Friday’s ad is for the new pop top bottle that Schlitz debuted in the early 1960s. It’s their stubbie bottle — I just love the look of the stubbie bottle — showing how easy it twists off. And then there’s that tagline. :Now a beer bottle you can open with your bare hands.”
This came out a month ago but somehow it escaped my notice then. MillerCoors unveiled their latest gimmick to sell more beer to wholesalers meeting in Las Vegas. According to Brand Week, it’s called the Miller Vortex and described as “a bottle with specially designed interior grooves that ‘create a vortex as you’re pouring the beer,’ according to a rep, who explained that the brand’s goal is to ‘create buzz and excitement and give consumers another reason to choose Miller.’ The Vortex bottle, which begins hitting shelves this month, will be supported by advertising from DraftFCB.”
As Peter Rowe succinctly put it in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Miller’s Vortex bottle is, at first glance, stupid. The neck swirls your beverage as it’s poured. This, if we remember our Beer Chem 101, stirs up the aromas and unleashes a larger head.
All of which can be done by, what, pouring beer from an un-Vortexed bottle and giving your pint glass a twirl?
Exactly. This is one of those things nobody needed being touted as the savior of mankind. You can see how it works in the short video below.
In related news, I also saw a television commercial yesterday for Miller Lite‘s aluminum pint bottle, which they debuted to several test markets in 2008. I guess it must have gone well.
And now yesterday, I saw a press release that Miller is bringing out “improved” packaging for their Miller High Life. Perhaps most humorously, the release is titled Common Sense Gets A New Look. The release begins with this gem. “Miller High Life, the brand synonymous with common sense, is bringing a new look to store shelves this month with the debut of new primary and secondary packaging across all bottle and can offerings.” Synonymous with common sense? What does that even mean? Marketing Daily has the story, too. Below is the new 12-pack.
And here it is side-by-side with the old package. Wow the difference is so amazing, the beer’s just going to fly out of the store.
So that’s three cosmetic changes all geared to sell more beer, which is not bad in and of itself: a new gimmick bottle, an aluminum bottle and new packaging all designed to turn around slowing sales. And this is why I think the big guys will continue to slip. They never once considered it was what was inside the bottle that might be the problem. Sure, packaging needs to be updated from time to time, but gimmicks are never a good idea, at least to my way of thinking. Maybe they’ll get an initial trial sales bump from the curious, but I can’t see that it will last. The vortex is completely ridiculous, even embarrassing. The aluminum bottle doesn’t seem any better than the can, but is more expensive to produce. New packaging will, of course, become old packaging in time.
The real reason that sales are falling is that people are turning to other products, notably craft beer. But Miller still sells an awful lot of low-calorie light beer — I don’t understand for the life of my why anyone buys light beer — and so there’s really no impetus to change it or abandon it. As a result, they’ll keep throwing whatever they can think of against the wall to see what might stick and thus drive sales. And apparently, anything they can think of is a very broad range indeed. Given what they’ve tried in the past and what they’re currently trying, I’d love to know what some of the ideas that didn’t get out of the meetings might be. That should be a pretty funny list.
Thursday’s ad is one of the oldest I’ve come across. It’s from 1877 and is, I believe, for a Baltimore brewery, an F. Klemm. The lithograph was created by a Baltimore firm, A. Hoen & Co. I chose it because today in 1851, an ice machine was patented so brewers no longer needed to go all the way to the north pole for their ice. Still, it’s pretty funny seeing the polar bears take to beer so completely. To the left, you can see one smoking a cigar, but my favorite is on the right where a, presumably, mama bear is giving her cub a sip of her beer.
If you missed last year’s Lagunitas Beer Circus, you missed one of the most amazing spectacles involving beer I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending. It was so good, they’ve moved it to May for the better weather and because it deserves its own time slot.
Tickets are now on sale for the 2nd annual Lagunitas Beer Circus, which will be held Sunday, May 16 from 1:00-6:00 p.m. Tickets are $35, which includes admission and 10 beer tokens, and be purchased by calling 707.769.4495.
