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Beer In Art #77: George Garrard’s Whitbread Brewery

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art-beer
Today’s works of art are from the 18th century by a fairly minor artist: George Garrard, who was born in London and lived from May 31, 1760 to October 8, 1826. The first painting below is entitled Loading the Drays at Whitbread Brewery, Chiswell Street, London, and was painted in 1783.

Garrard_loading-drays

The second, below here, is known as Whitbread Brewery in Chiswell Street and was painted the previous year, 1792. Wikipedia has a little more information about an engraving of it. “A painted engraving of Whitbread Brewery in Chiswell Street London in 1792. It it also titled ‘A View from the East-End of the Brewery Chiswell Street, The famous Whitbread Brewery. A carthorse is being backed into a dray.'”

Garrard_whitbread

Here’s some biographical information about Garrard, from Answers.com:

George Garrard (b London, 31 May 1760; d London, 8 Oct 1826). English painter and sculptor. After serving an apprenticeship with Sawrey Gilpin, later his father-in-law, Garrard became a student at the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1778, exhibiting his first sporting picture there in 1781. Though his occasional genre paintings were better received than his many animal subjects (Sir Joshua Reynolds purchased his View of a Brew-house Yard from the Academy exhibition of 1784), he initially determined to practise as a sporting artist, probably on the advice of the notorious sportsman Colonel Thomas Thornton (1755-1823) for whom he had worked in the 1780s.

You can see a few more of Garrard’s paintings at Bridgeman and also at the Tate Museum.

Portland Food Writer Goes Negative

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thumbs-down
This is just disappointing. A writer at the Portland Mercury, Patrick Alan Coleman, missed the point of the Beer City USA poll by Charlie Papazian and the Brewers Association and instead took things negative with this missive.

Normally I wouldn’t be concerned about something from the Examiner. But Asheville, NC? We’ve got to take them down. We’ve got more “beer city” in the backwash at the bottom of our pint glasses than can be found in all of their pubs and breweries.

Dude, you should be ashamed of yourself. This is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be about civic pride, beer pride, beer community pride and building up support for your hometown. It’s not supposed to be about tearing down the other communities. It’s not about insulting other communities. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you’ve never even been to Asheville or probably any other beer towns, either, because you come off like a provincial bigot. You’re not helping your community. Both towns have a lot to offer, beer-wise. It goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of Portland and have many, many friends in the Rose City. And I hope they all do the right thing and denounce you for being so antithetical to what makes the broader craft beer community so great: the sense of community that’s bigger than any one town.

Harpoon To Can Their Beer

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beer-can-beer
Another regional brewery is joining the ranks of those who are canning craft beer. Harpoon Brewery is canning two of their beers, the I.P.A. and the Summer Beer.

From the press release:

The Harpoon Brewery is pleased to announce that your backpack will be a little easier to carry on hiking trips this summer; introducing Harpoon IPA and Harpoon Summer Beer in cans. Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, the Harpoon Brewery will offer its flagship India Pale Ale and seasonal Summer Beer in 12-ounce aluminum cans. The beer, which was brewed at Harpoon’s Windsor, VT brewery, is being canned at FX Matt in Utica, NY today. The new cans will enable New England craft beer lovers to enjoy Harpoon beers during summer activities and at locales where glass bottles are not convenient.

It’s interesting to see more larger craft breweries turn to cans these days. I’m guessing we’ll see more and more of this size brewery adding cans to their line-up.

harpoon-summer-can harpoon-ipa-can

Uganda’s Deadly Waragi

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uganda
If you recall last week I did a post about Kenya’s Kill Me Quick Moonshine. It seems another African nation is having a similar problem. This time it’s Uganda, who according to Time Magazine, is having issues with a “methanol-laced version of a homemade banana gin known as waragi.

