Friday’s ad is for the German brewery Spaten from either 1924 of 1933 (accounts differ). It’s by the famous German poster artist Ludwig Hohlwein. I love the stylized server and just the timeless quality of the art.
As far as beer is concerned, Hohlwein is probably best know for creating the artwork of the monk used in the label for Franziskaner Weissbier.
The world is turned upside down. All of the neo-prohibitionist groups have been complaining for a very long time, since 1933 in fact, that alcohol advertising has to be severely restricted. The moment the 21st Amendment passed, ending Prohibition, the temperance groups didn’t admit defeat and start minding their own business but simply changed tactics. Instead of trying to make alcohol illegal for everyone, they tried to make it harder and more expensive for the companies to do business and harder for the consumers who wanted it to find it and/or afford it.
That’s a strategy they’ve continued to push over the past 75+ years, and in fact they’ve really stepped up those efforts lately. That’s why the anti-alcohol groups are constantly trying to get taxes on alcohol raised. It’s also why they’re trying to to get more and more restrictions on how and where alcohol can be advertised. One of their most persistent claims is supposedly how harmful alcohol ads are to young people. They’ve even got their own “studies” to prove it.
A recent one by the Center on Marketing Alcohol and Youth (CAMY) begins with the premise that “there is growing evidence that youth (defined as 12-20 years olds) exposure to alcohol advertising increases the likelihood and quantity of underage drinking.” Back in 2003, because of the whining of the anti-alcohol groups, the major alcohol companies pledged to reduce their advertising in publications that also included underage readers.
So CAMY last week released the results of a study they conducted to see the Youth Exposure to Alcohol Advertising in National Magazines, 2001-2008. The study found the following:
Overall, in other words, they found that there’s far less ads in publications which young people might read. Which is what they wanted, right? So you’d think they’d be happy, wouldn’t you? But here’s the thing. They continue to proselytize that young people are drinking more and more, even right in the study itself, which gives the following background. “More young people in the U.S. drink alcohol every month than smoke cigarettes or use any illegal drug. In 2008, 10.1 million young people between the ages of 12 and 20 reported drinking in the past month, and 6.6 million reported binge drinking.”
So let’s see if I have this straight. The study shows, as Health Day reports, “alcohol makers have largely met the industry’s voluntary standard (adopted in 2003) of not placing ads in magazines with 30 percent or more youth readership.” And yet underage drinking continues to soar according to these same groups. Is it just me, or does that seem contradictory? If kids seeing ads for alcohol is the huge problem they claim it is, wouldn’t you expect that if there are fewer ads directed at children, that underage drinking would decrease. But that’s not apparently what’s happened. So maybe it’s time for the neo-prohibitionists to admit these ads weren’t the big problem they claimed and their self-serving studies were as bogus as a three-dollar bill.
I shouldn’t even have to explain how ridiculous it is that a magazine should lose advertising at a time when all print publications are having a hell of time making ends meet just because what they write about appeals to both adults and people under 21. Why, for example, should Rolling Stone — with a 12-20 year-old readership of around 25% — not advertise to the 75% of its readers who are legal adults just because both adults and young people enjoy music. And who came up with the 12-20 range? I can’t imagine how a twelve-year old reacts to an alcohol ad is remotely similar to a twenty-year old. That they consider all kids in that age range as the same seriously calls into question the entire exercise. Eighteen-to-twenty year olds (who incidentally should be allowed to legally drink) might be swayed by alcohol advertising if they’re alcoholically active, but a twelve-year old? It’s absurd.
The study did show that while wine and liquor dropped across the board, beer did rise slightly to fill the void. But while this is undoubtedly an unpopular idea, I much prefer my kids might see a beer ad over something laden with high fructose corn syrup, like soda, pop or soft drinks. Beer at least is all-natural and is not loaded with chemicals like soda. And last time I checked, it was still illegal for kids to actually buy beer. So no matter how the little darlings react to the horror of seeing an advertisement for beer, it really shouldn’t matter one wit. They still can’t buy it. Before the angry comments begin, I realize that underage kids can manage to get their hands on booze, but that sill doesn’t change the fact that it’s already illegal. It’s still not a valid argument why adults shouldn’t be allowed to see a beer ad in a publication that someone under 21 might also happen to see. And guess what, it’s not working anyway. Reducing the ads themselves has not resulted in kids under 21 drinking less, in fact just the opposite if we accept the anti-alcohol faction’s own propaganda. Their own studies seem to show that reducing those ads — as they insisted was necessary — is having almost no impact on underage drinking.
