Today is the birthday of Dylan Thomas, one of the modern world’s greatest poets. Thomas was born in Wales, but wrote all of his poems in English. He was a lifelong beer drinker, though developed a taste for hard alcohol later in his life. He also uttered what is one of my favorite quotations about drinking.

“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks just as much as you do.”

           — Dylan Thomas

We’ve all heard the frightening numbers from the British Beer and Pub Association: 5 pub closures a day, 36 each week, costing 44,000 jobs in the past five years with a similar number projected for the next five. In addition, thirty-seven major breweries closed with a loss of 25% of brewery employees nationwide.

There are plenty of things to blame for this sad state of affairs. The tightening of the credit market and banks generally make the future seem even dimmer, with fewer new pubs opening every year. Then there’s rising energy and ingredient costs for brewers — everything from aluminum, barley and hops to oil and natural gas. The recent smoking ban chased away many regular pub patrons and neo-prohibitionists continue to have a chilling effect on the pub trade, too. On top of all that, supermarkets are selling beer below cost as a loss leader to get people into their stores, selling beer for less than the price of bottled water, while at the same time increased duties on beer have made a pint more pricey.

Another reason many point to is the wave of pub company mergers over the last couple of decades, creating giant conglomerates of pub companies and precious few independent ones. One such company is Enterprise Inns, who owns nearly 8,000 pubs in the UK. In 1991, they started with 368 pubs and seventeen years later have grown over 21 times larger.

One of their landlords, Colm Powell, of the Punch and Judy in Tonbridge, believes Enterprise “is trying to force him out of the pub he has run for 17 years.” He recently finished a 10-day hunger strike to protest the death of the English pub, sleeping each night in a coffin inside the pub. He’s also set up a website, Dying For the Pub Trade, that includes an open letter to Ted Tuppen, the CEO of Enterprise Inns and “A Book of Condolences” for others to tell their own stories and offer support. The Guardian has a good, in-depth story on Powell’s plight entitled Calling Time. There’s also a video of Powell stating his case at Kent Online.

Powell has run the Punch & Judy for seventeen years, but five years ago Enterprise became the owner when they bought it, and many others, from Whitbread. The large pub companies are all about the numbers and, I’m told, don’t treat their landlords as unique personalities, but see them as lines on a balance sheet. That’s one of the biggest problems with large companies in general. They may be great with economies of scale, but they can’t see things in any other way but as groups of largely the same thing. That’s one of the biggest reasons chain stores are all virtually identical. But because of their role in communities and because so much of their personality comes from within, pubs are perhaps the worst business model in the world to apply to a chain model.

According to Powell, after Enterprise took over, they began raising prices on everything from rents to kegs, and increases have taken up to 55% of his potential profits. His eviction is now set for November 11 and he’s planning another hunger strike beginning on November 1.

At 11:00 a.m. “on November 11, he will lose the business he has run for 17 years, and with it his social life and his home, because he lives above it.” Powell anticipates the end will be messy. “When they come to take me they’ll have to physically take me out in the box.”

About a month ago, you may recall a Santa Cruz graduate student in chemistry was arrested for homebrewing with poppies.

To update this story, on Friday the student, Chad Renzelman, was given a sentence of “drug diversion,” essentially parole, meaning if he “stays out of trouble for the next 18 months, the drug conviction will be taken off his record, according to his attorney.” The Santa Cruz Sentinel has the full story.

Remember those iconic “whassup” Anheuser-Busch ads from almost a decade ago? Advertisers love it when a catch phrase works its way into public use outside the original advertising because it spreads the meme far wider than advertising alone can ever manage. Whassup was one of those catch phrases that captured public attention for a brief period of time and spread itself all around popular culture, and was used referentially in a variety of contexts. You don’t hear it that often these days, but its memory still lingers in the public conscious.

The Whassup ad campaign, officially called True, ran from 1999 to 2002. The first spot aired during Monday Night Football on December 20 1999. It was actually based on a short film called True by “Charles Stone III, that featured Stone and several of his childhood friends – Fred Thomas, Paul Williams, Terry Williams, and Kevin Lofton. The characters sat around talking on the phone and saying “Whassup!” to one another in a comical way. The short was popular at a number of film festivals around the country and eventually caught the attention of Vinny Warren, a creative director at the Chicago based ad agency DDB, who took the idea to August A. Busch IV, vice president of Anheuser-Busch, and signed Stone to direct Budweiser TV commercials based on the film. Scott Martin Brooks won the role of “Dookie” when Kevin Lofton declined to audition. “Whassup!” won the Cannes Grand Prix award and the Grand Clio award, among others). In May 2006, the campaign was inducted into the CLIO Hall of Fame.” The phrase spread like wildfire and Wikipedia has a good list of where “whassup” appeared as a pop culture reference.

