The Department of Homeland Security is, apparently, all done securing our borders from terrorist threats. I say that because they’ve moved on from their stated work, which consists of — as their website puts it — “Preserving our Freedom, Protecting America,” to the more important job of protecting America’s breweries from the looming spectre of terrorist attack. The first to be saved is Creekside Brewing, a new brewery that recently opened in San Luis Obispo, California. Owners John Moule and Eric Beaton were told by the TTB (The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) that they must “protect the[ir] beer from terrorists” by building a wall around their tanks. At first the tanks, which sit in full view inside the brewpub, were separated from the public by some poles and chains. Not good enough, said the TTB. They must “be behind a physical barrier with locking doors,” they were told. So they put up locks. Still not good enough. Moule and Beaton were told to build a wall. After a lot of asking, they were finally told that “the wall was needed to prevent someone from poisoning the beer. What’s more, [the representative] told him it was a post-Sept. 11 measure that fell under the supervision of the Department of Homeland Security.” Creekside Brewing had to spend $15,000 on iron gates and thick glass and plastic, which also delayed their opening by a month.

Above is the new terrorist-proof Creekside Brewery. (Photo by Steve E. Miller of New Times). But where the story gets even more interesting, is that no one can say for sure exactly why, or under what law, they were singled out by the TTB to protect their brewery from a potential terrorist attack. As detailed by New Times, a local SLO newspaper, every federal agency pointed the finger at someone else when pressed for reasons why Creekside had to protect its beer. It’s pretty clear they’re the only brewery so far that’s been forced to put their brewery under lock and key in this fashion. But when it came to reasonable questions like “why,” things quickly turned into a Kafka novel. It’s definitely worth reading the New Times article, in which a labyrinth series of federal agencies were contacted, none of which would claim responsibility for Creekside’s delay in opening or their having to spend $15,000 on the new security measures. At the end, your head will be spinning. And you won’t feel any safer. As another blogger, Dick Destiny, put it. “One is more likely to be stung to death by bees than be the target of a terrorist attack in SLO.”

 
By sheer coincidence, I suspect, there is a Terrorist Beer Movement, but it has to do with people playing the video game America’s Army.

I’ve previously featured such beer and sci-fi related items from Star Trek and Futurama. We can now add Star Wars to the list, courtesy of he “official” Star Wars blog. A sculptor by the name of Paul Loughridge, who online goes by Lockwasher, who work primarily with scrap metal bits, created an R2-D2 model using a Heineken mini-keg. He made it for the San Jose Super Toy show and it’s over 16″ tall. The Star Wars blog also has an interview with Loughridge about the robot. Sadly, it contains no beer, but given that it’s Heineken, maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.

While nudity and disappearing bits on beer labels is hardly new, a trio of Australians have launched the latest version with their new Skinny Blonde. One of the three, Jarrod Taylor, is an artist who designed the label and another, Hamish Rosser, is a chemical engineer who figured how to make the skinny blonde’s bikini disappear using a chemical process similar to disappearing ink.

 
The three are from Bondi, a suburb of Sydney, and formed the company Brother’s Ink to make and market the beer. They began brewing in Taylor’s kitchen three years ago. The third owner is Richie Harkham, who’s a wine maker, actor and producer.Hamish Rosser is also the drummer for Australian band, The Vines.

They describe the beer on their website as follows. “Skinny Blonde contains no preservatives, chemical additives or animal products whatsoever so its OK for vegans. It’s 100% Australian.
Unlike most beers brewed in Australia Skinny Blonde is 100% Australian owned and operated. And it’s 100% Beer. Skinny Blonde is 5.2% alc/vol, low-carb and as tasty as its name sake.”

Yesterday, Brouwer’s Cafe in Seattle, Washington, held their 7th annual Hard Liver Barleywine Fest. I was fortunate enough to judge again this year, and it was yet another terrific festival. When the doors opened at 11:00 a.m., a line snaked up to the end of the block and Seattle’s best Belgian bar was filled to capacity with minutes of opening.

After Hard Liver judging, Tom Peters (from Monk’s Cafe in Philadelphia), Matt Bonney (co-owner of Brouwer’s) and Stephen Beaumont relax with a few more tasty beers.

For more photos from this year’s Hard Liver Barleywine Fest, visit the photo gallery.
 

I just got into my hotel room in Seattle. I’m in town for the Hard Liver Barleywine Festival over at Brouwer’s, though I’ll first be attending a cheese and beer tasting courtesy of Alan Shapiro’s SBS Imports, and then a whisky tasting tonight.

Anyway, I came across an interesting little factoid in a magazine I was reading on the plane. I can’t verify its accuracy or its source, but it’s interesting all the same.

The “estimated number of drunk people in the world at any given moment” is 46,948,952, or nearly 47 million. With an estimated current world population, as I write this, of 6,894,222,276 or roughly 6.9 billion, that means a mere 0.68% of the world — less than 1 percent — is inebriated at any given time. That doesn’t sound like very many drunks in the world when expressed that way, now does it?

