The NBWA (National Beer Wholesalers Association) posted a short video yesterday celebrating the 77th anniversary of the ratification of the 21st Amendment, ending Prohibition, which occurred December 6, 1933. It’s never too late to celebrate that. Enjoy.
Heineken Redesigns Bottles, Reduces Number Of Sizes
Heineken announced at the beginning of December that next year they’ll be launching redesigned bottles and cans along with a big reduction in the number of sizes they’ll be selling worldwide. The packaging redesign is cosmetic, but the package size reduction is more worrying.
According to the press release, “[t]he restyling aims to streamline the visual identity and make the brand even more consistent and recognizable in all 170 markets worldwide where Heineken can be enjoyed. The new bottle will come in five different volume sizes and will be available in Western Europe at the beginning of 2011 and across the rest of the world by 2012.”
While I realize that packaging, brand identity, etc. are very important, I still can’t help but laugh at some of the language and the way in which the new packaging design is framed. For example, check out this description:
The new bottle, replacing the XLN (extra long neck) and Heineken shortneck packaging, is introduced in two versions: embossed and standard. The new design features a unique curved embossment on the neck and back, which not only looks good, but also adds a pleasing to-the-touch feel, whilst a distinctive embossed mark acts as a stamp of quality and authenticity. Additionally, the new shape makes it look proud while enhancing the premium positioning of the bottle.
Yes, nothing says quality like a “pleasing to-the-touch feel” except perhaps the actual taste of the beer. How “proud” the new bottle looks. Huh? The “embossments,” made by using “strategically placed indents and tactile ink” somehow add “to the overall drinking experience.” Hilarious. Nothing makes me enjoy my beer more than having little raised spots on my bottle to hold on to. Of course, I always pour my beer into a glass, but I’m weird that way. No worries, a newly redesigned glass “features an embossed curve on the side, adding a pleasant feeling when held.” So they got us glass-drinkers covered, too. Whew.
But all this attention paid to their “revolutionary tactile ink” just cracks me up, and is indicative of why the big brewers are stagnating. They continue to focus on marketing and ignore what’s really important: how their beer tastes. Undoubtedly, marketing is going to keep them huge for a long time to come, but slowly it is having an effect. So this “revolutionary ink, created by a series of small raised dots on the surface of the can, gives the consumer a better feeling in the hand, enhanced grip and allows the brand to appear more refreshing and recognizable.” Nothing like an “enhanced grip” to make the beer “appear more refreshing.” I’m certainly interested in how that process works. How exactly does my grip on the beer bottle give the beer inside “the power to restore freshness, vitality, energy, etc.,” which is the definition of refreshing. That’s some pretty impressive osmosis.
The new “magic” embossed Heineken bottle.
But snarkiness aside, the real news is that Heineken will be reducing the number of package sizes they offer worldwide “from fifteen to five bottles sizes.” I understand any company’s reasons for reducing the number of items they sell, to a point at least. As they concede, it’s being done to achieve “greater efficiencies in the supply chain.” And it may not mean anything, but then again I can see at least one possible scenario that could play out. If Heineken cuts two-thirds of its package sizes, it’s not too hard to imagine the other international beer companies doing likewise. With the vast majority of glass manufacturer sales going to just a few companies, most likely they’d simply discontinue making the package sizes that Heineken and the others abandon. That would make those other ten bottles sizes unavailable for smaller breweries, too, or at least prohibitively expensive. Maybe that’s a stretch, but at a minimum I think it at least bears watching.
The changes will start early next year, first in Western Europe, and then the rest of the world over the balance of the year.
The new can with “tactile ink.”
Santa Beer Cozy
I don’t know how I missed this last year, but Urban Outfitters carried exclusively a two-piece Santa Claus beer cozy. They don’t have it this year, it’s sold out now. And all the blogs featuring, like at Nerd Approved, are from last year, too. So while I would never use a beer cozy, it is hilarious.
Beer In Ads #258: Samichlaus Bound
Monday’s holiday ad is for Samichlaus Bier, now brewed at Schloss Eggenberg in Austria each year on December 6 — today — because the beer’s namesake, Santa Claus, or at least St. Nicholas, has his feast day today.
Below is an interesting graphic of the changes in Samichlaus bottles over the years from 1984 to 2004.
