Tuesday’s ad is for Budweiser from 1958. It’s from the “Where There’s Life … There’s Bud” series and features a couple at the beach. The man is pouring beer from a can to overflowing — tilt the glass, dude! — while the woman tries to sip it up before it spills over the side, while holding a partially-eaten sandwich. Is it just me, or is there something vaguely odd about the ad?
The theory that it was beer that caused early man to make the transition from hunter/gatherers to farmers instead of bread, thus starting civilization itself, has been gathering steam since it was first proposed by anthropologists in the 1950s. The latest support comes from archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who will be submitting his recent research to the journal Current Archeology. His theories suggest that it wasn’t just the beer that was important, but its use in rituals like feasts that help bring people together.
From the article in Live Science:
The advent of agriculture began in the Neolithic Period of the Stone Age about 11,500 years ago. Once-nomadic groups of people had settled down and were coming into contact with each other more often, spurring the establishment of more complex social customs that set the foundation of more-intricate communities.
The Neolithic peoples living in the large area of Southwest Asia called the Levant developed from the Natufian culture, pioneers in the use of wild cereals, which would evolve into true farming and more settled behavior. The most obvious explanation for such cultivation is that it was done in order to eat.
Archaeological evidence suggests that until the Neolithic, cereals such as barley and rice constituted only a minor element of diets, most likely because they require so much labor to get anything edible from them — one typically has to gather, winnow, husk and grind them, all very time-consuming tasks.
Hayden told LiveScience he has seen that hard work for himself. “In traditional Mayan villages where I’ve worked, maize is used for tortillas and for chicha, the beer made there. Women spend five hours a day just grinding up the kernels.”
However, sites in Syria suggest that people nevertheless went to unusual lengths at times just to procure cereal grains — up to 40 to 60 miles (60 to 100 km). One might speculate, Hayden said, that the labor associated with grains could have made them attractive in feasts in which guests would be offered foods that were difficult or expensive to prepare, and beer could have been a key reason to procure the grains used to make them.
“It’s not that drinking and brewing by itself helped start cultivation, it’s this context of feasts that links beer and the emergence of complex societies,” Hayden said.
Feasts would have been more than simple get-togethers — such ceremonies have held vital social significance for millennia, from the Last Supper to the first Thanksgiving.
“Feasts are essential in traditional societies for creating debts, for creating factions, for creating bonds between people, for creating political power, for creating support networks, and all of this is essential for developing more complex kinds of societies,” Hayden explained. “Feasts are reciprocal — if I invite you to my feast, you have the obligation to invite me to yours. If I give you something like a pig or a pot of beer, you’re obligated to do the same for me or even more.”
“In traditional feasts throughout the world, there are three ingredients that are almost universally present,” he said. “One is meat. The second is some kind of cereal grain, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, in the form of breads or porridge or the like. The third is alcohol, and because you need surplus grain to put into it, as well as time and effort, it’s produced almost only in traditional societies for special occasions to impress guests, make them happy, and alter their attitudes favorably toward hosts.”
Food and beer together at the heart of the birth of civilization. Now that’s pairing idea I can get behind.
In response to the highly unscientific study published in The Lancet last week suggesting alcohol is more dangerous than heroin, FullFact.org — “A [British] independent fact-checking organisation” — asked the question “Are alcohol-related problems on the rise?” Their conclusion? “Full Fact finds little support in the evidence.”
Monday’s ad is for Schlitz, from — I’m guessing — the swinging, sophisticated sixties with a play on their famous slogan “when you’re out of Schlitz you’re out of beer” being rendered more proper, as “When One Is Out Of Schlitz, One Is Out Of Beer.”
Fritz Maytag may have stepped back from his daily duties at Anchor Brewing, the brewery he owned and ran since 1965, but that doesn’t mean he’s slowing down. He’s still running his winery, York Creek Vineyards, and consulting with the new owners of Anchor Brewing & Distilling.
And later this month, on November 18, the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society will present their William C. Ralston Corporate Award to Fritz Maytag and Dave Burkhart on behalf of Anchor Brewing.
