While driving down to the East Bay for the bimonthly Celebrator tasting Tuesday night, I had my iPod on shuffle. A few years back someone gave me a handmade CD entitled “Music To Drink Beer By” featuring a bunch of cool beer-themed songs. Actually I have three out of four of these, each with different songs. Curiously, many of them start out with an old radio beer commercial before the song starts. Prior to Big Bill Lister’s Blowing the Suds Off My Beer is an unintentionally hilarious ad for Ballantine Ale. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s from the 1950s.

It’s a nice reminder that although it feels like a great majority of people know very little about beer nowadays, we’ve certainly come a long way since the Fifties. In context, I understand that this comes from a time when beer and lager were marketed as synonymous terms and it wasn’t uncommon for breweries to advertise they had beer and ales. So this would have undoubtedly sounded perfectly normal to the ears of people in that time, but it now sounds positively quaint. If possible, in your head imagine a silky smooth deep bass male voice over.

Here’s the transcript I made from it:

Beer drinkers, if you’ve tried every beer there is to try and even the best doesn’t quite make it with you, maybe it isn’t beer you’re really looking for. Maybe you’re ready for beer’s big brother: ale. Ballantine Ale. Oh, ale looks like beer alright and it’s light like beer. But it packs a lot more taste than beer. A clean, dry, tangy taste. The aroma tells you right off. Clean. Dry. Tangy. Here’s the kind of flavor it takes to really satisfy a man. Yet, because it’s light, there’s plenty room for more. Try it. Beer’s big brother. Ale. Ballantine Ale. C’mon. Graduate from beer. Join the ale men.

After hearing that, I know I wanted to join “The Ale Men!” I love how they describe the bitterness as “tangy,” presumably to avoid any negative associations. And the notion that it takes “flavor” to “really satisfy a man” just cracks me up, though to be fair I want flavor, so maybe they were on to something. But be careful the next time you order a pilsner or other lager beer. Big brother could be watching!

Ballantine Ale was one of the few ale breweries that had much impact prior to the 1980s. Ballantine was founded by Peter Ballantine, who was born in Scotland in 1781. It’s flagship pale ale is one of the oldest brands of beer in the United States. At its peak, Ballantine was the 4th largest brewer in the United States. Like seemingly most defunct brands, it is now owned by Pabst, and they have up an “official” website. There’s also some more information at Wikipedia and at Falstaff Fan Page (which once owned the brand, too).

Anheuser-Busch InBev announced today plans to close the Stag Brewery, their brewery in London. Situated in the Mortlake District on the River Thames, it’s part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and is on the south bank of the River Thames between Kew and Barnes with East Sheen inland to the south. It’s one of England’s oldest brewing sites and is also the largest brewery in London today. Once a Watney’s brewery, the present structure was originally built in the 19th century, though exactly when is uncertain. There may have been brewing on the site as early as the 15th century. Martyn Cornell at Zythophile has a typically thorough history of the place from June of this year.

The decision was made because of a “restructuring of its operations in the United Kingdom,” according to A-BIB. British InBev Spokeswoman Rebecca Mowling also mentions “’synergies’ arising from the $52 billion November takeover of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch.”

It currently employs 182, brewing Budweiser, Bud Ice and Michelob Ultra. Pending union negotiations, under the present plan it will close next year, in 2010.

The Stag Brewery on the River Thames, right at the finishing line for the famous annual Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race.
 

If you have kids and are in the beer business, there’s precious few things you can buy for them with beer logos or graphics on them. Which is shame, I say. When Porter was born, Anchor Brewery presented him with a cool onesie. A year or so later, a friend at Deschutes gave him a logo shirt just his size.

I don’t understand why people are so squeamish about this nowadays. When we were kids and iron-ons were all the rage, especially down the shore at Wildwood, Ocean City or any of the other New Jersey resort towns we’d drive to for a weekend getaway in high school. Tourist shops were littered with countless iron-ons, many of them beer themed and they had no qualms selling them to us. And why should they? You can’t drink a shirt. There’s no law so far as I know that prohibits minors from wearing the image of a product that they aren’t allowed to buy. It’s the same bullshit thing with websites claiming that you must be 21 to read their brewery website. Why? Since when is reading about anything restricted?

