Thursday’s ad is from 1951 and is for Goebel Beer, a brewery in Detroit, Michigan from 1873 to 1964. Through the mergermania of the latter half of the 20th century it ended up being owned by Stroh’s. They did a series of ads featuring beautiful landscapes with a glass of Goebel’s in the foreground. My favorite part of the text is “Goebel Beer — It’s Mello-ized.”
A new study was just published online, and will be in print in next month’s journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research with the nearly impenetrable title Sociodemographic Predictors of Pattern and Volume of Alcohol Consumption Across Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites: 10-Year Trend (1992–2002). CNN simplified the story’s title, originally from Health.com, to More Americans Drinking Alcohol. To me the most interesting thing about this is that it’s really two stories, one positive and one sort of negative, and it’s all in the way it’s framed.
As presented on CNN, the story begins with mainly the positive aspects of the story. More Americans Drinking (Alcohol) summarizes the study like this:
Between 1992 and 2002, the percentage of men and women who drank alcohol increased, as did the percentage of whites, blacks, and Hispanics, the study found.
Americans don’t seem to be drinking more, however, as the average number of drinks consumed per month remained steady.
“More people are drinking, but they seem to not be drinking heavily as frequently,” says Rhonda Jones-Webb, an epidemiologist and alcohol expert at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, in Minneapolis.
So that’s good news, especially considering that moderate drinking is healthier for you than abstaining or over-indulging. So if more people are hitting the sweet spot, so to speak, that should be good news, eh?
Oh, but wait, here comes the other shoe:
Yet the study revealed an important exception to that trend: an uptick in the number of people who binge drink at least once a month. Binge drinking is defined as consuming five or more drinks in one day.
“We need to address this increase, which may be associated with alcohol abuse,” says Dr. Deborah Dawson, Ph.D., a staff scientist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, in Bethesda, Maryland. “We may need focus our attention on preventive measures that target binge drinking.”
Of course the main problem with all that alarm over binge drinking is the definition itself. Five drinks in one day is an absurd way to define binge drinking. Originally it was essentially a bender with no limits. Little by little the definition has been whittled down by organizations and our government keen to have a number they could use in compiling statistics. But that also means a five-course beer dinner creates an event where every single diner is a binge drinker. Even the new Dietary Guidelines just released have changed the standard from daily to weekly allowable amounts and changed the daily standard to four drinks for a male, so long as the weekly limit is not reached. So that means four drinks in one day is fine, but one more and you’re a dangerous binge drinker. It’s this sort of nonsense that allows neo-prohibitionist groups to use suspect statistics with the government imprimatur to give them more credibility than they rightly deserve.
Then there’s this chestnut:
The rise in the proportion of drinkers and in binge drinking could be a sign that society is more accepting of alcohol consumption (and overconsumption), says Dr. Stephen Bahr, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah.
“There has been much emphasis on drug education and treatment but not as much emphasis on alcohol misuse, which could signal a change in norms and explain the increase in the prevalence of drinkers,” he says.
I don’t know what planet Bahr lives on, but when my kindergartner is lectured to with MADD propaganda that alcohol is a drug and he comes home with the notion that his parents are drug users because they have a beer with dinner, I’d say there’s plenty emphasis on alcohol misuse. It’s absurd in light of all the anti-alcohol propaganda for anyone to suggest people are drinking more because they haven’t heard it might be bad for them. If anything, they’re preached to death.
The original Health.com piece, Survey: More Americans Drinking Alcohol, is under the section heading Alcoholism, subtly framing the story as if it’s about alcoholism, which of course it’s not. More people drinking does not automatically mean there are more alcoholics or even more people at risk of becoming alcoholics. But framed the way it is, that’s what it seems to presuppose.
Some of the other findings, as reported by Health.com:
The study itself only concluded the following, at least in the abstract:
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.
I’m sorry, having five drinks on a given day once a month, or even once a week, is hardly a sign of the fall of civilization, even if a few more are now than they were ten years ago. I’m not even sure it’s all that newsworthy. But for reasons passing understanding — perhaps it’s simply the 24/7 news cycle — it became news and even got picked up by CNN.
James Spencer at Public CEO, a California government-focused blog, has an interesting read today about an e-mail he received from the Marin Institute and what he found when he looked closer at it. It’s entitled Who’s Really Behind the Booze Tax and Why? and it’s certainly great to see more people taking a critical look at San Francisco’s proposed new tax on alcohol and exposing it for what it really is.
His conclusion?
They hate alcohol and don’t want it around. Fair enough, but why weren’t they open from the start? The email should have read: “We are against alcohol and we don’t want you to drink it.” The Marin Institute isn’t looking out for the best interest of the city of San Francisco or its economy. It has its own interests. And if their true goal is to stop us from drinking alcohol, then they must understand that this tax is going to have a dramatic effect on reducing sales, right? Sounds like they are making the argument for why this additional alcohol fee would be a terrible idea.
Wednesday’s ad is from the 1960 and is for Schlitz, featuring the slogan “Know the real joy good living … move up to Schlitz!” Some of the good living go-togethers include pretzels, popcorn, crackers and burgers.
