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“Whassup” in Hebrew

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I’ve never been a fan of the big brewer’s television commercials, but occasionally they can be funny if you set aside the long-term damage I think the ads have done to beer’s image. Many of the ads have been popular enough to enter the public conciousness. One such ad was the Budweiser “Whassup” campaign of several years ago. Stephen Beaumont sent me this hilarious parody of the whassup ad with several rabbis yelling “shalom” excitedly to one another.

UPDATE: A friend of mine objected to this parody as vulgar, rude and stereotypical, and suggested that Stephen and I were above finding the same funny. Taken aback, I did a little research into who created this mockery and it was done by David Berenbaum, a Jewish scriptwriter for Neurotrash.com (which no longer exists). TV Adland has some additional info about the spoof. Berenbaum also wrote the Will Ferell movie Elf and Disney’s The Haunted Mansion. I’m not sure my own personal Anti-Defamation League should be picking on me for laughing at it.

Reading About Reading Beer

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Don Russell, a.k.a. Joe Sixpack, had a startling piece of news in his latest Philadelphia Daily News column, my hometown beer is making a comeback! Reading (that’s pronounced “red-ding“) Beer’s advertising and merchandising stuff were about as ubiquitous as it gets for me growing up because I spent a lot of my youth in bars with my alcoholic stepfather (there, now you know). My memory of the beer is that it wasn’t any better or worse than most of what was available at that time. And by the time I was paying attention, it was already being brewed outside Reading, in Fogelsville, which at that time was still a Schaefer brewery, if memory serves.

The Reading Brewery opened in 1886 on South 9th and Little Laurel Streets and closed ninety years later in 1976, when I was a junior in high school. As Don points out, it had a very loyal following in the area. As recently as the late 1990s, I was home for a visit around the winter holidays and went bar-hopping with some old friends who were also in town. Most of the bars we went to not only still had quite a bit of Reading Beer breweriana on their walls but several still used Reading Beer and other local brewery coasters. I must confess I even pocketed a couple of them for myself, I was so taken aback that they were still using them and wanted proof.

So the new Legacy Brewing Co. (who are the same folks that previously owned Pretzel City Brewery) have announced that they will be bringing back Reading Beer in all its adjunct glory. (I confess I’d prefer if it was all-malt, but I won’t quibble.) They’ve even set up a new company just to handle the Reading Beer and keep it separate from the Legacy craft beers. Initially it will be draft only but if it proves popular — and quite frankly I can’t see how it won’t be — then bottles (or better still, cans) will follow in wider distribution. According to Russell’s article, since it was first announced in the local paper, The Reading Eagle, last week, the brewery has been inundated with inquiries.

And I must agree with Jack Curtin when he writes “I definitely like the way these guys think” about brewer Scott Baver’s rationale for bringing back Reading Beer.

“Look, we’re brewers. For me, I just love making beer and being part of the beer industry. But we’re business people, so why not make a product that covers every end of the spectrum?

“If my customer wants it, what am I, an idiot for not doing it?”

I know this was just a regional beer even in its heyday, and that very few people are likely to get worked up about it. But since I’m one of them, you’re reading about Reading here.

The can of Reading Beer that sits on a shelf next to where I typed these very words.

Craft Beer Defined as “Unusually Flavored”

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In ABC News’ online Money section, business writer Eric Noe has a piece entitled For Dessert, How About a Beer?. In the middle of the article, Noe makes the following revelation:

Sales of craft beers, the industry term given to unusually flavored or seasonal beers, grew at 11 percent during the first half of the year.

Let that sink in. ABC defines craft beer as either “unusually flavored” or “seasonal beers.” Perhaps if you listen very carefully you can hear a faint thumping sound. That’s me banging my head repeatedly against my keyboard. The only thing keeping my head from spinning completely around are the laws of physics.

Remind me not to go drinking with Eric Noe. “Here, Eric, try this Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. How about those unusual flavors? We call them hops.” I can only assume by “unusually flavored” he means that they actually have flavor, which is the reason sales of industrial light lagers are down — they don’t have much in the way of flavor at all.

