Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Win Tickets To The SF Giants Brewfest Saturday

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sf-giants
Come join me and my family this Saturday for the inaugural San Francisco Giants Brewfest at the ballpark, sponsored in part by the San Francisco Brewers Guild. All seven brewery members (Beach Chalet, 21st Amendment, Thirsty Bear, Social Kitchen Brewery, Magnolia Pub, Speakeasy & Gordon Biersch) will be pouring their beer from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, and then the game begins at 6:05. Tickets are $20, which includes a commemorative glass, unlimited samples, music by “The Famous” and tickets to the Giants vs. Diamondbacks game.

Giants-Brewfest-2010

What could be better than a deal like that? How about free tickets? Leave a comment here telling me why you’d like to go to the Brewfest and the baseball game this Saturday and the best answer will win two tickets, courtesy of the San Francisco Giants and the Brewer’s Guild. Comments, or entries, must be posted here by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday (yes, that’s in two days) and the winning entry will be announced at 6:00 p.m. The winner will then be able to pick up their tickets at will call on Saturday. See you there!

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UPDATE 5.27: And the winner …? It was a tough choice, there were many worthwhile entries. I almost chose the newly engaged couple, and the recent San Diego transplant. Then there was the never-been-kissed friend and the intern on his first weekend in San Francisco. But I was most moved by the plight of Stuart Dejesus, who desperately needs a day away. He’s trying to plan a wedding with twin 10-month old babies. I think he and his fiance deserve a day in the (hopefully) sun. Congratulations Stuart, your tickets will be at will call under your name.

Pabst Finds A Buyer

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pabst
Harry Schuhmacher, from Beer Business Daily, is reporting that at long last, Pabst Brewing may have finally found a buyer. The new buyer is C. Dean Metropoulos, formerly of Pinnacle Foods, a food brand giant that he sold last year for $2 billion.

For several years, Pabst has been owned by a non-profit charitable foundation in Northern California, the S&P Company of Mill Valley. The I.R.S. has been insisting since at least 1996 that S&P must sell off Pabst, but they’ve been unable to find a qualified buyer. As a result, the I.R.S. has been granting them extensions while they’ve continued to search for a buyer.

Harry’s take?

He is “adept at revitalizing neglected brands like Chef Boyardee canned pasta, Pam cooking spray and Dennison’s canned chili—and for getting shelf-space mileage out of stronger brands like Bumble Bee canned tuna. ‘I look at all kinds of acquisitions, but I narrow it all down to the strength of the businesses I am already in,’ Metropoulos says to Forbes. Sounds like the right man for the job.

UPDATE: The news from Beer Business Daily is now posted publicly for subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

What Is Beer?

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pint question-mark
A provocative question to be sure, but not one I’ll even try to answer. Instead, take a look at how that question was answered 70 years ago by the the United Breweries Industrial Foundation in an ad they ran in the January 15, 1940 issue of Life Magazine. On page 69 of Life, they answer the question “what is beer?” eleven different ways.

what-is-beer

At the bottom right, there’s also an address where you can send away for a booklet with the “facts.” I’d love to see a copy of that booklet. It’s interesting what they were probably trying to accomplish with the ad, shining a light on all of the positive aspects of beer and distancing themselves from the negative, no doubt with many people at that time still remembering the prohibition era criminal elements. That’s why they argue that brewers want “to clean-up or close-up the small minority of law-violating places which abuse the license to sell beer. The brewers want to protect your right to buy beer in decent, respectable surroundings.” It makes sense, of course, that the new post-prohibition brewing industry wants to get off on the right foot, reminding people what good there is in their continuing to be in business, especially while the prohibitionist organizations were still hard at work, despite being dealt the near-death blow of prohibition being over-turned less than a decade before.

Below are close-ups of the eleven answers proffered to the question “what is beer?”

Employment Manager

wib-manager

Tax Collector

wib-taxcollect

Farmer

wib-farmer

Dietician

wib-dietician

Business Man

wib-businessman

Housewife

wib-housewife

Doctor

wib-doctor

Police Chief

wib-police

Brewer

wib-brewer

Poet

wib-poet

Average Citizen

wib-consumer

I just love the fact that “Poet” is included. It makes me want to write more poetry. And how many of you know a brewer who looks, or dresses, like this one? But most of these are just hilarious, though undoubtedly true, they’re statements you rarely see stated in ads nowadays. Still, I’d really like to see more pro-beer ads today. I think we need them now more than ever.

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.