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Anheuser-Busch Employee Throws Salt in the Wound

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I got a comment today to an old post about the daughter of a Latrobe Brewery employee’s petition and open letter to Anheuser-Busch president Augie Busch IV hoping to persuade A-B not to move production of Rolling Rock and close the Latrobe Brewery.

Here’s the comment, from Bud:

The brewery has nothing to do with A-B. The letter and these comments are meaning less.

The original post was from May of this year, one week after the announcement that the Latrobe Brewery would be closing at the end of July and A-B would move production to their plant in Newark, New Jersey. It was an emotional time, especially for the town and the families who were losing their livelihoods when and if the brewery closed. So many people, myself included, didn’t initially focus on the details. But as it was later pointed out, it was InBev who would decide the fate of the Latrobe Brewery, not Anheuser-Busch. A-B bought the rights to the Rolling Rock brand and not the brewery itself from InBev. Of course, we don’t know if the brewery was originally part of the deal and it was negotiated away as one of the terms of the sale to A-B. We know A-B didn’t need another brewery. We know later in May A-B categorically said they were not interested in the Latrobe Brewery. It’s tricky to speculate, of course, but it seems logical that InBev would have preferred to sell both the brand and the brewery to one buyer. That would have been better for them but as we’ve seen, not for the ultimate buyer of the Rolling Rock brand.

Regardless of who carved the brewery out of the deal or even if it never was part of the deal, there was a backlash against A-B. Many people were upset that A-B was moving production of the brand to New Jersey. From a purely by-the-numbers business point-of-view, one can certainly see the logic in the decision. But, of course, business is often not just about the numbers. There are also PR considerations, especially for a company so large and so visible as Anheuser-Busch, one that claims in lofty terms its desire to be a seen as a good corporate citizen. So A-B was certainly involved, even if indirectly, in this story and they indeed played some role in the future of the town of Latrobe, the Latrobe Brewery and the employees of the brewery. To believe otherwise I find quite naive. A-B may not have had a legal obligation to the brewery or its employees, but an argument can be made that they did have a moral one. They made the decision to not buy the Latrobe Brewery — there’s no question InBev would have sold it to them — so it’s not unreasonable for A-B to shoulder some of the blame. It may be merely an externality (an economic term for costs not borne by a company, but by others as a direct or indirect result of the company’s actions) but people were harmed by their decision. It did not happen in a vacuum, as Bud, our commenter, seems to believe. InBev, did eventually find a buyer and City Brewing of LaCrosse, Wisconsin finalized the sale in late September, but the brewery did close at the end of July. As of today, I don’t believe the Latrobe Brewery employees are back to work yet.

But let’s get back to Bud. Why should we care if he doesn’t understand how A-B might have been even a little responsible for what happened in Latrobe, Pennsylvania? Why should we take offense if Bud asserts that if A-B has no legal obligations, then anything the people effected by these events have to say about it is “meaning less (sic)?” Well here’s the thing. Bud may have used his America Online account to post his comment, but he sent it from work. And apparently he’s unaware that you’re never completely anonymous in cyberspace, because thanks to a signature embedded in his post I know he’s an Anheuser-Busch employee. He made his comment from a server at One Busch Place in St. Louis, Missouri and, from the look of it, one of the corporate servers. I suspect he’s not in the marketing department or upper management — they would have known better. But I guess people caring about their community, brewing history and their livelihoods really rankled Bud and he couldn’t resist proclaiming A-B’s innocence in all of this. Coming from an A-B employee, his otherwise simple cluelessness comes across to me as arrogant and showing a distinct lack of compassion. People fighting for their community, their heritage and their ability to put food on the table to feed their families should never be called “meaningless,” least of all by the very people forcing them into that situation.

Christina Gumola, the woman who wrote the letter, later responded to my own reservations about the potential efficacy of her letter to Busch IV as follows:

Of course my efforts may seem far fetched; however if people just accepted being told “no” and didn’t fight for what they believed in then chances are they are not too happy. I’ve always fought for what I believed in and most of the time had positive results by doing so. I am also a realist and understand that nothing may occur as a result of my efforts. At least I know that I tried! I would like to thank those of you who, though may be pessimistic, but are still supportive. I really appreciate it. Finally, fight for what you believe in-you won’t have the chance for what you want if you just let it go!!

It’s hard to read that and not want to take Bud by the scruff of his arrogant little neck and shake him a little bit just to see if he’s got a heart beating in his chest. All of her efforts may be meaningless to you, Bud, but at least she tried to fight for what she believed in, however hopeless. What have you done lately that you can be proud of besides pour salt into a wound your employer helped open in the first place?

