Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Session #9: Music & Beer

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Our ninth Session, hosted by Tomme Arthur at the Lost Abbey Brewer’s Log, involves the pairing of beer with music, another subject near and dear to my heart. My original aspiration was a career in music, preferably writing, and once upon a time I played the saxophone and clarinet. What’s interesting about that is how common it is. There are so many brewers and beer people who are musicians that it’s harder to not find a brewing musician than it is to find one.

It’s almost five in the morning on Friday, and I have to get on a plane in a few hours for a trip to Germany. Couple that with the lost days in Pennsylvania to attend my great aunt’s funeral earlier this week and I’ve gotten myself more behind than usual. So instead of something new, I’m instead going to quote myself from a piece I did on beer and music for Beer Advocate magazine’s May issue.

Music has a way of getting under the skin and directly into our soul. It touches us in ways that seem almost magical. Hearing an old tune can transport us back in time and allow us to relive memories. A new song can infect us with a desire to dance, commune with friends or shout to the heavens. As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche quipped, “Without music life would be a mistake.”

Only beer can make this experience more intense. Alcohol is called a social lubricant for good reason. When enhanced by the inhibition-releasing power of beer, music comes alive and worms its way into our very being. As Nietzsche later wrote, “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” So it is that brewers provide an invaluable service to humanity’s progress and spiritual evolution. They create the catalyst that allows great music to flourish and they give all of us a simple way to enhance life’s pleasures. For this reason, music and beer go together like no others and create a combination that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. A good beer makes the music sound better and a good song cries out for a brew.

To the outsider, both beer and music seem to flow chaotically, yet both are very ordered and mathematical. The best of brewing is both art and science, and brewers who make a consistent beer are fastidiously organized. There is a precision integral to the process from how long the boil lasts to at what exact moment to add the hops and in what amount. So, too, music can be endlessly ordered into time signatures and tempos. For each, measures are very important. Both musicians and brewers express themselves as artists by putting a lot of themselves into their craft, be it a new stout or a new song. But beyond that, because of the nearly infinite combination of 12 notes and four basic ingredients, both pursuits are a kind of ordered chaos. It’s no surprise then, given these fundamental similarities, that many brewers are also musicians and many breweries have their own band. The same type of person is drawn naturally to both pursuits.

So no specific tasting this session for me, but really every tasting involves music as a backdrop so perhaps it’s not necessary. As no doubt will be shown time and time again in the posts that will appear for this session, beer and music are inextricably linked. My iPod is loaded with beer drinking songs and my brain is loaded with beer memories that are triggered by music. All I need is a beer to complete the cycle. But of course that will only make me thirsty for more music.

 

Magnolia 10th Anniversary Concert

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Magnolia Pub & Brewery on Haight Street in San Francisco will be celebrating their 10th anniversary next Monday in grand fashion at the Great American Music Hall. On November 5th they will host a concert for a mere 20 bucks with all manner of cool stuff going on with many surprises planned. It looks like it should be a great time.
 

 

Sam to Sam: “Sorry About That”

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sam-adams-new
Okay, it’s not exactly a full-blown apology, but the words “for that we apologize” do appear in a statement released today by the Boston Beer Co. regarding what they characterize as “clarification” of “what really happened in Portland, Oregon.”

The statement begins:

The Boston Beer Company, brewer of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, wishes Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams the best of luck in his pursuit of higher office. And guess what – Samuel Adams Beer has in no way ever suggested that Sam Adams the candidate cannot use his own name. But, according to recent stories in the media, it sure hasn’t looked that way.

Which I guess is their way of saying Intellectual Property Manager Helen Bornemann never said “she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites “probably for the length of the time the election is being held,” as was reported by the Associated Press. It sure looks like a direct quote. It would nice to have a more definitive answer about that statement, because frankly that’s the one that stuck in my craw. She either said it or she didn’t. Which is it?

