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UK Neo-Prob’s Go Nuts … Again

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There’s a great post today by Pete Brown concerning more nonsense from Great Britain’s neo-prohibitionist-leaning government flacks. Yet again confirming, at least to me, his status as a kindred spirit regarding this issue, Pete begins with this understandably anger-fueled assessment of the situation. This story comes at the beginning of the year, when people are stopping to take stock of their lives, but instead “the neo-prohibitionists go completely fucking apeshit, pouncing on the moment when many moderate drinkers prove they don’t have a drink problem by taking a few weeks off the sauce, and use it to ram fear and alarm down the nations throats as never before.”

Effectively, the tortured math from the UK’s National Health Service suggests that one-and-a-half pints of lager constitutes “hazardous behavior,” even if that amount is consumed over a week’s time! Congratulations to England, they’ve finally beaten us in being completely ridiculous about drinking guidelines. Read Pete’s post, it’s brilliant stuff.

Big Beer Balloon

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Need a giant promotional balloon for your business? How about a 15-foot mug of beer? If you’re in Florida, you can rent one from Giant Balloon Rental. They also have a giant Coors beer can, too. That one is 23-feet tall. I’m guessing if one balloon rental company has it, they all probably do. I want one for my next party, much better than a jumpie house.

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Photoshop Fun With Beer: A Time Suck

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The humor website Freaking News, whose tagline is “News Photoshop Contests,” apparently has held several contests involving beer, challenging people to create funny pictures using Photoshop. In some cases they offer an image to start with and manipulate and in others they just suggest a theme. Below are some of my favorites from the Cold Draft Beer contest.

FN-Boom-Beer
Boom!

FN-Beer-Lake
Beer Lake.

FN-Drunk-Bouguereau
Drunk Bouguereau. The original is La Petite Mendiante (The Little Beggar) painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1880.

You can see many more beer-altered photos in these contest galleries. Warning: it’s a time suck.

  • Beer Endorsement Pictures
  • Beer Mug Pictures
  • Beer Olympics
  • Cold Draft Beer
  • Pint of Beer Pictures

Session #35: New Beer’s Resolutions

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Our 35th Session is hosted by Christina Perozzi & Hallie Beaune, authors of the recently published beer book, The Naked Pint. For now the announcement is currently up on Beer For Chicks, but soon enough, the Session will be on The Beer Chicks, a new website by Perozzi & Beaune. But back to their Session topic — “New Beer’s Resolutions” — which they describe thusly:

So we want to know what was your best and worst of beer for 2009? What beer mistakes did you make? What beer resolutions do you have for 2010? What are your beer regrets and embarrassing moments? What are you hoping to change about your beer experience in 2010?

Hmm, that’s a lot to swallow. Ba-dump-bump. Rimshot!

Rim Shot  Cool Sounds sound bites

Best and worst beers of last year? I certainly had plenty of great beer throughout 2009. The new Utopias? Life & Limb? Pliny the Younger? Black Tuesday? Dark Lord? Tasting directly from the barrels at Russian River? I don’t think I could pick just one favorite. A worst beer? I tend to forget the bad as soon as it’s gone. I’d rather focus on the great beer. Beer mistakes? Undoubtedly, at least I hope so. As Joyce said, “a man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” Beer regrets? I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention. Embarrassing moments? For a second year in a row, I didn’t make it all the way through the Keene tasting at Brouwers, the day after the Hard Liver Barleywine Festival.

session_logo_all_text_200

“What are you hoping to change about your beer experience in 2010?” Okay, that’s a question I can sink my teeth into. This is probably going to sound odd, but I think I’d like to drink more beer in 2010. As it is, I drink almost every day. But usually it’s at home, afternoons and usually later in the evening with dinner. With a second grader and a kindergartner that need to get picked up every day and shepherded around to music lessons, etc., it’s not exactly easy to be out drinking every night. But in a sense that’s where the magic happens. Setting is important.

Me and Bruce Paton
In 2010, I want to do this more. Just be out more, drinking with friends.

So that’s my hope. To share a beer with more people this year, get out of the house more. Spend more time in bars, restaurants and breweries. That’s one of my New Beer’s Resolution, to drink more beer. Join me?

Bruce Paton & I drink the first beer of the day
Drinking my first beer on New Year’s Day at Barclay’s in Oakland with Bruce Paton, the Beer Chef. My first beer this year was Moonlight Toast, which I followed with Moonlight’s Christmas beer: Santa’s Tipple.

You can also see some more photos in this slideshow from today’s quick trip to Barclay’s.