The rest of the article is banal stuff — and old hat — about Miller’s new chocolate beer (Frederick Miller Classic Chocolate Lager), Anhesuer-Busch’s chocolate beer, etc., something the craft beer segment has been doing for years. But, of course, to ABC it’s only news once the big players (you know, the ones who advertise on ABC) begin to make beer with chocolate or chocolate-like flavors. The article also touches on the recent spate of infused beers, beers with added vitamins, caffeine, etc. and manages to confuse those beers with ones having different flavors, too. Last time I checked vitamins don’t have a particular flavor, do they?

As far as I can tell, the author isn’t really sure what flavor is, I mean he seems confused about its very definition. For example, he reports that “Anheuser-Busch has gotten in on the act, too, introducing flavored beers like Michelob Honey Lager and Michelob Amber Bock.” The honey lager may have “a touch of honey,” as A-B claims, but does that really make it a “flavored beer?” More to the point, what flavors have been added to the Amber Bock? Malt?

Eric Shepard, executive editor of the industry trade publication Beer Marketer’s Insights remarks in the article that “[p]eople are saying they want something more flavorful than just malt, yeast, hops and water.” No offense, Eric, but I don’t think that is what people are saying. Malt, yeast, hops and water are more than sufficient to make a bewildering array of rich, flavorful beers. This year’s Great American Beer Festival judged 69 distinct and different beer styles, only a handful of which used anything more than the classic four ingedients. This is exactly what craft brewers have been doing for twenty-five years. People do want those ingredients used to produce something that tastes like … well, something. They want it to taste like beer, for example. That would be a good start.

Noe concludes:

For the major breweries, creating specialty brands isn’t the problem.

But while microbreweries, which have lower operating expenses, can turn a profit by selling relatively small amounts of specialty beers, the bigger operations like Miller and Anheuser-Busch probably won’t see immediate profits from these newer products.

For now, the goal of offering craft beers may be to lure customers back to the major brands.

“So far, the big breweries haven’t proved particularly adept at selling craft beers,” Shepard said. “But it makes a whole lot of sense — this is where the market is going.”

I love the honesty of his remark, “the goal of offering craft beers may be to lure [my emphasis] customers back to the major brands.” People must be “lured” to drink the major brands. That says it all, don’t you think?

Bob Lachky: “Here’s to Advertising”

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Bob Lachky, the man responsible for Anheuser-Busch‘s Here’s to Beer public relations campaign, has a new job. According to a report in today’s AdAge Lachky has been named Anheuser-Busch’s chief creative officer by Augie IV, who has worked closely with him for twenty years. This means he will be responsible for “all the brewer’s agency relationships and creative output” and, as one insider put it, “Bob is going to be an integral part of the new regime.”

It will be interesting to see what will happen to the Here’s to Beer campaign, since much of it was closely associated with Lachky personally.

Bob Lachky

Stephen Beaumont vs. New York Magazine

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Earlier today I got an e-mail from my friend and colleague, Stephen Beaumont:

I like it when consumer magazines publish stories about beer, I really do, even when I don’t write them. But it pisses me off when they accord such a noble and respected beverage about one-twentieth of the respect and consideration they would wine or cognac or gourmet chocolate bars.

Case in point is the new issue of New York Magazine and its panel review of 21 beers. On the surface, it looks like an okay story, but the more you get into it, the more its flaws are exposed. Which is why I’ve written a rebuttal to the piece.

At the most basic, I’m sending you this simply to bring these stories to your attention and get your reaction. At the most, I’d love to spread the message around a bit so that hopefully these kind of review pieces might eventually become the exception rather than the rule.

Amen. This is the same kind of hatchet job I’ve been complaining about a lot lately. Read the original story in New York Magazine first and then Stephen’s rebuttal. Go ahead, I’ll wait. When you come back, I’ve got a few things to add to Beaumont’s wonderful critique.

Finished? Good, here’s a few random observations I can add. First off, the article is titled Ales in Comparison. But of the 21 beers reviewed — the ones “in Comparison” — nine are lagers and four are hybrid wheat styles, meaning more than half are not ales. That would be like having a tasting of eight red wines, nine white wines and four champagnes and calling the whole thing “Red Wines in Comparison.” That would be ridiculous, of course, but it’s exactly what New York Magazine did here in their zeal to be clever.

In his introduction, author Ben Mathis-Lilley claims Budweiser and Stella Artois taste the same. While I’m not a great fan of Stella Artois, on any given day it does taste decidedly different from Budweiser. And though both are adjunct beers, I’ll drink Stella Artois whereas I’d pass on a Bud, the point being they’re different enough that they can’t reasonably be called “taste-alikes” as Mathis-Lilley does.

