Brookston Beer Bulletin

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Beer In Ads #295: Krueger’s Cream Ale

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Monday’s ad is one of the first advertising canned beers, in honor of the anniversary of the first beer can being sold today in 1935. It’s for Krueger’s Cream Ale, the first beer to be sold in a can. They tested the package in Richmond, Virginia, far from their native New Jersey in case the test went poorly to avoid any damage to the brand in their home market.

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Beer In Art #113: Pablo Picasso’s Le Bock

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This week’s work of art by one of the modern world’s most famous artists, Pablo Picasso. The painting is known as Le Bock (“The Beer”), but it’s real title is “Portrait of Jamie Sarbartes, the Poet.” Picasso painted it in 1901 and today it hangs in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Picasso-portrait-of-sabartes

The Pablo Picasso Gallery describes the painting like this:

This is sometimes called Le Bock (The Beer) or simply Portrait of Sabartes; but Picasso himself insisted on ‘the poet’ as part of the title. There was a hint of irony in this as a description of Sabartes, and the painting undoubtedly presents him in an exaggeratedly soulful, glamorous light.

According to Sabartes, it was painted not long after his arrival in Paris from Spain (October 1901). He was sitting alone in a tavern, in a state of myopic isolation and boredom, until Picasso and some companions suddenly burst into the room and cheered him up. A few days later, in Picasso’s studio, Sabartes was shown this painting, which he recognized as portraying ‘the spectre of my solitude’. It is arguably the first work of Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’, characterized not only by all-pervasive blue tones but by a preoccupation with suffering, rejection and poverty.

There’s a biography of Picasso at Wikipedia and also Biography.com. You can also see more of Picasso’s art at Olga’s Gallery, ArtArchive and the ArtCyclopedia. Then there’s Picasso.com and his “official” website.

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.

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ABI To Include Stella Artois In Super Bowl Ads

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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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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.