Beer In Ads #13: Schlitz Here’s One I Can Understand

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It’s the first day of the new year, of course, and this year I’ll be highlighting beer ads every week day — Monday through Friday — instead of just once a week on Thursdays. I just have too many already collected that I think are wonderful and merit sharing, so I decided to make 2010 the year of the beer ad here at the Brookston Beer Bulletin. Some will be old, some from mid-century (the 50s, 60 and 70s) and other will be more contemporary. The only unifying theme is that I think they’re artistic, more clever than the usual beer ad or have something else going for them. Feel free to suggest an ad you like and, if I agree, I’ll put it in the queue.

The year’s first ad, from Schlitz, was published in 1952. I don’t know who the artist was, but it looks like many other Schlitz ads from the same period, so it may have been a house illustrator. But it seemed appropriate for today because it’s set in an art museum, where I believe all of these ads belong.

schlitz-art-musem-1952

Here’s One I Can Understand

This man may not be an art expert, but he knows fine beer when he tastes it. There are millions of people like him … people who like the taste of Schlitz so much that no other beer is in the picture for them.

Toasting the New Year 2010

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Here at the Brookston Beer Bulletin we’re pausing today to wish you and yours a very Happy New Year. 2009 was yet another interesting year and was rarely dull with plenty of drama. Nobody knows with any real certainty what 2010 will be like for the beer industry, but I’ll be here for my fifth straight year of ranting about it, er .. analyzing it, online. I hope you’ll join me on another year’s worth of adventure in the beer world.
 

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Taken last night in front of the Christmas tree; Alice, Porter and a tasty beer. Westvleteren. What better way to start the new year. Sometime today raise a glass of a tasty libation as we toast you a Happy New Year with one of my favorites:

Observe, when Mother Earth is dry,
She drinks the droppings of the sky,
And then the dewey cordial gives
To every thirsty plant that lives.

The vapors which at evening sweep
Are beverage to the swelling deep,
And when the rosy sun appears,
He drinks the misty ocean’s tears.

The moon, too, quaffs her paly stream
Of lustre from the solar beam;
Then hence with all your sober thinking!
Since Nature’s holy law is drinking,
Mine’s the law of Nature here,
And pledge the Universe in beer.

            — Tom Moore, The Universal Toast

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This is one my favorite out-takes. I have plenty more of the kids mugging for the camera and making funny faces. And here’s one final toast.

Love to one, friendship to many, and good will to all.

            — Anonymous

Welcome to 2010.

Here are more of my favorite toasts. Let me know if I’m missing one of your favorites.

My Report Card From 2009

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Last year at this time, I made my usual five predictions for the 2009 beer year. Let’s see how I did.

 
2009 will be the year of the collaboration beer.

My Score: A+
Boy howdy, was it ever. Even Sierra Nevada waded into the collaborative pool with their first one. Collaborations between brewers were everywhere throughout the year and at this point I’d wager they’re here to stay.

 
Food & Beer Goes Mainstream.

My Score: B-
While beer dinners and food pairing events are still on the rise, things didn’t reaching the tipping point I thought they might or hoped they would.

 
Merger shakeouts will effect small brewers.

My Score: C
While mergers among distributors did continue in 2009, and the mess between ABIB and MillerCoors and their distributors still hasn’t reached a final solution, most regional brewers didn’t feel the pinch much. The fact that craft beer is growing faster than domestic and imports didn’t hurt, either. But some small brewers continued to look for alternative distribution solutions so it’s still not all rosy either.

 
Beer prices will continue to rise.

My Score: A
All the rising ingredient costs finally caught up with the big brewers, who previously had been trying to keep retail prices down. But InBev’s philosophy regarding pricing is fundamentally different than A-B’s had been, so when they announced price hikes, everyone else followed suit (as they usually do).

 
New Drys’ attacks will be more aggressive.

My Score: A+
This one was probably a little too predictable, but I was yet again surprised by just how aggressive these buzzkillers were in 2009. The vituperation of their rhetoric, the lengths they went to bend facts to their will and the outright fabrications are just astounding, especially given that the basis for their point of view is often on moral grounds. That their words and deeds can be so void of morality in the ends-justify-the-means approach taken seems a cruel irony that appears lost on them.

 
04-bp
Overall Score: B+
I think I did better last year, though in three out of five this year I think I hit the nail on the head pretty well. But the other two, not so much. C’est la vie. Now, to put on the ol’ thinking cap for next year’s predictions. See you next year!

Tomorrow I’ll make my predictions for 2010.

When All Else Fails, Blame Society

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crime-dog
Here’s another troubling development in the drive to erase alcohol from society. A study to be published next March in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research was featured in Science Daily last week based on an early view of the study online. (Thanks to Bulletin reader Pete M. for sending this to me.) That account was titled Alcohol Outlets Lead to Specific Problems Among Youth and Young Adults suggesting the issue is settled but the study’s title is a more vague: Ecological Associations of Alcohol Outlets With Underage and Young Adult Injuries. The Science Daily account is based on the study, but being unwilling to shell out the necessary doubloons for a subscription so I can read the whole thing means only the abstract is available to me, and it’s one of the least useful ones I’ve ever read, having almost no real information about the study at all. Here it is in its entirety.