Thursday’s ad continues our week of ads from France, this one done in 1930. It’s for Biere Phenix, which was founded in 1886. The artist’s name is Leon Dupin. Either the sailor’s drinking in the fog, or he has a disembodied hand.
Gizmodo has an intriguing post up right now, combining ideas from two books about early man and the dawn of civilization, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality and Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages. In Orgies or Beer? You Only Get One, author Joel Johnson speculates that early man eschewed group sex with multiple partners to settle down and make beer, setting us on the path to modern civilization, monogamy and the happy hour. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s a pretty funny idea. (In other words, you can safely ignore the many outraged commenters who seem to have confused Gizmodo with an academic journal, they’re an entirely different kind of funny.)
As Patrick McGovern makes the case in Uncorking the Past, a growing body of evidence is pointing to alcohol — and most likely beer, or a rudimentary form of it, at least — as the reason early nomadic man settled down, in order to grow the crops to insure a steady supply of it. In other words, beer, rather than bread, may have been responsible for civilization as we know it today, with all its good and bad developments and legacies. In the newer book, Sex at Dawn, authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá argue that what we gave up for civilization, agriculture and beer was free love, group sex and orgies. Gizmodo summarizes the book’s claims in chart form.
One thing that’s funny about the chart is that everything leads to war, and the most hate-filled comment that I ever received was from someone calling himself “The Savagist” who took that same view to ridiculous heights. He vehemently believed that beer and alcohol were directly responsible for every bad thing that ever happened in the history of mankind, ignoring anything good that civilization also brought. Given his epithet, one might have reasonably presumed he had or wanted to return to that savage “pre-civilized” time, but he was obviously still living in a building, with electricity, and typing on a computer connected to the internet, with no sense of irony. Apparently, when he looked in Pandora’s Box, there was no hope at all after beer released all the evil into the world. Me, I found hope … and hops.
But back to Sex at Dawn, and the key points, as laid down in the Gizmodo article:
But accidental alcohol was around for probably millions of years and the “drunken monkey hypothesis” proposed by biologist Robert Dudley “attempts to explain why our bodies have evolved such a happy capacity for metabolizing ethanol.” McGovern extends that idea in Uncorking the Past.
On average, both abstainers and bingers have shorter, harsher lives. The human liver is specially equipped to metabolize alcohol, with about 10 percent of its enzyme machinery, including alcohol dehydrogenase, devoted to generating energy from alcohol. Our organs of smell can pick up wafting alcoholic aromas, and our other senses detect the myriad compounds that permeate ripe fruit.
A couple of years ago, this came up in a different context, in a post I wrote entitled Beer and Civilization which discussed a book by Steven Johnson entitled The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. In Johnson’s book, he discusses how at the dawn of civilization, survival often depended on how a person’s body reacted to and could tolerate the beer that was generally safer to drink than water. Over time, only people who were genetically predisposed with the ability to drink large quantities of beer survived, passing that trait down to their children so that perhaps today most of us have such an ancestor as evidenced simply by the fact that we’re here. As [George] Will (and Johnson) explains.
The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”
But sitting here in my pajamas, typing on my laptop, beer in hand, surrounded by the trappings of modern society, I can’t help but think we made the right choice. I know the world has many, many challenges and problems but would any of us be happier crawling around the Savannah in a loincloth hunting (and gathering) for our next meal — and without a beer to pair with it? Beer may have been responsible for the single greatest butterfly effect in our civilization’s history because it’s nearly impossible to say what life might be like had we not taken the path we’re on. Did we give up orgies for our beer and civilization? Who knows, but I still think we chose wisely.
Another funny and very interesting excerpt from Sex at Dawn is The Flintstonization of Prehistory in which modern morals and values are super-imposed on to the past.
Wednesday’s ad is yet another one from France, done in 1920. It’s for Biere De Vezelise, a brewery that was located in northeastern France since 1863, when it was founded by Antoni Moreau. The brewery closed in 1971. The artist’s name is Guerzan.