Wikio Beer Blog Rankings For December
At first I wasn’t sure why I was asked to get a sneak preview of the rankings for beer blogs by Wikio and blog about them, apart from Stan recommending me and Alan, but I got a pleasant surprise when they finally arrived in my inbox. For the category Beer Blogs, which appears to cover North America (or at least the U.S. and Canada), I apparently moved up from #4 last month to claim the top spot for December. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good, especially because I have so much respect for the work done by the majority of the writers in the Top 20, and many of them are personal friends as well as colleagues. Who doesn’t welcome the validation that they’re doing a good job?
The new rankings for Beer Blogs will be released on Wikio this Wednesday, but here’s a sneak peek at the Top 20:
Wikio December Beer Rankings
| 1 | Brookston Beer Bulletin (+3) |
| 2 | Beervana (-1) |
| 3 | Brewpublic (+/-0) |
| 4 | Drink With The Wench (+4) |
| 5 | The New School (+2) |
| 6 | Appellation Beer: Beer From a Good Home (-4) |
| 7 | A Good Beer Blog (-1) |
| 8 | Beer in Baltimore (+2) |
| 9 | Seen Through a Glass (-4) |
| 10 | Washington Beer Blog (+8) |
| 11 | Seattle Beer News (+17) |
| 12 | The Stone Blog (not in Top 100 in Nov.) |
| 13 | Beeronomics (-1) |
| 14 | KC Beer Blog (+2) |
| 15 | Beer Therapy (+15) |
| 16 | BetterBeerBlog (-2) |
| 17 | It’s Pub Night (+3) |
| 18 | Jack Curtin’s LIQUID DIET (-3) |
| 19 | Thirsty Pilgrim (+/-0) |
| 20 | Brouwer’s Cafe (-7) |
Ranking made by Wikio
I added the relative movements of each blog from last month. Three blogs dropped off the Top 20, and three new ones appeared, of course, including one that hadn’t been ranked before.
Across the pond, Pete Brown re-captured the top spot in the UK’s beer and wine blog rankings.
I confess I never looked closely before at how the rankings are compiled, but essentially Wikio explains it like so:
The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. Our algorithm accords a greater value to links from blogs placed higher up in the ranking.
A blog linking another blog is only counted once a month i.e. if blog A links to blog B 10 times in a given month, it is only counted as having linked to that blog once that month. The weight of any link decreases over time. Also, if a blog always links to the same blog, the weight of these links is decreased.
Only links found in RSS feeds are counted. Blogrolls are not taken into account.
Not everybody seems to put much stock in the rankings, and I think that’s simply because it’s difficult to quantify such subjective notions as quality, authority, influence, knowledge of subject, effectiveness in communication, etc. Plus, they’re just getting started in North America. This is only the third month they’ve been tracking beer blogs here. Jeff Alworth, whose blog Beervana was No. 1 the last two months (and the first two to rank U.S. beer blogs), had a great analysis of the rankings in an October post entitled The Number One Beer Blog in America. And in November, Stan Hieronymus at his Appellation Beer Blog had a lively discussion about How Wikio Ranks the US Beer Blogs which also included some interesting comments.
But how should we be deciding such a complicated question? If not using weighted links from RSS feeds, what should the metric be? And for purposes of discussion, lets set aside what I assume will be the many arguments why we shouldn’t bother at all. What else should be included? Traffic? Should there be a BCS-like poll taken?
Also, I know there are other ways in which rankings are done, such as Alexa (which once you drill down to “beer” is all but useless for our purposes), Google PageRank (mine’s never changed in 6 years), and several where they only track blogs that register, making those ones also pretty useless. And for Twitter there’s WeFollow, which seems to never change. Anybody know of any others?
In the end, I think it’s good fun so long as we don’t take it too seriously. Maybe it makes me work a little harder now that I know I’m being judged against my peers. Doubtful, but it’s still something I’ll continue to at least look at. Like most people — I assume — I’m driven to do a better job all the time, constantly challenging myself to be a better writer, communicator, taster, etc. Comments, Facebook “Likes,” Re-Tweets, traffic, Google analytics and people coming up to me at beer festivals all provide different kinds of feedback about how I’m doing at my chosen profession. Having one more way by which to measure myself can’t be a bad thing. And especially not this month, where I got an early Christmas present. How cool is that? But congratulations to everybody on the list. I know it’s a cliche to say we’re all winners, but in fact I think that’s true. Over the past six years that I’ve been blogging, the number and quality of beer blogging has vastly improved. And that’s a good thing for beer, and for all of us. Happy holidays.
