Last summer, Labatt USA moved its headquarters from Connecticut to Buffalo, New York. The Associated Press is reporting that Labatt USA has now added a buffalo to their beer label to reflect their new business location. “Labatt USA President Glen Walter hand-delivered a case of the newly labeled beer to Mayor Byron Brown Thursday. In exchange, Brown proclaimed Thursday ‘Labatt USA Day.'” I can’t find an image of the new label anywhere, but I’m curious to see what it looks like. Is it a blue buffalo?

We already know that the price of barley has doubled over the least year, but according to a scientist from New Zealand, global warming may keep that situation from getting any better and will continue to hamper efforts to increase the supply of barley to be used in making beer.

From the AP story:

Jim Salinger, a climate scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said climate change likely will cause a decline in the production of malting barley in parts of New Zealand and Australia. Malting barley is a key ingredient of beer.

Speaking at the Institute of Brewing and Distilling ‘s 30th Asia Pacific Section Convention, Salinger predicted “the price of beer is likely to rise in coming decades because climate change will hamper the production of a key grain needed for the brew — especially in Australia.”

Though Salinger was talking about only his native New Zealand and Australia, it’s not hard to extrapolate that the same climate changes will have similar effects in other parts of the world, too. He finished his talk on this cheery note. “[C]limate change could cause a drop in beer production within 30 years, especially in parts of Australia, as dry areas become drier and water shortages worsen.”

According to a news radio station in Seattle, Washington, KOMO Radio, farmers in the Yakima area have responded to the rising price of hops and are pulling out other crops to plant hop rhizomes this year. From the report:

Growers are feverishly reconditioning yards and adding new land at an unheard-of pace. Growers are receiving multiple-year contracts with prices front-loaded to help them shoulder the estimated $6,000-per-acre cost to plant yards and also upgrade equipment.

I presume the acres mentioned in this report are in addition to the 6,000 of high alphas that was announced in January at the hop growers convention.

Ralph Olson, general manager of grower-owned HopUnion of Yakima, a buyer who deals primarily with smaller craft brewers, thinks the figure may be closer to 8,000 acres by the time all is said and done. That would be a jump of nearly 25 percent in acreage in one year.

That would suggest an additional 2,000 acres, of which hopefully at least some will be aroma hops. There’s been a lot of speculation but no one’s been sure what would happen this year. Now that spring is upon us and it’s time to start planting, it’s looking like more hops are being planted than previously expected. If that trend continues in other places where hops are traditionally grown then that’s very good news indeed.

David J. Hanson, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Sociology of the State University of New York at Potsdam, has been researching alcohol and drinking for over 40 years. He’s also the host of the Alcohol Problems & Solutions website, which is quite remarkable for both it’s scope and size.

Hanson’s goal with the site “is to provide information to stimulate thought and discussion about alcohol issues.” The sheer number of topics tackled is nothing short of amazing, including Alcohol Information, Alcohol Issues, Drinking & Driving, Alcohol & Youth, and Alcohol & Health divided into at least twenty-six sub-categories. I have literally lost hours at a stretch just wandering around and reading what’s there. He has no agenda to push and a result his view is unlike any other around, where neo-prohibitionist and cheerleading websites alike tend to only nakedly take one side. You never feel that way with Hanson’s writing, and as a result he’s much easier to take at face value, even on the occasions when I don’t agree with him.

He’s continually updating the news section to follow what’s being discussed about alcohol policy and politics. And he never shies aware from the controversies that are so much a part of this debate. In addition, there are also resource pages that include collections of articles, readings and other references on Alcohol Advertising, Alcohol in the Diet, Anti-Alcohol Industry, Binge Drinking, Brain & Alcohol, Breast Cancer and Alcohol, Breathalyzer Accuracy, Cancer and Alcohol, Diabetes and Alcohol, Drunken Driving, Deceptive Alcohol “Facts,” Heart Disease, Legal Issues, Longevity and Alcohol, Social Norms Marketing, Underage Drinking, Women’s Health & Alcohol, and Zero Tolerance. Fascinating stuff.

This is my third pick for “Website of the Month,” which I started featuring on the right sidebar two months ago, because I get so many link requests, and because I have so many in my blogroll, I wanted to highlight the best ones I come across.

Sacramento Brewing will be serving up their Spring Brewmaster’s Dinner on April 23, beginning at 6:30. The dinner will be five courses and the cost is $50. It will be held at their Town & Country location. Call 916.485.4677 for reservations. I’ll probably see you there.

