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Beer In Ads #294: Miller High Life, For The Taste Of Your Life

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ad-billboard
Friday’s ad is for Miller High Life from 1956, displaying a busy, chaotic mess of images including a high life bottle being poured into what looks like a ceramic stein. Then there’s a loaf of a bread and summer sausage with a knife to cut it and napkins (one red and one with a checkerboard pattern) to keep one’s hands clean along with a large pipe and a sculpture of a rooster sitting on a beer keg in the background. With the high life logo hanging in the background, this as just seems way too busy. Sorry for the bad pub, but for me, that’s not in good taste.

56millerbeer

ABI To Include Stella Artois In Super Bowl Ads

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stella-artois
Anheuser-Busch traditionally pulls out all the tops for the Super Bowl, one of the most-watched television events of the year, especially for their core demographic. And that looks to be true for this year’s game, as well. But according to a report from Advertising Age yesterday, they’ll be trying something new this year.

The biggest overall change is that “instead of running nine ads for a total of five minutes, as it did last year, A-B will air five ads that run over three-and-a-half minutes.” The ads themselves will be similar to past efforts. But 2011 will mark the first time they’ve deviated from their core brands of Budweiser and Bud Light. One of their spots, a 60-second ad, will be for the uninspired Belgian lager Stella Artois under the banner of a new campaign, “She is a thing of beauty.”

I’m fairly certain this isn’t the ad they’ll be running, but this one was supposedly directed by Wes Anderson and Sophia Coppola.

Despite the Marin Institute’s incessant complaining about alcohol advertising during the Super Bowl — oh, the horror, why won’t anyone think of the kiddies? — of the 28 planned advertisers, only one is an alcohol producer, Anheuser-Busch InBev. So not only are they misplaced about who watches the Super Bowl, but seeing as a mere 3.5% — exactly one — of the advertisers are alcohol producers it hardly seems worth all the hue and cry they’ve raised. Of the 3-4 hours of the game, just 3-1/2 minutes are taken up by beer ads, representing less than 2% to under 1.5%, depending on how long the game ultimately runs. Even at that, it assumes anyone watching would be glued the set the entire time, a dubious proposition at best, especially applied to children. But the Marin Institute won’t be happy until they’ve “freed the bowl” from even those three and half minutes.

Personally, I’m looking forward to this year’s Super Bowl, especially if my beloved Packers manage to win on Sunday. It’s been more then a decade since I’ve actually cared about who wins the game, it would sure be nice to have someone to root for this year.

“How Beer Saved The World” To Be Revealed January 30

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earthday
The documentary that the Discovery Channel was rumored to be working on, How Beer Saved the World, is now scheduled to air on Sunday, January 30 at 8:00 p.m. Pacific time. The trailer is a bit overwrought, but they appear to have some good people being interviewed on camera, such as Charlie Bamforth and Gregg Smith. This should be interesting.

If you want a good laugh, check out the ignorant comments on the YouTube page for this trailer. Their hilarity is only matched by their inanity. It’s certainly amazing how effective anti-alcohol propaganda is as evidenced by some of the nonsense being spouted. It’s also funny, and a little sad, to see the contrast between beer people, who can readily admit that there are some people who abuse alcohol and cause problems for themselves and others, and neo-prohibitionists who cannot bring themselves to concede that alcohol has any positive aspects to it whatsoever.

Celtic Beer: 500 B.C.

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celtic-blue
Science News last week had a fascinating tale from 2,500 years ago, about ancient Celtic breweries in present-day Germany. It was revealed in a new paper by Hans-Peter Stika, entitled Early Iron Age and Late Mediaeval malt finds from Germany—attempts at reconstruction of early Celtic brewing and the taste of Celtic beer, that early Celts built breweries “capable of turning out large quantities of a beer with a dark, smoky, slightly sour taste.”