Beer In Art #105: Arthur Runquist’s Homesteaders
This week’s work of art comes courtesy of Eric Steen, who also writes the beer blog Beer and Sci-Fi. We got to talking about beer and art during the recent Beer Bloggers Conference in Boulder last month and Eric told me the story of how the Portland Art Museum commissioned him to do an art & beer project the last two years as a part of their Shine A Light, a non-traditional one-night experience showing art in a different light. For the project, Steen “invited three breweries to tour the museum. They each selected an art piece and then brewed beer inspired by that artwork. For the first Shine A Light exhibition in 2009, Chad Kennedy, from Laurelwood Public House & Brewery, chose Homesteaders, by Arthur Runquist, which was painted in 1939.
Homesteaders is an oil painting, on canvas, 38.5 in. wide by 32.5 in high and is the Fine Arts Collection, Public Buildings Service, U.S. General Services Administration. It was created as a part of the WPA, or the Works Progress Administration, back in the day when the government actually cared about art and supported it. Today, the painting is owned by the Portland Art Museum.
For Steen’s art & beer project, he curated his concept by putting together art with beer to fulfill his concept of the two being paired together.
Chad Kennedy with the beer he made, inspired by Homesteaders, that was served for free to museum guests. (photo by Vivian Johnson)
As Kennedy explained his choice of the Homesteaders:
Homesteaders by Arthur Runquist drew me in for several reasons. The simplest and perhaps most obvious connection between my beer brewing and this painting was the corked bottle sitting on a log in the foreground of the painting. While this piece is about the hard work and perseverance of pioneers and laborers (this is a WPA funded piece), the bottle in the forefront signals the rewards of hard work – this is very similar to how I see our beers’ role in society.
Secondly, the subjects in this painting are working as a team to achieve a common goal. As a small brewery this reminds me of our work environment. Not only are we a small team of brewers, but as craft brewers, we’ve made the conscious choice of striking out on our own; sometimes taking big risks in hope of new experience, and if we’re lucky others will follow us and the journey will be a benefit for the greater good — In our case, making our beer culture stronger, moving away from mass marketed, lifeless beer.
Drawing inspiration from Homesteaders meant designing a beer that was out of the ordinary, took chances and struck out on its own. I considered the historical perspective of the painting and decided to utilize some non-traditional brewing ingredients – ingredients that likely would have been used by people in the painting to create a drink to help them relax when all the work was done.
Our beer still uses malted barley, but also contains malted wheat, corn and molasses for sources of sugar to ferment. In a nod to the fermentation vessels of the paintings day — we added a small dose of American oak to the fermented beer giving it a slight “woody” character. The beer doesn’t fall into a style but tries to take us flavor-wise to a place we’ve never been. In doing so, I hope the beer, as well as the painting, take you on a unique and inspiring journey.
In the video below, local artist Carson Ellis gives a short talk about Homesteaders, by Arthur Runquist.
To learn more about Runquist, the Laura Russo Gallery has a biography and a small gallery of his work.
Gilbert Arizona Declares Family & Beer Incompatible
Thanks to Rob Fullmer (a.k.a. olllllo) at Beer PHXation for letting me know about this weirdness. Arizona recently relaxed its 2005 law regarding the sampling of beer, wine and spirits in grocery stores. But one town mayor, John Lewis of Gilbert, Arizona, isn’t happy that someone might be able to have an ounce or two of alcohol, especially if he happens to be in the vicinity of that tasting with his children.
According to the Arizona Republic, he thinks having his kids see people even sipping alcohol will have untold consequences and will undo his careful parenting to, presumably, keep his children from ever seeing demon alcohol anywhere throughout their lives. Here’s how the Gilbert mayor put it:
Lewis recently called on local grocers to “withstand the temptation” to offer free taste-testing of beer, wine and spirits at their stores. He said his family frequently shopped at Sam’s Club, for example, and he would not want his children to be in an atmosphere where alcohol could be sipped.
“For the image and preservation of what has been building Gilbert as a family-centered community, I hope we would not approve the sampling privileges in a family environment,” Lewis said.
I love Fullmer’s response in Beer PHXation:
Apparently Lewis, a grown man, finds the task of teaching his children about the responsible and legal enjoyment of alcohol (or the abstention of it for that matter) in the mere presence of adults tasting 1 or 2 ounces — while still maintaining a code of conduct suitable for the likes of a Sam’s Club — capable of erasing years worth of parental upbringing.
