Monday’s ad is from a French brewery in the medieval village of Albi, the capital of Tarn, a tourist area in southern France. Founded in 1822, I assume that’s King Gambrinus holding the bottle with his picture on it. I also imagine those are supposed to be hops in the foreground, but they look more like strawberries.
In honor of labor day, here’s a fun series of illustrations showing all the labor necessary to make beer, in this case Guinness. In 1981, Guinness commissioned British illustrator and artist John Ireland to create twelve paintings whimsically depicting the steps that go into making Guinness beer for a calendar.
From the Guinness Collector’s Club website:
John was born on the 19th March 1949 at Aldershot Hants and attended Farnham Grammar school, Farnham Art School and finally Ravensbourne College of Art and Design. He lived and worked in London from 1971 until moving to Norfolk in 1976. John has two sons, two sheep, a dog and a wife Tessa and has worked as a freelance illustrator since leaving college, principally for magazines and publishing, with a little bit of advertising. In recent years. A lot of his work has involved caricatures including collections of sporting personalities and a weekly drawing for the TV Times for over nine years.
John [Ireland] writes:
“I had been asked a few years prior to 1980 to submit ideas for a Guinness Calendar but nothing came of it, and when I was asked to produce roughs for a W. Heath Robinson pastiche I was initially reluctant, suggesting I could do something in my own style. When it became obvious that they – J.Walter Thompson the advertising agency — were set on doing it their way, I decided that it was better I should do it rather than someone else mess it up and do Heath Robinson a disservice.”
“There were similarities in our styles, which is presumably why I had been asked in the first place. I had been interested in his drawings since I was a child, having bought his books at jumble sales. The whole job went amazingly smoothly and following a guided tour of the Park Royal Brewery, it was left up to me to decide on which elements of production I should highlight.”
“This is so unusual for advertising, normally you are presented with layouts that you have to stick to rigidly and all the copy has been written already. In this instance I even wrote the captions. My initial roughs were accepted with hardly any changes suggested. I only had to make the May drawing a little busier and ensure that wherever possible both bottled and keg beer should be depicted as apparently there was intense rivalry between the two divisions of the company. The barman in the December drawing is actually a portrait of Heath Robinson with his cat ‘Saturday Morning’ and the customer is my Father.”
Blogger Phil Beard, at his Notes on the Visual Arts and Popular Culture, also has a nice post on the series. These days John Ireland is best known for his caricatures.
January: Hop Picking Time in the Guinness Fields
February: Early Morning on the Guinness Farm
March: Industry in the Guinness Maltings
April: Roasting the Guinness Barley
May: Mixing the Guinness Mash
June: Filtering the Guinness Wort
July: Fermenting the Guinness
August: Bottling the Guinness
September: Signing the Day’s Production of Guinness
October: The Training of the Guinness Quality Testers
November: Delivering the Guinness
December: The First Guinness of the Day
Yesterday, we took our annual family-outing to pick hops at Moonlight Brewery in Sonoma County, California. Founder and brewmaster Brian Hunt has a quarter-acre he planted several years ago after Vinnie Cilurzo, from Russian River Brewing, had to pull out the hops he had at Korbel when he moved the brewery to Santa Rosa. Russian River’s now growing their own and Moonlight has continued to keep his hopfield going, using the hops primarily to brew his fresh hop beer Homegrown.
I’ve been volunteering to help pick hops for a number of years now, and began taking the family a few years ago, recreating how it would have been done in he later Nineteenth century before hops were harvested using machinery. In those days, the entire community would turn out to pick the hops, with the men working the fields, women putting on lavish picnic spreads (and helping with the picking) and the kids pitching in andalso playing among the hopvines. It’s great fun and really does feel like the community coming together to help out. Everyone does their part, and we all talk and laugh while sitting in the circle and picking the hops.
The Abbey de St. Humulus hop field, a.k.a. Moonlight Brewery
The beautiful green of hops in the field, ripe for the picking.
My daughter Alice outstanding in her field … hop field, that is.
Hops on the vine, as far as the eye can see.
A close-up of the hop cones, the flowers that will be picked and added to the beer.
Moonlight brewmaster Brian Hunt holding a bundle of hops, freshly cut down for picking.
The hopvines are placed in the center of a circle, where people work on each vine, pulling the hops off by hand and putting them into a plastic bucket.
My wife Sarah showing off her hop-picking skills.
Below is a slideshow of our family outing to pick hops. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.
And below is a short video of cutting down the hops and taking them to be picked.
Today’s painting is by one of the most famous post-impressionist artists, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The painting is most often called “The Hangover,” though occasionally subtitled “Portrait of Suzanne Valadon,” an artist on her own right. It’s also been called “The Drinker.” The original hangs in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. It was painted in 1888.