Anchor Profiled As Successful Small Company

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Last week, USA Today profiled Anchor Brewery in their Inside Money section as a stellar example of a successful small company with no desire to grow larger and larger like the trap so many other successful companies fall into. The story is in conjunction with the publication of a business book on small companies, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham, an editor at Inc. magazine. On the same day as the Anchor profile, USA Today also has an article about Burlingham’s new book entitled To grow or not to grow? Some companies decide to stay put. Both are written, naturally, from a business perspective but are a good, positive pieces for craft beer. It’s certainly nice to see that for a change.

AP’s Beer by the Numbers

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Last week, quite a number of papers ran a short little filler item from the Associated Press that just listed the following statistics regarding the beer industry and U.S. consumption.
 

  • 1,409: The number of breweries — ranging from brewpubs to national brewers — operating in the United States.
  • 306: The number of breweries in California last year, putting the state first in the country. Mississippi was last with one.
  • $82 billion: The U.S. sales volume for beer last year. Craft beer — beer typically made in small batches by regional or local brewers — accounted for $4.3 billion.
  • 21.3 gallons: The amount of beer consumed per capita last year in the United States. New Hampshire led all states with 31.1 gallons. Nevada, North Dakota, Montana and Wisconsin rounded out the top five. Utah was last at 12.2 gallons.
  • 48: The percent of all beer sold in metal cans last year in the United States. Glass bottles followed at 42 percent and draft beer was at 10 percent.
  • 84.1: The market share held by major U.S. breweries and noncraft regional brewers. Imports have 12.4 percent and craft brewers hold 3.4 percent.

Beer Goes Wireless

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Heineken and IBM, along with a few other companies, have partnered together to test wireless tracking of beer shipments. Dubbed “The Living Beer Lab,” the scheme will allow Heineken to know the exact location of any shipment of its beer, even in the middle of the ocean, using “triangulation techniques of both satellites and cellular base stations to locate exactly where the cargo is.”

The first test is currently underway, with ten containers of Heineken in the water and in transit from both the Netherlands and Great Britain en route to the United States.

According to ZDNet UK, “Integration has been completed with IBM WebSphere service oriented architecture (SOA) to maintain a paperless trail of the beer’s journey from customs in Europe through US customers and into the distribution centre on the other side of the Atlantic. The process will eliminate the need to fill in up to 30 documents on each journey, and could vastly decrease the amount of time the beer spends in transit.”

Here’s a more thorough explanation of how it all works, complete with impenetrable business jargon from The Retail Bulletin:

IBM’s Secure Trade Lane solution will provide real-time visibility and interoperability through an advanced wireless sensor platform and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), based on IBM’s WebSphere platform. The project’s SOA, called the Shipment Information Services, leverages the EPCglobal network and EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) standards, so rather than build and maintain a large central database with huge amounts of information, distributed data sources are linked, allowing data to be shared in real time between Heineken, Safmarine and customs authorities in the Netherlands, England and The United States.

In this project, Safmarine will ship ten containers of Heineken beer from locations in both Netherlands and England, through their Customs Authorities, to the Heineken distribution center in United States. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will coordinate the project and provide best practices documentation to share across the European Union.

“The Beer Living Lab is setting a roadmap for the next generation e-Customs solutions. We test innovative solutions, based on IBM’s Tamper Resistant Embedded Controller (TREC) and SOA developed by IBM that could revolutionize customs,” said Dr. Yao-Hua Tan, professor of Electronic Business, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Companies using these solutions could benefit greatly due to less physical inspections by customs; thus these e-customs solutions greatly facilitate international trade.”

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, more than 30 different documents are associated with one single container crossing a border, which equals roughly five billion documents annually. The findings of the project will provide a viable alternative to manufacturers, shippers, retailers and customs administrations as they look to move to a paperless trade environment. Once accepted and implemented widely, paperless trade will support initiatives such as Green Lane, which will eliminate most inspections on arrival, thus significantly speeding up ocean fright shipments and improving the profit margins for shippers.

“Because efficient collaboration is a paramount requirement to making this work, IBM built the Shipment Information Services to address interoperability. If governments around the world are serious about electronic customs and paperless trade, they need to encourage each country to adopt open standards environments to enable collaboration and data sharing throughout the trade lane,” said Stefan Reidy, Manager, Secure Trade Lane, IBM. “The Beer Living Lab project is the first step in building the Intranet of Trade, which will help to substantially improve efficiency and security in the global supply chain.”