Boston Beer continues:

A little history: last week The Boston Beer Company learned that an individual named Dave Anderson of Portland, Oregon had registered two domain names that featured the name Sam Adams. Not knowing his intent, we sent him a letter asking him not to use these sites. Next thing we knew, we had a call from the legal department at broadcasting conglomerate, Clear Channel, at which point we learned that Dave Anderson is a DJ at Clear Channel’s KEX radio and that a man named Sam Adams was indeed running for Mayor of Portland. We wish we had learned a little more about Portland’s race for mayor before sending out that initial letter, and for that we apologize.

Notice how in the statement they use the passive phrase “asking him not to use these sites.” Reread the original letter again and see if that sounds like they’re just “asking?”

The only thing they really admit to in the letter is that they “wish [they] had learned a little more about Portland’s race for mayor before sending out that initial letter.” Amen, that is the problem in a nutshell. And that’s the only thing they’re apologizing for, that they wish they’d “learned a little more.” I hate to keep beating a dead horse, especially over a company I generally like a great deal, but that sure seems like a pretty half-hearted apology. Notice that they’re not actually apologizing for sending the letter, making threats or not using a more measured approach or even for Bornemann’s statement that “she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites ‘probably for the length of the time the election is being held.'”

They go on to say that they reacted so swiftly because they’ve had bad experiences in the past and characterize themselves as “a small company.” Technically that’s correct because the federal standard for a brewery business to qualify as a small business it must have less than 500 employees. According to Google Finance, Boston Beer has approximately 433. Certainly they’re smaller than Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors and even Pabst, but with total revenues last year exceeding $285 million they are the biggest microbrewery in the country, and by a pretty wide margin. The next closest brewery is Yuengling, and while they’re privately held so I don’t know their revenue, I do know they have only 185 employees and are not distributed nationwide. With numbers so much larger than a majority of their peers, calling them small seems a little hard to swallow. I doubt they talk about themselves that way to investors. But if you’re trying to garner a little sympathy, the underdog card is always a good one to play.

They go on to explain their actions:

Why did we ask Clear Channel and Dave Anderson not to use those domain names? In the past we have experienced times when individuals and organizations have tried to use our brand name for commercial purposes or to disparage our good name. We have learned that, as a small company, we need to protect our identity. At the least we wanted to prevent a situation where people looking for our Web site end up linked to a radio station promotional site.

On the other hand, there have been occasions over the years when individuals actually named “Sam Adams” have registered domain names that included the words Sam Adams, and we have had no quarrel with that.

Those are, of course, all legitimate reasons and any company should protect its intellectual property. But as they say, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. When you use a bludgeon, you should expect things might go awry. Would it have mattered if Bornemann had waited another day or even a few hours to send the letter, giving her ample time to figure out the true nature of the situation she was facing? Would such a modest delay have weakened her case? Could she not have called her company’s local field representatives and/or the distributors of Samuel Adams beer working in the Portland area soliciting what they knew? Could she not have looked up the website of the radio station or the name “Sam Adams” along with the modifier “mayor?” I think any of these actions might have been quite revealing and saved her company much grief.

But there’s one more thing I think would make all of this go away, and that’s perhaps the hardest thing for any modern company or person, for that matter, to do: and that would be giving an unqualified apology or just saying a blanket “I’m sorry.” I’m not sure why that’s so difficult for people these days, but it does seem spin always gets in the way. You almost never hear people just simply say they’re sorry. Instead they “regret,” or “wish it had been different” or some other similar device so it sounds like they’re apologizing without actually doing so. There’s a great phrase used in a song by one of my favorite songwriter/singers, John Wesley Harding, and the line is “naked as a true apology.” And I think that nicely captures people’s feelings today about apologizing, that it somehow makes them vulnerable or open to attack. But sometimes it really is the best thing to do, right or wrong. I’ll even start the ball rolling. To all of the people I’ve met over the years and who are my friends at the Boston Beer Co., I’m sorry for having been so hard on the company over the last couple of days.