Here’s a description of the circus from one of two Facebook pages for the event.
This year’s going to be c-r-a-z-y. In lieu of a bigtop they’re gonna take over the entire Lagunitas parking lot and Beer Sanctuary. More space means more Circus.
Already confirmed are awesomeness like a midway with carnival games; different stages with bands like the kings of klown-fi, Gooferman; aerialists, contortionists, and sideshow freaks like Jo-Jo The Dog-Faced Boy and The Bearded Lady; oilpunks of the Golden Mean Giant Snail Car and burlesque teasers Boiler Bar Revue & Theater; with tons more to be announced.
Oh yeah, and the beer in Beer Circus? Well, this is a Beer Festival and Lagunitas always does ‘em right. So with your ticket you’ll get a healthy number of pours. Not only from their standard lineup and one-of-a-kind brews found only in their TapRoom, there’ll be taps from 10 local breweries: Ace Cider, Dempsey’s Brewing, Russian River, Moylan’s, Marin Brewing Company, Moonlight Brewing, Sonoma Springs Brewery, Napa Smith, Third Street Aleworks, and Iron Springs Brewerys (hopefully with their Ambrewlance).
I had such a great time at this last year, it’s definitely one not to be missed. See you there!
A recent study from several universities in the Netherlands shows as much as a 40% decrease in the risk of type 2 diabetes for people who drink alcohol in moderation as compared to people who abstain altogether. Reuters is reporting today about the study, which went online last week at the website for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
The study itself, entitled the “Combined Effect of Alcohol Consumption and Lifestyle Behaviors on Risk of Type 2 Diabetes,” concluded that even a healthier overall lifestyle could not explain the lower risk brought upon by moderate alcohol consumption, as had been previously thought.
From the Abstract:
Objective: We studied whether moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes in adults with combined low-risk lifestyle behaviors.
Design: We prospectively examined 35,625 adults of the Dutch European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC-NL) cohort aged 20–70 y, who were free of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer at baseline (1993–1997). In addition to moderate alcohol consumption (women: 5.0–14.9 g/d; men: 5.0–29.9 g/d), we defined low-risk categories of 4 lifestyle behaviors: optimal weight [body mass index (in kg/m2) <25], physically active (≥30 min of physical activity/d), current nonsmoker, and a healthy diet [upper 2 quintiles of the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet].Results: During a median of 10.3 y, we identified 796 incident cases of type 2 diabetes. Compared with teetotalers, hazard ratios of moderate alcohol consumers for risk of type 2 diabetes in low-risk lifestyle strata after multivariable adjustments were 0.35 (95% CI: 0.17, 0.72) when of a normal weight, 0.65 (95% CI: 0.46, 0.91) when physically active, 0.54 (95% CI: 0.41, 0.71) when nonsmoking, and 0.57 (95% CI: 0.39, 0.84) when consuming a healthy diet. When ≥3 low-risk lifestyle behaviors were combined, the hazard ratio for incidence of type 2 diabetes in moderate alcohol consumers after multivariable adjustments was 0.56 (95% CI: 0.32, 1.00).
Conclusion: In subjects already at lower risk of type 2 diabetes on the basis of multiple low-risk lifestyle behaviors, moderate alcohol consumption was associated with an approximately 40% lower risk compared with abstention.
All good news, right? Well, one feature that’s ubiquitous every time another study has great news about drinking beer drives me absolutely crazy. The Reuters’ report concludes with this unnecessary disclaimer, as they all seem to.
That said, [the lead research scientist] also noted that experts do not recommend that non-drinkers take up moderate drinking simply because it is related to lower risks of certain diseases. Alcohol always carries the potential for abuse, and the known risks of problem drinking have to be balanced against the possible health benefits of moderate drinking.
It’s as if they’re afraid that if they don’t say something like this, that people will go on a drinking binge, thinking it’s good for them all of a sudden. Can they really think so little of their audience? Or is simply being worried about liability? Either way, it drive me to drink.