Now if only they’d stop using those green bottles that result in Heineken being such a skunked beer most of the time.

U.K. Shows Perspective in Rejecting Increasing Beer Tax

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Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary for the U.K.’s Department of Health, during an interview Friday in youth newspaper First News told them that she would ask the British government to increase the tax on alcohol, and especially alcopops, as a way of combating underage binge drinking. And not just increase them, but “really increase taxes on alcohol.”

The Treasury Department quickly rejected her call for the increase, suggesting that it was her job to combat binge drinking and raising taxes on all alcohol would “punish responsible drinkers in an attempt to change the behaviour of a small minority.” Amen.

And according to the Daily Express, another “Treasury source said the idea was misguided because the main consumers of alcopops were no longer youngsters, while the move also risked driving whisky producers out of business.”

Now if only our government could find its spine to stand up to the neo-prohibitionist agenda in similar fashion. Ah, dare to dream …

N.Y. Times Reviews Ambitious Brew

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Friday’s Book Section of the New York Times reviewed two new beer books, including Marueen Ogle’s Ambitious Brew. The gave it a decent review, but perhaps more importantly it’s great to see the Times actually review books about beer. That’s certainly a sign that “the times they are a-changin’.”

New York Magazine Letter to the Editor

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A couple of weeks ago, New York Magazine did a tasting of several unrelated beers and published their findings. Stephen Beaumont wrote an essay decrying the article and I likewise threw in my two cents, adding some random complaints.

The magazine, to their credit, invited Stephen to write a letter to the editor and he graciously invited some other beer writers to also sign the letter, in the hopes of having it carry more weight. The issue for the week of October 30 has printed his letter in their Letters to the Editor section, and I’ve also reprinted it below.

Ales in Comparison

As writers and editors who specialize in beer, we’re always delighted to see our preferred beverage receive coverage in the mainstream press, even when the story doesn’t involve any of us. Really, we are. But we’re dismayed when said story fails to treat such a noble drink with the respect it deserves, as was the case in Ben Mathis-Lilley’s “Ales in Comparison” [“Strategist: Taste Testing,” October 16]. Would New York Magazine assemble a random group of “enthusiastic” art lovers to critique the latest show at the MoMA? Would it publish a review of a haphazardly selected group of wines, sherries, ports, and champagnes, dismissing one as “girlie,” another as “sissy,” and a third simply because it has “a funny name”? Again, likely not. Yet this is exactly what Mathis-Lilley does, presumably because beer’s egalitarian reputation makes it somehow okay. Please, continue publishing stories about beer. There is a wealth of choice out there, and consumers no doubt appreciate all the guidance they can find. But before you commission your next article, please take a look at the methodology involved and ask yourselves, “Would this be acceptable were the topic fine wine, theater, or the city’s latest culinary hot spot?”

—Stephen Beaumont, writer, worldofbeer.com; Julie Bradford, editor, All About Beer; Jay Brooks, writer, brookstonbeerbulletin.com; Lew Bryson, writer, lewbryson.com; Tom Dalldorf, publisher, Celebrator Beer News; John Hansell, publisher, Malt Advocate

Will it do any good? Who knows, but you do what you can, fight the good fight and hope for the best.
 

Pete’s Wicked Stout Marinade?

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In today’s North Coast Journal, a weekly alernative rag for Humboldt County, California, in the food section called Talk of the Table, Joseph Byrd has an article titled Texas Chili. The food information looks sound enough, but I’m no expert on chili. He begins by detailing what chili is, where it originated (San Antonio, according to the article), and begins going through detailed instructions on how to make it, all well and good. However, mid-way through his piece he writes the following:

The meat is put into a marinade of dark bitter stout overnight. There is a dark beer called “Pete’s Wicked Ale” which I find nasty and undrinkable, but it’s perfect for this purpose.

Now Pete’s Wicked Ale began its life as an American Brown Ale. Now that the original Pete has left for more chocolatey pastures, my memory is that under Gambrinus these days it more resembles an amber ale. And it’s ironic that Pete’s Wicked Ale today is brewed in San Antonio, Texas, the home of chili. But either way, it’s hardly a stout, and frankly I have a hard time calling it a dark beer. But I suppose if industral light lager is your standard — which is my guess — (with something like 1 lovibond) then I suppose Pete’s Wicked Ale is at least much darker.