The tasters are described as a “panel of untrained but enthusiastic drinking aficionados.” Well how scientific. Forget for a moment that calling an “enthusiastic” drinker an “aficionado” is probably oxymoronic, but what value is there in the opinion of people not trained to judge and/or evaluate the quality of a beer? Why is is you never see wine evaluated by enthusiastic amateurs, but it’s fairly common for newspaper articles to assemble an unnamed group of people to taste beer with no training and then report their findings as if they were all Robert Parker? Why do they assume one needs no training to evaluate beer? It’s preposterous, of course, and one more reminder of how ignorant the wine and food media is about beer. Wine takes years of training to learn, its nuanced flavors reveal themselves only to the sophisticated, discerning palate. But beer? That swill can be tasted by anybody — no training necessary — just throw a bunch of random bottles in a styrofoam cooler and voilà, you’ve got a story.

Even if I knew nothing about beer, why should I care if another person, equally ignorant, didn’t like a particular beer. In the New York Magazine article, negative descriptors such as “sissy,” “too girlie” or “eh” are used to describe some of the beers. What does that tell me about how they taste? Absolutely nothing, of course, which makes this entire exercise all but meaningless. In the first group of random beers, some of the panelists even correctly described one of the beers which was revealed in an aside as “accurately, according to our moderator.” So if they comment that on one of the beers some of the tasters actually got it right, showing by mentioning it they were surprised, what does that say about how wrong they got all the others? And if they got it wrong most of the time, as I suspect they must have, why report on it at all? What value does having the opinions of people with no training and no proficiency for what they’re tasting being used to educate others about what they taste like? Isn’t that like asking a blind person to describe a color?

And as Beaumont points out, the tasting flights have almost no logic to them and the beers tasted against one another bear no relation to each other, which would make it difficult for the seasoned taster, and all but impossible for the neophyte. It’s a process doomed to fail from the start, and another reason why this tasting is so comical. I’d be laughing except for the fact that some people will probably take this seriously and base their buying decisions on the article in what is otherwise considered an influential publication.

Also, in the article, the author gives the following advice. “Beer-pairing rule of thumb: Match up similar flavors.” Which is the same as saying white wines with fish. While such a rule of thumb may sometimes work, it’s extremely limiting and rigid, and ignores what choosing a contrasting beer might add to the experience.

For one of the beers, the only thing said about it was it “had a funny name.” How condescending. Thanks. That’s very helpful for me if I might want to drink it. But it’s indicative of the tone of the entire piece. There’s very little here that’s actually useful and they seem to have a great deal of trouble taking the subject seriously so I’m left with one final question. Exactly what is the point of this article?

 

 
UPDATE: New York Magazine invited Stephen to write a letter to the editor for their next issue. In the hopes of having it carry more weight, he graciously invited other beer writers to also sign the letter. Six of us agreed to sign it. In addition to me and Beaumont, the letter was also signed by Julie Bradford (All About Beer), Lew Bryson, Tom Dalldorf (Celebrator Beer News) and John Hansell (Malt Advocate).

 
UPDATE (10.27): New York Magazine has now printed Stephen Beaumont’s letter to the editor.

James Bond’s Beer

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I’ve been a huge fan of James Bond since I was a kid. I read all of Ian Fleming’s novels and even the later ones when John Gardner took over the series, among others. And, of course, I’ve seen all of the films many times. Not only am I aware that Sean Connery was not the first James Bond — it was an American, Barry Nelson — I’ve had a videotape of the show for decades. It was originally aired as a teleplay on live television in 1954 (eight years before Sean Connery debuted as James Bond in 1962’s Dr. No) on the show “Climax!.” It was based on Fleming’s novel Casino Royale and Peter Lorre played the villain, Le Chiffre. Suffice it to say I’m a big fan.