Having a family environment and an educational and informative environment for alcohol use are not mutually exclusive, in fact, the family environment IS the proper environment.
Precisely. What exactly is the problem with seeing adults having a simple taste of alcohol in a responsible, legal environment? This is the sort of modeling behavior we should want our kids to see. Lewis is so far off the deep end that he’s not just upset that his kids might actually see people drinking, he’s even bothered by “an atmosphere where alcohol could be sipped.” [my emphasis.] That means just the thought of there being a place where alcohol “could be sipped,” that there’s a possibility it might happen, is enough to worry him. That he could walk past even an empty roped off area, children in tow, is just too much for him to bear.
Not to get too personal, but according to his bio, he’s been married for 29 years, has 8 kids and 4 grandchildren. The likelihood that he even has impressionable little kids to actually walk through the grocery store with seems somewhat unlikely. So what he’s doing is just political grandstanding.
But his suggestion that somehow sampling alcohol is incompatible with family I find most offensive. I have a family. Countless brewers and beer lovers have families and see no contradiction with the two. That’s because there is no contradiction. Adults can enjoy a drink responsibly without damaging their family. People have being doing so for time immemorial. Why is is that some people believe that there is only one way to parent … their way?
When the bill passed the state legislature, only one representative voted against it, republican Andy Biggs, whose district includes — you guessed it — Gilbert. For him, it was all about the doughnuts, to wit:
“I go in with my kids to go get doughnuts at the Safeway,” Biggs said. “It’s one thing to walk through the liquor department to go to the bakery, but it’s something else when you’ve got people there serving alcoholic beverages.”
Seriously, it’s about his freedom to buy doughnuts without seeing alcohol? What exactly is wrong with these people? Why is it “something else,” whatever that even means, if there is beer sampling? I feel confident he could take another route to reach the bakery. But failing that, if it’s such a big deal couldn’t he just buy his doughnuts somewhere else? Nothing against Safeway, but they’re not exactly the gold standard for pastry.
It just feels like, based on their nonsensical comments, that this is personal for both politicians. And they’re using their positions to force their own issues with alcohol on the rest of the people they represent, in a way that feels out of touch with the average person’s opinion. Obviously, it’s hard to know how any community feels about so complex an issue as alcohol, but I feel confident in saying that a majority of people there do at least drink it.
The original impetus for the bill was to give local alcohol manufacturers a chance to compete locally by allowing Arizona beer and wines to be sampled. As you might expect, Todd Bostock, president of the Arizona Wine Growers Association, believes that “most families wouldn’t be offended by in-store sampling because they already consume alcohol at the dinner table in front of their children. The more kids are exposed to responsible drinking, it won’t be a foreign thing to them,” Bostock said. “It’s not taboo.”
It certainly shouldn’t be, and based on the 54-1 vote it would appear most people agree.
Guinness Ad #45: Christmas Seals
Our 45th Guinness poster by John Gilroy features Santa’s sleigh being pulled by a pair of seals balancing a Guinness bottle and pint glass on their respective noses as Santa chases them in hot pursuit. The slogan is “My Goodness, My Christmas Guinness.” Personally I don’t think the jolly fat man is going to get his Guinness back.
In the similar painting below, used as a postcard, there’s only one seal pulling the sled along with many of the famous Guinness advertising icon animals. Santa Claus is driving the sleigh and they’re transporting a case of Guinness.
Searching For Science In A Glass Of Beer
NPR’s Science Friday had an interview this week with Charlie Bamforth, talking about beer and his new book, “Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing.” Bamforth, of course, is the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Professor of Brewing Science at the University of California at Davis. In the segment, entitled Searching For Science In A Glass of Beer, Charlie takes questions and discusses the brewing process more generally. There’s also a transcript of the talk on their website. [And a hat tip to Rick Sellers for letting me know about the show.] Enjoy.
The Myths Of 24-Hour Drinking
The BBC’s home editor, Mark Easton, had an interesting editorial a few days ago about The Myths Of 24-Hour Drinking in which he writes about the effects of the UK’s Licensing Act 2003, which among other changes to the laws concerning alcohol, opened up the possibility of some drinking establishments staying open 24 hours. Proponents hoped it would create jobs and more business and opponents were certain longer hours in the pub would create more drunks. Neither happened, of course, and it’s an interesting read, including all the usual heated comments.