Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Beer In Ads #2162: Gladys Swarthout

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Friday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1948. In the later 1940s, Pabst embarked on a series of ads with celebrity endorsements, photographing star actors, athletes, musicians and other famous people in their homes, enjoying Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This one features Miss Gladys Swarthout and her husband Mr. Frank Chapman. She “was an American mezzo-soprano opera singer and entertainer.”

In the ad, Swarthout and her husband, also an opera singer, are in their “Connecticut Home,” in what looks like a den or music room. They’re sharing a bottle of beer, although they are two full glasses.

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Beer Birthday: Chris Nelson

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Today is the 51st birthday of Chris Nelson, better known as The Beer Geek. Chris and his wife, Merideth Canham-Nelson, recently completed an around the world beer festival tour, but are still traveling the globe searching for great beer. A few years ago his wife also published Teachings From the Tap, her account of the year they spent circling the globe visiting beer destinations. Join me in wishing Chris a very happy birthday.

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The first “official meeting” of the Bay Area Beer Bloggers. From left: Merideth Canham-Nelson, me, Chris, JJ (the Thirsty Hopster), and Gail Ann Williams and Steve Shapiro, both from Beer by BART.

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In front of the Rocky statue in downtown Philadelphia during our trip to the first Philly Beer Week.

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At the OBF media tasting: Rick Sellers, from Pacific Brew News, Merideth and Chris Nelson, The Beer Geek, and Meagan Flynn (at right) with her assistant, Annalou, former publishers of Beer NW during the 2007 Oregon Brewers Festival.

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Chris, at right, with Shaun O’Sullivan, Merideth, and Jeff White in Pub Talk Radio in Monterey in September of last year.

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Chris and Merideth at Pangea in 2012 (photo “borrowed” from Facebook, by Virginia Vasquez)

Beer In Ads #2161: Jonathan M. Wainwright For Pabst

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Thursday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1948. In the later 1940s, Pabst embarked on a series of ads with celebrity endorsements, photographing star actors, athletes, musicians and other famous people in their homes, enjoying Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This one features the “Hero of Bataan, Defender of Corregidor,” Joseph M. Wainwright. He “was a career American army officer and the Commander of Allied forces in the Philippines at the time of their surrender to the Empire of Japan during World War II. Wainwright was a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his courageous leadership during the fall of the Philippines.”

In the ad, Wainwright is at “Fiddler’s Green,” holding a gun while “relaxing in the den of his Texas home.” On a tray in front of him, there’s two bottles of Pabst and two glasses. Another man, who appears to be talking to, has already started drinking his beer, or is at least holding it in his hand. If I were him, I’d be waiting until after Wainwright put down the gun to begin drinking.

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What Can Brown Do For You?

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For our 120th Session, our host will be Joe Tindall, who writes The Fatal Glass of Beer. For his topic, he’s chosen Brown Beer, which sounds simple enough, but I’ll just let Joe explain what he means:

The colour brown has certain connotations, some of which I won’t dwell on. But used in reference to beer, it can signify a kind of depressing old fashioned-ness – to refer to a traditional bitter as ‘brown’ seems to suggest it belongs to a bygone corduroy-trousered era. As breweries who pride themselves on their modernity focus on beers that are either decidedly pale or unmistakably black, the unglamorous brown middle ground is consistently neglected.

So for Session 120, let’s buck the trend and contemplate brown beer. This might be brown ale, or the aforementioned English bitter; it could be a malty Belgian brune, a dubbel or a tart oud bruin; even a German dunkel might qualify.

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In mid-2015, I was Thinking About Beer Color, so it could be fun to restrict that to just one family of color, the browns. There certainly are a lot of beers that fit into that range. What’s your take on the narrow band on the beer color rainbow. To participate in February’s Session, on or before Friday, February 3, 2017, post your thoughts on what brown has done for you. Just comment on the original announcement or via Twitter. Joe’s Twitter handle is @FatalGlass.

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Beer In Ads #2160: Tommy Henrich For Pabst

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Wednesday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1950. In the later 1940s, Pabst embarked on a series of ads with celebrity endorsements, photographing star actors, athletes, musicians and other famous people in their homes, enjoying Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This one features Tommy Henrich. He “was an American professional baseball player, nicknamed ‘The Clutch’ and ‘Old Reliable.’ He played his entire Major League Baseball career as a right fielder and first baseman for the New York Yankees (1937–1942 and 1946–1950). Henrich led the American League in triples twice and in runs scored once, also hitting 20 or more home runs four times. He is best remembered for his numerous exploits in the World Series; he was involved in one of the most memorable plays in Series history in 1941, was the hitting star of the 1947 Series with a .323 batting average, and hit the first walk-off home run in Series history in the first game of the 1949 World Series.”