You know you’re old and curmudgeonly when you remember fondly returnable beer and soda bottles. They had a heft to them, felt heavier in your hand or carrying them to the car. That’s because they were made to last, to be used over and over again. I hadn’t really thought about it until this morning, but that was real recycling, well before the term had even been coined. But it was just practical to make things that could be re-used. It’s almost a cruel joke that as a society we’re so obsessed lately with recycling when without realizing it we were doing far more of it years ago before almost all packaging, including bottles and cans, became throwaways. If we really cared more about the environment and the world than our own selfish “convenience” then it would be easy to just return to … well, returnables.
Unfortunately, I’d say it would be almost impossible to change our collective habits at this point (yes, I’m a pessimist as well as a curmudgeon) despite the fact that many places around the world never stopped using returnable bottles. Germany is a prime example of this. All the beer bottles sold there are returnables and every brewery has huge stacks of cartons filled with bottles waiting to be cleaned and reused. Obviously, their economy hasn’t suffered and people haven’t decided to stop drinking beer because they might have to return the bottles rather than just throw them away. But I just can’t see that happening here where everything is about being fast and convenient, where it’s all about “instant” gratification. Lest you accuse me of being too self-righteous, I include myself among the lazy multitudes.
I bring this up because the Lehigh Valley [Pennsylvania] Morning Call has an interesting article about their local beer, Straub Brewery, and how Returnable beer bottles to become extinct if Straub doesn’t get back some cases. It’s not surprising that Straub is one of only two breweries who are still using returnable beer bottles — the other being Yuengling — and that both are in Pennsylvania, since the Commonwealth is the lone remaining (as far as I know) case state, meaning almost all beer is sold by the case at what are called “beer distributors.” This may have made sense in 1933, but it’s become an increasingly antiquated system as the years have rolled on.
From the article:
Straub Brewery, a 138-year-old family-owned business about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, is begging customers mostly in Pennsylvania but also some in Ohio, New York and Virginia to return thousands of empty cases.
Without them, Straub says it will do as nearly every brewer has done over the years — eliminate returnable bottles from its inventory. Only one other major brewer and the nation’s oldest , D.G. Yuengling & Sons of Pottsville, still sells beer in returnable bottles. But it plans to phase out the practice by fall.
All major brewers, including Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors, gave up on returnable bottles years ago because their costs multiplied with national distribution. About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981, but since 2007 the percentage has been negligible, according to the Beer Institute in Washington, D.C. In Pennsylvania, more than a quarter of all beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981, but that was when state liquor control laws required most beers to be sold by the case through distributors which readily accepted the returns.
So hopefully their customers will heed the call and start returning their bottles so they can be used again. I know it’s a forgone conclusion that returnable bottles will die out at some point, but the nostalgic, romantic in me (a.k.a. old man) still thinks that the returnable is an idea that should be revisited, especially with the recent increased focus on being green. It would be hard to argue that reusing bottles and packaging wouldn’t ultimately be better for the environment than our current recycling efforts. But I think Dick Yuengling summed up the situation best.
“The consumer’s been indoctrinated; we’re a throwaway society,” Yuengling said. “Everybody’s environmentally conscious, but if you put a case of returnable bottles in front of them, they say, ‘What’s that?'”
Tuesday’s ad is another one from France, done in 1929. It’s for Maik Les Bieres De Luxe, a brewery located on the Champs-Elysess in Paris. The artist is T. Mercier.
In a provocative article today, the business-oriented website, TheStreet.com, which describes itself as the “leading digital financial media company,” pondered whether Anheuser-Busch InBev might possibly be considering buying the Craft Brewers Alliance (CBA). The piece, by Miriam Reimer, entitled Anheuser-Busch Takeover Target: Craft Brewers Alliance?, certainly had the wags wagging on the blogosphere today.
There’s a great reminder of just how insignificant craft beer is to the business world in the opening paragraph, which refers to the CBA as that “little-known craft beer maker.” Compared to the big two, that’s understandable, but given that the brands in CBA are some of craft’s biggest players, it’s also pretty funny and humbling. But it’s good to remember that what many of us take so seriously is just a very small sliver of a much bigger pie.
