Our fourteenth Guinness poster by John Gilroy is yet another variation on the iconic toucan on a weathervane, the difference here is he’s high above a country setting on a bright Spring day in the mountains above a lake where, as the tagline suggests, it’s a “Lovely day for a Guinness.”
Earlier this month, AC Golden Brewing — a wholly-owned subsidiary of MillerCoors — announced their newest project, Colorado Native. AC Golden is essentially just the Coors pilot brewery located inside Coors’ massive brewery complex in Golden, Colorado. Pretending they’re a small, separate, independent company may work on paper, for legal purposes, but I’d like to believe that most people can see through the deception.
The idea behind Colorado Native, while arguably laudable, seems too calculated to be sincere, especially when it’s being done by a global multinational company. Designed to appeal to locavores, it’s “brewed in Colorado with virtually all Colorado ingredients, more than any other beer.” More than any other beer? Do they mean more than any other beer in Colorado? Or any other beer, regardless of where it’s from? If the latter, I believe they may be forgetting Sierra Nevada’s Estate Ale.
The beer itself is an amber lager, which should at least please Michael Lewis, who at this year’s CBC famously dissed any craft beer that’s not a lager. Still, it’s hard to get worked up about a beer, no matter how well-intentioned, that’s made in the heart of one of the largest single breweries in the world. To me that sends a mixed message at best. The beer may taste fine, and probably does, but it’s not be marketed on taste, it’s being used instead to sell an idea. And that’s where I think it’s doomed to fail. No matter how native Colorado Native is, it still can’t separate itself from the unnaturally large parent company that’s about as un-local as a business can be.
The other odd bit about Colorado Native is that it’s also being promoted using social media, as detailed in Advertising Age. They have a Facebook page and will be using SnapTag technology on its packaging, something other “small” companies like Unilever, Ford and Crayola are also using to reach and data mine customers. In the AdAge piece, here’s how they characterize breweries using social media.
Brewers have typically been slow to move into mobile and social-media channels because of concerns that age verification presents too big a hurdle for consumers to be willing to jump over — Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Michelob is perhaps the only major-brewery owned brand on Twitter, for instance — but that isn’t stopping MillerCoors here.
Huh, how did they miss the literally hundreds of small breweries on Twitter and Facebook, so many it’s a damn phenomenon. Over the past two years, the Craft Brewers Conference has held two panel discussions about the use of social media by breweries, one of which I sat on the panel. And their comment about age verification continues to stick in my craw. Where the hell does it say only adults can TALK or READ about alcohol? Drink, yes, I disagree with that but understand it. That people under 21 aren’t allowed to read about beer on websites is something that makes no earthly sense.
But back to Colorado Native. Using tools that only very large companies can afford doesn’t make them seem particularly small or local, which as far as I can tell is the image they’re trying to project. In the Denver Business Journal, SnapTag’s chief marketing officer Jane McPherson was quoted. “Rather than just looking at the bottle, they [consumers] can have a much fuller brand experience.” I know marketing is important, but really? A “fuller brand experience?” I have no doubt that the brewers tried to create the best-tasting beer they could, but this whole “project” seems more about the image and marketing than the beer. It’s more about trying to fit an identified niche than just creating a beer they like and trying to see if people like it and will buy it, too. It just feels too calculated. And that’s why, to me, it may be a native beer, but it still seems entirely unnatural.
Friday’s ad is for a Canadian beer from Labatt’s. Labatt’s 50 Ale debuted in 1950 “to commemorate 50 years of partnership” and until 1979 was their best-selling beer. According to Labatt’s website:
John and Hugh Labatt, grandsons of founder John K. Labatt, launched Labatt 50 in 1950 to commemorate 50 years of partnership. The first light-tasting ale introduced in Canada, Labatt 50 was Canada’s best-selling beer until 1979 when, with the increasing popularity of lagers, it was surpassed by Labatt Blue. Labatt 50 is fermented using a special ale yeast, in use at Labatt since 1933. Specially-selected North American hops and a good balance of dryness, complemented by a fruity taste, provide Labatt 50 with all the distinguishing features of a true ale.
According to the ad copy, it was “Canada’s fastest growing ale because it has Spirit!” I’m not even sure what that means. The artwork looks typical of North American beer ads from the 1950s and so I suspect the ad is from that decade.
Thursday’s ads are for Budějovický Budvar — one of two original Budweisers — known in the U.S. as Czechvar for reasons I’m sure you understand. The town of České Budějovice or Budweis inspired Anheuser-Busch to name their beer Budweiser, which essentially means beer from Budweis. It was today in 1895 that Budějovický Budvar was founded, which is why I decided to highlight one of their ad campaigns today.