The Menu:

Dinner: 6:30 PM

First Course

Fresh wild Alaskan ivory salmon with spicy pecan butter

Beer: India Pale Ale

Second Course:

Robollita (Italian bean soup)

Beer: Nut Brown Ale

Third Course:

Arugula & spinach salad with sun dried tomatoes, dry salami, and baby mozzarella

Beer: Hefeweizen

Fourth Course:

Seared breast of duck with mushroom cannelloni and golden marsala sauce

Beer: Red Horse Ale

Fifth Course:

Beer poached pear strudel served with Brussels Blonde reduction sauce

Beer: Brussels Blonde

Peter Hoey, brewmaster at Sacramento Brewing (on left), at the GABF Brewer’s Reception last year, along with Rich Norgrove from Bear Republic and Arne Johnson of Marin Brewing.

 
4.23

Sacramento Spring Brewmaster’s Dinner

Sacramento Brewing Co., Town and Country Village, 2713 El Paseo Lane, Sacramento, California
916.485.4677 [ website ]
 

Last year I did an annotated list of the Top 50 so I could see who moved up and down, who was new to the list and who dropped off. Four breweries dropped off the list and there are three new ones who weren’t on last year’s list. The reason that math doesn’t work out is because last year the combined breweries of Gambrinus were listed together but this year they were separated again, with two of them making the top fifty. So here is this year’s list again annotated with how they changed compared to last year.
 

1. Anheuser-Busch; #1 last year, no surprises
2. Miller Brewing; ditto for #2
3. Coors Brewing; And #3, too
4. Pabst Brewing; And #4, too
5. Boston Beer Co.; Second year at #5, having moved up 2 spots the previous year
6. D. G. Yuengling and Son; Same as last year
7. Sierra Nevada Brewing; Same as last year
8. New Belgium Brewing; Up 1 spot from #9 last year
9. High Falls Brewing; Up 1 spot from #10 last year
10. Spoetzl Brewery; Split off from Gambrinus, which last year was #8
11. Widmer Brothers Brewing; Same as last year, after shooting up 6 spots the previous year
12. Redhook Ale Brewery; Same as last year
13. Pyramid Breweries; Up 1 spot from #14 last year, having moved up 6 spots the previous year
14. Matt Brewing; Up 2 spots from #16 last year
15. Minhas Craft Brewery; Same as last year
16. Deschutes Brewery; Up 1 from #17 last year
17. Iron City Brewing (fka Pittsburgh Brewing); Down 4 from two years at #13, just coming out of bankruptcy
18. Boulevard Brewing; Same as last year
19. Full Sail Brewing; Up 2 from #21 last year
20. Harpoon Brewery; Same as last year
21. Alaskan Brewing; Down from #19 last year
22. Magic Hat Brewing; Up 2 from #24
23. Anchor Brewing; Down 1 from #22
24. Bell’s Brewery; Up 2 from #26 last year, after moving up 9 the previous year
25. Goose Island Beer; Up 6 from #31, the second year in a row they’ve moved up 6
26. August Schell Brewing; Up 2 from #28
27. Shipyard Brewing; Up 2 from #29
28. Summit Brewing; Down 1 from #27
29. Mendocino Brewing; Up 1 from #30
30. Abita Brewing; Up 2 from #32
31. Gordon Biersch Brewing; Down 6 from #25
32. Brooklyn Brewery; Up 2 from #34
33. Stone Brewing; Up 4 from #37, after moving up 11 the previous year
34. Rogue Ales; Up 2 from #36
35. Long Trail Brewing; Down 2 from #33
36. New Glarus Brewing; Down 1 from #35, after jumping 10 spots the previous years
37. Kona Brewing; Down 14 from #23
38. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery; Up 4 from #42
39. Firestone Walker Brewing; Up 1 from #40, after rising 7 the previous year
40. Great Lakes Brewing; Up 1 from #41
41. Lagunitas Brewing; Up 3 from #44
42. Flying Dog Brewery; Up 3 from #45
43. Sweetwater Brewing; Up 3 from #46
44. BridgePort Brewing; Split off from Gambrinus, which last year was #8
45. Rock Bottom Brewery Restaurants; Down 6 from #39
46. Gluek Brewing (now known as Cold Spring Brewery); Not in the Top 50 last year
47. Straub Brewery; Down 4 from #43
48. Odell Brewing; Down 1 from #47
49. BJs Restaurant & Brewery; Not in the Top 50 last year
50. Victory Brewing; Not in the Top 50 last year

The following breweries dropped off the list, meaning they were on the 2006 list but are not on the 2007 list of the Top 50 breweries.
 

