Tuesday’s ad is for the Budweiser flat-top can from 1964. They’re going for that manly fisherman demographic. I found it interesting given yesterday’s post, Evolution of a Beer Label, just how much importance A-B was placing on its label in 1964. Notice what the ad copy reads. “The story is on every Budweiser label.” But I think the previous question asked by the ad, “[i]s there any real difference in the way beers are brewed,” will have the average beer geek laughing out loud.
I found this interesting bit of research at the PsyBlog, run by Jeremy Dean, a Psychology researcher at the University College London. The post is entitled Why Loud Music in Bars Increases Alcohol Consumption, and concerns some recent research conducted into the relationship between volume and drinking patterns. Specifically, Dean cites two studies, one in Glasgow, Scotland and the other in France. In some ways the findings are obvious, but it does tend to confirm what you probably already guessed. The PsyBlog starts with the premise that the average bar traditionally keeps the lights dim and the music loud.
But turning the music up so loud that people are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same beneficial effect on social interactions. Because everyone is shouting, the bar becomes even noisier and soon people start to give up trying to communicate and focus on their drinking, meaning more trips to the bar, and more regrets in the morning.
Of course this is exactly what bar owners are hoping for. People sitting around quietly nursing their drinks for hours are no good for profits. Talkers aren’t the best drinkers. At least that is the received wisdom in the industry.
The first study, Sound Level of Environmental Music and Drinking Behavior: A Field Experiment With Beer Drinkers, was published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Their results indicated “that high level volume led to increase alcohol consumption and reduced the average amount of time spent by the patrons to drink their glass.”
The second study was published in the journal Popular Music & Society, and was titled Alco-pop? The Use of Popular Music in Glasgow Pubs.
Here’s a bit more as to how the research was conducted.
The level of the music was randomly manipulated to create the conditions of a true experiment. It was either at its usual volume of 72dB or turned up to 88dB. For comparison: 72db is like the sound of traffic on a busy street while 88db is like standing next to a lawnmower.
Sure enough when the music went up the beers went down, faster. On average bar-goers took 14.5 minutes to finish a 250ml (8 oz) glass of draught beer when the music was at its normal level. But this came down to just 11.5 minutes when the music was turned up. As a result, on average, during their time in the bar each participant ordered one more drink in the loud music condition than in the normal music condition.
The observers even measured the number of gulps taken to finish each drink — the level of the music was found to have no effect on this. So the faster drinking was as a result of more gulps rather than bigger gulps.
The conclusions from both studies seem to validate one another, suggesting a universal application. The results do seem to favor a causal connection between louder music and increased drinking, but what they don’t answer is why this is the case. As Dean puts it. “Some think that people drink instead of talking while others have argued that they drink more because the music creates greater levels of arousal, which then leads to more drinking.”
Personally, I prefer a bar where I can hear myself think, where pleasant conversation is encouraged, but then I prefer to sip, not gulp, my beer in almost any environment. So clearly, I’m not the target demographic, nor I suspect are most hardcore beer geeks, but it still is a fascinating peek into what makes us tick — and drink.
UPDATE: The BC Brews Blog also came across this study independently and posted about it in Loud Music = Heavier, Faster Drinking.
Below is, as far as I know, the most recent label for Budweiser, updated in 2000. We all know that labels change over time, sometimes dramatically, but usually more subtly with just small tweaks from time to time. But even small changes over a long period of time become dramatic in the long view. So this is a fascinating peak into those changes.
Etiquette Systems, a label manufacturer, has an online gallery showing what they call the Evolution of America’s Most Famous Beer Label. It shows a dozen different versions of the Budweiser label, from the first 1876 version up to the 2000 latest one, with all of the changes in between.
Monday’s ad is for Ballantine Ale from 1947. It features a woman in a white dress with white roses in her hair. Is that really who drank ale in the late 1940s? Ah, well. If I’d just come back from the war, I suppose I’d have a beer with her, too.
Yesterday, I had a post about some sober statistics that came from CDC — and specifically their Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System — by way of an article in U.S. News & World Report. The statistics from the article concerned the most sober American cities according to their (questionable) data.
But there were two additional data points from two other questions asked in the poll conducted by the CDC. So I thought I’d see what those questions were all about. Here are some more lists based on that data.