I can certainly imagine it would make a fine marinade — after all, many beers do — but to describe the beer as “nasty and undrinkable” seems downright pernicious, and not just to the beer but also to the author’s own reputation. I say that because such a description shows a certain ignorance for the subject matter and calls into question his qualifications overall, in my opinion. It’s one thing to dislike a particular beer — I dislike plenty — but to label it “undrinkable” and confuse it with a stout shows a certain lack of sophistication regarding his beer knowledge. And it begs the question why such an aside was even necessary? What was the purpose of offering how distasteful the author found the beer? It doesn’t really add anything to the story, unless he wanted to be sure none of his readers might mistake his endorsement of the beer as a marinade for actually liking to drink it, too.

At first, I thought the story originated in Texas, before later realizing he’s right here in California, just a short drive up the coast from me. If he’d been a Texas native, I might more easily forgive his apparent lack of beer savvy, but here in California as a food writer it’s an unpardonable sin.

Giving the Bishop the Finger

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Did you know sex sells? Yeah, me neither. The late comedian and social critic Bill Hicks used to say that the advertisement that big business wants to run is simply a photograph of an attractive woman fully naked and the text “Drink Coke” (or any other company’s slogan). Unlike me, he made it sound funny, of course, but the point is that it’s not really a secret that sex is used to sell almost every imaginable kind of product or service. I had a whole semester on this subject in college, where we were even shown the word s-e-x spelled out in an older version of KFC’s Colonel Sanders logo, along with much else.

Among beer advertisements, especially those of the big breweries, sex is a frequent sales tool from the Coors Twins to St. Pauli Girl. A review of older beer ads will quickly reveal that this is not a new phenomenon, either. Many early breweries used attractive women in their advertising. I’m not necessarily opposed to seeing an attractive woman per se, but when it’s used merely to pander to base instincts and outmoded stereotypes then it’s bad for the beer industry, at least in my opinion. Most of the worst examples of this — Miller’s mud wrestling “cat fight” ad was a particularly bad one — essentially take the position that their target audience is all but exclusively male or certainly male enough that they can safely alienate half the total population. And not just any male, but a certain kind of unenlightened male, the ones for whom Jackass, Beavis and Butthead, Dumb and Dumber, and Beerfest are all high art. Does that make me elitist? Maybe, but I’d rather that than see beer’s image continue to be so unceasingly tarnished.

Not surprisingly, that is outmoded thinking, because the demographics of beer are changing and beer drinking among women is on the rise. Some recent studies show that of the total beer consumed in America, women drank 25% of it. And while it may be no surprise that the age group with the most women beer drinkers is 21-30, the number of women drinking beer who are over age 50 is growing significantly.

But I wouldn’t argue that sexual imagery should never be used in advertising (or art or anywhere else). I don’t think that’s the right solution and frankly I don’t think it possible. Despite fundamentalist attempts globally to suppress sexual awareness and expression, it is a potent part of human nature. Without the sexual urge, we might never procreate and continue as a species so it certainly fills a very vital role in the life cycle.

I would suggest, however, that common sense and a sense of perspective and context might be employed in how sexual images are used, not least of which because we’ll never evolve if advertising continues to keep us wallowing (and literally wrestling) in the mud of our basest primal instincts. The people whose products are being advertised in these ways should have a bit more respect for themselves and their product. Why the big beer companies want to associate themselves with mud wrestling, talking frogs, man law, flatulent horses, etc. is beyond me because it does nothing to elevate the image of their product. Interestingly, when Miller tried to change that carefully created image by using the tagline “Beer: Grown Up,” hardly anyone was buying it. USA Today polls showed a majority of people didn’t like the ads and didn’t think they were effective. Despite Terry Haley, the brand manager for Miller Genuine Draft, saying “[w]e believe in what we’re doing, [w]e’re tapping into a true social trend, and we’re going to stay the course,” Miller quickly dropped the ads, and switched ad agencies, who presumably will return to the puerile.

But the other side of this debate is one of easy offense and our willingness to censor should even only a sole complaint be lodged. Advertisers, advertising and the media generally beat a very hasty retreat when faced with criticism, which is a powerful wedge for organizations and individuals with agendas and an axe to grind. (The media, of course, is paid for by advertising — you may think that you are TV, the magazine and the newspaper’s customer but you are not. Their customer is the advertiser.) For years, organizations with a small, minority membership have caused havoc for the rest of us when they cried offense at one imagined slight after the other. The media landscape for a time was (and probably still is) rife with stories of letter writing campaigns from citizen’s groups in which television shows (and other media) were deemed by these yahoos to be too provocative, too sexy, used too much bad language, showed different morals then their own, and on and on. Basically, much like neo-prohibitionist groups, some people cannot rest until the world is remade in their own image, indeed they cannot tolerate any difference of opinion or alternative (to their own) lifestyle being on display, especially if their children might furtively glance longingly at such imagined hedonism. Worse still, entire entertainment programs have been altered, changed or canceled, books have been banned, and songs have been censored all on the basis of a few complaints or even a single complaint. That 299,999,999 people in the U.S. do not complain seems to carry no weight, or at least far less weight than the single whiner who does. This is literally the very opposite of a democracy, in which the desires of the many are circumvented and denied by a tiny handful of individuals, or in some cases a single person.

