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Sam Calagione Ready For His Close-Up As Date Set For TV Show Debut

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discovery
Mark your calendars. The date has now been set for the debut of Brew Masters, the Discovery channel television show that will star Sam Calagione. It will debut on Sunday, November 21 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT.

Here’s part of the press release:

It’s cold, it’s comforting, it’s beer….but for Sam Calagione, founder of one of America’s leading craft brewers Dogfish Head Brewery, beer is a passion, a business and a personal quest for best, most imaginative brews. Premiering Sunday, November 21 at 10 PM E/P on Discovery Channel, BREW MASTERS follows Sam and his partners in suds as they travel the country and the world sourcing exotic ingredients and discovering ancient techniques to produce beers of astounding originality.

From chocolate to oysters to tomatoes, Sam is constantly pushing his team and himself to innovate and celebrate the amazing world of beer and beer making. The imagination of the Dogfish Head team is matched only by the fun they inject into every facet of their jobs. Beer tasting meetings in the conference room with co-workers, a bocce ball league in the parking lot, filming original rap videos in the brewery plant, its all in a days work for BREW MASTERS.

BREW MASTERS taps more than just kegs and barrels, it unlocks a fascinating history of beer making, showcasing the ingenuity and passion behind our love affair with those alluring suds and how it played a role in building civilizations, said Clark Bunting, President and General Manager of Discovery Channel.

Running a successful business also requires inspiration, so BREW MASTERS hits the road for the ultimate beer tasting road trip. Sam sets out to recreate ancient ales that have been discovered at sites around the world from Egypt to Peru. He travels to Rome to research old world Italian beers as inspiration for a new site in New York with Mario Batali. A visit to New Zealand introduces the idea of making the first tomato based beer. And back home, Sam is tasked to come up with a commemorative beer called Bitches Brew to celebrate the 40th anniversary release of Miles Davis famous recording.

Beer has always been my passion. It is so much more than what you see in the glass. I’m excited to share the diligence, daring and creativity that we pour into our work, said Calagione.

BREW MASTERS is produced for Discovery Channel by Zero Point Zero Productions. Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia are executive producers. Tim Pastore is executive producer for Discovery Channel.

And Channel Guide magazine also mentions the new show for the fall lineup.

Onion Spoof: Americans Get Majority of Exercise While Drunk

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onion-the
For something a little lighter than recent topics, here’s a funny video from The Onion, spoofing scientific studies about drinking, Americans Get Majority of Exercise While Drunk. It begins. “Over 75% of an average American’s exercise now comes from drunkenly dancing, stealing street signs, and carrying home passed-out friends.” It looks like embedding isn’t working, so go view at The Onion.

Family Dining Leads To Responsible Drinking

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It’s not often I agree with the neo-prohibitionists but last month the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) released the findings of their sixth annual Importance of Family Dinners survey. And guess what, kids who eat with their parents at family dinners are less likely to develop bad habits like binge drinking, smoking or drug use. It’s one of those studies I characterize as “duh studies,” because the results are so obvious. Do we really need a survey to tell us that being engaged with our children is better than being alienated from them? At any rate, Medical News Today, has the story of this year’s survey.

The first one was conducted in 2003, and based on their survey concluded that “teens who have dinner with their families five or more nights in a week are 32 percent likelier never to have tried cigarettes (86 percent vs. 65 percent), 45 percent likelier never to have tried alcohol (68 percent vs. 47 percent), and 24 percent likelier never to have smoked pot (88 percent vs. 71 percent). This also led to CASA creating a holiday, Family Day — A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children (September 27) and it’s one that I support and list on my calendar database of holidays.

But here’s my one quibble and where we part company — it’s always something, right? — these same organizations that celebrate family are the same groups that also have pushed to make it illegal for parents to give their own children a taste of alcohol in the home, believing they know better. For example, California just added civil penalties to the criminal ones for giving alcohol to a minor in the home. In theory, I’m not allowed to teach my own children about alcohol when I, as their parent, believe it’s appropriate. The best I can do is model responsible behavior by my example of drinking in moderation and trying to cast doubt on the propaganda they’ve been receiving at school literally since kindergarten that’s mandated by the state and with “learning” materials from MADD.