 

San Diego Wet Hop Festival Postponed

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I just got word that the Wet Hop Festival originally scheduled to take place this weekend at Tom Nickel’s place, O’Brien’s Pub, in San Diego, California has been postponed one week due to the fires raging through southern California.

From the press release:

I am going to postpone the Wet Hop Festival until next weekend, November 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I will have some wet hop beers on tap this weekend. Right now we have several from Sierra Nevada including Harvest Ale, 20th Street Fresh Hop Ale and the ESP — Extra Special Pale, which is the pale ale with wet hops added. I should also have the Port Brewing High Tide IPA on tap this weekend. I am still expecting about 25 beers for next weekend and we will have the Harvest and Riptide casks on tap on Friday, November 2nd.

Other word on the street is both Stone Brewing and Ballast Point are open again after being evacuated earlier this week.

 

 

Sam Adams: Patriot, Brewer, Bully

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I want to be clear from the start. There are people who have been bashing the Boston Beer Co. for a long time for a variety of reasons. I’m not one of those people. I like Jim Koch and think he’s done more good than harm to promote better beer to an ever-widening audience of consumers. I think Samuel Adams Boston Lager is a fine-tasting, if somewhat unremarkable, beer. When choices are thin, I’ll happily drink one, which is something I won’t do with several other high-profile popular beer brands. And the specialty beers Jim has made include some really terrific beers that have truly stretched the imagination and the very definition of what beer is.

That being said, I think Jim Koch is getting some awfully bad advice. First there was the ill-conceived radio talk show stunt that Boston Beer was involved with which challenged a couple to have sex in a church. Many were not amused — though personally I could have cared less — and there was some public relations fallout from the incident. Now there’s a new flap that’s not doing Jim Koch any favors and I think the blame rests squarely with his advisors and their poor handling of it.

The story concerns Portland, Oregon’s new candidate for mayor: Sam Adams. No, not the long-dead patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence. And not the historical brewer personage that the Boston Beer Co. appropriated for their own use in 1984. No, this Sam Adams has been around since 1963, or at least 21 years before the beer brand was trademarked. This Sam Adams is running for the mayor of beertown, Portland, Oregon. When current mayor, Tom Potter, who’s led the Oregon Brewers Festival Parade two years in a row, announced he would not be running again, popular City Commissioner Adams stepped up and announced his candidacy to be the city’s next mayor.

Two DJs from KEX News Radio 1190 in Portland, Dave Anderson and Mark Mason, registered the domain names www.samadamsformayor.com and www.mayorsamadams.com on behalf of the candidate and promised to give them to Adams provided he went on their show to discuss politics, which he subsequently did.

In the meantime, Boston Beer’s Intellectual Property Manager, Helen Bornemann, got wind of the web addresses and fired off a boilerplate cease and desist letter without, apparently, doing any research whatsoever or even picking up a phone to ask anyone about the domain names. I’m no lawyer, though I did work in a law office for eight years and I’m also married to one, but that strikes me as a pretty sloppy way to react. I know IP is something companies take very seriously and often vigorously protect, but a little fact-checking might have gone a long way toward keeping them from placing their foot so deeply in their mouth. The letter is up on the radio station’s website for all the world to see.

In the letter, she announced that they’ve been using the trademarks since 1984, to which the bemused mayoral candidate quipped. “I’ve been using it since 1963.” But Sam Adams the candidate is also concerned and his staff is talking with attorneys, too. Adams is already using the campaign slogan “Sam Adams for Portland Mayor” on his own website and it will likely appear on signs and bumper stickers. too.