In 2004, Budvar launched an ad campaign called the Ten Commandments, in which ten ads detailed what they considered good brewing practices, in part to distance themselves from larger European lager breweries that had made ingredient and process decisions that saved money but deviated from traditional brewing. The ads are meant to look intentionally old from the look of the paper, the text and the artwork. Each illustration shows the brewing practice and a possible punishment for breaking it. While I couldn’t find a full translation of them, I guessed as best I could.
Below is Commandment #2: Use Only Whole Hops.
You can see the rest of the Commandments below is a slideshow of Budvar’s Ten Beer Commandments. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.
This is my fourth annual annotated list of the Top 50 so you can see who moved up and down, who was new to the list and who dropped off. So here is this year’s list again annotated with how they changed compared to last year.
Two breweries are new to the list this year, Lost Coast and Stevens Point (who’ve transitioned to primarily all-malt brewing), while two dropped off the list; Cold Springs Brewery (fka Gluek Brewing) and Mac and Jack’s Brewery.
If you want to see the previous annotated lists for comparison, here is 2008, 2007 and 2006.
The Brewers Association has also just announced the top 50 breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2009. This includes all breweries, regardless of size or other parameters. Here is the new list:
Here is this year’s press release.
Also, the Annotated List is now up.
The Brewers Association just announced the top 50 breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2009, which is listed below here. For the third time, they’ve also released a list of the top 50 craft breweries based on the new definition adopted by the Brewers Association a few years ago. Here is the new craft brewery list:
Four breweries are new to the Top 50 Craft Breweries list; Bear Republic Brewing, Oskar Blues Brewery, Saint Arnold Brewing and Stevens Point. In addition, four dropped off the list; Otter Creek Brewing, Pete’s Brewing, McMenamins and Anderson Valley Brewing. Here is this year’s press release.
I’ll have my annual annotated list shortly.
Wednesday’s ads are not particularly old, but they are pretty clever. They’re actually ads for one of my least favorite beers — Heineken — but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the artistry and creativity of them. I chose a Heineken ad today because on this day in 1933, Heineken began importing their beer to the U.S. once more, since Prohibition had just ended. The slogan that ties the ads together is “For a Fresher World,” ironic given Heineken’s proclivity to becoming lightstruck (a.k.a. skunked) due, at least in part, to using green glass bottles and most grocery stores employing fluorescent lighting. In each ad, they’ve used Heineken’s various packages (bottles, cans, kegs, 12-packs, etc.) to create cityscapes of famous places. I’m sure it was done with computers, similar, I suspect, to Lego’s Design by Me software that my son Porter and I have been playing around with lately to create virtual Lego worlds. But instead of Lego pieces as building blocks, Heineken packages. The green-tinted cities are are a wonder to behold, what the Emerald City of Oz might have looked like if all the Munchkins drank beer.
Because I used to live in New York, it’s the most impressive one to me, especially in the higher resolution version (click on the image to see it larger, then click on “all sizes”). Check out the corkscrew as lady liberty, the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your thirsty, your parched, your beerless masses yearning to drink free.”
In addition to New York, there’s also one of Rio de Janiero.
And also Paris.
Saturday night, the last night of the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago — it being a World Beer Cup year — there was an awards banquet where the medals are handed out to a packed crowd of brewers and beer industry people. This year’s banquet, with 2,000 people, is believed to be the biggest beer dinner ever done — somebody call Guinness. At five courses, that’s 10,000 plates. The amount of food used reads like those lists you see for Oktoberfest. The dinner used 600 gallons of beer to pair with the courses, 200 gallons of beer to cook with, 400 pounds of butter, 300 loaves of bread, 500 pounds of onions, 600 pounds of pork belly, 160 pounds of mushrooms, 275 dozen eggs, 160 pounds of malt and 6 gallons of honey. The meal was created by Sean Paxton and Randy Mosher, with the recipes and cooking by Sean Paxton, a.k.a. the Homebrew Chef. It was impossible to capture the whole banquet space with a photo, so below is a short video of the beer dinner’s setting, shot shortly before it began.
Randy Mosher and Sean Paxton.
Here, Sean and Randy explain the beer dinner we’re about to enjoy.
The five courses are detailed below in the slideshow. Despite the size of the dinner, the service was surprisingly swift and before we knew it, it was time for the World Beer Cup award ceremony to begin.
After the dinner; Matt Brynildson, Nancy Johnson and Sean Paxton.
Below is a slideshow of the World Beer Cup dinner. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.
Tuesday’s ad is a bit of a horror show. The ad is for Bud Dry, since it was on this day in 1989 that Anheuser-Busch debuted the line extension to test markets, rolling it out nationally the following year. I’m no fashion historian, but those look like every bad fashion look from the late 1980s. Who do you think the target demographic was with this ad? The car is a 1957 Corvette. And maybe it’s just me, but apart from the obvious titillation and appeal to prurient interests, why advertise something called “dry” with such a “wet” scene?