These same groups also have pressured state alcohol regulators to not allow kids at beer festivals, though wine tastings are usually just fine. They claim to love family and want kids to not engage in what they believe to be dangerous behaviors, at least while they’re minors, but at the same time want to deny parents the tools and resources to educate their own children about those dangers. They don’t want kids even seeing adults drink, even though it’s legal for adults to do so and it would allow children to see their parents drink responsibly, thus showing by example how the majority of Americans consume it. It would model good behavior and act as a balance to negative stereotypes, showing that drinking can be part of a healthy adult lifestyle. Showing both the positive and the negative stereotypes would teach kids they have a choice, that drinking doesn’t have to lead to destructive behaviors if done responsibly.

We already know what happens when they’re not permitted to learn that lesson. They go off to college or out in the world and, on their own for the first time, binge drink or worse. And who can blame them? If they’ve seen no positive drinking examples and only know the propaganda they’ve been brainwashed with since elementary school, what else should we expect?

I agree that families should be engaged, that parents should be involved with their kids and especially their teenagers. But as long as parents are handicapped by misguided anti-alcohol advocates who think “just say no” is a valid approach or think kindergarten is an appropriate age to begin teaching kids about drinking and driving, then nothing will change. Real change has to begin at home, with the family, and that also has to include modeling positive behavior and freeing parents to make decisions about their own children.

I see the negative effects of the propaganda every time my six-year old daughter reminds me beer is a drug and I have to, yet again, explain to her that it’s okay for Daddy and other adults to drink it. Either they can’t be bothered to explain the difference between legal alcohol and drugs or she’s too young to grasp the concept. Either way, it’s not working. When Porter was her age, he came home from the “Red Ribbon Week” lectures chiding us for using cold medicine because it was a drug, and “all drugs are bad.” That’s the message he got. But that’s what happens when zealots are allowed to shape the policy and parents are cut out of the decision-making process for raising their own children.

Small Town Stupidity

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illinois
The most recent issue of Reason magazine arrived yesterday, and I stumbled on this little tale of small town stupidity from Quincy, Illinois. A man living there, Jonathon Schoenakase, suffered the loss of a good friend at the hands of a drunk driver. His response was unusual and was an incredibly positive reaction to a very emotional incident. He started “Courtesy Rides,” a free service in town offering rides for people who’d had too much to drink to get them home safely.

Stupidity #1

All well and good. He had a lot of takers for the free service and added a second car and then a bus to the fleet. Schoenakase supported his efforts on donations and tips. But that made the taxi drivers in town nervous and they lobbied the city council to change the law, which they did, specifically so Schoenakase would be required to buy a license.

And that brings us to the first stupidity. One reason the taxis were upset is because Schoenakase had a competitive advantage by virtue of being unlicensed. Taxis are not allowed to work past midnight, but bars in Illinois don’t close until 2:00 a.m. and some clubs at 4:00 a.m. Now why the fuck would you intentionally have a law that makes it harder for people who may have been drinking to get home safely. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense to simply change the law to allow taxis to operate after midnight than make Schoenakase have to license his free rides. In any event, the sheriff denied his application.

courtesy-rides

Stupidity #2

Right or wrong, Schoenakase continued to operate his free Courtesy Rides and the only complaints that police have received have come from the rival taxi drivers. He’s now been arrested twice in sting operations. Police “caught him” in the “illegal act” of accepting tips from riders. But Chief of Police Rob Copely admitted there wasn’t really a problem to begin with. “Under questioning from aldermen, [he] said the police department hasn’t received any significant complaints about Courtesy Rides.”

Copley also revealed that police used a sting-style undercover operation on several occasions to see if Schoenakase would try to coerce a tip or donation from a passenger who declined to give anything for a ride. Each time, he said, Schoenakase did nothing onerous to demand any kind of compensation.