In the ad, Henrich is showing off his “World-Series home run baseball” in what looks to be his study. I think they’re referring to the 1949 World Series, the year before, when “he gave New York a 1-0 victory in Game 1 when he homered against Don Newcombe on a 2-0 pitch to lead off the ninth inning, the first walk-off home run ever in the World Series.” Shortly before the ad ran, on January 19, 1950, he was awarded “Athlete of the Year,” although I don’t really know who gave him the accolade.

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Thesaurus Of Beer

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Today is the birthday of Peter Roget. He was born in 1779, in London, the son of a Swiss clergyman, and became a doctor, but was obsessed with making lists since at least the age of eight. I can certainly relate. Thanks to several bad incidents in his life — both his father and his wife died young, and a favorite uncle committed suicide in front of him — he suffered depression most of his life, and worked on his thesaurus as a coping mechanism. When it was first published in 1852, the full title was Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. After his death, both his son and then his grandson continued to work on new editions of what become known as Roget’s Thesaurus, the first reference book of its kind, although there are now dozens of similar books available.

I’m not sure if I’m so fascinated by words because I’m a writer, or if I’m a writer precisely because I love words. I have a long list of Beer In Other Languages, exhaustive lists of Drunk Words, slang terms for over-indulging and puke words, for when you really over-indulge. I’ve also looked at The Language Of Hangovers, but finding Beer Slang has proved far more difficult for some reason (although I should point out, that last one is a work in progress that I’ve only worked on a few times since first posting it in 2011).

As most beer historians will point out, beer as a generic term is fairly recent. Just ask Martyn Cornell or Ron Pattinson. And ale and lager as over-simplified subdivisions below beer is even trickier. But the fact remains, apart from wholly slang terms, there aren’t very many words which also mean beer, apart from beer. You might immediately offer “cerveza,” but that is, of course, in Spanish. So, because it’s Thesaurus Day, I checked out a few, and here’s what I found:

Roget’s Thesaurus

On Roget’s Thesaurus online, a search for “beer” yields this sparse response.

#959 Drunkenness: Nn. beer, barmy beer — beer.

Roget’s International Thesaurus 1922

Roget’s 1922 International Thesaurus is also online, on Bartleby.com, though it’s pretty unsatisfying, too:

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Thesaurus.com

Thesaurus.com, part of the dictionary.com family of reference website, gives this for beer synonyms:

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Oxford Dictionaries Thesaurus

The Oxford Dictionaries website reveals just this.

SYNONYMS
ale, beverage, brew
informal jar, pint, booze, wallop, sherbet
NZ Australian hop

WordReference Thesaurus

WordReference gives this list of words.

malt beverage, malt liquor, brew, suds, the amber brew, slops, brewskie, the amber nectar (slang), lager, lager beer, bitter, stout, ale, pale ale, alcoholic drink, booze (slang), a pint, a half, draught beer, draft beer, tap beer, cask ale

Curiously, only amber nectar, and booze are listed as “slang,” yet virtually all of them seem like either slang, specific types of beer or modified types of beer, like “draft beer.”

Infoplease Thesaurus

The thesaurus at Infoplease online yields this:

1. beer, brew, brewage

usage: a general name for alcoholic beverages made by fermenting a cereal (or mixture of cereals) flavored with hops

OneLook Thesaurus

The OneLook Thesaurus gives their top 100 beer-related words, though many don’t even make sense. You can even keep going, 100 new words at a time, and not surprisingly they get even less related to beer as you go deeper, some ridiculously so.

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Visual Thesaurus

This is the graph of beer synonyms that the Visual Thesaurus creates:

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Graph Words Online Thesaurus

The Graph Words Online Thesaurus gives a very similar answer to the Visual Thesaurus:

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Collins Dictionary Thesaurus

The Collins Dictionary Thesaurus gives this list of beer synonyms:

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Visuwords

Visuwords created a colorful graph of beer words, though very few true synonyms:

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Snappy Words

Snappy Words created this similar graph of beer words:

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Also, Wordnik and Power Thesaurus both give extensive answers, pulling from numerous sources, but end up giving almost all of the same answers as everyone else.

The conclusion is pretty much what I expected. There just aren’t many other words that mean beer. Apart from goofy slang and colloquialisms, there’s just no good generic words for it. One strange one that kept coming up was “brewage.” I’ve never heard that come up in conversation, have you? “I’m sitting here enjoying a glass of brewage.” It just doesn’t roll off the tongue. Maybe because it’s too close to sewage. But along with “brew,” it appears to be the most common synonym to come up. How is it possible that one of the most common words for beer is one nobody actually uses? I guess I’ll just have to keep enjoying my beer without any colorful words to substitute. C’est la vie. Happy Thesaurus Day.

