Monday’s ad is unusual insofar as its for a beer brewed in a village that no longer exists. Adelshoffen used to be in the Lower Rhine region of Germany. The most famous beer they made was Adelscott, which was launched in 1982. Heineken acquired the brewery through Fischer in 1996 and closed the brewery in 2000.
Today’s featured artwork is thoroughly modern, but on an old-time subject. It’s about the mansion built by Washington D.C. beer mogul Christian Heurich, who was born today in 1825. It’s a twenty-page independent comic book with a story by Matt Dembicki and art by Andew Cohen. Entitled The Brewmaster’s Castle, the story takes place March 7, 1945 as an 102-year old Heurich takes a bittersweet final stroll through the mansion he built between 1892-94. Here’s page 1:
The actual building still stands, known today as the Christian Heurich House Museum it’s billed as “Washington’s Most Intact Late-Victorian House” and described as follows:
One of Washington’s best-kept secrets, The Brewmaster’s Castle is the most intact late-Victorian home in the country, and a Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places.
Built in 1892-1894 of poured concrete and reinforced steel by German immigrant, local brewer and philanthropist, Christian Heurich (HI-rick), it is also the city’s first fireproof home.
Heurich was Washington’s second largest landowner, the largest private employer in the nation’s capital, and as the world’s oldest brewer, ran his brewery until his death at 102.
A visit to The Brewmaster’s Castle is a visit back in time to the late-19th Century, when the Heurich family was in residence in Washington’s premier residential neighborhood.
Here’s what the mansion looks like today.
But back to the comic book. Here, Christian Heurich strolls through his mansion.
And near the end of the story, Heurich begins turning out the lights.
The original Christian Heurich Brewery opened in 1873 but was closed in 1956 by Christian Heurich, Jr., who took over the brewery after his father died in 1945. Where the brewery stood is now the site of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In 1986, Christian Heurich, Jr.’s son Gary Heurich started Olde Heurich Brewing, an early D.C. microbrewery that lasted twenty years, closing in 2006.
You can buy your own copy of the comic book for only $5 (plus $1 shipping) directly from the author. You can pay him directly via PayPal using his e-mail address of mattdembicki (@) gmail (.) com. He’s “hoping [they] might get some funds soon to print a larger run and get greater distribution. You can help. Support the arts and brewing history (not to mention independent comics) — all worthy causes IMHO — by buying this unique hand-crafted comic directly from the artist. Below is the cover.
RustyCans.com has more on Heurich’s history.
It’s never too late to celebrate great news. Congratulations to Jeff and Heather O’Neil on the birth of their twins, August William and Clara Jean, born July 21. Jeff is the brewmaster at the Ithaca Beer Co. Join me in wishing Jeff and Heather best wishes on the addition of two new fermenters to their brewery family.
Jeff and Heather with the twins — Clara on the left, August the right — and their 4-year old son Henry Sinon.
Particulars:
Label: August William
Original Gravity: 6 lbs., 7 oz.
IBUs: 20 in.
Style: Boy
Release Date: July 21, 2010; 4:20 p.m.
Label: Clara Jean
Original Gravity: 7 lbs., 6 oz.
IBUs: 19 in.
Style: Girl
Release Date: July 21, 2010, 4:21 p.m.
Ithaca brewer Jeff O’Neil with his twins.
First there was Greg Koch’s I Am A Craft Brewer, a short video he used to finish his keynote speech at the Craft Brewers Conference a few years ago. That was followed up by I Am A Homebrewer and I Am A Canadian Craft Brewer. New Brew Thursday has just premiered the latest one, this time from the perspective of the consumer, in I Am A Craft Beer Drinker, though to be fair many of the people in the video also work in the industry in some capacity as well as being passionate consumers. Dr. Bill features prominently in the video, which makes sense on several levels, not least of which is he’s a member of New Brew Thursday, and now an employee of Stone Brewing. Enjoy.
Our 34th Guinness poster by John Gilroy features an auto mechanic not needing a jack at all, instead lifting the car off the ground with one hand to work underneath it, thanks to the “Guinness for Strength” he just enjoyed.
Friday’s ad is a striking ad for the Swiss Lowenbrau in Zurich. There’s not much to say about it, it pretty much speaks for itself. It’s simple, only two colors; the red lion, holding and wrapped in the black flag. Timeless.
An alert Bulletin reader (thanks Sean O.) sent me a link to an article in the Bohemian alternative weekly, Liquor’s the Kicker: How a Tax Aimed at Alcopops is Harming Craft Brewers by Alistair Bland.