In a disappointing editorial in today’s San Francisco Chronicle entitled Liquor By Any Other Name, the lie that alcopops, malternatives, and FMBs contain spirits is once more trotted out in what appears to be wholesale propaganda rather than honest editorializing.

Last year, the California Board of Equalization apparently bowed to pressure from anti-alcohol groups and reclassified FMBs as spirits, despite the fact that they DO NOT contain spirits. I wrote about this deception last year when the BOE passed the new rules. At that time, Michael Scippa, advocacy director for the Marin Institute, was using the tactic of repeating a falsehood in the hopes that eventually people would take it as a fact. I won’t dignify it by repeating it here, but this was my response.

That’s not true, they are malt beverages with flavoring added. Distilled spirits are not added and it is not where their “alcoholic content” is derived from. They are most closely related to beer, which is precisely why they they are called flavored malt beverages and why they have been taxed like beer. Their alcohol content is likewise about the same as the average beer. They are fermented like beer and then chemical flavoring compounds are added, which give FMBs their distinctive sweet, fruity essence. Unlike attorney Scott Dickey’s assertions, which in fact are mischaracterizations, FMBs are exactly what their name suggests, no one has deceived anyone.

In the editorial, they state that revenues of $38 million were expected from the reclassification, but that only about $9,000 in taxes has been paid. Apparently, FMB manufacturers in response re-formulated their drinks to remove even the chemical essence of their spirits flavors and — probably, this is just a guess — used strictly chemical flavorings not derived in any way from their spirits. If the new law says, however ridiculously, that no spirits whatsoever can be in these drinks, then they did what any logical person would do, they removed them. But because this has nothing to with fairness, this has our editorialist up in arms. Here’s how they put it.

The manufacturers admit that they’re not paying the tax, and — get this — they don’t think they need to, because over the course of the last year they’ve managed to “alter” the drink formulas of thousands of these beverages so that they’re technically beers, not liquor.

Well, get this, they always were “technically beers” and no amount of wishing otherwise will change that fact. They never were “liquor,” only the BOE changed the definition so that the inclusion of any amount of “spirits” would reclassify them as “liquor” for purposes of taxation. That in no way magically converted them into a liquor. It’s in a sense the same way that a person with any African-American blood in them, no matter how distant, once made them classified as a black person in our more racist past. An ugly example, to be sure, but that’s exactly what the neo-prohibitionists are doing, making it seem as if a 5% a.b.v. FMB is the same as a bottle of 100 proof whisky just because it contains an infinitesimal amount of the essence of a spirit flavoring. And then the editorial has the audacity to call the FMB manufacturers “disingenuous, if not deceptive.” Oh, and just to illustrate how much they don’t understand this issue, there are about twelve manufacturers of FMBs, each making perhaps no more than a half-dozen brand extension flavors, nowhere near the “thousands” that the editorial asserts.

According to current law, the state has no right to look at the formula itself. The federal agency known as the TTB has that express function. But the editorial doesn’t like that fact, calling the alcohol industry “dangerous” — now who’s being disengenuous? — because, as they put it, the TTB “seems more interested in protecting so-called trade secrets than in helping the state of California regulate a dangerous industry.” Oh, now suddenly it’s about “regulating” the industry. See here I thought they were trying to extract taxes from the FMB manufacturers. Please.

So on Tuesday, the BOE voted 3-2 to request that FMB manufacturers hand over their formulas, even though the Feds have already reviewed and approved them. But the agenda is revealed in the editorial’s last sentence, naturally. “California’s congressional delegation needs to ask federal regulators why they’re siding with these manufacturers instead of public health and the state’s fiscal interest.” And just a paragraph before it was all about regulating the “dangerous” industry. Now, it’s about money. Oh, and the trumped up claim of “public health,” the slightly classier version of “it’s for the kids” argument that’s ubiquitous in the New Drys’ quiver of propaganda.

I’m pretty tired of these arguments, but here goes, again. Yes, California is in the throes of an economic crisis, just like most other states and our federal government, too. But that does not mean it’s appropriate to target one industry to foot the bill. If the state needs more money — and it does — then that burden should be shouldered by all of us, equally. Period. And the “public health” interest is supposedly all about not wanting underage kids to drink FMBs. Well, unless I missed something, it’s already illegal for them to do so, just like it’s illegal for people under 21 to drink beer, wine or liquor. This is an issue of enforcing current laws. Period. The New Drys’ stated agenda for raising the taxes on FMBs is to make them more expensive for teens to buy, which in their collective mind means that it will reduce consumption among our state’s youth. It’s a deeply flawed strategy, and punishes virtually everyone along the supply chain, from manufacturer to adult consumer.

In the end, for me the most troubling aspect of these propagandist editorials is that the reason most neo-prohibitionists want to remove alcohol from society is on moral grounds. That’s the root reason, though getting there is couched in the typical rhetoric of protecting children and society from harm. I could accept the moral arguments if I felt that the tactics used were themselves moral, but they’re not. It’s very hard for me to have someone lecture me about morals through propaganda that spreads lies and falsehoods to further a supposedly “moral” cause, freely using an “ends justify the means” approach. To me, that’s the very definition of disingenuous and deceptive.