This is, of course, true of advertising as well. The hue and cry against much advertising is loud and shrill and seems never to cease. And while I may not disagree with all of it — I’m no fan of a lot of advertising — I find truly reprehensible the impulse to inflict one’s beliefs on the rest of society, as if any person could be certain of the one, true moral compass and way to live one’s life. That anyone pays attention to these nutjobs is a sad commentary indeed on the way our world is heading, but that’s a debate for another day and another forum.

What prompted all of what preceded, is an item reported yesterday by the BBC News in an article titled ‘Provocative’ beer ad criticized. According to the report, a complaint was filed with the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, an organization that is paid for by the advertising industry and which acts essentially as an ombudsman. That means that people offended by advertising may file complaints and have their cases adjudicated by the ASA. In this instance, a print ad for Bishop’s Finger, a popular beer brewed by the Shepherd Neame Brewery of Kent, England had a complaint filed against it. The ad that prompted the complaint has been removed from Bishop’s Finger’s website, but here is a similar one:

In the offending one, which apparently ran in the magazine Time Out, the woman was seated on a bale of hay and the text read, “I love a good session on the Bishops Finger.” And here are all seven print ads, after the offending one was quickly removed. The name “Bishop’s Finger” has it’s origin in the “ancient finger-shaped signposts that showed the Pilgrims the way to Canterbury Cathedral” that are unique to the Kent area of southeastern England.

It is overtly sexual? Sure. Is it offensive? Not to me, I find it mildly amusing. It does play on the origin of the beer’s name and hearkens back to Chaucer’s time. It uses a pretty obvious double entendre, of course, but it is in context. According to the BBC article, Bishop’s Finger is known for running humorous ads. At least it’s not a scantily clad bikini gal holding a beer for no discernible reason other than to titillate.

The ASA examined the ad for four breaches of the UK’s advertising guidelines and only found that they had violated one, and ruled as follows:

We considered that the text “I love a good session on the Bishops Finger” played on the connotations of drinking and sexual activity. We considered that the woman’s pose was suggestive and concluded that, in combination with the headline text, it was likely to be seen as linking alcohol with seduction and sexual activity.

On this point, the ad breached CAP Code clause 56.9 (Alcoholic drinks).

Here’s 56.9 in its entirety:

Marketing communications must neither link alcohol with seduction, sexual activity or sexual success nor imply that alcohol can enhance attractiveness, masculinity or femininity.

Based on their ruling, the the “Advertising Standards Agency told the beer maker in future to adopt an approach that did not link alcohol with sexual activity.” Okay, I’m sure they’ll get right on that. And given that alcohol and sexual activity are, in fact, linked insofar as sexual activity can be linked with practically anything, I’m not even sure how you could possibly enforce such a perniciously vague standard. Right or wrong, alcohol has been called a “social lubricant” for centuries. That’s one of its roles in society, to pretend otherwise seems dishonest.

But here’s the thing, and perhaps the point of all this — finally — only ONE person in all of England complained about this ad. Only One. Out of a population of more than 60 million people, only ONE person was offended enough to complain. That one person being offended by the ad prompted a full-scale investigation involving who knows how many people, a news article in the BBC, and a major brewer to withdraw an ad from the market. Does that seem reasonable? It sure doesn’t seem so to me. Like many issues of censorship, the person who lodged this complaint could have asked a few friends before starting this ball rolling. Perhaps some friend’s support or non-support might have changed or strengthened their resolve. But even if a 100 people had complained, a hundredfold increase, I would still be skeptical that justice had been served. Perspective has to play in role in looking at issues of censorship and people being offended. I’m sorry this person felt as badly as she (or possibly he, I suppose) claims to have, but that doesn’t mean the whole of England should have to sit up and take notice. Is there anything published in the world today that you couldn’t argue might be offensive to somebody? It’s one thing to be sensitive to the views of others, but quite another to insist the world be inoffensive to all. Every time we pander to such an extreme minority view, however well-intentioned, we fan the flames of intolerance and make it harder for all of us to co-exist. Why can’t we all just have a beer and get along?