• Stevens Point Brewery
• Mac and Jack’s Brewery
• Big Sky Brewing
• Otter Creek Brewing
• Gambrinus; Last year the combined totals of their breweries, Spoetzl Brewery, BridgePort Brewing, Pete’s Wicked, and Trumer Brauerei were #8; this year they were considered separately

At 12:01 a.m., 75 years ago, beer became legal for the first time in thirteen years, but in only 19 states. Though it would be eight more months until Prohibition officially ended (on December 5), President Franklin D. Roosevelt kept his first campaign promise by encouraging Congress to modify the Volstead Act and they passed the Cullen-Harrison bill, which FDR signed into law on March 23. The bill allowed the sale and manufacture of low-alcohol beer (3.2% alcohol by weight/4.0% by volume), along with light wines, too. For brewers, it represented a return to brewing and those that had remained opening making non-alcoholic products quickly retooled. Those that had been shuttered for over a decade had a harder time re-opening, but some did manage it. Ultimately Prohibition did irreparable harm the industry as a whole and less than half of America’s breweries did not survive.

The Brewers Association this year cleverly called the celebration “75 Years of Beer” since this year is the 75th anniversary of 3.2 beer being legalized in 19 states. But that won’t work next year, because “76 Years of Beer” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. From their press release:

Historians note that Prohibition officially ended on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment. But earlier that year, newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt took steps to fulfill his campaign promise to end the national ban on alcohol. He spurred Congress to modify the Volstead Act to allow the sale of 3.2 percent beer in advance of the Twenty-first Amendment being ratified. Thus on April 7, 1933, Roosevelt himself received newly legalized beer at the White House to toast what was the beginning of the end for Prohibition. In the 24-hours that followed, more than 1.5 million gallons of beer flowed as Americans celebrated.

“April 7th is a day to recognize the past 75 years of beer and the beer community’s contribution to American’s quality of life. The explosion of creativity and innovation by those who make beer is an American success story,” said Charlie Papazian, President of the Brewers Association.

“As we celebrate this significant day in the history of beer, we also recognize the incredible contributions beer has made to our nation and the economy over the last 75 years,” added Jeff Becker, President of the Beer Institute. “Today, our industry contributes nearly $190 billion annually to the U.S. economy and provides more than 1.7 million jobs to our nation’s workforce.”

“April 7th is the perfect time to highlight the entrepreneurial spirit and economic contributions America’s beer industry brings to our country. Americans now have access to nearly 13,000 labels of beer — within the safest alcohol distribution system in the world — because of the state-based regulatory system that was established 75 years ago,” added Craig Purser, president of the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA).

See, that’s a lot of angles that have little to do with repeal or the specific history of the event but which capture the spirit of the celebration, namely a holiday talking about beer’s virtues.

Another historian that I greatly admire, Maureen Ogle (author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer) tells the true story of the events surrounding April 7 in an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times.

She writes:

Today, we look back on Prohibition as an exercise in temporary insanity, but the 13-year experiment in sobriety was rooted in our quintessentially American faith that we can perfect the world. A broad cross section of people — men and women, urban and rural, young and old — supported the ban on alcohol because they believed that it would reduce crime, alleviate poverty, strengthen the family and nurture a more perfect union.

That lofty vision collapsed under the weight of reality. Prohibition spawned an underground economy devoted to making, shipping and selling booze. The officials trying to enforce it earned more from bribes, kickbacks and the resale of confiscated alcohol than from their meager salaries. The poison of such corruption permeated daily life. It undermined respect for the Prohibition amendment and, by extension, for the Constitution itself. Worse, Americans realized that in banning the production of alcoholic beverages, one of the nation’s largest and most heavily taxed industries, they had closed the spigot on a significant source of both jobs and revenue.

Maureen also has a number short stories having to do with April 7, 1933 on her blog that are worth reading.

Bob Skilnik also sent out his own press release in an effort to make sure the right story is told.

April 7th is Not the 75th Anniversary of the End of National Prohibition

“What was was once a trite beer history canard has become an outright lie,” says beer historian Bob Skilnik. “I can only hope that the apparent rewriting of U.S. brewing history is either an innocent result of poor research and not a shameful display of industry greed, just for the sake of a bump in beer sales.”

Bob Skilnik, author of “Beer & Food: An American History” (ISBN 0977808610, Jefferson Press, Hardcover, $24.95), argues that industry embellishments and poor research have distorted the true date of Repeal on December 5, 1933, which signified the revocation of the 18th Amendment and the enactment of the 21st Amendment and brought back the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic beverages.