And yes, I realize it may very well be wine in the glass and the bottle, but I’m holding out hope that it may also be beer because I like the painting so much. Toulouse-Lautrec was an alcoholic most of his adult life, and originally had a taste for beer and wine, though he later began drinking American-style cocktails, too. He had a hard time coping with people’s cruel tendency to mock his short stature and turned to drink as a result.
Art and alcohol were his only mistresses, and they were mistresses to which he devoted all of his time and energy. He was doing one or both almost every day of his life until he died.
For more about Toulouse-Lautrec, Wikipedia is a good place to start, and there are a number of links at the ArtCyclopedia and the Artchive. And you can also see a number of his other works at Olga’s Gallery, the Artliste, the Web Museum and CFGA.
To celebrate International Bacon Day I modified a decadent comfort food my wife came up with a few weeks ago. She takes a hot dog and slices it down the middle, filling it with cheese. Then it’s wrapped in a Pillsbury crescent roll and baked in the oven. I call them “super dogs” for no particular reason other than it rolls off the tongue nicely. Today I added a slice of bacon to each one to make “super bacon dogs.” I ate five of them, boy were they tasty.
My daughter Alice slicing the hot dogs.
Ready to go in the oven.
Fresh from the oven and ready to eat.
Afterward, my wife Sarah had a special bacon treat for dessert.
Chocolate-covered bacon on a stick, which a friend of my wife’s from work discovered at our local candy shop (thanks Brian). They come in both milk chocolate and dark chocolate.
Our 33rd Guinness poster by John Gilroy a “My Goodness, My Guinness” ad, with a polar bear having stolen the zookeeper’s bottle of Guinness.
Friday’s ad is an odd one. It’s for the Staten Island, New York brewery Rubsam & Horrmann. Founded in 1870 in in the town of Stapleton. Piels bought them out in 1953 but closed the brewery ten years later. The ad’s scene is set in Cuba, so I’m guessing the ad is from around the time of the Spanish-American War, which was in 1898. The guy in the brown hat looks like Teddy Roosevelt and the on the right the white-haired man resembles either Buffalo Bill Cody or Mark Twain. But despite the navy parked in Havana harbor, they’re all toasting with Rubsam & Horrmann beer.
Our 43rd Session is all about the new. Hosted by Carla Companion, better know as The Beer Babe, she’s tackling The New Kids, by which she means the many, many new breweries that have started up in the last couple of years.
Here’s how she explains it:
Picture yourself starting school, on a cool, crisp September day. Only, you’re not as excited as you usually are because you’re starting at a new school. No one knows who you are, groups of friends are already established, and you have nightmares about getting lost in the hallways trying to find your next class. How will you ever fit in?…
In some ways, there may be a beer-world parallel to this experience: new craft breweries joining an established beer community, or even tougher, breaking into a non-craft beer town.
….With the astounding growth of the number of craft breweries this year, chances are there’s a new one in development, or has just started out in your area. My challenge to you is to seek out a new brewery and think about ways in which they could be welcomed into the existing beer community. How does their beer compare to the craft beer scene in your area? Are they doing anything in a new/exciting way? What advice, as a beer consumer, would you give to these new breweries?
Take this opportunity to say hello to the new neighbors in your area. Maybe its a nanobrewery that came to a festival for the first time that you vowed to “check out” later. Maybe it’s a new local beer on a shelf on the corner store that you hadn’t seen before. Dig deeper and tell us a story about the “new kids on the block.” I look forward to welcoming them to the neighborhood!
She’s certainly right about the sheer number of new breweries. It defies logic, the economy and conventional wisdom about both. At every measure, at a time when most businesses are flat at best, the number of craft breweries continues to rise. In the past four years, over 250 new breweries have opened. How awesome is that? According to the BA’s wonderful brewery detective Erin Glass, roughly one new brewery is now opening every day, with more on the way. Last year, 110 new breweries opened, but in just the first six months of 2010, 155 have opened. According to a July report by the BA, Director Paul Gatza speculated that there could conceivably be 250 new brewery openings by the time the apple drops on Times Square signaling the end of this year.
And according to Gatza, “[i]t isn’t just an increasing number of nanobreweries, either. [Though frankly, I love the trend of Nano- and Pico-breweries.] We are seeing strong growth in the traditional brewery openings—you know, a business plan for a microbrewery or brewpub that gets out of the planning phase and into operation.”
And last year, Erin was tracking about 260 brewery project at various stages of development. Today the number she’s following is 389. Could we hit 2,000 breweries in America in the next few years? It sure seems possible, even inevitable. Imagine what might happen if (or when, trying to sound hopeful) the economy turns around.
Fourteen years ago, in 1996, it felt like we’d hit a wall. After a number of years of remarkable growth, more breweries began to close than were opening. The numbers looked bleak. The Craft Brewers Conference was a far more somber — dare I say sober — affair than it had been in earlier in that decade. But then things began to turn around. Slow but steady growth began in the late 1990s and has not only continued from that time, but even picked up speed.