Objective: This paper argues that associations between rates of 3 specific problems related to alcohol (i.e., accidents, traffic crashes, and assaults) should be differentially related to densities of alcohol outlets among underage youth and young adults based upon age-related patterns of alcohol outlet use.

Methods: Zip code-level population models assessed local and distal effects of alcohol outlets upon rates of hospital discharges for these outcomes.

Results: Densities of off-premise alcohol outlets were significantly related to injuries from accidents, assaults, and traffic crashes for both underage youth and young adults. Densities of bars were associated with more assaults and densities of restaurants were associated with more traffic crash injuries for young adults.

Conclusions: The distribution of alcohol-related injuries relative to alcohol outlets reflect patterns of alcohol outlet use.

From Science Daily’s account:

“Over the past four decades, public health researchers have come to recognize that although most drinkers safely purchase and enjoy alcohol from alcohol outlets, these places are also associated with serious alcohol-related problems among young people and adults,” said Paul J. Gruenewald, senior research scientist at the Prevention Research Center and corresponding author for the study.

“In the early studies, researchers believed associations were due to increased alcohol consumption related to higher alcohol outlet densities,” added Richard Scribner, D’Angelo Professor of Alcohol Research at the LSU School of Public Health. “However, as the research area has matured, the relations appear to be far more complex. It seems that alcohol outlets represent an important social institution within a neighborhood. As a result, their effects are not limited to merely the consequences of the sale of alcohol.”

So while admitting the problem is very complex, they nonetheless go on to leap to some pretty simple conclusions, that don’t seem at all supported by the evidence. At a minimum, their conclusions are only one of many possible reasons for the results their data seems to show, but which in no way leads to one inescapable conclusion, as they seem to think.

As my Bulletin reader Pete succinctly puts it:

It strikes me as another example of a giant leap of logic between an observed correlation and implied causation. There’s a link between, on the one hand, the residential ZIP Codes of patients of certain ages discharged from hospital for certain injuries, and on the other, the number of bars, restaurants, and liquor stores in those same ZIP Codes. Interesting, perhaps, but the real question is why?

Exactly. Why indeed?

But the truly scary bit is in their half-baked conclusions.

The key message, said both Gruenewald and Scribner, is that a neighborhood’s alcohol environment plays a role in regulating the risks that youth and young adults will be exposed to as they mature.

“From a prevention perspective, this represents an important refocusing of priorities, away from targeting the individual to targeting the community,” said Scribner. “This is hopeful because a community-based approach that addresses the over concentration of alcohol outlets in a neighborhood where youth injuries are a problem is relatively easy compared with interventions targeting each youth individually.”

So liquor stores are already subject to strict zoning in many places, will this be used to further isolate them next to the adult bookstores at the edge of towns? Won’t that just increase drunk driving?

Again, I turn to Pete’s assessment.

With no other supporting evidence, the study’s authors appear to suggest that more of these “alcohol outlets” in your neighborhood lead to more assaults, accidents, etc. They make this assertion despite the fact that the hospital data they used doesn’t say whether or not alcohol was even involved in those cases. Moreover, the ZIP Code of one’s residence is often not the ZIP Code where one purchases and consumes their alcohol; where we live and where we drink are not the same, particularly at the spatial resolution of ZIP Codes.

If they really want to explain the empirical patterns they found, I suggest the researchers look at other factors that might correlate with the geography of alcohol outlets. Check zoning ordinances, for example, and the neighborhoods in which such outlets are allowed. My guess is you’d find nearby residences populated disproportionately by less affluent households, ones who are either: (a) at more risk of being involved in an accident or assault regardless of any connection to alcohol, and/or (b) are less likely to have health insurance and thus more likely to end up in a hospital emergency room following minor altercations and accidents that would be treated on an outpatient basis in a more affluent part of town.

There are no doubt plenty of possible explanations; the quickness with which researches will jump to the conclusion that it’s the alcohol’s fault never ceases to amaze me.

Indeed, that is the mystery and the trouble, especially as this is the sort of thing that neo-prohibitionist groups, spearheaded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have been spending millions of dollars on, and not surprisingly getting the results that they want to further their agenda. There are research groups funded by the brewing industry that come to opposite conclusions, of course, but those are usually discounted or discredited for that affiliation, yet the media rarely does the same to studies like this one, not even bothering to ask about the funding or the agenda of the group. That such studies can then be published in “legitimate” science journals makes them even less likely to be questioned, even though that’s exactly what the media should be doing.