One of my favorite painters — Rene Magritte — famously reminded us of this in his iconic The Treachery of Images, though you probably know it by the translation of its text, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” which is “This is Not a Pipe.” The painting, you’ll recall, is simply a tobacco pipe on a blank canvas with the text beneath it. And the point Magritte was making is that images are not the objects, just representations. And so it is with brewery logos and words on a page (or computer screen). They’re not the beer themselves, which is prohibited for kids, but merely images. They have no intrinsic power, only what we assign to them.

But our society is so in thrall to the screeching minorities that believe they know best how you should raise your children that almost no company can offer such products for fear of these groups’ reaction, effectively curtailing what would otherwise be legal products that harm no one, unless you count the delicate sensibilities of the neo-prohibitionists (okay, I’m tired of writing that word and so will start using Lew Bryson’s preferred term, the New Drys, just to break it up). Heaven forfend that children see beer, beer brand logos or worst of all, beer on clothing. They might become familiar with them and/or not afraid of them, and we can’t have that. Because of this, I personally love finding shirts for my kids that will drive the New Drys nuts.

So I was mightily bummed yesterday when I came across this shirt, “B is For Beer,” because it’s only available is size up to 36 months, well past my urchins. I first stumbled on it from a UK website, but happily there is an American retailer carrying it, Baby Dagny.

It’s available in white, light blue and hop green. If my kids were younger, I’d buy two.

Last year at this time, I made my usual five predictions for the 2008 beer year. Let’s see how I did.

 
The hops and malt shortages will continue to plague the industry throughout 2008 and may even grow worse.

My Score: A
This one wasn’t too much of a stretch, of course, though things did begin to calm down somewhat with the 2008 harvest.

 
Beer prices will go up, that’s a fact not a prediction. The real question is whether or not beer consumers will be willing to pay more and, if so, how much more?

My Score: A
Initial sales figures do seem to bear out that consumers are willing to pay a little bit more for craft beer. The growth figures by dollars remained in double digits, though with higher prices, it would have more surprising if they hadn’t. Volume growth did slow a little bit to 6.5% but was still better than the mainstream macro brands.

 
Distributor consolidation will increase and will continue to make things difficult for small brewers trying to bring their beer to market or increase their distribution to new areas.

My Score: A+
This was pretty much the number one topic at the NBWA Convention with Miller and Coors in arbitration and major import companies trying to figure out where they’d land. With InBev looking to make deep cuts to pay for acquiring Anheuser-Busch, there will likely be more distributors for sale and other shake-ups still to come in 2009.

 
Mergers among big multi-national beer companies will continue and at least one or two big such announcements will be made in 2008.

My Score: A+
I’d say this hunch came through with flying colors.

 
Neo-Prohibitionists will continue to step up attacks on alcohol generally and to specifically and inexplicably target beer.

My Score: A
This one was probably a little too predictable, but I was still surprised by how aggressive these chuckleheads became in 2008, attacking Santa Claus, alcopops and trying to get beer saddled with new and higher excise taxes.

Overall Score: A
I did better this year than last, though in retrospect I think I didn’t exactly go out on a limb with any of my prediction, taking a pretty safe route. At least it feels that way in retrospect. I think I’ll have to try harder this year to make less predictable predictions. See you next year!

A friend sent me this comic strip from Argyle Sweater by Scott Hilburn. It exploits the concept of beer goggles for comedic effect. The strip ran four days ago on 12.27.

 
There’s a line in another comic strip, a favorite of mine — Bizarro by Dan Piraro — that this comic made me immediately think of. It goes something like this. There are three people, each espousing their philosophy relating to glass that’s half liquid, half air. “As a pessimist, I say ‘the glass is half-empty,’ as a optimist, I say ‘the glass is half-full,” as an optometrist, ‘I say what the heck difference does it make?'”