcoholism percentages are higher among Native Americans, and it has to do with evolution and when man began to settle down in the fertile crescent. Alcohol — a crude form of unhopped beer — was more than likely the initial reason that civilization sprang up and man began cultivating grains. As it was often safer than the water, people who could tolerate larger amounts of beer tended to survive to pass their genes along. Simply put, you and I are here because our distant relatives could tolerate alcohol. But some archeologists believe that Native Americans did not have the same line of ancestry and therefore did not build up a tolerance for alcohol that the descendants of Europe and the Middle East did. And it’s thought that it’s for that reason that many Native Americans have had difficulties over the centuries with alcohol.

Captain Al Cohol is a being from another world who crashed on Earth and was frozen in ice for one million years, until some Inuit peoples from Fish Fiord [sic] defrosted him. He’s so strong he makes people “shiver in their Kamiks.” After being subdued, a doctor gives him so medicinal rum and it turns out that alcohol is his Kryptonite.

One sip and Capt. Al Cohol goes stumbling around the Arctic until frozen again, he’s captured by the leather-skinned Billy Vermin, the “diabolically cruel, rum-running, fur snatching enemy of the people of Fish Fiord.” The comic portrays a single glass of rum as having the power to enslave a person while even their own rhetoric explains that alcoholism “creeps up on its victims and grows slowly but surely worse.” But is has that Reefer Madness vibe of danger from just one sip that’s common to all this type of propagandist literature.

A second story, “The Tale of the Fiery Tomb” then has Capt. Al recount his origin story. He’s from the planet of Barkela, millions of light years away. Their society was nearly Utopian with no wars … “but try as [they] might — [their] civilization could never learn to control the use of alcohol!” Gadzooks! Al ashamedly continues how “after dark one day [he] returned home drunk to find [his] wife and children …” — it’s too terrible to tell, I can hardly re-type it, oh the humanity — they were “already in bed!” So Al decided he needed another drink and headed out to the “space van” — where else would stash your booze? — but on the way accidentally blew up his house, killing everyone inside. Wracked with guilt, he volunteered for a 10-year space exploration mission that crash-landed him in the Arctic. But then then the evil Ravenmen (bird men looking suspiciously like the Hawkmen in DC Comics) appeared as he was having his tea.

Apparently more issues were planned, but I can’t tell if they were ever published. Anybody have an idea what the symbol on Capt. Al’s costume is meant to be? I’m stumped. It appears to be a yellow chevron with a line at the bottom, but it doesn’t really look like anything alcohol-related.

Again, I’m not intentionally making fun of alcoholism, it is a terrible problem for many people (and one I’m intimately familiar with in my own life), but I’m pretty sure the transformation depicted here is not really how it works. I know their hearts were in the right place and were only trying to help, but propaganda this naked is too obvious to do any good, at least in my opinion. When you exaggerate the problems and effects of something to further an agenda or make a case, you damage that message. This is what neo-prohibitionists have done and continue to do in their efforts to convince the public that the worst case scenario is the average, ordinary result of alcohol consumption. It rarely is, of course, but you can’t scare people with the realities of moderate consumption by showing that problem drinkers constitute only a small minority of all people who consume alcohol. The vast majority drink responsibly but you never hear their stories. Moderation isn’t destroying our society, so neo-prohibitionists have to invent and embellish for effect and create imaginative fictions like Captain Al Cohol.