It’s the same story I told briefly in an earlier post, but in much greater detail. It’s about how the Marin Institute, and other anti-alcohol groups, went after Alcopops to get them re-classified as “distilled spirits” even though there’s no actual spirits in them and they’re the same strength as the average beer. The idea of getting them taxed at a higher rate was, according to Michele Simon, research and policy director of the Marin Institute, so manufacturers would be forced to “raise their retail prices and make them less appealing—or accessible, anyway—to children.” Of course, making them more expensive for adults is of no importance and neither was the fact that her claim that they’re “pretending to be beer” was hogwash. Nobody ever called them beer. Most retail chains, including when I worked at BevMo, created a new class of drinks to categorize them. We called them “Malt-Based Beverages” because that’s exactly what they were. Beverages that started like beer, brewed with malt, and then a flavor essence was added toward the end of the process to give them their specific individual flavor. The end product was the same a.b.v. as most beer, and so they were taxed accordingly. The difference is a lot. Beer is 20 cents per gallon while spirits are $3.30.
But the law failed utterly to do what was its stated purpose. “[B]rewers explain[ed] during public hearings that the new language would drag them under purview of the distilled spirit tax, [and] reps of the giant alcopop companies warned the board that they would alter their drink formulas and thereby dodge the tax if approved, according to California Small Brewers Association executive director Tom McCormick, who both gave and listened to testimony at a public meeting in Sacramento prior to the law’s passage.”
And that’s exactly what the Alcopop manufacturers did. “Records available on the Board of Equalization’s website show that 27 flavors of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, 16 flavors of Smirnoff flavored beverages and seven flavors of Bacardi alcopops are now made without distilled spirits.”
What did happen, was craft brewers who make barrel-aged beers now account for nearly all of the taxes collected due to this new law. “According to the Board of Equalization, $93,378.10 has come from taxation as distilled spirits of drinks that previously were taxed as beer, and brewers of bourbon- and brandy-barrel-aged beers have paid almost all of it.”
According to Tom McCormick, who runs the California Small Brewers Association, and who witnessed the new law from start to finish:
The entire process of enacting the distilled spirit tax—from its beginnings as a sincere petition from the Marin Institute to its current state of malfunction—has made a mockery of state policy making.
“It didn’t do anything to fix the [alcopop] problem,” he says. “It only ensnared craft brewers, and it has wasted taxpayer dollars in the process.”
The Marin Institute’s reaction? “‘In hindsight, someone obviously should have figured out better language to isolate these alcopops and leave beer out of it,’ [the Marin Institute’s] Simon says.”
The thing is hindsight was never needed. This was not a case of the consequences of this legislation being unknown or unintended. They were known to all relevant parties. There was ample opportunity to improve on the language of the bill at numerous stages of the process from the bill’s introduction to its being signed into law. But nothing ever was changed. Everybody knew what would happen and that’s exactly what’s come to pass. There were no surprises. That’s what happens when unintended consequences are really intended ones.
I was going to stay away from commenting on a new bill in California, AB 1060, really I was. Something about it bothered me from the start, the problem it seeks to fix never seemed credible, but it seemed inevitable that it would pass anyway. It was actually introduced in February of 2009 and has been winding its way through the state legislature ever since. It was recently passed and is on its way to the Governator’s office for signature or veto.
What AB 1060 does it make it illegal for stores, primarily grocery stores, to sell alcohol using the new self-serve checkout machines that are popping up all over the place. The argument is that underage kids can get around the roadblocks in the system set up to keep underage people from being able to — gasp — purchase alcohol. The bill also tackles the made-up problems of intoxicating people buying booze and theft, though it’s not the theft of the alcohol that worries the state, but the theft of the tax revenue lost in the theft.
The bill was spun so that it’s all about “Alcohol & Teen Drinking Prevention,” as is made clear by the Yes on AB 1060 website. They write:
AB 1060 only requires that customers walk over a few feet to a checkout line with a cashier who can check ID. It’s not too much to ask to protect our youth and our communities.
It is only a matter of time that our youth will exploit a vulnerable system to purchase alcohol without showing ID. We must take action to stop it now.
As they state, “[i]t’s not too much to ask to protect our youth and our communities.” And no, perhaps it’s not, but it is just one more way in which the roughly 80% of the population who is above 21 is inconvenienced yet again in our out-of-proportion drive to “protect” the young’uns. And that’s why I initially just let it go, because I’d sound like even more of a jackass than I usually do if I got worked up about not being able to more quickly check out of the grocery store every time I wanted to buy beer.