Apparently that’s just how they treat good Samaritans in Quincy, Illinois.

Online, the Reason article, though slightly different from the print version, put it this way.

When you’re charging for something and someone else figures out a way to offer it for free, normally you’re SOL. Unless, of course, you happen to be operating in a regulated industry with licensing requirements—and you happen to have the ear of the city council and/or the chief of police. Then there’s another, more appealing alternative: You can make the competition illegal.

But I think Jalopnik in writing about the story summed it up best:

We understand the police are just following the law, but this entire situation stinks like a three-days-worn t-shirt off a drunk’s back. A guy goes out of his way to reduce drunk driving in his town, an effort he’s doing to honor his dead friend, and the city shuts him down at the behest of a taxi company. Real nice work there. If nothing else how about just give the guy his $10 license and be done with all this pointless nonsense.

Reason even picked Quincy Police Chief Rob Copely as their Nanny of the Month for August of this year.

Beer In Ads #208: Every Glass of Schaefer Tastes the Same

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Monday’s ad is for Schaefer Brewing from 1970. The ad is promoting the idea of consistency with the curious tagline, “Every Glass of Schaefer Tastes the Same. That’s What Makes It Different.” The ad was for the Boston and New England market, suggesting enjoying your Schaefer beer while watching the Red Sox play baseball, and also mentioning that it was sold at the concession stands of, presumably, Fenway Park.

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The Most Dangerous Things & The Duckworth Scale

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Over the weekend I was perusing a book I picked up during my last trip to England, The Book of General Ignorance, a trivia book based on a British TV show, QI, which stands for Quite Interesting. There’s a whole series of QI books, and I was drawn to it initially because Stephen Fry was involved, and I’m a big fan of his work. One of the entries I read recently was entitled “What’s three times more dangerous than war?” It was the first sentence that leapt out at me. “Work is a bigger killer than drink, drugs or war.”

Many anti-alcohol organizations begin their press releases, policy papers, etc. with the eye-catching statistic that alcohol-related deaths account for a higher number of deaths than another kind. But this seems to fly in the face of that. It claims that “around two million people die every year from work-related accidents and diseases, as opposed to a mere 650,000 who are killed in wars.” While I might quibble with the adjective “mere,” it’s clear that far more die at work or in war than from alcohol. You can read the entire entry on the bottom of page 69 through Google Books.

Of course, some recent studies insist that two million die worldwide each year due to alcohol-related causes. Still others insist it’s involved in 1 in 25 deaths, which would mean that if it were really 2 million, then total world mortality for a given year would be 50 million. According to the UN, about 62 million people die each year. In the World Health Organization’s top 10 causes of death worldwide, alcohol is not among them. In 2001, a study by the CDC claimed 75,754 deaths were attributable to alcohol, but added that “low consumption has some beneficial effects, so a net 59,180 deaths were attributed to alcohol.” I could keep going citing study after study with different results, because the way you structure the statistics leads to the ultimate results. And that’s why who does the study and/or their motives are so important. And that’s why you shouldn’t believe such statistics without finding out where they came from, not even mine.

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Somewhat off-topic, but quite interesting — at least to me — is the statistics behind the QI’s pronouncement of what’s safe and what’s dangerous were based on The Duckworth Scale, a “scale for assessing the risks involved in various activities” created in 1999. It takes its name from its creator, Dr. Frank Duckworth, a retired statistician. The scale is logarithmic, like the Richter scale for earthquakes. It grades one’s risk of death from activities ranging from washing up to playing Russian Roulette. It starts at zero for living on planet earth for a year, to a maximum of eight for certain death.