“Congressional events leading up to April 7, 1933 allowed only the resumption of sales for legal beer with an alcoholic strength of no more than 3.2% alcohol by volume (abv), weak by today’s standards. Congress had earlier passed the so-called Cullen-Harrison Bill which redefined what constituted a legally ‘intoxicating’ beverage. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill on March 23, 1933. The bill’s passage took the teeth out of the bite of the Volstead Act of 1919 and raised the Prohibition-era legal limit of alcoholic drinks from .05% abv to 3.2% abv.”

“Bringing breweries back online on April 7, 1933 in states whose legislatures agreed to go ‘wet’ again gave a tremendous shot in the arm of an economy in the throes of the Depression. In just forty-eight hours, $25,000,000 had been pumped into various beer-related trades as diverse as bottling manufacturers to the sawdust wholesalers whose product lay strewn on the floors of saloons. For the first day of nationwide beer sales, it was estimated that the federal tax for beer brought in $7,500,000 to the United States Treasury.”

In the next few months, scores of states held constitutional conventions which led to the passage and enactment of the 21st Amendment, the first time a constitutional amendment had nullified another. It also gave municipal, state and federal governments the time to sort out the taxation and regulation of the entire drink trade, a legacy that continues.

On December 5, 1933, the true end of National Prohibition became a reality when Utah signed on to the Repeal amendment, satisfying the requirement of needing at least 36 states for the enactment of the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

I certainly admire his tenacity in trying to set and keep the record straight. As a history buff myself, I’m keenly aware that a lot of our history that we take for granted is simply wrong, for a variety of reasons. It’s quite remarkable to contemplate, but much of what was in our history textbooks is simply not correct, not exaggerations or off a little, but completely fabricated or with most of the facts incorrect. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me is a fascinating study on just how wrong is so much of what we were taught in school.

But I’m also a calendar geek (I guess we need a new word for that, too — perhaps holiday head or time bandit?) and the way holidays come about has almost nothing to with reality or the truth of when the events that are being celebrated took place. Christmas is the classic example, with their being no actual certainty when Jesus’ birthday was, and I’ve read accounts placing it in the spring, as well as other times of the year, too. Thanksgiving, if it ever really took place at all, was not when we celebrate it. The Declaration of Independence was actually adopted on July 2, and both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson believed that would be the date we celebrated American independence. It took two more days of making changes to the document which was then ratified with the modifications on the fourth. The rest is, well, history. You get the idea.

But there’s no law or ethic or whatever preventing a group of people from celebrating whatever they want whenever they want. What’s tricky is merely reaching a tipping point where enough other people agree to recognize the date as well. Mother’s Day, for example, is a relatively modern invention, with our version of it originating just after the Civil War, even though its roots are ancient. But different countries celebrate it on very different days. The actual date doesn’t really matter in the end nearly as much as the spirit of what is being celebrated. If we keep alive the notion that prohibition was a failed experiment that exacted a terrible cost on our nation, that legislating morality is a bad idea and you can’t really stop people from doing something that they find pleasurable, then who among us should be bothered by whether it’s remembered on April 7 or December 5? I realize the difference here is that we know with historic certainty that repeal did not take place on April 7, so we should definitely avoid calling it Repeal Day; that honor should go to December 5. But I see no reason not to also celebrate on April 7. With the neo-prohibitionists nipping at our heels once more with the vigor of a junkyard dog, setting aside two days each year to remind our critics that Prohibition will not work and celebrate how much beer enriches our lives, our economy and our society in positive ways seems like a good idea to me. Since it is the day that beer once more legally flowed after thirteen years, we can justifiably called it “The Return of Beer Day” or “3.2 Beer Day” or “Back to Beer Day” or even “New Beer’s Eve” as it was originally known.

To learn more about the history of Prohibition, here are some interesting links:

• Alcohol Prohibition Was A Failure, Policy Analysis from the Cato Institute
• Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition, from Brown University
• April 7 is NOT the 74th Anniversary of the End of National Prohibition 2008, by Bob Skilnik.
• April 7 is NOT the 74th Anniversary of the End of National Prohibition 2007, by Bob Skilnik, with an excerpt from his wonderful book Beer & Food.
• Prohibition: A Lesson in the Futility (and Danger) of Prohibiting, from the book Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do
• Schaffer Library of Drug Policy History of Alcohol Prohibition
• Temperance & Prohibition History, from Ohio State
• The Day Beer Flowed Again, by Maureen Ogle
• Thinkquest’s Prohibition — The “Noble Experiment”
• Wikipedia