According to a recent study by the NPD Group, a research firm, 5,204 restaurants have closed since the Spring of 2009, representing a 1% drop in the total number. As reported in the Nations Restaurant News, “[i]ndependent restaurants took the hardest hits, while chains kept their unit counts relatively stable.” As the Brewers Association revealed last week, brewpub openings increased slightly, reversing a trend where they’d been losing ground to the recession. Perhaps that’s tied to craft beer’s continuing increases, perhaps not. In any event, less restaurant visits means less opportunities to purchase beer, so that’s bad news for the production breweries who sell packaged and draft beer to restaurants.
Tuesday’s ad is from the 1950s and is for Schlitz, featuring a beautiful natural vista with a man holding up a glass of beer against it as backdrop. And the slogan, “Move up to quality — move up to Schlitz,” is kind of a hoot. But I certainly want to be in that spot with a beer, if indeed it’s even a real place.
Drawing on the USA Today article Dry America’s Not-So-Sober Reality: It’s Shrinking Fast, Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, a non-profit organization that debunks anti-gay lies and myths, has an intriguing piece on the Huffington Post comparing anti-gay activist tactics to those of neo-prohibitionists. It’s called Beers and Queers, and is worth reading, regardless of how you feel about either issue.
USA Today ran an interesting story earlier this month about the dry counties dotting still the landscape, areas within eight states where despite alcohol being legal statewide, it’s still illegal in those counties (along with some specific towns). According to Dry America’s Not-So-Sober Reality: It’s Shrinking Fast, many of the remaining 328 may soon become wet, too.
From the article:
Today, 1 in 9 counties is still dry. But drys are losing ground on all levels, from the state — since 2002, 14 states have ended bans on Sunday alcohol sales — to the very local. In April, a 19-block section of western Louisville (the M-107 precinct) voted 89-41 to go wet.
The number of Tennessee communities that allow sales of liquor by the drink (in bars and restaurants) has increased 56% since 2003. In the same period, 22 of Texas’ 254 counties and more than 235 of its municipalities have gone wet (or “moist,” a nebulous category in which beer and wine might be legal, but not liquor).
Even in Kansas — the state that produced the ax-wielding saloon-wrecker Carry Nation; that passed the first state prohibition law in 1881; and that did not repeal it until 1948 — 16 counties have gone wet since 2002.
One interesting side note is that economics is one of the most popular reasons, with communities wanting the tax revenue from alcohol sales. But that’s also the way that neo-prohibitionists have been going after alcohol, by trying to impose more and higher taxes. An interesting dichotomy, I’d say. Below is a nice chart of where the dry counties are and their number as compared to the total counties in each state.
Another d’uh study was just released by the Mintel Group, showing that Alcohol Manufacturers Drink in Profits From At-Home Consumption, almost as if the alcohol industry manufactured the recession.
With fewer jobs, less money circulating (at least in the bottom 99% of the economy) and the nation deep in recession, exactly what result would any reasonable person expect but the fact that more people are staying home? Here’s what Mintel’s study found:
Among alcohol drinkers, 90% consume alcoholic beverages at home, compared to 77% who drink outside the home. Furthermore, those surveyed consume almost twice the amount of drinks at home in an average month than they do in restaurants or bars (10 vs. 5.7).
The nearly $80 billion off-premise alcoholic beverage market has grown 21% since 2004 as more consumers cut back on eating out in light of trying economic times. Drinkers are also cutting back in terms of the alcohol they’re purchasing for at-home consumption — 28% of respondents who drink alcoholic beverages at home have traded down to less expensive brands than last year to save money.
“In a price-sensitive environment, consumers may shy away from discretionary expenses, like alcohol, to save a few bucks,” says Garima Goel-Lal, senior analyst at Mintel. “About half of those who report drinking alcohol at home are drinking less than they did a year ago, but the market is still enjoying viability.”
While beer enjoys the largest share of market sales (48%), wine is the most popular alcoholic beverage consumed off-premise, with 67% of those who drink alcohol at home indulging in a glass. Distilled spirits are consumed by 57% of respondents and regular beer by 53%.
To me, the most interesting statistic is that drinking at home is causing people to have almost twice as much when they imbibe. In a sense, it’s like a backlash against people being afraid to drink when they’re out due to the efforts of neo-prohibitionists to create such anti-alcohol atmosphere. I wonder how that registers with their community? In fact, Join Together led with the bit about people drinking more, though you’d think that perhaps they’d be celebrating the fact that less people are driving to do their drinking.
Monday’s ad is from 1959 and is for a brewery I’d not heard of before, Hampden Brewery of Willimansett, Massachusetts. The guy at the sparse desk is Karl H. Bissell, Sr., chairman of the board for the brewery, though at that time it was known as Hampden-Harvard Brewing. Eventually Piels bought it but the brewery was shut down in 1975. Curiously, it’s been restarted as a craft brewery earlier this year as Hampden Brewing Co.
Frankly, Bissell looks more like James Carville and I’m not quite sure how this guy with his cueball noggin sitting behind a big, empty desk was meant to inspire brand loyalty or switching brands. And the slogan “New England’s Finest Beer At New England’s Fairest Price” is not exactly Shakespeare, either.
They appear to have brewed ales and lagers.