Beer In Ads #2159: Lawrence Tibbett For Pabst

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Tuesday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1949. In the later 1940s, Pabst embarked on a series of ads with celebrity endorsements, photographing star actors, athletes, musicians and other famous people in their homes, enjoying Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This one features Mr. & Mrs. Lawrence Tibbett. He “was a famous American opera singer and recording artist who also performed as a film actor and radio personality. A baritone, he sang leading roles with the Metropolitan Opera in New York more than 600 times from 1923 to 1950. He performed diverse musical theatre roles, including Captain Hook in Peter Pan in a touring show.”

In the ad, Tibbett and his wife, Grace Mackay Smith, are aboard the S.S. Brazil, a “Moore-McCormick Luxury Liner.” They’re looking at something off in the distance, while a server is bringing them a couple of beers.

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Beer In Ads #2158: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. For Pabst

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Monday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1949. In the later 1940s, Pabst embarked on a series of ads with celebrity endorsements, photographing star actors, athletes, musicians and other famous people in their homes, enjoying Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This one features Douglas Fairbanks Jr.. He “was an American actor and a decorated naval officer of World War II.” He was, of course, “the only child of actor Douglas Fairbanks and his first wife, Anna Beth Sully.” Mostly for that reason, he was given an acting contract and started in supporting roles, but was elevated to starring by the late 1920s. He moved around a bit, changed studios, and live in the UK, with some of his most memorable parts being in “Morning Glory” (1933) with Katharine Hepburn, “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937) and “Gunga Din” (1939).

In the ad, Fairbanks is deep sea fishing “off Catalina Island,” which is “located about 22 milessouth-southwest of Los Angeles, California.” Unseen hands deliver him full glasses and bottles of beer, as he smiles during what I presume is a break in the fishing action.

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Beer In Ads #2157: William Bendix For Pabst

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Sunday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1950. In the later 1940s, Pabst embarked on a series of ads with celebrity endorsements, photographing star actors, athletes, musicians and other famous people in their homes, enjoying Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This one features General William Bendix. He “was an American film, radio, and television actor, who typically played rough, blue-collar characters. He is best remembered in movies for the title role in The Babe Ruth Story. He also memorably portrayed the clumsily earnest aircraft plant worker Chester A. Riley in radio and television’s The Life of Riley. He received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for Wake Island (1942).”

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In the ad, Bendix sits in a barcalounger in his San Fernando Valley home, with a pipe in one hand and a mug of beer in the other. There’s also a sandwich for him on an end table. So if there’s a television in front of him in that room, it’s a pretty perfect setting. This series, with the photos inside a round blue ribbon ran for a few years, and then they changed the format slightly, squaring the photos, getting rid of the ribbon frame, and changing up the text away from talking about where the people were in the photo. Below is the newer version of the same ad, from the mid-1950s, just for contrast.

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Beer In Ads #2156: Hap Arnold For Pabst

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Saturday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1949. In the later 1940s, Pabst embarked on a series of ads with celebrity endorsements, photographing star actors, athletes, musicians and other famous people in their homes, enjoying Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. This one features General Henry H. Arnold, better known as simply “Hap” Arnold. He “was an American general officer holding the grades of General of the Army and General of the Air Force. Arnold was an aviation pioneer, Chief of the Air Corps (1938–1941), Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces, the only U.S. Air Force general to hold five-star rank, and the only officer to hold a five-star rank in two different U.S. military services. Arnold was also the founder of Project RAND, which evolved into one of the world’s largest non-profit global policy think tanks, the RAND Corporation, and one of the founders of Pan American World Airways.

Instructed in flying by the Wright Brothers, Arnold was one of the first military pilots worldwide, and one of the first three rated pilots in the history of the United States Air Force.[nb 1] He overcame a fear of flying that resulted from his experiences with early flight, supervised the expansion of the Air Service during World War I, and became a protégé of Gen. Billy Mitchell.

Arnold rose to command the Army Air Forces immediately prior to American entry into World War II and directed its hundred-fold expansion from an organization of little more than 20,000 men and 800 first-line combat aircraft into the largest and most powerful air force in the world. An advocate of technological research and development, his tenure saw the development of the intercontinental bomber, the jet fighter, the extensive use of radar, global airlift and atomic warfare as mainstays of modern air power.”

In the ad, it says “Served to” Hap Arnold, which seems to suggest the woman is not his wife, but a different ad does identify her as Hap’s wife. He looks like he’s dressed for a 70’s disco, but this is from 1949, so I guess he was just ahead of his time. Or perhaps the Army was experimenting with uniforms that fit into civilian society better, and this was a prototype. Besides, it looks like he’s on a farm, so most likely not to close to any nightclubs. This is the largest image of the ad I could find and it’s hard to make out anything except “California,” although that other ad states that it was shot at the Arnold’s cattle ranch in Sonoma County, California, so he’s a neighbor.

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