So when I read that in the new adaptation of Casino Royale (due in theaters November 17) Bond will drink a Heineken in a six-figure cross-promotion, I must say my first reaction was suspicion. Suspicion because every single time this story was reported it contained a justification for this move, saying that in Fleming’s novel his character James Bond does drink beer for the first and only time. If they want to have Heineken be a sponsor for the film and have the character drink one, that’s their decision even though I really hate these type of deals where products are featured prominently in films for big bucks. To me the insertion of the products into the action is way too obvious so that it distracts you from what makes movies so enjoyable, which is allowing you to escape into the story. It’s hard to feel swept away into a story when a giant bus drives by behind the action with a billboard reading “Drink Coke” every time the characters are walking outdoors. And in Pierce Brosnan’s second film as James Bond, Tomorrow Never Dies, during a “rooftop motorcycle chase in Saigon, Bond returns the bike to street level by using a parked truck which carries cases of Heineken beer as a ramp. Cans fly in every direction. Several kegs of Heineken are seen when the motorcycle briefly skids.” The Amsterdam brewer’s relationship with the Bond films has thus been going on for some time now, so it’s really no surprise that they’d want to crank it up a notch for the new movie.

But trying to justify such a greedy, commercial intrusion by saying it will make the film more accurate since the news stories all claim Bond did drink a beer in the novel seems to me avarice run amuck. A common element all of these news stories shared was that while they all claimed that Bond drank beer in Fleming’s Casino Royale novel, not one of them gave any specifics. For example, in Dowd on Drinks, by William M. Dowd, he writes the following:

In the first Bond novel, “Casino Royale,” the character who became known for his knowledge and enjoyment of wines and spirits actually drank beer. (Pause here for startled gasps by those reading this sacrilege for the first time.)

How opprobrious. “Startled gasps? Sacrilege?” Now why someone who knows and enjoys wine and spirits also drinking beer would be a sacrilege is never explained, perhaps Dowd thinks it self-evident. But it’s highly insulting and it displays that media prejudice I’m always going on about. Here’s another drinks writer who apparently thinks all beer is bad and all wine (and spirits) are good. Must be nice to live in such a black and white world in which reality has no place in your version of things.

Another account, this one from the Hearst Group, said “[i]n the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, the super spy who became known for his knowledge and enjoyment of wines and spirits actually (my emphasis) drank beer.” Oh, he actually drank beer, he didn’t pretend to drink it, or he didn’t just order but actually choked it down, too. What on earth is wrong with these people? Can they not see how ignorant they appear?

The reason, of course, they’re falling all over themselves to justify this move is obvious. The vodka martini, shaken not stirred, is part of the Bond ethos, a big part of his coolness, his personality and his popularity. So tampering with that is obviously risky but since there’s a lot of money at stake, they will do anything to keep the money without losing the fans. So by saying Bond actually did have a beer in the book makes it much easier to sell, as many of the reports have offered. For example, here’s how one wire service put it.

James Bond purists will be grateful to know that the beer plot is not just a money grab by the movie’s makers. Casino Royale was the first Bond book written by Ian Fleming and the only one in which Bond drinks beer.

So then the real question is, is it true? Did Bond drink a beer in the novel Casino Royale? I grabbed my dog-eared copy of Casino Royale from the attic in search of the answer and read it again, because it had been years since I’d cracked it open although I certainly couldn’t remember any reference to beer. I still have my old “complete and unabridged” Signet paperback that was in my parents house growing up. It’s a sixth printing from October 1962. Here’s what I found.

  1. In Chapter 5, on page 30, Bond orders his first drink in the book, an Americano. An Americano is a cocktail made with bitters, sweet vermouth, and soda water.
  2. In Chapter 7, on page 40, Bond orders C.I.A. man Felix Leiter a “Haig-and-Haig” (which is scotch whisky) and himself a “A dry martini” … “One. In a deep champagne goblet.” Then he gives the bartender more detailed instructions on how to make it. “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.” Have I stumbled upon the origin of Bond’s famous “shaken not stirred” predilection? Bond tells Leiter that the drink is his “own invention” and that he plans “to patent it when [he] can think of a good name” demonstrating there are some subjects on which Bond is quite ignorant, patent law for example.
  3. In Chapter 8, on page 46, Bond shared a “cold carafe of vodka, very cold” with fellow agent and Bond girl “Vesper Lynd.”
  4. Later in the same chapter, on pages 47-48, Bond orders a bottle of champagne, a “Taittinger 45” but the waiter persuades him that the “Brut Blanc de Blanc 1943” would be better and Bond agrees.
  5. After long expositions about playing baccarat, Bond returns to drinking finally in Chapter 13, on page 75, when he ordered a bottle of champagne for himself and Felix Leiter to celebrate his victory at cards.
  6. Then in Chapter 14, at page 78, Bond orders another bottle of champagne, this time Veuve Cliquot, to have with his scrambled eggs and bacon, which he shared with Vesper.
  7. Shortly after that, Vesper is abducted and Bond gives chase, getting captured and tortured in the process. For many pages nothing is drunk, as Bond can’t even get a drink of water from his torturers. Eventually he gets away and after recovering in the hospital, goes on a holiday on the French coast with Vesper. In Chapter 24, on page 129, she and Bond share yet another bottle of champagne which he chased a page later with some brandy.
  8. Finally, in the second last chapter, number 26 on page 138, they share a final bottle of champagne before the story concludes unexpectedly (and I won’t give away the ending).