According to an AP story, “Boston Beer’s Helen Bornemann said she didn’t know there was a real Sam Adams running for mayor when she sent the letter.” But she sent it anyway without bothering to find out. To me that’s a bully’s arrogance. It’s saying I must be right and you have to prove me wrong … or else. She further tries to excuse her behavior by claiming that “she feared someone was copying the advertisements” that Boston Beer Co. ran years ago, a marketing campaign called “Sam Adams for President.” Feared, but again didn’t try to find out any facts to support those fears.

So okay, she made a mistake. I could almost excuse her behavior up to this point as being over zealous in trying to protect her client’s or her company’s interests (it’s not clear if she’s a lawyer but if not she’s clearly consulted with one and cites specific law in her letter to the radio DJs). But then she pours gasoline on the fire with this statement, again from the AP story. “Bornemann said she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites ‘probably for the length of the time the election is being held.'”

Oh, really. She’s “willing,” is she, to talk about whether Sam Adams should be allowed to use his own freaking name in his own campaign website as he runs for mayor of a prominent American city? How magnanimous. How insulting. Oh, and after the election she may not allow him to be able to continue using his own name? This is an excellent example of how to get yourself some very negative PR. I don’t think it’s even about a strict interpretation of law, it comes down to how the public — your potential customers — view your actions. And the city of Portland is not amused.

If you didn’t know, the state of Oregon has already had a somewhat tenuous relationship with the Boston Beer Co., ever since they had another contract brand that they marketed under the name Oregon Beer Co. in the mid-1990s To be fair, I really liked the Blackberry Porter they made, but Oregonians were not particularly thrilled with having their own beer prestige co-opted by a beer that — and somebody correct me if I’m not remembering this correctly — wasn’t even brewed in Oregon. Boston Beer had, of course, a legal right to use the name but it struck many people at the time as somewhat dishonest.

There’s already a backlash and calls to boycott Samuel Adams beer over this latest gaffe. In addition to the AP story that’s been picked up all over the place, such as in the Washington Post, there’s also been local coverage in the Oregonian and Willamette Week. Naturally, it’s Portland bloggers who are setting the tone and calling for boycotts, such as Rusty’s Blog, who’s following it day by day. Today, for example, his post is called Sam Adams Post, Day 3. Others include Beervana, Blue Oregon, The Champagne of Blogs, Jack Bog’s Blog, Metroblogging Portland, Witigonen and the ZehnKatzen Times. But my favorite take on all this is from Isaac Laquedem’s blog, who advances the novel theory that Boston Beer Co. may be in violation of local election laws (as set forth in ORS 260.695). The way the election laws are written it’s possible to interpret them so that if they continue to sell the Samuel Adams brand people could confuse the bottles as a political endorsement for the candidate. Hilarious.

I think when all the dust settles, this will be remembered and perhaps even taught in business schools as a stellar example of how and why not to react to a potential IP threat in a kneejerk fashion. Yes, Bornemann will cling to the excuse that she was just doing her job and perhaps she even has a leg to stand on, legal-wise (though I sort of doubt it), but had she exercised even a modicum of common sense and tried to learn something about the true nature of what she perceived as a threat to her company’s trademark, she could have avoided creating a PR nightmare that will doubtless continue to haunt her company for years to come, especially in Portland, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. How much ill will has been created and how much business will Boston Beer ultimately lose over that simple failure to investigate and the bullying tactics of their IP Manager? Obviously, that’s hard to say, but I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes come performance review time.

 
UPDATE: Yesterday the Wall Street Journal Law Blog dubbed this issue the Trademark Dispute Of the Day: Sam Adams v. Sam Adams. Apparently they’ve received a call from a spokeswoman for Boston Beer claiming “they never had an issue with the mayoral candidate using his name but they do have an issue with the radio station using Sam Adams for its own business purposes.” Hmm. That’s new. Sounds like revisionist backpedaling to me. Let’s not forget that Boston Beer’s IP Manager, Helen “Bornemann said she’s willing to discuss Adams’ use of his name on his Web sites ‘probably for the length of the time the election is being held.'” That certainly goes beyond the scope of merely having an “issue with the radio station using Sam Adams for its own business purposes.” And while we’re at it, what exactly would be the “business purposes” that Boston Beer is so worried about? Given that the word “mayor” is in both domain names and there really is a person named “Sam Adams” who’s running for and quite possibly will be elected mayor (and I’ve got to believe all this publicity will give Adams a big assist in getting votes) it’s hard for me to understand their concerns. Wouldn’t a reasonable person conclude that the first domain name would be used by the mayoral candidate and the second by mayor Adams (assuming he’s elected) and not for any nefarious “business purposes.”