One funny thing I can’t help but note is how our nation’s youth is portrayed as being at once naive and in great need of being protected and, of course, not be able to responsibly drink alcohol but yet at the same time they say it’s “only a matter of time [before] our youth will exploit a vulnerable system to purchase alcohol without showing ID.” Wow, we must have a pretty savvy and well-organized generation of kids who can take down the best computer minds who created — you have to admit — the pretty amazing self-checkout machine.
Anyway, what’s changed my mind is that MADD, Join Together and the Marin Institute are all supporting the bill and urging Governor Terminator to sign it into law.
Except, as an aside, I have to mention that the Marin Institute is supposedly a “watchdog.” What are they doing weighing in on this? Their “mission” is “to protect the public from the impact of the alcohol industry’s negative practices.” This has absolutely nothing to do with the alcohol industry, this is about grocery stores and youth access to alcohol (supposedly, anyway). Making it harder for everyone to buy alcohol draped in the protective mantle of “it’s for the kids” is the domain of the neo-prohibitionists, something they assure me they’re not.
But when you look deeper, you find that this bill may not really be about the kids at all, and instead may be about money and unions. The support of the neo-prohibitionists was either a calculated ploy on the part of the bill’s sponsors or a very happy accident. State Senator Tom Harmon, from the 35th District (Orange County coastline) has a very different story to tell. Last month, he wrote AB 1060 is a Solution in Search of a Problem, which is below here in its entirety. It made no difference, of course, in the final vote, because a good story, especially one that’s about protecting the kiddies, beats the truth every time.
When something looks too good to be true, a smart person starts wondering what’s behind it. In the case of Assembly Bill 1060, you don’t have to look very far. Presented as a feel-good law to protect kids, this bill is really about protecting union jobs.
AB 1060 purports to solve a number of “problems.” Minors sneaking alcohol through self-service checkouts, drunken shoppers buying more booze, and the state missing out on its share of sales taxes because self-check out technology facilitates stealing. None of these arguments makes much sense.
The bill theorizes that kids could buy alcohol beverages at self-serve check aisles. In fact, there is already a lock-out mechanism at such stands preventing anyone from buying alcohol without a clerk present to sign off on their age. Next?
Protecting inebriated shoppers from themselves is a real howler. Anybody who’s ever used one of those self-serve check-out stands knows it’s difficult enough for a sober person.
Finally, the bill’s author worries that the state will lose sales tax money if more booze is boosted. Is this about money or about protecting customers? If this were a problem, would stores — who have more to lose than the state if their merchandise is stolen — have instituted self check-out in the first place? Obviously not.
AB 1060 would deny a liquor license to any store “using a point-of-sale system with limited or no assistance from an employee of the licensee.” Read that again. It means a store that sells alcohol beverages could not have any self-serve check stands.
The bill’s true target is Fresh and Easy, a new supermarket chain that features all-self-service check stands. Fresh and Easy supermarkets are designed to provide affordable food choices by holding down costs through automation and energy efficiency. They’re finding a niche in low-income, underserved neighborhoods. Their workers are non-union.
AB 1060 mandates greater employee supervision of self-service check stands, increasingly used in major supermarkets. And it would limit supermarkets’ low-cost, self-service technology.
Instead of helping constituents find accessible, affordable food, this bill by Assemblyman Hector De La Torre will raise food prices for all shoppers in order to protect supermarket unions. It has nothing to do with protecting youngsters, drunks or taxpayers.
But none of that matters to the neo-prohibitionists. They care about restricting access to alcohol for everybody.
Thursday’s ad is a beautiful one for an Birra Italia, a Milan brewery. It’s from 1906 and was created by the German artist Adolfo Hohenstein, who was well-known for his Opera posters. Oddly enough, he’s “considered the father of Italian poster art and an exponent of the Stile Liberty, the Italian Art Nouveau.”
Reason TV, the video arm of Reason magazine (who’ve I’ve written for), was created through a grant from Drew Carey. They’ve done a number of short online videos on a variety of subjects, and have their own YouTube channel. They even did one based on, or perhaps inspired by, the article I did for them a few years ago, entitled Beer: An American Revolution. More recently, they did an interesting 10-minute interview with Fritz Maytag, the godfather of the craft beer movement in America. If you’ve heard Maytag speak before or have been around him any length of time, there’s nothing new in the interview, but with him moving into the role of Emeritus as new owners take over the day-to-day operations, it’s great to have a video record of some of Fritz’s stories.