Given the increases in market share by craft breweries, in both volume but especially dollars — and now a sharp increase in brewery openings over the last few years — it seems clear we’re in the midst of a new wave of craft beer. Like the the first wave, craft is again the subject of media attention, is increasingly taken seriously by the business world and is being targeted more vigorously by the big beer companies.
It certainly feels like this may be our time. Twenty years ago, microbreweries were mostly alone in promoting the idea of artisanal products. Today there’s artisanal cheese, bread, coffee, charcuterie, beef, chicken, pastries, ice cream and on and on, not to mention organic farming, with its produce and fruit. The world has caught on and caught up. More and more people just get it now, and increasingly each year’s newly minted 21-year olds that add to the percentage of craft beer drinkers in greater numbers. It will be interesting to see how the next few decades play out as time squeezes out the older mainstream beer drinkers in favor of younger generations who came of age in a world where craft beer was already established.
And those same generations are and will also responsible for a whole new group of brewers and brewery owners, too, as we’re starting to see right now. Large or small or really small, what a fun time to be drinking craft beer.
Friends and regular Bulletin readers will already be aware of my obsession with comfort foods. Almost all of my favorite foods fall into that category: frites, potato chips, bacon, shepherd’s pie, Monte Cristo sandwiches, cheese, peanut butter pie and pretty much anything fried. So a few weeks ago, when I got a call from my friend, brewer Brian Hunt from Moonlight Brewing, I was especially susceptible to an idea he had that craft beer, too, should be considered a comfort food in its own right. I loved the notion immediately and we got together to talk about the idea over a few pints of comfort beer. The result of those discussions — plus some more research and conversations — was a feature I wrote that was just published online at the Brewer’s Association’s new CraftBeer.com, entitled Is Beer Comfort Food?
As a word nerd, I was fascinated to discover that the phrase is actually a fairly modern one, though there’s some disagreement as to its actual origin. The first use of the phrase appears to be in 1966, though it was an isolated occurrence and did not catch on at that time.
In “The Thin Book,” a 1966 work by ‘”a formerly fat psychiatrist’” named Theodore Isaac Rubin. The book’s ad copy read, ‘”Learn about ammunition foods, comfort foods and emergency foods.’” Reached in New York, Dr. Rubin recalls: ‘”I just made it up; I didn’t hear it anywhere. It means food that makes you feel good, that was always available and would help to sustain a diet.’” (“Ammunition foods” never made it into the canon.)
Likewise, Liza Minnelli (and I assume that yes, it was that Liza Minnelli) used the term in “Dieting Is All Well and Good— But Give Me ‘Comfort Food’!”, a piece she co-wrote with Helen Dorsey for Pennsylvania’s “Clearfield Progress’” Family Weekly section in July of 1972. That’s most likely why Wikipedia incorrectly identifies its origin as 1972.
But it appears to be in the latter half of the 1970s that the concept of comfort food began to catch on. The Merrian-Webster Dictionary lists its first use as 1977, making it roughly the same age as craft beer itself. Merriam-Webster added it to their dictionary the same year, although it wasn’t listed in the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary until 1997.
In the May 1978 issue of Bon Appétit, an article entitled M.F.K. Fisher on Comfort Foods appeared, somewhat solidifying the term, though some point to a March 1985 column by New York Times food writer Marian Burros, “Turning to Food For Solace.” William Safire credits her for popularizing the term, writing in 2003:
Burros was largely responsible for the term’s popularization. In a 1985 Times column titled ‘”Turning to Food for Solace,’” she wrote that the restaurateur George Lang, owner of New York’s Café des Artistes, “said his comfort foods ‘are foods I can eat any time, whether I’m full or not…. Comfort foods are the perfect tranquilizer.'” Lang said, ‘’My whole childhood is brought back with goose liver,” and the sophisticated food columnist revealed her own nostalgia for spaghetti and meat sauce or a tuna-fish sandwich.
Word expert Barry Popik disagrees and in his blog The Big Apple has undoubtedly the best account of the various claims to the term’s origins.
But back to the original question, is beer a comfort food? Brian Hunt and I think so, and so did several other brewers I spoke to. To find out why we think so, check out Is Beer Comfort Food? on CraftBeer.com.
CNN is reporting that the World’s ‘Oldest Beer’ Found in Shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Åland Islands. The Ålands are an autonomous group of nearly 6,000 islands near Finland. The cargo ship is believed to have been sailing from Denmark, most likely Copenhagen, sometime between 1800 and 1830 possibly bound for St. Petersburg, Russia. There’s also speculation that t may have been sent “by France’s King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.”
Initially, divers found bottles of Champagne, but later found additional bottles, some of which burst from the pressure upon reaching the surface, revealing that there was beer inside them. From the CNN report:
“At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island’s ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.
“It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living.”
It will certainly be interesting to see what further analysis of the beer reveals.