Brookston Beer Bulletin

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Bud Light Wheat Vs. Blue Moon

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I confess that when Bud Light Golden Wheat first appeared in the market, I gave it almost no notice. It was yet another line extension in an increasingly crowded portfolio. If I had noticed that it also included citrus and coriander it might have been more apparent that it was conceived, at least in part, to attack Coors’ Blue Moon. Given Anheuser-Busch’s track record of going after literally every product on the market — no matter how small the niche — what’s more surprising in hindsight is that it took so long. Blue Moon first debuted in 1995.

Crain’s Chicago Business had an interesting article on Monday about the battle, entitled Budweiser Takes On MillerCoors’ Blue Moon In Craft Beer Brew-Haha.

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But since its debut last October, Bud Light Golden Wheat has made significant progress, showing just how important distribution and access to market can be.

Anheuser-Busch showed last month that it has the marketing muscle and distribution wingspan to make up lost ground quickly. It sold 263,000 cases of Bud Light Golden Wheat in November, nearly equaling Blue Moon’s total, IRI data show.

It’s an interesting read, and to me the takeaway is Harry Schuhmacher’s thoughts, as quoted in the article:

“It’s very important because craft beers are the only growing part of the business,” says Harry Schuhmacher, editor of San Antonio-based trade publication Beer Business Daily. “This is where the future of beer is going, and they want to make sure they are well-established in the category.”

Bone Density Strengthened By Moderate Beer Drinking

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Although Reuters only recently wrote about this new study, Moderate Drinking May Help Build Bone Density, it’s based on a study published in February in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. According to the journal abstract:

Goal: Our aim was to determine the association between intake of total alcohol or individual alcoholic beverages and bone mineral density.

Design: Adjusting for potential confounding factors, we examined alcohol intakes and BMD at 3 hip sites and the lumbar spine in 1182 men and in 1289 postmenopausal and 248 premenopausal women in the population-based Framingham Offspring cohort (age: 29–86 yrs.).

Results: Men were predominantly beer drinkers, and women were predominantly wine drinkers. Compared with nondrinkers, hip BMD was greater (3.4–4.5%) in men consuming 1–2 drinks/d of total alcohol or beer, whereas hip and spine BMD were significantly greater (5.0–8.3%) in postmenopausal women consuming >2 drinks/d of total alcohol or wine. Intake of >2 drinks/d of liquor in men was associated with significantly lower (3.0–5.2%) hip and spine BMD than was intake of 1–2 drinks/d of liquor in men. After adjustment for silicon intake, all intergroup differences for beer were no longer significant; differences for other alcohol sources remained significant. Power was low for premenopausal women, and the associations were not significant.

Conclusions: Moderate consumption of alcohol may be beneficial to bone in men and postmenopausal women. However, in men, high liquor intakes (>2 drinks/d) were associated with significantly lower BMD. The tendency toward stronger associations between BMD and beer or wine, relative to liquor, suggests that constituents other than ethanol may contribute to bone health. Silicon appears to mediate the association of beer, but not that of wine or liquor, with BMD. Other components need further investigation.

There was nothing ambiguous about the results of the study, “it’s very clear,’ said Dr. Katherine Tucker of Boston’s Tufts University that the positive effect on bone density from beer and wine is “larger than what we see for any single nutrient, even for calcium.”

From the Reuters article:

Men who had a glass or two of wine or beer daily had denser bones than non-drinkers, the researchers found, but those who downed two or more servings of hard liquor a day had significantly lower BMD than the men who drank up to two glasses of liquor daily.

The women who drank more than two glasses a day of alcohol or wine had greater BMD than the women who drank less. Nonetheless, this finding shouldn’t be seen as meaning that the more a woman drinks the better it is for her bones, Tucker noted; there were simply not that many women in the study who drank much more than this.

Beer is an excellent source of silicon, a mineral needed for bone health that has become increasingly rare in the modern diet, the researcher noted. Beer’s silicon content accounted for at least some of its bone-building effects in men, she added; there were too few women who drank beer to draw conclusions about how the mineral affected female bone density.

Sounds like you your bones will thank you for drinking beer moderately. A beer a day keeps the bone doctor away?

Brookston Beer Quiz #1

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Here is the first of what will most likely be many beer quizzes. I’ll probably do a new one every few weeks. I have tons of similar graphics I’ve been collecting for another project and figured I’d put them to good use in the meantime.

This first one is pretty easy, though I think having multiple choice answers makes them all easier. For each question you’ll be show the first letter of a brewery or beer brand’s name from their logo or label and you have to identify which one it is. Good luck. Let me know how you did.

Help Choosing Your Beer

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This is a very fun little chart, though it must have taken quite some time to actually put together. Over at Eating the Road, they’ve assembled a flowchart to help you choose what beer to drink.

Here’s how they describe it:

In conjunction with the amazingly useful, humorous and insightful Sloshspot.com we’ve put together another flowchart to make your decision making that much easier. Just in time for those wonderful Holiday parties, Eating The Road to the rescue. We figured you may need this one a bit more than the others seeing that you may be a little…ahh, under the influence. Due to that, please use this chart with caution and responsibility.

I ended up with Utopias and Cantillon, so in my case it worked pretty well. Enjoy. At Eating the Road, you can also find links to other flowcharts, including ones for Fast Food, Chain Restaurants and cereal.

NOTE: If you find it hard to read at this size, you can view it full size here.
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Beer In Art #56: Mark Blanton’s Bohemia Pin-Up

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This Sunday’s work of art is decidedly adult in nature, as much art often is, and is by Mark Blanton. Blanton is a modern artist, a hyper-realist it appears, and also has done a series of pin-up art, which he “created as a tribute to the Sixties’ art movement known as Pop Art and the work of Pop artist Mel Ramos, Pin-up artists Alberto Vargas and George Petty.” The highlighted work today, featuring Bohemia beer, is channeling Mel Ramos so much that for a long time I actually thought it was by Ramos.