So unless I missed it somehow, there’s not one mention of beer in the novel I can find, much less a scene in which Bond actually drinks one. I skimmed through the book many times before resorting to re-reading the whole thing cover to cover trying to be thorough and not miss finding a bottle in a haystack. It was an awful lot of trouble just to prove a point. (The wonderful website Make mine a 007 also details the drinks Bond has in Casino Royale and reaches the same conclusion). So the propaganda spin machine is in high gear and not one news organization bothered to check the facts or even ask where in the novel Bond drinks this seminal beer that apparently makes crass commercialism justifiable. They all just reported what the press release said and didn’t question a thing, even though a moment’s pause should have been enough to suggest it might be too convenient. What are the odds that the story they were re-making just happened to be the only James Bond novel in which the main character drinks a beer as Heineken was paying them an undisclosed six-figure amount to depict him doing just that. Not one reporter considered exploring that angle? It’s good to know our nation’s media is the hands of such a capable, inquisitive bunch.

But let’s look at the story’s other claim, that Casino Royale is the one and only novel in which Bond chooses beer.

  • In Diamonds Are Forever, Fleming’s fourth Bond novel, 007 takes Bill Tanner to lunch at Scotts where he orders a Black Velvet, which is a mixed pint of champagne and Guinness.
  • Later in the same novel, while driving to Saratoga with C.I.A. compatriot Felix Leiter, they stop at roadside greasy spoon called “Chicken in a Basket” where Leiter and Bond have Miller High Life with their lunch.
  • In Goldfinger, the seventh novel, while chasing the villian through Europe, Bond washed down his lunch at Geneva’s Bavaria brasserie with Löwenbräu beer.
  • In The Hildebrand Rarity, one of the short stories in the collection published under the title For Your Eyes Only, after circling an island in a boat Bond stops for a chicken salad sandwich and a “cold beer” from a cooler. This story first appeared in Playboy magazine in 1960.
  • In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the 11th novel (excluding the short stories), Bond has four steins of Franziskaner at the Franziskaner Keller with his taxi driver to celebrate his engagement to Tracy. It is in effect his bachelor party and when he’s reunited with his fiancee, she accuses him of smelling “like a pig of beer and sausages.”
  • In The Man With the Golden Gun, Fleming’s 13th novel, while searching for Scaramanga, Bond orders a Red Stripe in the Dreamland Cafe and has two more before he leaves.
  • In The Living Daylights, part of a second short story collection, this one published under the title Octopussy and the Living Daylights, Bond has a lunch of salted herring and two draft Löwenbräus.

That’s a total of seven instances where James Bond has a beer in six different Fleming stories (four novels and two short stories). So not only does Bond not have a beer in Casino Royale, it was also not the only instance of his doing so as virtually all of the recent news stories have claimed. And lest you think they can weasel their way out of this lie by claiming they meant the Bond films, Bond has also had beer on screen before, too. In the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, after escaping from Piz Gloria, Bond orders and drinks a beer from an outdoor stand while trying to blend into the crowd. So at every level, the moneyed interests of the film production company and the beer sponsor, with the media’s complicity, is simply rewriting history to fit their short term goals of having Bond drink a Heineken for money in the latest film.

Propaganda aside, I’m certainly in favor of James Bond drinking beer. If they’re trying to re-invent (or reboot) James Bond — which is my understanding of what the new film represents — it makes sense that a modern Bond would have embraced good beer along with the other pleasures of life today. That would be in keeping with the character’s philosophy. Undoubtedly one of the reasons that Bond was not a beer drinker in 1953 and beyond, when Fleming began writing the Bond novels, was that there were not many good beers widely available worldwide and what was available was not often written about. Remember Michael Jackson’s first beer book wasn’t published until 1977. And American wines were held in no better regard during that time period, either. So keeping Bond’s tastes and preferences rooted in a time fifty years ago, when the diversity and quality of alcohol beverages was vastly different than it is today, doesn’t make sense anymore, if indeed it ever did.