At any rate, the idea of ABI buying the CBA was floated by Washington Street Investments president Bryce Peterson. Despite stating that “such speculation is premature,” he had no problem engaging in it himself. The thinking is, apparently, that ABI “might think it’s smart to buy a strong brand in the craft area and use its incredible distribution and marketing strengths to grow the acquired business.” Which sounds good on paper, but that’s exactly the reason that Anheuser-Busch earlier invested in the CBA brands individually, before their merger in 2008. When craft beer was beginning it’s latest growth trend, A-B distributors started wanting to carry some, too, and that drove A-B to partner with RedHook and Widmer to satisfy that demand. As a result, I’m not sure what buying the remaining 64.4% of CBA that ABI does not own would accomplish. The bulk of the article is given over to share prices, quarterly sales, and other business analysis. It’s interesting, up to a point, but all the numbers don’t seem to manage to answer the basic question of what advantage there would be for ABI. Plus, isn’t ABI still trying to trim the fat to pay for buying Anheuser-Busch?
The article concludes with a poll, asking readers to answer the question posed by the title: “Yes — Anheuser-Busch sees long-term potential in Craft’s growing corner of the market” or “No — Anheuser-Busch wouldn’t bother with such a small-time player.” What’s surprising is that as of this evening better than 17% thought “no.” They obviously are oblivious to A-B’s history. I’ve never seen a niche market too small for them try to own or destroy … ever. And InBev is even more ruthless than A-B was, so it’s hard to imagine them not going after craft beer in some fashion. Whether it will be by buying the CBA, at least at this point, is still an open question.
UPDATE 8.26: Author Miriam Reimer did a follow-up article to this one, Anheuser-Busch Thirsty for Craft Brewers, Poll Says, focusing on the poll at the end of it. She contacted me about the piece, and we spoke on the phone for a good half-hour, quoting me briefly in the article on page 2.
Jack McAuliffe may just be the most elusive figure in the short history of craft beer. He was craft before craft beer was cool. The former Navy man and engineer founded the very first modern microbrewery in Sonoma County, California in 1976 (New Albion incorporated October 8, 1976) and began production the following year using a brewery he built from spare parts. His New Albion Brewery was all alone for at least three years until Sierra Nevada Brewing joined him in 1980, essentially doubling the number of new breweries.
But New Albion was a bit ahead of its time and by 1982 was out of business. As I understand it, a disheartened McAuliffe tired of reliving his brewery’s failure, and eventually disappeared from the burgeoning beer community that his efforts inspired. For a number of years, few people knew where he was, but Maureen Ogle managed to track him down living in Las Vegas when she was working on Ambitious Brew and provides one of the fullest accounts of the New Albion Brewery beginning at Page 291. More recently, after a bad car accident landed McAuliffe in intensive care, he moved to San Antonio, Texas to live with his sister. Happily, San Antonio has taken to their adopted son, and the San Antonio Express-News had a nice story about Jack and his new collaboration with Sierra Nevada Brewing, San Antonio’s Jack McAuliffe is namesake of commemorative Sierra Nevada beer.
Ken Grossman pours a beer for Jack McAuliffe as (I think) Charlie Bamforth looks on.
The latest collaboration beer celebrating Sierra Nevada’s 30th anniversary this year is based on a beer that Jack used to make at New Albion for another annual celebration.
In the late ’70s, New Albion brewed a special beer for annual Summer Solstice parties that didn’t particularly hew to any style, but occupied a space somewhere between a porter and a barley wine.
Using that concept and the ingredients that were available at the time, Ken and Jack’s Ale recipe was born. It contains Canadian two-row and European caramel barley and a combination of Cascade and cluster hops.
Grossman describes the beer as a “dark barleywine that is bottle fermented.” It clocks in at 10 percent ABV, which McAuliffe points out is the upper limit of what conventional yeast can survive. Like any beer, you can drink this one right away, but it will likely improve with age.
It’s certainly great to see Jack McAuliffe in the public eye again. Few people deserve to be more well-known in the beer world than him. It’s a real shame that so few people know Jack and his contribution to the modern craft beer community. We all really should know Jack. Hell, I think October 8 should be considered the birthday of modern craft beer, which in a couple of weeks will celebrate its 34th. Let’s all raise a toast to Jack, every year, on that day.
Jack & Ken’s Ale, a black barley wine.
Monday’s ad is an old one from Quilmes, the best-selling beer in Argentina. “Y Todos Con” translates to “And All With” Quilmes. I love the stylized glasses in the hands, and the way they depict the motion of having just clinked them together.