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Looking through Ramos’ oeuvre revealed, as expected, many, many paintings of nude women with a commercial product of similar size, a pop art style that Ramos pioneered. But as many different variations as Ramos painted, I could not find one featuring a beer. You can see his work at Modernism, Art History, or the Ro Gallery .

Not finding it among Ramos’ works, I started looking elsewhere to identify it eventually finding Mark Blanton, many of whose works are strikingly similar to Ramos.

Given the obvious phallic symbolism of a beer bottle it seems strange that Ramos never did a painting with beer, although he did paint one with a wine bottle. Luckily, Blanton stepped in to fill the void.

You can also see more of Blanton’s Ramos-inspired pin-ups at his website, and also at Pin Up and Cartoon Girls and at the History of Pin Up Art.

Beer In Ads #9: Regal Pale Skiing

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Today’s ad is most likely from the 1950s or early 60s, and is for Regal Pale Ale, a beer that was at least distributed in California as late as the 1960s, though I’m not sure where it was brewed and I can’t find my copy of American Breweries II under the mess that is my office. It’s been cold this week, not frozen tundra cold or even Pennsylvania-cold, but it has been California-cold with the kids delighting in seeing frost on the ground and watching me scrape ice off the car windows. That means ski weather, so I thought this ad of a skiing beer can cleverly using other beer paraphernalia to complete the picture was appropriate. I wonder what they considered the other great American beer?

Coincidentally, New Jersey’s legendary Heavyweight Brewing used the name Regal Pale Ale for the first of their OneTimeOnePlace (OTOP) series back in 2003.

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New Beer’s Day Session Topic Announced

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Our 35th Session falls smack on New Year’s Day, January 1, 2010 and the hosts, Christina Perozzi & Hallie Beaune, have chosen an appropriate topic for the holiday: New Beer’s Resolutions. Their announcement is currently up on Beer For Chicks, but come the new year, the Session will be on the newly launching The Beer Chicks, a new website by Christina Perozzi & Hallie Beaune, authors of The Naked Pint. In a nutshell, here’s what they mean by New Beer’s Resolutions:

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?

The month of January, of course, is named for the Roman god Janus, whose domain was gates, doors, doorways, beginnings and endings. He was the perfect choice when the calendar was changed around 713 B.C.E. when January and February were added to the Roman calendar (before that March and Spring were the beginning of the year). Janus is often depicted with two faces, one looking forward to the future and the other looking back to the past. That’s why the first holiday of the year is the ideal moment to stop and reflect on the year that just ended and to contemplate what path lies ahead in the coming one. Let’s hear how beer figures into that in 2010!

Beer In Art #55: Gregg Hinlicky’s Brewer Portraits

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Today’s works of art are part of a larger project undertaken by New Jersey illustrator Gregg Hinlicky. A decade ago, he began an undertaking to paint portraits of his favorite brewers.

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Garret Oliver, from Brooklyn Brewery.

The original ten paintings were quite large, averaging seven-feet tall, whereas later portraits are three-feet by four, which has allowed him to speed up and increase output.

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John Maier, from Rogue.

The goal for Hinlicky it to paint at least thirty brewer portraits with an eye toward ultimately publishing a book of the portraits.

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Fritz Maytag, from Anchor Brewery.

Hinlicky attended the Newark School of Fine & Industrial Art and held several design and marketing positions before joining D&R Communications, which has been his day job for over seven years.

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I’m not sure what brewery this is, but the painting’s titled “Henry.”

I particularly like this peek inside an unnamed brewery.

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It looks like he’s also done the logo for Climax Brewing, shown here on the label for their 10th Anniversary Ale.

Hinlicky does sell his work and takes commissions, too. If interested, you can contact him through his website.

Paintings used with the permission of the artist. All works © Gregg Hinlicky.

Puttin’ Up The Brookston Xmas Tree

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My favorite parts of celebrating the holiday season all involve the originally pagan rites like the mistletoe, the yule log, exchanging gifts and, of course, the Christmas tree. We got our tree last night and decorated it this morning. My mother was somewhat obsessed with Christmas, and did a completely different tree theme every year, often making all the ornaments herself. She’d also buy a few ornaments every year and add them to a box for me and, when she passed away in 1981, I inherited all of the ornaments. I’ve continued the tradition of buying new ornaments every year, though I don’t have a whole new tree each year. Instead, the family looks through the boxes and boxes of ornaments and we choose the ones that catch our fancy each year to create our decorated tree. Many of the ornaments reflect our passions, so Porter has train ornaments and Alice has princesses. Over the years I’ve amassed ornaments of some of my peculiar fetishes, such as globes, clothespins, snowmen, birds, potatoes, bowling pins, the Packers and, of course, beer. So this morning I took a photo of each of my beer ornaments, which are presented below in he slideshow. Hoppy Christmas.

Beer: A 6-Pack

Below is a slideshow of my beer-themed Christmas ornaments. 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.

Beer In Ads #8: Eugene Oge’s Biere au Diable

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Today’s ad is an old classic, by Eugene Oge, a French illustrator who did a number of great beer adverts during his lifetime from 1861-1936. He was a major figure in the Belle Epoque and did many outstanding ads for resorts, food, and all sorts of beverage brands. This ad, known as Biere au Diable (Beer to the Devil) was done in 1912. I’ll undoubtedly feature more of his posters, but this is probably my favorite. I love the bright colors, the contrast and the simplicity of it. As they (you know who “they” are) say, “in heaven there is no beer.” If true, then this is where we must go to drink it. I’m not spending eternity without beer. I’ll meet you there.
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