But Heineken? Not Heineken. Bond’s character would never drink such swill. He wouldn’t be a snob about wine, food, clothes, cars and practically everything else and then drink such a pedestrian beer. In fact, in the novel Casino Royale, in Chapter 8, just after ordering champagne, Bond makes the following pronouncement:

“You must forgive me,” he said. “I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It’s very pernickety and old-maidish really, but then when I’m working I generally have to eat my meals alone and it makes them more interesting when one takes trouble.”

So there is absolutely no way someone who would say that would turn around and order a skunked green-bottle of Heineken. Maybe a Thomas Hardy 1968, a Samuel Adams Utopias, a Deus, or a Cantillon Rose de Gambrinus. He’d more likely order something showy, expensive and impressive; something that showed he had good taste. And that would never be a Heineken. Often Bond orders local specialties in the novels and films, and Casino Royale takes place in northern France. The fictional resort town where most of the novel takes place is supposedly near the mouth of the Somme River in the Picardie region, which is only about two hours from Belgium. So while France is not known for its beers, a good selection of Belgian beers would likely be available at the casino and area restaurants. That’s what a beer savvy Bond would order.

The way I see it, this is simply a money grab despite — or perhaps because of — all of the protestations that it’s not. As entertainment news goes, this seems to be important to a lot of fans, which is no doubt why the spin was necessary in the first place. The story was certainly picked up by a lot of news outlets, both in print and online. That not one I could find got the story right but did the spin doctor’s bidding so completely says quite a lot about the state of our media, I think. Sure, in the end, who cares if a film and the media hoodwinked people into thinking one thing while another was true? It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of life. It is, after all, just a movie. And while that all may be true, I can’t help but think that in a media culture where the truth seems to have no bearing in editorial decisions that lying to the public about something that really does matter is getting easier and easier to do. Because if the media can lie to the public so unabashedly here, what else are we being lied to about? What else are we not being told? What else is the media not bothering to check or follow up on? And most importantly, when will they start taking beer seriously?

For trivia’s sake, there was also a Bond beer once upon a time. In 1968, there was “James Bond’s 007 Special Blend,” brewed by National Brewing Co. of Baltimore, Maryland. They’re highly collectible because they were produced for only a short time, which was due to having never been officially licensed.

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“A subtle blend of premium beer and malt liquor.” Umm, what will they think of next?

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New Binding Website

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The Binding Brauerei Group announced today a new website for the U.S. market has been launched. The Binding Group, known as the Radeberger Group in their native Germany, owns several beer brands and imports at least five of them to the United States: Radeberger, Clausthaler, DAB, Krusovice and Tucher.

Radeberger Pilsner is a world class pilsner and brewed in the town of Radeberg, just outside Dresden. The brewery itself is beautiful as is the surrounding area of what was once part of East Germany. If you get a chance to visit Dresden and Radeberg, I highly recommend it. Be sure to order the unfiltered version of their pilsner, a Zwickel, available exclusively at the brewery. It’s wonderful. Radeberger was recently featured as the beer in the sophomoric film Beerfest, which is a shame because the beer is so much better than their association with the film might otherwise imply.

Miller Expands Import Selection in U.S.

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SABMiller announced yesterday their intention to bring four of the beer brands they own worldwide into the United States, presumably to bolster sagging sales of their core brands. Beginning next year, “Colombia’s Águila, two Peruvian brands, Cristal and Cusqueña, and Polish brew Tyskie will join SABMiller’s global brand Pilsner Urquell and Peroni on US shelves.”

All four will be sold in the New York market, whereas Tyskie will also be sold in the Chicago area and the three Latin American beers will also be in the Florida market.

According to Just Drinks, “SABMiller’s stable of US beers has struggled domestically. For the three months to the end of June, domestic sales to retailers fell 2.4%. Miller Lite brand volumes were level in the period.”