In this one, pollsters asked people if they’d had a drink of alcohol in the last 30 days. The list below is the cities (which the CDC classifies as “Metropolitan Statistical Areas”) which had the most people who have not touched alcohol in the month before they were polled. The number is parenthesis is the percentage who answered no.
Not many surprises again from what you might guess, all the states are from the south plus nearby West Virginia and Utah, where Mormonism holds sway.
So here’s the opposite list, the metropolitan areas with the highest percentage of people who have had alcohol in the last month.
The second question asked people if they’d had a drinking binge (by their ridiculous definition, of course) but curiously it doesn’t say within what period of time. So without the actual question asked, we have to conclude that there was no time period (because it would almost certainly appear in the statistical data). That means this is an expression of who’d had five or more drinks at one session … ever. Hmm.
Here’s the ten metropolitan areas with the fewest binge drinkers. The number in parenthesis represents the percentage of people who have never had five or more drinks at one sitting.
I must live in truly decadent places because I can’t even imagine a place where 9 of the 10 people you meet on the street have NEVER had five drinks at one time.
But here’s my people, the areas where the most binge drinking takes place. I should hasten to point out that I don’t believe for a second that binge drinking is a good idea, but that the CDC definition is complete and utter nonsense.
The numbers themselves still seem a bit low. The percentages are for people who said yes, they’ve had five drinks at one sitting. Even the highest percentage are would be roughly 1 in 5. But it may simply be a factor of people under-reporting what they perceive to be bad behavior.
Today’s works of art is another modern one, painted in a style that’s known as Photorealism or, more likely, Hyperrealism (the two are similar), although the artist doesn’t characterize his work in that way. The artist is Steven R. Kozar and his painting is titled Wisconsin Craft Brews, featuring bottles of beer from three Wisconsin breweries, Capital Brewery, New Glarus and Sprecher.
The painting is 18 x 24 in. and is a watercolor. The original has been sold, but prints are available for $25 at his online store. Most of the works in his gallery are landscapes, and they’re spectacular.
Kozar’s a Wisconsin native, living in McFarland. Here’s a short biography from his blog:
Born 1964 in Lake Zurich, IL. Studied at ISU from 1983 to 1984, and at The American Academy of Art in Chicago from 1985 to 1986. At age 23 moved to rural Wisconsin and began full-time painting. Kozar’s paintings have been exhibited along side most of the artists he admired as an art student, including Midwestern artists Harold Gregor, James Winn, and James Butler. He has also exhibited with many of today’s contemporary masters, such as Andrew Wyeth, Gary Ernest Smith, Ralph Goings. John Stuart Ingle, Burt Silverman, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Peter Sculthorpe and Nelson Shanks.
You can see more of Kozar’s work at his website and his blog also has a few videos during the painting of this work, which are interesting to watch.
In trying to catch up with everything going on in the world, here’s one that fell through the cracks. Drew Beechum, of the Maltose Falcons homebrew club fame sent me this over the holidays and it’s still relevant. It appears law enforcement is monitoring social media like Facebook to catch crooks … well, not crooks, exactly, but underage drinkers. And not just monitoring Facebook, but according to the LaCrosse Tribune, police actually created fake Facebook profiles then tried to friend underage kids (with or without probable cause, it doesn’t say) to look for mentions and photos of underage drinking. They’ve even made arrests. Beechum wades into the questions raised by this practice in a post titled We’ve Always Been At War With Eastasia. There are a lot of privacy issues raised by this, I think, and it bears watching IMHO.
Here’s an interesting list. Usually, we hear about the top drinking cities, but this is the top ten (or bottom ten, depending on your perspective) cities for NOT drinking, that is the cities and towns that don’t drink very much. I found the list in a U.S. News & World Report article but the data comes from the CDC (and is for communities of 10,000 or more people). The first four are pretty clear, but then it’s a four-way tie for fifth followed by a two-way tie.