From the press release:
Receiving the Ralston Award on behalf of Anchor Brewing will be Fritz Maytag and David Burkhart. Maytag, considered the father of modern microbreweries, had been at the helm of Anchor Brewing for 45 years. Maytag helped spark a revival in the craft of making beer by hand and inspired thousands of entrepreneurs to follow him in creating small, artisan breweries. He won the 2008 James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. The company was sold this spring but he serves as Chairman Emeritus, Anchor Brewing Company.
Burkhart, a staff member of Anchor Brewing and a California-born historian and honors graduate of Yale, is the author of Earthquake Days: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake & Fire in 3D and the editor of Cocktail Boothby’s American Bartender. He is also a professional trumpeter who teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and performs with the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony. His latest book project is called Cocktails & Punches in Mark Twain’s San Francisco.
Congratulations to both, and to Anchor. Tickets to the Awards Luncheon may be purchased online.
Food GPS has an interesting Q & A-style interview with the founder of Lagunitas Brewing, Tony Magee. I’ve known Tony since shortly after he started his brewery and he’s one of may favorite people in the industry. Check out the Q&A with Lagunitas founder Tony Magee.
When the Brewers Association redefined “craft beer” a few years ago, it was viewed with controversy and downright scorn by more than a few people. It’s certainly understandable that the BA needs to define what it means to be a craft brewer, because after all that’s their charter. They’re a trade organization for the craft brew industry. They have to be able to define what it means to be a member and to determine who can and cannot be a member. The new definition took a long time to be agreed upon, and even today not everyone does, even within the organization among its members. Some former members were kicked out at the stroke of a pen, so to speak, when they no longer fit the new definition. I personally have mixed feelings about how it’s currently defined and believe it needs further tweaking. But I’m not actually prepared to launch into that discussion right now. Someone else has, however.
Danner Kline is one of the founders of Free the Hops, the grassroots organization that successfully got the Alabama state legislature to raise the maximum a.b.v. allowed from 6% to 13.9% and continues to work toward bringing “the highest quality beers in the world to Alabama.” Kline has his own take on the craft beer definition, What Is Craft Beer?, that appeared in the Birmingham Weekly last Thursday. It’s worth a read, and it’s worth thinking about and discussing, as it will have to change again, especially if the effort right now to change the numbers for breweries in the Unites States Congress is successful.
Today’s artworks are all by one of the world’s most well-known artists, Vincent Van Gogh. Given last Friday’s Session topic — wheat beers — I thought it would be fun to look at some paintings of what fields. Wheat fields were a favorite subject for Van Gogh and throughout his life he painted at least 40 artworks that included a wheat field.
One of his most famous wheat field paintings was Wheatfield with Crows, painted toward the end of Van Gogh’s life, in 1890, the same year he passed away. It was also the subject of an episode of Simon Schama’s Power of Art, a wonderful documentary series on art that I heartily recommend. In addition, it was used in a surreal sequence of a lesser know film by Akira Kurosawa called Dreams. The original is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Here’s what the Van Gogh Museum has to say about the painting:
Wheatfield with Crows is one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and probably the one most subject to speculation. It was executed in July 1890, in the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life. Many have claimed it was his last work, seeing the dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows and the cut-off path as obvious portents of his coming end. However, since no letters are known from the period immediately preceding his death, we can only guess what his final work might really have been. Some scholars believe it was the Tree-roots, but we have no proof that this was the case.
Another one painted around the same time was Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky, also painted in 1890.
Can Gogh also executed a series of paintings called “The Wheat Field” series. All of the paintings “depict the view Van Gogh had from the window of his bedroom on the top floor of the asylum” at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence from June 1889 to May 1890. Here’s one from that series, Wheat Field, Sunrise, painted in 1890.
And here’s another one, Wheat Field with Rising Sun, from 1889.
For more about Vincent Van Gogh, Wikipedia is a good place to start, though there’s even more at the Vincent Van Gogh Gallery, which has a complete list of his works. There are also tons of links at the ArtCyclopedia and another biography at the Web Museum.
If you remember OK Go’s Rube Goldberg video for the song This Too Shall Pass, Trumer Brauerei has just put out a similar — but equally great — one using all Trumer paraphernalia. Enjoy.
Our 42nd Guinness poster by John Gilroy features carrying the biggest bale of hay, having presumably just finished off a pint of Guinness. The glass in the bottom right is empty, after all. That’s what gave him “Guinness for Strength” to be able to carry such a big load. It also looks a bit like a giant blond afro.