From Time’s The Battle to Stop Drink from Destroying Uganda:

Unregulated waragi accounts for nearly 80% of the liquor produced in the country, according to the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS), which oversees production of legal products in the country. It doesn’t help that the alcohol is inexpensive and that the penalties for producing or selling it are ineffective. A tall glass of homemade waragi — usually made from bananas or cassava, millet or sugarcane — goes for about 25 cents, one-sixth the cost of the leading regulated brand.

While there are differences and similarities between the problems both countries are experiencing, it still seems it’s a failure of striking that balance between regulation, taxes and market forces. As we increasingly have to examine our own alcohol policies as the call for increased taxes continues, it’s useful, I think, to see how the rest of the world both effectively, and in these cases ineffectively, deal with finding that balance.

Stopping Underage Reading

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websites
This continues to just piss me off — I know, what doesn’t? — but it’s resurfaced again in a HealthDay News report on the television website for Channel 13 WTHR Indianapolis. The article, Alcohol Companies Use New Media to Lure Young Drinkers: Report, is about the time-honored practice of believing that current times are the worst they’ve ever been (not like when we were young) and today’s youth is in more danger (not like the innocent times when we were young). Every generation seems to go through these machinations that the corruption of the young is either a new phenomenon or is far worse now because of some modern innovation that wasn’t around (in those innocent days when we were young).

Today’s bogeyman is the “latest new media technologies — including cell phones, social networking sites, YouTube and other features of the expanding digital universe — [used] to reach young drinkers.” Or at least so says a new report, Alcohol Marketing in the Digital Age, by American University in Washington, D.C. The report naturally singles out Facebook, MySpace and other social media and the web more generally as the new moral vacuum where our youth is being corrupted. It’s slightly more grounded than many of these types of reports, but it’s still fairly alarmist of the-end-is-nigh if we don’t do something variety. The fact that every older generation is afraid for the younger generation and pretends to be protecting it by trying to stop some imagined danger makes such arguments fall flat for me.

But here’s the bit that continues to chap my hide:

One area the study authors want officials and activists to look at is weak age-verification mechanisms, pointing out how easy it is for a young person to enter a false birth date so they are legally “of age” to enter a Web site.

Yet I’m not aware of any website that can dispense beer or any other alcohol. All you can do at the average website is — drum roll, please — read. So why on earth do you have to be 21 to read? Could someone check out a book about beer at the local library if they were under 21? Of, course. But online, now that’s dangerous. Until it’s against the law to read then no one has to be “‘of age’ to enter a Web site,” whether it’s about beer or anything else. Trying to keep people from information, even if it’s perceived to be the wrong sort of information, is a very slippery slope. And frankly, keeping people in the dark about something that’s supposedly bad for them keeps them from the truth, forming their own opinions, and exposes them only to the “approved” message, which is often laced with propaganda and misinformation to promote a specific agenda. That’s in part, at least, why so many people today fall for neo-propagandist arguments about the evils of alcohol. As long as the propaganda is so one-sided and people, young or otherwise, have no access to a balance of perspectives, then ignorance will continue to rule the day, as it so often does.

Henny Youngman was probably the exception to the rule when he quipped “when I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.” Unfortunately, more people probably believed what they read and gave up drinking. And that will continue to be the case if we continue to keep people from reading about things that others believe to be dangerous. That’s the very definition of a society that’s not free. Now I need a drink. See how dangerous this all is?

SF Weekly’s Best of San Francisco

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sf-weekly
The weekly alternative SF Weekly announced the winners in their most recent “best of” issue for 2010.

  • Reader’s Poll Winner for Best Brewery: Magnolia Gastropub
  • Best Beer Bottle Selection: City Beer Store
  • Best Cult Brew: North Coast Le Merle
    nc-le-merle
  • Best Microbrewery: Elizabeth Street Brewery
  • Best Brewery Tour: Speakeasy Ales and Lagers
  • Best Beer and Trivia: The Church Key

And a special shout out to Jesse Friedman, whose blog Beer & Nosh won for Best Food Blog.

Congratulations to all the beer winners. Here, you can read the rest of the Bars & Clubs winners or take in the entire Best of San Francisco 2010.