The Duckworth Scale

  • 8.0 Suicide Russian roulette (six bullets)
    Jumping off Eiffel Tower
    Lying in front of Flying Scotsman
  • 7.2 Russian Roulette (one game)
  • 7.1 Continuing smoking cigarettes (male aged 35 – 40 a day)
  • 6.9 Continuing smoking cigarettes (male aged 35 – 20 a day)
  • 6.7 Continuing smoking cigarettes (male aged 35 – 10 a day)
  • 6.4 Deep sea fishing (40 year career)
  • 6.3 Rock climbing over 20 years
  • 5.5 Accidental falls (new born male)
    Lifetime car travel (new born male)
    Dying while vacuuming
    Dying while washing up
    Dying while walking down the street
  • 4.6 Murder (new born male)
  • 4.2 Rock climbing (one session)
  • 2.0 Riding fairground rides (100 times)
  • 1.9 100 mile car journey (sober middle aged driver)
  • 1.7 100 mile flight
  • 1.6 Destructive asteroid impact (in the life-time of a new born male)
  • 0.3 100 mile rail journey

Those are the only ones I could find on the scale, but I’d love to see where more activities fall on the scale. Has anyone seen a more comprehensive list?

Next Session To Clear Up Wheat Beers

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Our 45th Session will be hosted by Bruce Tichnor, who runs the Canadian BeerTaster.ca. He’s taking us back to our roots, to spend a cloudy afternoon with wheat beers, or has he describes it:

We wanted to get back closer to the roots of the Session and pick a topic which was simple and yet gives a wide range of interpretations so we chose, simply (or perhaps not so simply), Wheat Beers.
Feel free to take this topic in any direction you like, specific reviews, historical information, or any other twist you’d like to use. Wheat beers are a pretty wide topic and actually cover German style Weizen, Heffe Weizen, etc. along with Belgian style Witbier and even Flavoured Wheat beers.

There are very few guidelines here, just have some fun drinking Wheat Beers in the fall instead of the summer.

So see if you can clear up the cloudy subject of wheat beers with your own post for the next Session, on Friday, November 5.

Calling The Brew Kettle Black

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In an irony apparently lost on the Marin Institute, their latest missive to the faithful accuses Big Alcohol of doing “anything” to protect their business. The exact headline is Big Alcohol will do anything to avoid paying for alcohol-related harm. This is related to the industry’s recent support of California Proposition 26, which is attempting to close the loophole created by the California Supreme Court that allows “fees” to be imposed under certain conditions with just a majority vote rather than the 2/3 vote required for ordinary taxes. This has led to a spate of taxes pretending to be fees being imposed throughout the state. The proposition seeks to expose those hidden taxes and subject them to the same standard as any other taxes.

As I wrote before in Trash Talking Prop 26, this proposition was not started by the alcohol industry, or even the oil or tobacco industries, but was a grassroots effort sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Taxpayers’ Association, and is supported by nearly sixty chambers of commerce and tax organizations. There is also support from trade organizations in a wide range of businesses and industries. It wasn’t until August that alcohol donations were made and that’s a significant point the Marin Institute is conveniently ignoring. It was at that time that “every company who makes alcohol, distributes alcohol and sells and serves alcohol realized they were under attack by the Marin Institute, who was pushing [San Francisco supervisor John] Avalos and supplying him him with all the resources for the test case to add a new tax to alcohol in San Francisco. That’s when most of us even became aware of Prop 26. Before that, I’d wager, hardly anyone in the alcohol industry had paid it much attention. When you’re being attacked, you tend to defend yourself.”

So at a minimum, the Marin Institute is mis-characterizing Prop 26 and at worst is using the results of its own actions to claim that the alcohol industry will go to great lengths to “avoid paying for alcohol-related harm.” But first of all, the notion of “alcohol-related harm” is something that the Marin Institute made up themselves. Alcohol companies, like any business, are simply trying to protect themselves from having to pay more taxes. This is something every company in every industry would do, in fact has to do, indeed is mandated to do by their corporate charter. Shareholders would be right to revolt if they didn’t take those steps. That the Marin Institute is using this very reasonable and understandable reaction to being attacked by the Marin Institute to paint the industry as going too far is more than a little hypocritical as it shows the lengths that they will go to in bending reality to their service. The rest of the missive also misstates what the proposition is really about, further showing how far they’ll go to further their agenda. If that’s not the pot calling the brew kettle black, I don’t know what is.