 

The Pour on Cask

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Eric Asimov had another great beer piece yesterday at The Pour, this one was an overview on cask-conditioned beers. Personally, if I have a choice I always go with the cask version. In fact last night while out with some old high school buddies, I enjoyed Sara’s Ruby Mild on cask at Magnolia and later Moonlight’s Sublimmminal at the Toronado. Yum.

 
And here’s some general information on casks.

The parts of a beer barrel.

 

Cask Sizes:

  • Pin: 4.5 gallons
  • Firkin: 9 gallons
  • Kilderkin: 18 gallons
  • Barrel: 36 gallons
  • Hogshead: 54 gallons
  • Puncheon: 72 gallons
  • Butt: 108 gallons

 

The Crime of Beer Consumption

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A Bulletin fan (thanks Jim) sent me this link to a an article by Jascha Hoffman in the New York Times, in fact it was from the Magazine section’s Idea Lab this past Sunday and was titled Criminal Element. It’s a very interesting and provocative read, especially if, like me, you’re a fan of economic theory and the kind of oddball ways economics can be used in new ways, in the mold of the recent book Freakonomics. It centers on an idea by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, that eliminating the lead from gasoline caused crime rates to fall in the 1990s.

Reyes found that the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag — just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early ’90s, when crime rates hit their peak.

Such a correlation does not prove that lead had any effect on crime levels. But in an article published this month in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, Reyes uses small variations in the lead content of gasoline from state to state to strengthen her argument. If other possible sources of crime like beer consumption and unemployment had remained constant, she estimates, the switch to unleaded gas alone would have caused the rate of violent crime to fall by more than half over the 1990s.

What an interesting theory that …. hey, wait a minute. What was that? “[O]ther possible sources of crime like beer consumption!?!” WTF! Since when did drinking beer become a source of crime? Where are those statistics? I’ve heard of hardcore heroin addiction leading to crime to support a drug habit, but beer? I don’t think so. If anybody out there has access to more than just the abstract of the article I’d love to run down where she got this idea. All I can find is that “beer consumption” is one of eleven “state-level variables” listed in the article’s appendix and that the information on “Beer consumption is from the Brewers Almanacs, published by the Beer Institute. It is measured as consumption of malt beverages in gallons consumed per capita.” But how does mere consumption lead to crime? Curiously, there’s no mention of spirits or wine consumption leading to crime, just beer, despite the fact that hard liquor was a permanent fixture at every high school and college party I ever attended. Has the demonization of beer just become so internalized and taken for granted that academia doesn’t even need to justify it? Frankly, I’m flummoxed. Am I missing something or just over-reacting as I’m so often accused? I’ve never resorted to crime to support my beer habit? How about you?

 

Soviet Anti-Alcohol Posters

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I happened upon this cool bit of history while searching for some images the other day. It’s the Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters, a collection of old Soviet propaganda posters on the evils of drinking. There are more then thirty of them here, with translations. What struck me most in looking through them is that they’re really not all that different from the propaganda used by neo-prohibitionists working today in the United States. It’s the same sort of sensationalist nonsense with little basis in facts. But it’s somewhat comforting to know that propaganda is propaganda, no matter where it came from, and they are sort of fun to see. Enjoy.

Translation: “Rich inner substance.”

Translation: “Profiteer is a worst enemy.”