Not many surprises from what you might guess, except that when you look deeper at the statistics, something odd emerges, at least to me. Those parenthetical numbers represent the percentage of people surveyed who said they don’t drink “more than two drinks per day” (if adult males) or “more than one drink per day” (if adult females). Otherwise — get this — they’re considered “heavy drinkers.” That’s right, have more than two drinks on the same day ever and you’re a heavy drinker. It’s hard to imagine a more useless way to define this, unless you’re trying to inflate the numbers and make it appear that problem drinking is more of a … well. problem, than it actually is. Defining heavy drinkers as “adult men having more than two drinks per day and adult women having more than one drink per day” undoubtedly accomplishes that, especially when you consider that the CDC defines binge drinkings as five or more drinks during one session (4 if you’re female). This is how to create a problem that doesn’t exist. (Note: I don’t mean that there aren’t problem drinkers, I only question that it’s as epidemic as these statistics suggest.) The way it is now, drink one or two beers a day, you’re fine. But have a third and you’re a “heavy drinker.” Have two more for a total of five and you’re — gasp — a “binge drinker.” Really?
Using the same data from the CDC survey, the top 10 heaviest drinking cities are:
That’s a strange list, too, and not what I would have predicted. Three in Florida and six total from the southern states. You just have to wonder how truthfully people answer a question like this when it’s posed.
I meant to comment on this more fully before now, but my friend and colleague Stephen Beaumont beat me to the punch with his post, A Victory for Boire Moins, Boire Mieux. He had nearly the exact same thought I had, too, though not in French. Boire Moins, Boire Mieux translates as Drink Less, Drink Better, the unofficial ad hoc motto of craft beer.
I’m referring to a Wall Street Journal article published Thursday, Falling Beer Sales Have Brewery Mergers Over a Barrel, where they detailed how beer sales have fallen 2.2%, the first year since 2003 that showed negative growth in total beer sales volume (and the highest negative number since the 1950s). And sure that’s what the numbers say, from one perspective, at least. The Journal, an unabashedly pro-business paper, lost no time decrying the terrible implications for big business and especially the on-going merger-mania the big beer companies are engaging in. There’s also a handy chart.
And sure, they all show declining volume, except for two near the bottom, Boston Beer and Yuengling. And that’s the tip of an iceberg that tells a very different story than the one the Wall Street Journal is telling. As Beaumont notes, “nearly every craft brewer I speak with is sounding quite happy with their sales figures from the preceding year and optimistic about 2010.” And that’s exactly what I’ve been hearing all along the hopvine, too. The 1500+ breweries that didn’t brew more than 2-million barrels a year, are doing quite well, thank you very much. Not all of them, of course — some brewpubs have been struggling with less people eating out — but overall they’re trending positively. And that’s a very different story than the Journal is telling.
So I’ll leave you with Stephen’s conclusion:
The BBC and Yuengling numbers are important because they represent what I believe is really going on, which is not so much a literal “worsening” of demand, but rather a shift in demand, coupled with a growing endorsement of the old French axiom boire moins, boire mieux, or “drink less, drink better.” Simply, the battle is between style and substance, and right now, substance appears to be winning!
The WSJ doesn’t see this because they’re used to looking only at the large, public corporation side of things, rather than the successful entrepreneur side. Then again, weren’t they the ones who years ago predicted that the craft beer craze was finished?
I’ve been avoiding this story over the last few weeks, mostly because I’ve been busy with other work and it’s a complicated one. I’ve sure you’ve seen it and pieces of it, though. It’s even gone mainstream, with Time magazine wading into it, mostly because of the big business angle. In a nutshell, Anheuser-Busch InBev announced more layoffs despite having also recently announced just over $1.5 billion in profit for Q3 2009. The latest proposed layoffs, about 800 jobs at ABIB’s European breweries included about a third in Belgium. But unlike here in the U.S., labor unions still have a bit of actual power in the EU. And they decided to fight back. At several breweries in Belgium — Stella Artois, Jupiler and Hoegaarden — workers have barricaded the breweries, and even took management hostage overnight at one plant.
After two weeks, supplies of Stella Artois and other beer brands owned by ABIB were running low, though most headlines seemed to suggest that beer itself was almost out in the nation. Obviously, with hundreds of breweries still open there was hardly a shortage of beer, just a shortage of a few popular ones, but none that true beer-loving Belgians would even miss. But on Friday, the union agreed to stand down and enter into negotiations, for the time being “they struck a deal that postpones the brewer’s plans to reduce 303 jobs in Belgium — some 10 per cent of its work force there. It says it will also create 40 call centre sales positions, bringing net job losses to 263.” According to the AFP, “‘After the blockade is lifted, the unions and management will start from scratch with meetings of the works council that will deal with problems site by site,’ union representative Tangui Cornu told AFP.” Reuters also had an update.