On Friday, a new Whassup political ad appeared on YouTube, using actors who resembled the original Whassup guys, showing where there are eight years later, thanks to current administration policies. It was created by 60 Frames, a film company that creates internet content. Whatever your political leanings, it’s a great use of satire in casting archtypes in specific light to make a point. Really, it’s as poignant and sad as it is funny. The version below was added to YouTube on Saturday and begins with the original Whassup ad, which I think gives better context to it, since you can compare and contrast the original with the newer satirical one. Genius — True.

As I wrote about last week, one of the biggest sponsors of the presidential debates via the Commission on Presidential Debates was Anheuser-Busch. The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank does both columns and video for his Washington Sketch. He made a funny video about his experiences at the last debate, and especially at the Budweiser Beer Tent, where journalists can find free food and beer. Apparently this is the fifth year that there’s been a beer tent at the debates.

I don’t have a lot of specifics, but this was too cool not to share. According to the Green Upgrader and few Asian news websites, a “Thai Buddhist temple has found an environmentally friendly way to reach nirvana, using discarded bottles to build everything on the premises from a crematorium to toilets.”

The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple in Sisaket province, roughly 370 miles northeast of Bangkok, is better known as “Wat Lan Kuad” or “Temple of Million Bottles” because of the glittering from countless glass containers on the walls. The temple first started using discarded bottles in 1984 to decorate the monks’ shelters. This attracted more people to donate more bottles to build other buildings such as a pagoda, ceremony hall and toilets. Bottle tops were also used to decorate murals.

According to Abbot San Kataboonyo, “the more bottles we get, the more buildings we make.”

Thai monks from the have used over one million recycled glass bottle to construct their Buddhist temple.

There are a dozen more photos at the Green Upgrader and you can see the amazing ways in which the monks used the bottles to create some pretty spectacular structures.

Surprisingly, there are at least two buddha breweries in the world. The Laughing Buddha, in Seattle, and Lucky Beer, in Australia, with a very cool Buddha-shaped bottle.
 

Scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas are hard at work trying to create a beer that can fight cancer and heart disease. A student research team of six is trying to genetically engineer a beer to include higher levels of resveratrol, the chemical found in red wine that’s believed to fight diseases. It’s the key ingredient that has led to what has been dubbed the “French paradox.”

Last June, scientists at the University of Wisconsin found that giving resveratrol to middle-aged mice makes them age more slowly and has the further advantage of strengthening their heart, even when given a high fat diet. In addition, recent breakthroughs in nanotechnology at Stanford, UC San Diego and Texas at Austin with regard to heart conditions made what the Rice students are trying now possible.

So far, they’re in the “process of developing a genetically modified strain of yeast that will ferment beer and produce resveratrol at the same time.” They quickly discovered that the yeast used in the Rice lab is not particularly good for making a decent-tasting beer. So this summer, the team asked local craft brewer Saint Arnold Brewery for some of their own yeast. Apparently, resveratrol is tasteless and odorless, much like iocane powder, that poison used in The Princess Bride.

“We’re now putting these genes into the yeast,” Taylor Stevenson, one of the team members said. “We’re fairly confident it will work because all the components have worked separately.” The plan is that hopefully the genetically modified yeast could be sold to commercial breweries so that they could make healthy beer, though at this phase of the work it will likely be at least five years before a commercially viable strain is developed.

The team’s immediate plans are to enter their BioBeer in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine Championship Jamboree next month in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rice’s news staff also has an article about the team’s efforts entitled Better beer: College team creating anti-cancer brew.

Despite the obvious advantages of a beer that’s indisputably healthy — though in truth beer today is plenty healthy, regardless of neo-prohibitionist propaganda to the contrary — my initial reaction is one of skepticism. Perhaps that’s because I don’t understand genetic engineering all that well. But the idea of a genetically modified beer or Super Beer does not strike me as the best idea to come along. I guess that makes me more of a traditionalist when it comes to food. I’m not a fan of GMOs and I don’t see how this is appreciably different. If GMOs are generally a bad idea, why would genetically modified brewer’s yeast be good?

Up, up and away. It’s Super Beer!