 

Miller’s press release has the following information about the four brands:

Águila is Colombia’s No. 1 brand with a 56 percent market share. It is a cultural icon, dominating the Colombian social and sports landscape. With nearly 2 million expatriate Colombians living in the US, there is a sizable market to pursue

Brewed since 1922, Cristal is Peru’s No. 1 selling beer with 52 percent share, combining a light-bodied profile with strong Andean imagery. It has been the No. 1 US import from South America for the last seven years, primarily appealing to the approximately one million Peruvian consumers in the US

Cusqueña – or “Gold of the Incas” – is the premium beer of Peru, and originates from Cuzco, the seat of the Inca empire

Tyskie, currently celebrating its 377th anniversary, is the No 1. brand in Poland, Central Europe’s leading beer growth market. The brand is rich in heritage from its origins near the beautiful city of Krakow and has since been elevated to national prominence, appealing to discerning consumers as the finest Polish beer with a full, satisfying taste

Rainier Brewery Area to be Gentrified

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It was announced today that a local Seattle developer, the Sabey Corporation, has bought the historic Rainier Brewery along Interstate 5 and plans to develop the space into a multi-use area for shopping, business offices, living spaces and light industry. For $9.9 million, they got 5.5 acres, which includes “310,000 square feet in four former brewery buildings: the Brew House, the Malt House, the Bottling Plant and the General Office.”

The Rainier Brewery was built in 1903 by the Seattle Brewing & Malting Co. and Georgetown was originally created as a company town, though annexed by Seattle in 1910. Three local breweries, Claussen-Sweeney Brewing, the Bay View Brewery (a.k.a. Kopp & Hemrich) and the Albert Braun Brewing Association merged together in 1892 to form the Seattle Brewing & Malting Co. Rainier celebrated their 100-year anniversary in 1978, though the brand was not created until May of 1893, when the newly merged company needed a new brand name for their beer. Ten years later it would be the sixth largest brewery nationwide and the west coast’s biggest. After prohibition, Fritz and Emil Sick bought first the brewery (in 1933) and then the Rainier Brand (in 1935). A few years later they installed the 12-foot neon “R” that became a Seattle landmark (which it was officially declared in 1993). Initially, it rotated but after Interstate 5 was built it remained stationary for fear it would distract motorists. After being very popular for several decades, the brand was sold to G. Heilmann in 1977 and then it slipped in and out of other hands until 1996, when Stroh’s acquired it.

They got out of the beer business three years later and brewing of “the Green Death” was moved down the road to Olympia Brewery in Tumwater after Pabst bought the brand name. The Tumwater plant closed in 2003 but Pabst continues to own and produce the Rainier label and last year even started an ad campaign playing upon the nostalgia for “Vitamin R” called Remember Rainier. It was finally removed on July 3, 2000 and replaced with a green “T” about the same size for Tully’s Coffee, who had moved their headquarters to the building. Many saw the switch as a change in Seattle’s beverage priorities. The “R” was donated to Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, where it remains today.

Under the new development plan, many of the current tenants will be invited to stay, including Georgetown Brewing Co., a small craft brewery that has been in the old building since September 2002. Sabey believes that the neighborhood of Georgetown is ripe for a renaissance and their acquisition of the property may also facilitate growth in the area. Renovations are not likely to begin for at least eighteen months and won’t be finished until at least 2012.

Sabey also owns the Post-Intelligencer building along with several other prominent historic Seattle properties. Some of Sabey’s previous projects have included “converting a chicken-processing plant into the Elliott Park North biotech building and converting the 1910 Sisters of Providence Hospital into the James Tower life-sciences center.” They also own a piece of the Seattle Supersonics basketball team.

My initial sense that while I’m glad that they will preserve the Rainier brewery in some fashion, the look of the planned renovations seem a little too clean to me, a little too thought out. Sometimes too much planning results in an area that’s not organic since it isn’t allowed to be created naturally.

I’m thinking of areas like LoDo in Denver or the Warehouse District in Cleveland where in each case one prominent building was renovated, which led to another and then another until after a period of time the entire neighborhood had been transformed. This looks like the whole area will be done in one fell swoop which may or may not work, depending on how people perceive it. Seattle will either accept it or avoid it for being too Disneyfied, meaning it could seem too plastic, too forced and inauthentic. At least that’s how the drawing of the proposed changes strike me on first blush. Only time will tell. If only they’d bring back the giant neon “R.”

An artist’s rendering of planned development at the original Rainier Brewery site.

(Studio Meng Strazzara, October 10, 2006: Jim Bryant/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)