Beer In Art #96: Charlene Audrey’s Four Beer Nations

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Today’s art is by Charlene Audrey, a freelance illustrator born in Syracuse, new York, but raised in Quebec, Canada. She’s done high-end wallpaper and decorative arts but more lately does painting. She created these four paintings which are sold as posters on most of the popular poster websites. Each one depicts the beer of a specific country; Belgium, the U.S., Ireland and Germany. Why these four? I couldn’t tell you. Each painting shows a bottle of beer and a glass filled with the beer in the foreground. The backgrounds include a sign for the pub or brewery and a landscape from the country, too.

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Belgium.

Charlene_Audrey-America
America

Charlene_Audrey-Ireland
Ireland.

Charlene_Audrey-German
Germany.

Beer Drinkers Are Normal, Study Derisively Claims

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In yet another hatchet job by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a new study they sponsored declares “Alcohol Consumers Are Becoming The Norm,” as if that’s a bad thing. The longitudinal study using data almost two decades old from the NIAAA’s 1991-92 National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey and the 2001-02 National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions was conducted by researchers at the UT Southwestern School of Health Professions. The results are being be published this month in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, a journal of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. To say the study is most likely biased, without even having to look at it, is something of an understatement.

The press release for the study begins with this eye-catching pronouncement. “More people are drinking than 20 years ago.” But that’s not correct. A more accurate statement would be that more people are drinking eight years ago than were doing so twenty years ago. Not quite as sexy, or alarming, but correct based on the actual data the study examined.

But really, even if true, if more people are indeed drinking today than twenty years ago, so what? The statement completely ignores context. We know mass-produced beer is down. We know craft beer is up. Couldn’t an equally valid explanation be that more people are drinking less, but better beer. That would mean more moderate drinking, which has shown to cause people to live longer than either abstaining or over-drinking. Shouldn’t that be considered be excellent news? But when the people studying the data owe their careers and paychecks to the study of “alcoholism,” it’s always bad news. The glass is quite literally, always half empty.

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Just look at how they define drinkers vs. non-drinkers. For purposes of the study, someone who has had twelve drinks of at least “0.6 ounces” in the last year is considered a drinker. That’s a total of 7.2 ounces in an entire year and you’re a “drinker.” That’s less than half a pint in a year, for chrissakes. Less than that and you’re a non-drinker. Talk about just saying no. But an increase in the number of people who’ve had less than a half pint is on the increase, apparently, and that’s cause for alarm? Are you kidding me? That would be laughable if lead researcher Dr. Caetano didn’t sound so serious. He thinks “that continuous monitoring of alcohol consumption levels is needed to understand better the factors that affect consumption. Monitoring also would help to detect as early as possible signs that rates of risky drinking behaviors such as binge drinking or drinking to intoxication may be increasing.” And he’s worried about people who’ve consumed as little as 7.2 oz. in one year. Is it just me, or is that the proverbial tempest in a pint glass?

But wait, it gets better. Based on what any reasonable person would consider almost no drinking at all, he has the following recommendations.

“This suggests to us that a variety of public-health policies such as restrictions on alcohol advertising, regulating high-alcohol-content beverages, increasing taxes on alcohol, as well as treatment and brief interventions may be needed to reduce alcohol-related problems,” he said.

How? How does that suggest these draconian measures? To them, the “reasons for the uptick vary and may involve complex sociodemographic changes in the population, but the findings are clear: More people are consuming alcohol now than in the early 1990s.” But that’s not even true from their own findings. First of all, as I said before, this compares a study from 1991-92 to another one conducted in 2001-02. That was eight years ago, not “now” as he states. Then with such flimsy increases using as their base amount less than 8 oz. of alcohol consumed in an entire year, they think it’s appropriate to make recommendations calling for more regulation, higher taxes and more medical intervention. That’s completely absurd and utterly disproportional to the findings.