Published earlier this month in the journal, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, here’s the abstract:

In this paper, we discuss specialised ditch structure from the early Iron Age settlement of Eberdingen–Hochdorf (early La Tène Period, fifth–fourth century BC), that contained large numbers of evenly germinated hulled barley grains. This malt appears to be the result of deliberate germination, given the purity of the finds and the associated unusual archaeological structure, which may have been used for germination and/or as a drying kiln for roasting the malt. The Hochdorf malt most probably was produced for the purpose of beer brewing. To learn more about the morphology of malt and the effects of carbonisation on it, experiments on modern barley grains were undertaken. Their results are compared to the ancient Hochdorf malt. Based on the excavated findings and finds as well as theoretical reflections on the early Iron Age brewing process, attempts at reconstructing the possible taste of early Celtic beer are presented. Additionally, a malt find from late mediaeval Berlin in northeast Germany is presented. A mixture of deliberately sprouted hulled barley as well as rye and oat grains, which were not germinated, was found. The three different cereals could have been used for brewing a typical mediaeval/early modern beer since the use of mixed crops for producing beer has been quite common. Because of a lack of further evidence, it remains unclear whether or not the half-timbered house in the late mediaeval town was a trading place and storehouse for malt or the brewery itself, where the malt was processed to make beer.

A large store of charred grains of barley were discovered at a site in northeast Germany, near Berlin. The barley was found in ditches, suggesting a “large malt-making enterprise.”
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He then reconstructed the steps he believes the early Celts would have used to brew their beer.

  1. Dig a ditch, in an oblong shape.
  2. Soak barley in the specially constructed ditches until it sprouts.
  3. Grains were then dried by lighting fires at the ends of the ditches (providing dark color & a smoky taste).
  4. Lactic acid bacteria stimulated by slow drying of soaked grains, a well-known phenomenon, adding sourness to the brew.
  5. Mash up the barley to maximize the sugar content.
  6. Flavor it with henbane — a.k.a. stinking nightshade — which was found at the site. Henbane would also have made the beer more intoxicating. It could possibly have contained other spices such as mugwort or carrot seeds.
  7. Boil the ingredients with the mashed grains, towards the beginning to flavor the beer.
  8. Heated stones may have been placed in liquefied malt during the brewing process (though so far none have been found at the site). Otherwise, it would probably have been heated over a low fire.
  9. Separate out the lumpiest bits of grain.
  10. Fermentation then my have been triggered by using yeast-coated brewing equipment or by adding honey or fruit, both of which would have contained wild yeast.
  11. Let the yeast settle to the bottom.
  12. Cool the beer and drink.

Not all of the steps have been confirmed by the evidence yet, but the search goes on.

John Stuart Mill On “Sin Taxes” & Prohibition

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philosophy
The British philosopher John Stuart Mill was, besides being “particularly ill” on “half a pint of shandy,” a big proponent of the concept of free will, as the song says. In his book On Liberty, he also argues in favor free speech and, 150 years ago, was against minimum alcohol pricing as if it were today, which is why I bring it up.

In today’s UK newspaper, The Telegraph, British writer Brendan O’Neill argues convincingly against minimum pricing on alcohol in a piece entitled ‘Minimum alcohol pricing’ is a Sin Tax designed to punish poor people for the crime of getting hammered.

The British government has been discussing minimum alcohol pricing for a number of years as a way of stopping binge drinking, defined as uselessly there as here. O’Neill sees it rather differently, as “an assault on a certain kind of boozing, the kind indulged by the less well-off who prefer to drink lager or cider and let their hair down rather than quaff chardonnay and discuss Tunisia. The very term “binge drinking” — and bear in mind that, for a man, binge drinking means downing a paltry four pints in a night — is designed to conjure up images of the non-wine-drinking classes, who swig on bottles of beer with no sense of control or decorum; who scoff and down and binge rather than sip. Them, not Us.”

And that brings us back around to John Stuart Mill. I hadn’t seen these quotes before, but they’re brilliant. In On Liberty, he addressed this very issue by calling such price hikes a de facto “sin tax” because, then as now, it’s a regressive tax that punishes the poor for not behaving as some people might want them to.

Here’s what he wrote:

“Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price.”

And:

“To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition, and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable.”

As O’Neill concludes, that’s simply “prohibition through the backdoor, targeted at those whom the political classes consider to be reckless and self-destructive.” On this side of the pond, it’s all that moralizing plus anti-alcohol groups trying to convince us it’s about safety and “the children” and saying that raising the price will fix all our problems, and the economy to boot. Problem is, it never works. It’s just another attempt at Prohibition. Prohibition Lite, perhaps, but the aims are the same.