Don’t worry, it’s the not the individual person who abuses alcohol and good sense that’s at fault here, it’s the community where he lives. As a Monty Python skit once suggested, with a Bobby investigating a murder: “society’s to blame? Let’s lock them up instead.”

Top 10 Beer Stories of 2009

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Here we go again. It’s year’s end once more and time for reflection on the past and what it might mean for the future, or at least the next year. While these top ten lists are ubiquitous at this time of year, I enjoy them too much all year long to not continue them through the holidays. It helps, I think, to stop and reflect on what happened over the previous year which puts the whole year in perspective and makes it easier to prepare for the coming one. So here are my choices for the top ten beer stories of 2009.
 

The Explosion of Beer Weeks: Prior to this year there had been beer weeks, but 2009 saw an explosion of new week-long beer celebrations all around the country. Beerapalooza morphed into SF Beer Week, along with new ones in Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle and two in Washington, D.C. And more are planned for 2010, bringing the total number of beer weeks very close to two dozen.

Bill Brand Passed Away: This is probably a bigger story in the Bay Area, but Bill’s influence as a beer writer was broader and wider than just Northern California. Bill had many more stories to tell when the train struck him in February of this year, and his loss continues to be felt throughout the beer world.

ABIB Begins Acting Like We Thought They Would: Despite promises by InBev throughout the negotiating process to buy Anhesuer-Busch, the newly configured ABIB in January began acting exactly like everyone who’s followed the company believed they would. In January they closed their London brewery, V-P Bob Lachky left mysteriously in February, in early March they began dictating new terms to understandably pissed-off suppliers and at the end of that month suspended the “born on date” on many brands. That’s in addition to lay-offs, price hikes and other “changes” to their corporate structure.

White House Ties To Neo-Prohibitionists: This was quite troubling, especially to those of us in the Liberal camp, but in April newly elected President Obama chose the Director of MADD to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, all but insuring no sane decisions in the near future. A few months later, in October, it was revealed that the head of neo-prohibitionist groups had visited the White House on numerous occasions, even meeting with the President a few times. During the same time period, no beer or alcohol representatives had similar access. And all this took place while the neo-prohibitionist groups were crying about the beer lobby and its undue influence in government.

Tactical Nuclear Penguin: Love it or hate it, no beer managed to get as much ink this year as the Scottish BrewDog’s record-beating Tactical Nuclear Penguin. At 32% a.b.v., it’s now the strongest beer in the world. The collaboration between Dogfish Head and Sierra Nevada that resulted in Life & Limb was a close second.

The Beer Summit: Though July’s presidential Beer Summit at the White House did no real favors for craft beer, it did put beer front and center in the public consciousness for a few days. Everyone wanted to talk beer and the speculation about what beer each of the three men would choose became fever pitch in the days leading up to the non-event.

Rock Art’s Vermonster vs. A True Monster: This year’s David and Goliath story involved the Hansen Beverage Company and their flagship Monster Energy Drink. It’s probably no coincidence that they recently signed a distribution with the famously litigious Anheuser-Busch, but when they got wind of a seasonal release by the tiny Rock Art Brewery, named Vermonster, a battery of white-lipped attorneys were set loose on the unsuspecting Vermont microbrewery. The arguments that they made were more facetious than even are normally made in these bully fights, and there was a groundswell of outrage, helped along by new social media like Twitter and Facebook. In the end, Hansen backed down and got essentially what Rock Art offered them in the beginning, but with the added bonus that many people — myself included — will never buy another Hansen’s product as long as they live. Bullies should never be rewarded.

Beer Wars: The Movie: While the movie itself sparked its own war of sorts online, the pre-release marketing and filmmaker Anat Baron’s continued engagement of the beer community afterward has kept its message going, debated and analyzed for most of the year. Whether you appreciated what the film was trying to accomplish or not, it did keep things lively throughout 2009.

It’s the Economy, Stupid: When the economy tanked, many states and even the Federal government — urged on by neo-prohibitionists taking advantage of the situation — floated bills and other legislation trying to punish the beer and alcohol industry with higher taxes. The rationale for all of this was that strapped budgets needed to be put right and called on alcohol to pay even more than it already does (which is more than any other goods save tobacco.) While many such misguided attempts were ultimately defeated, many more remain open and worrisome.

Recession-Proof Craft Beer: Though the sales figures for craft beer did dip slightly, they continued to be healthy and far greater then either imports or domestic macrobeer. And growth by dollars continued to rise, in part due to higher prices, but also due in part to consumer’s willingness to pay a little bit more for better beer, seen as an affordable luxury. This essentially confirmed the recession-proof nature of beer, and especially craft beer. I’ve personally spoken to many, many breweries who are continuing to see excellent sales and sales growth in stark contrast to the big guys.

And what will next year bring? See my post later this week with my predictions for the beer industry in 2010.