This seems so obviously an agenda in search of a study. The suggestions were already in place. It’s the same nonsense that neo-prohibitionist groups have been pushing for years. This study was just shamelessly shoe-horned into that agenda.

But again I think part of what bothers me about these type of studies is that they take the view that any drinking is bad, no matter how small or moderate. They don’t take into account the context of the drinking. Is it with food? Is it with friends over a long period of time? Is it a few times a week or all at once? Even the Federal government increased their recommendations of safe drinking from two to four drinks a day, assuming the weekly intake stays below their recommendations. And they’ve acknowledged the numerous studies that show moderate drinking is part of a healthy lifestyle and will also most likely mean you’ll live longer. But these anti-alcohol funded studies just add up the amounts people drink and say it’s all bad for you, no context necessary. It’s just self-serving propaganda. If an alcohol industry group had sponsored this, it would have been dismissed immediately. But anti-alcohol groups get no such scrutiny. Their studies are embraced by the medical community, such as Medical News Today, which ran the study’s press release as a news story almost verbatim. Also, Science Daily reprinted the press release as news, disclosing its source at the bottom, well after the average reader stopped reading it. They also provide a link to the press release and the original journal article, something that Medical News Today can’t be bothered to do.

Though the headline is Alcohol Consumers Are Becoming The Norm, the title of the study itself is Sociodemographic Predictors of Pattern and Volume of Alcohol Consumption Across Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites: 10-Year Trend (1992–2002), the headline bears very little resemblance to the study itself.

Here’s the abstract:

Keywords: Ethnicity; Race; Binge Drinking; Drunkenness; Intoxication; Whites; Blacks; Hispanics

Background:  There have been limited trend studies examining variations on the patterns of alcohol consumption among Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics in the United States. The current paper reports national trends in drinking patterns, volume of drinking (number of drinks per month), binge drinking, and drinking to intoxication among Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics over a period of 10 years and identifies sociodemographic predictors of these behaviors across the 3 ethnic groups.

Methods:  Data are from the 1991 to 1992 National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey (NLAES; n = 42,862) and the 2001 to 2002 National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC; n = 43,093). Both surveys used multistage cluster sample procedures to select respondents 18 years of age and older from the U.S. household population.

Results:  Trends varied across different dimensions of drinking and ethnic groups. There were no statistically significant differences in the mean number of drinks consumed per month among men and women in any of the 3 ethnic groups between 1992 and 2002, but there was a significant rise in the proportion of current drinkers in both genders and in all 3 ethnic groups. Multivariate analysis indicated that, compared to Whites in 1992, Blacks and Hispanics did not increase their volume of drinking, but Whites did. Drinking 5 or more drinks in day at all did not increase between 1992 and 2002, but drinking 5 or more drinks at least once a month was more likely for all groups in 2002 compared to Whites in 1992. Drinking to intoxication at all was more likely among Whites in 2002 than 1992, but drinking to intoxication at least once a month was more likely among Whites and Blacks in 2002 than 1992.

Conclusion:  The only common trend between 1992 and 2002 across both genders and 3 ethnic groups was a rise in the proportion of drinkers. There was also a rise in drinking 5 or more drinks in a day (Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics) and drinking to intoxication (Whites and Blacks), but this was limited to those reporting such drinking at least once a month. The reasons for these changes are many and may involve complex sociodemographic changes in the population. It is important for the field to closely monitor these cross-ethnic trends in alcohol consumption.

I don’t see a reference to the headline, Alcohol Consumers Are Becoming The Norm, anywhere in either the press release or the abstract. Nothing in the abstract addresses normalization of any kind. After the headline, it’s never mentioned again. I don’t understand what it even means, becoming the norm? Alcohol has been consumed since the beginning of civilization. It hasn’t suddenly become anything. It’s been perfectly normal for adults to drink alcohol since at least 1933, when it became legal again in the U.S. It’s pretty hard to take the whole thing very seriously, when the headline itself is nothing but sensationalist propaganda.