Monday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1942. This World War 2 ad features ghostly horses riding the sky above Navy warships to illustrate the power of diesel engines which, according to A-B, were first built for use in their breweries. Hmm.
Sunday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1943. This World War 2 ad features a scene aboard a warship that’s firing its guns, contrasting the modern ship to the sailors firing cannons from a colonial wooden ship, with the tagline “The Ammunition is being passed.”
Today is the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., one of my favorite authors. I wrote about him when he passed away in 2007 in a post entitled So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut’s Beer Heritage and detailed his relationship with John Hickelooper’s father and a beer Wynkoop later made based on Vonnegut’s grandfather’s recipe. There were essentially two different beer stories involving the Wynkoop Brewing and Vonnegut, and I’ve learned a little more about them over the past decade.
The first one was in the mid-1990s, when the Denver Public Library held a special event around 1996 (sources vary between 1995-97) called Denver Public Libation to commemorate the opening of the new library. The library partnered with Wynkoop, who invited several well-known authors to write mini-stories to be printed on the labels. Some of the writers included Clive Cussler, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter Thompson, among others. Vonnegut also wrote something for the event. His piece was 160 words and entitled “Merlin,” and tells the story of “the unfortunate events that ensue when the master wizard casts a spell that equips the Knights of the Round Table with Thompson submachine guns.” Despite its short length, I cannot find a copy of it anywhere, and it doesn’t appear to have been reprinted anywhere else. It’s listed in his bibliography as having only been “Serialized on bottles of Denver Public Libation Ale, made by Wynkoop Brewing Company.”
John Hickenlooper wrote about the story in “The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics:”
The second instance was around the same time, when Wynkoop created a beer with Vonnegut based on his grandfather’s recipe. It was called Wynkoop Mile High Malt.
Vonnegut himself detailed the experience in his 1997 semi-autobiographical novel “Timequake.”
The label artwork was based on a self-portrait by Vonnegut, who was also an artist.
And in the book “Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut,” by Kurt Vonnegut and William Richard Allen, he explains more about his grandfather’s beer.
On November 11, 2007, Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, reintroduced Kurt’s Mile High Malt to celebrate the late author’s birthday. The beer was originally created by Vonnegut’s grandfather, Albert Lieber, of the Indianapolis Brewery, using coffee as the secret ingredient. Kurt’s Mile High Malt was first brewed in 1996 thanks to Wynkoop Founder and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a friend of Vonnegut’s. At Vonnegut’s request, coffee was added to the Mile High Malt, making it a close recreation of his grandfather’s original.
Then, in 2014, they released it again for the brewery’s 25th anniversary. It was part of their “Even-Smaller Batch Series” and was even canned.
Saturday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1941. This just prior to World War 2 ad features a frontiersman chopping down wood to contrast how open America was compared to “Today, [when] “you can’t find a place to park.”
Friday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1940. This just prior to World War 2 ad features English writer Samuel Johnson and his position on the importance of friendships.
Thursday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1943. This World War 2 ad features the animals marching down a hill, maybe to the slaughter, since it’s their meat that is the subject here. Even during the war, Americans are very well nourished, apparently in part due to Anheuser-Busch’s yeast being used to fortify animal feed. Hmm, seems like a bit of a stretch, but it is making me hungry.
For our 141th Session, our host will be me again, which will make sense shortly. As you may know, I write the Brookston Beer Bulletin, and have been involved in The Session since Stan Hieronymus first conceived of it in 2007. For my topic, I have chosen The Future Of Beer Blogging, which seems to be changing a lot lately, I believe, and is certainly different than it was ten years ago.
My topic is fairly broad and open-ended, but centered on what has happened to beer blogging over the almost eleven years since we started the monthly Session. Back in those dark ages of the mid-2000s, beer blogging was relatively new, and many people were jumping in, no doubt in part because of how easy and inexpensive it was to create a platform to say whatever you wanted to say. It was the Wild West, and very vibrant and engaging. You could write short or long, with or without pictures, and basically say whatever you wanted. People engaged in commenting, and whole threads of conversation ensued. It was great.
Fast forward a decade and there are many more ways that people interact online, and blogs, I think, lost their vaunted place in the discussion. Now there’s also Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and countless other ways to communicate online. This has meant blogging, I believe, has lost its place at the top, or in the middle, or wherever it was. That’s how it feels to me, at least. I think one incident that confirmed this for me is that recently the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference changed its name to the “Beer Now Conference,” a seeming acknowledgment that the landscape has changed. They explained the decision thusly:
We love bloggers. But after many discussions with key players, we have determined our community has reached consensus that the term “bloggers” is too limiting. Blogging, after all, is just one medium used by beer writers. Even with our switch in 2015 to the name Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference, we believe we are not including those who primarily communicate on beer via podcasts, photos, and video.
So where do you think the future of beer blogging is heading? What will it look like next year, or in ten years? Will it even still be around? If not, what will replace it? People won’t stop talking about beer, analyzing it and tasting it. But how we do all of those things certainly will. That’s what I’m interested in with this topic. What do you think the future will hold? What will we all be doing, beerwise?
To participate in the November Session, simply leave a link to your session post by commenting to this announcement, or email me, ideally on or before Friday, November 9, or really anytime this month. Since this is late notice, and our second-to-last Session, take all the time you need.
Participation in The Session has been waning for quite some time now, and finding willing hosts has become harder and harder. I’ve had to cajole and beg for hosts many times, and I’m not sure why I’ve kept it up other than we’ve been doing it so long that I just kept going out of habit. But the reality is that if people don’t want to host and fewer and fewer people are actually participating I’d say that’s a pretty strong signal that the time has come to shut down the Session. So in consultation with Stan, we’ve decided that December 2018 will be the last Session. It’s been over ten years and by the time the smoke clears we’ll have done 142 Sessions, which is a pretty good run. Thanks to everybody who’s hosted and participated over the years. After this Session, there will be one more, and I could think of no more fitting host than the man who started it all, so Stan Hieronymus has agreed to be the final host to put a bookend on this grand 11-year adventure.
So by next year, The Session will be a distant memory. Now what? Is there something else we could, or should, be doing as an online community of people who write about beer through the internet? I don’t know the answer. I hate to see this end, but people’s priorities and methods of communication have been evolving so I’m not sure in what form we could keep any engagement going. But I can start a conversation. So let’s discuss. As a coda to this month’s session, please consider what we could do as a group to remotely weigh in on the beer world from time to time. Maybe the answer is nothing. But maybe it isn’t. As a bonus topic, what ideas do you have for what to do next?
Wednesday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1944. This World War 2 ad features a group of pilgrims walking through a snow-filled forest with the headline “Not an A Card in Ye Group,” which is a reference to rationing during the war. If you had an “A Card” you were permitted 3-4 gallons of gas per week, whereas a “B card” got you 8 and a “C card” got even more, but was reserved for doctors, mail carrier, railroad workers, ministers, etc. There were also “T cards” for trucks and buses and “X cards” for VIPs. It was primarily to save rubber, which was in short supply, not gas.
Tuesday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1944. This World War 2 ad features a Colonial American scene with “Ye Olde Melting Pot” on a street corner. I doubt that’s what actually happened, but I know there were scrap metal drives during World War 2. I have a newspaper clipping when my mother was a little girl when she was made a general in the “tin can army” for collecting a lot of metal (primarily because my grandfather’s job gave him access to it). What it has to do with beer is less clear, except that apparently the brewery also gave to the war effort.
Monday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1964. Taking a break from the World War 2 theme, this ad features an election theme, with everyone in favor of cheaper beer, but Anheuser-Busch recommending you “vote twice for Budweiser.”