A couple people sent me this this morning, though the first was Mike from Nashville (thanks, Mike). The comic strip Pearls Before Swine had a shout out today for Sierra Nevada samples. I doubt that’s going to work out for them, but you have to admire the chutzpah to try.
Wednesday’s ad is from Life Magazine, and ran in the April 17, 1950 issue. The Budweiser ads shows a couple gardening, with the tagline “There’s nothing like it … absolutely nothing.” But it’s the text that I really love, comparing mother nature to their beer.
No one works more tirelessly to give you the good things of life than Mother Nature. It is she, by the way, who brings you BUDWEISER. We supply her with the choicest of ingredients and the most perfect of working conditions and … slowly … slowly she matures every flavorful, sparkling drop of the world’s most famous beer.
Live life, every golden minute of it. Enjoy BUDWEISER, every golden drop of it.
Now that’s beautiful copy-writing.
John Heylin, who runs the Nor Cal Beer Guide, has an interesting article he posted today about the untold costs of aluminum cans, entitled Why Craft Breweries Should Stop Using Cans. In it, his main argument is that while cans have benefits once they’re made, that the process of creating aluminum cans have significant costs to the environment from the mining and processing of them. I hadn’t ever thought about it from that angle, and it’s certainly worth looking into further. He concludes with this.
The bottom line is this: aluminum is in no way environmentally friendly. Sure, after it is ripped from the Earth, smelted, shipped, refined, and made into a product it is easily recyclable and very light weight, but the cost is far too great. The cost to the environment and to the people living around these areas is just too much. Clean aluminum is like the myth of clean coal, it’s a total lie.
So what about glass? Heylin remarks that “at least glass comes from sand, is reusable, and when thrown away goes back to sand. Aluminum? It lasts forever.” I’m assuming, though, that taking sand and turning it into glass also has environmental costs associated with it, though what they are I don’t know off the top of my head.
In the end, I really don’t know how to balance which does the greater harm or is gentler on the planet. It seems no matter what we choose, some harm is done. I’m certainly not willing to give up packaged beer while so many other manufactured goods, and for that matter entire industries, are doing far worse damage. I guess today I’ll stick with draft beer. But wait, isn’t that one big aluminum can? Damn. Okay, I guess I’ll search out a wooden cask. Hold up, isn’t that chopping down forests for the wood? In the Joe Jackson song Cancer, a line in the chorus is “everything gives you cancer” and at one point in the song just after singing that line, a piano riff begins and Jackson yells out, “hey, don’t play that piano.” And in a sense, I guess my point is, like the song, that everything causes some harm and choices have to be made. Every brewery is built with mined metal, industrial processing plants, smelting, iron and steel, and goodness knows what else.
Should we try to make responsible choices? Of course. But in a world where every decision has consequences, and usually bad ones, even Thomas Hobson might have trouble making a choice.
Still, it’s always good to consider and rethink our assumptions on a regular basis. Any day that makes us think is a good day, in my opinion, at least, even if it’s driving me to drink.
Tuesday’s ad is, I believe, one featuring King Gambrinus, entitled Biere Allary by Jean D’Ylen. I chose it because it was today in 1294 that Jan Primus, a.k.a. John I, Duke of Brabant, and possibly the inspiration for King Gambrinus died. The ad is from 1925 in France.
“This Jean D’ylen image is another example of how his teacher, Cappiello, influenced his work. This poster is a cartone — it is set onto cardboard and would have then been placed above a display of the beer or set somewhere as an advertising tool inside the store. It was never made into a full-sized poster.”
You can see more posters by D’Ylen at art.com.
Monday’s ad is another modern series by Budějovický Budvar — one of two original Budweisers — known in the U.S. as Czechvar. The ad campaign features four simple ads, one for each of the primary ingredients of beer: barley, hops, water and yeast. I don’t know what any of the text says, but I love the simplicity of them.
