Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Beer In Ads #2645: Soup Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Saturday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, a party is going on at somebody’s house, with several couples in attendance. But as far as I can tell, there’s Ballantine Ale … and soup. That’s it. Just soup. That’s the only food seen in the ad. Which seems odd; I’ve never been to a soup and beer pairing, or even a soup and beer party.

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Beer In Ads #2644: Charades Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Friday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, a large party is being held in a tavern or some such. I’m not entirely sure what they’re doing but a good guess seems that they’re playing charades and the woman in the green dress is trying to get people to guess what she’s doing. Of course, she could just be waving to somebody, but everyone except the server is staring at her intently, as if they’re trying to figure it all out. So my money’s on charades.

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This scan of the ad is clearer, but it’s only the right half of the double truck.

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Beer In Ads #2643: Football Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Thursday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, two couples are meeting at a local tavern after attending a college footbll game at “State.” One couple arrived early and is already working on their first Ballantine Ale.

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The other scan of the ad is clearer, but this one shows a little bit more of the right edge of the ad.

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Beer In Ads #2642: Backyard Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Wednesday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, a couple is enjoying some beer on their back porch. Across their lawn their neighbors appear to be mowing the lawn and working in their garden. But the first couple poured them glasses of Ballantine Ale and are beckoning them to take a break and come over and join them for a beer. Now that’s being neighborly.

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Moon Crater “Beer”

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So this is an interesting bit of ephemera. There’s a crater on the Moon that is named “Beer.” I’d like to think it was named for the beverage, but unfortnately that’s apparently not the case. That would have made for a better story, but c’est la vie. Instead, there was a German amateur astronomer who it was named for. The crater in the center is one the called “Beer.” The other big one, in the upper left, used to be called “Beer A” but is now known as Feuillée. The string of smaller craters (known as “craterlets”) in a line to the east-southeast of “Beer” used to be called “Fossa Archimedes” but it’s been suggested they should be called “Catena Beer,” and it seems to be catching on.

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Here’s how the name came about:

  • Named for Wilhelm Wolff Beer (January 4, 1777 – March 27, 1850), a banker and astronomer in Berlin, Germany. Beer built a private observatory with a 9.5 cm refractor in Tiergarten, Berlin. Together with Johann Heinrich Mädler he produced the first exact map of the Moon (entitled Mappa Selenographica) in 1834-1836, and in 1837 published a description of the Moon (Der Mond nach seinen kosmischen und individuellen Verhältnissen). Both remained the best descriptions of the Moon for many decades.
  • Beer was Catalog Number 1185 in the original IAU nomenclature of Named Lunar Formations. The designation is attributed to Birt, and had earlier been adopted by Neison, 1876 (where the designation Beer A is used for what is now known as Feuillée, differing from the modern usage of Beer A for the much smaller crater selected in Named Lunar Formations). Schmidt is said there to have called this feature Hamilton (unrelated to the modern Hamilton) and to have used the name Beer for the crater now known as Rosse. However, Schmidt himself says that his personal preference since 1856, based on the Lohrmann maps (which he edited), was to call the present crater pair Beer and Mädler, but he changed these to Hamilton and Feuillée in his 1878 book in an effort to be consistent with the English observers.
  • In his 1880 article, Neison equates Schmidt’s 1878 Hamilton and Feuillée to his 1876 Beer and Beer A and the British Association’s Beer and Mädler.

The Planetary Society has an interesting post where they show an experiment of taking photos of the moon “under different solar illumination conditions.” The NASA photos are all of the craters Beer, Feuillée and the craterlets Fossa Archimedes, which are also known as “Catena Beer.”

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Beer In Ads #2641: Fun Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Tuesday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, a group of people are laughing it up at a party with free flowing beer. They seem to be having a good time, though I’m sure the beer is at least partly responsible.

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Beer In Ads #2640: Beach Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Monday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, two couples are on a beach, and three of them were smart enough to be on the blanket drinking a beer. The fourth person is running in from the ocean, and his wife has already grabbed a can o Ballantine Ale for him and is holding it up as an incentive for him to come back.

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We Want Beer Parade

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You’ve undoubtedly seen the photographs or men marching through the streets carrying signs that read “We Want Beer.” The parade, held on May 14, 1932, was organized by the city’s mayor, Jimmy Walker, and was originally called the Beer for Taxation march, although it quickly became known more popularly as the “We Want Beer!” parade. Mayor Walker was a flamboyant showman, but prohibition was also making life difficult for New Yorkers. The criminal element took over the sale and distribution of illegal alcohol and something like 400 murders each year were attributed to bootleggers and gangsters in New York. And the increased crime was harder to combat because of the city’s lost revenue from various alcohol taxes, which forced the mayor to dramatically reduce both his police and fire departments. There was also rampant unemployment as the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression.

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This is the iconic photo of marchers in the We Want Beer parade.

The photo above shows marchers at night, which may be surprising, but the parade actually lasted all day long, and continued into the evening.

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NYC Mayor Jimmy Walker.

Mayor Walker gave a speech in the evening over station WEAF of the National Broadcasting Company, in which he challenged the opponents of his “Beer for Taxation” plan to produce any other form of taxation that would be “less of a burden upon people already overburdened with taxation.”

Anti Prohibition Rally 1933

The parade began down Fifth Avenue from 80th Street in Manhattan, “with picket signs, in costume, and cars festooned with slogans. The marchers went west on 59th Street and back north on Central Park West, parading into the night,” with Mayor Jimmy Walker, “dapper in his derby and suit (and about to be brought up on corruption charges before resigning as mayor), led the procession.” Within the month, other cities held similar parades.

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“Interestingly, at noon, the marchers paused for a minute of silence in honor of Charles Lindbergh Jr., whose body was found dead in woods in New Jersey two days earlier.”

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It started as a fairly small protest, but quickly swelled to an estimated 100,000 marchers (and some accounts put that number closer to 150,000). One of the slogans they chanted was “Beer for Prosperity” and they also chanted the call and response “Who wants beer?” followed by “We Do!”

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Today I Found Out also has an account of the parade, including:

When Congressman Emanuel Celler heard about the event, he said he’d come and bring a bunch of friends. You’d be able to pick him out in the crowd by the two signs he’d be holding: “Never Say Dry” and “Open the Spigots and Drown the Bigots.” The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and the Grand Army of the Republic (a group of Civil War veterans) also turned out to march in the parade. Students and society matrons also joined the fray.

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They even created a souvenir program for the parade.

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And Steuben Taverns created a hanger to put on your car’s rear view mirror.

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And to get a sense of the parade itself, here is a video from the event.

Mayor James J. Walker leads the great Beer Parade in New York City:

Beer In Ads #2639: Christmas Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Sunday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, a couple is getting ready for the holidays, wrapping their Christmas presents. Although to be fair, in 1950s fashion, the woman is doing all of the work while the man is sitting in the easy chair and pouring himself a glass of beer. At least he appears to have given her a beer first, and is pouring himself his own only after he’s served his wife.

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Beer In Ads #2638: Piano Time With Ballantine’s Brewer’s Gold

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Saturday’s ad is for is by Ballantine Ale, from 1957. In the 1950s, Ballantine advertised the hop variety “Brewer’s Gold” as “a rare strain of choice hops” and even registered it as a trade-mark, although Brewers Gold is widely available today. In this ad, two couples are spending some time together when one of the sits down at the piano. That could have been the end of the evening, but luckily one of the women quickly got a tray full of Ballantine Ale for everybody. If you’re going to stand around a piano singing show tunes, you’re going to need beer.

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