Tuesday’s ad is another one for Heineken. I think it’s a fairly recent ad, but I’m really not sure, though I suspect it can’t be any older than the 1980s. It’s done in the style of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, whose birthday is today. Showing a bottle of Heineken popping open, with his trademark comic book style, and a satisfying “pssst” as it opens.
Niall, at the Missing Drink, has an interesting post about the possible buyout of SABMiller by Anheuser-Busch InBev. Entitled A Brief History of Big Beer, he provides some analysis of the deal, but I especially like his helpful chart of the M&A of all the major players, which is below. It’s great to see them laid out to encapsulate the history of those big deals, especially in recent decades.
Click here to see the chart full size.
Here’s his clever take on what the newly minted entity might be called, and what a new alphabet soup logo might look like. It was genius taking the “AB” from ABI and putting it with the “S” from SAB. It certainly will be interesting to see what new name (and logo) does emerge if the deal ultimately goes through.
Today is the 40th birthday of Richard Brewer-Hay, co-founder (with his wife Allie) and brewer of San Francisco’s smallest almost brewery: the Elizabeth Street Brewery. Despite its size (it’s really more of a nanobrewery or even a picobrewery) and intermittent schedule, it was named three years ago by SF Weekly as San Francisco’s Best Microbrewery 2010. I thought I had a photo of Richard and Allie from when I ran into them at the Map Room in Chicago during CBC a few years ago, but I guess not. Instead, I purloined the photos below from Facebook. Join me in wishing Richard a very happy birthday.
Given it was Richard’s tweet from the World Series that reminded me it was his birthday, here’s him at the first game of the World Series two years ago.
A self-portrait with his wife, Allie, in the Cascades in Washington a few years ago.
With Jabber the Parrot at eBay On Location in San Jose.
Below is a very, very short video I captured of Richard and Nico Freccia, from 21st Amendment, accepting their World Beer Cup award for the beer Richard and Shaun O’Sullivan made at 21A in Chicago.
Monday’s ad is for Heineken, from the 1950s. From what I can figure from using Google Translate, this ad ran in South Africa, because the language of it is Afrikaans. It seems to be something like: “Be a man! Drink a glass of spicy Amstel Beer.” It’s a strange ad, showing an attractive woman holding up a glass of beer, almost taunting us with “be a man!” The proportions of the illustration, however, look a little off when you examine them closely, giving them more of a cartoon-like feel.
Today in 2010, US Patent 7819286 B2 was issued, an invention of William L. Antheil and Nelson Bolton, assigned to Kegx LLC, for their “Beer Keg and Method Of Assembly.” Here’s the Abstract:
A container, or keg, for storing, shipping, and dispensing a bulk quantity of a fluid, for example, beer or like malt beverage, is provided. The container/keg includes a flaccid bag (56) for containing the fluid and a substantially rigid, pressure-tight, plastic vessel (10) within which the bag (56) is contained. The bag (56) has a mouth (58) secured with a locking ring or the like to an opening in the vessel (10) via which the mouth (58) is accessible externally of the vessel (10) for purposes of filling the bag (56) with the fluid and/or dispensing the fluid from the bag (56). Preferably, the shape of the vessel (10) permits it to be efficiently stacked and shipped when in a full or empty condition. Methods for assembling, filling and shipping kegs are also provided.
Today in 1988, US Patent EP 0138341 B1 was issued, an invention of Charles William Bamforth and Roy Cope, assigned to the Bass Public Limited Company, for their “Beer and Other Beverages and Their Manufacture.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:
This invention relates to beer and other beverages and to their manufacture. In particular the invention is concerned with the incorporation into a beverage of an additive enabling the beverage to have a head formed on it or to improve the quality of the head that can be formed on it.
The invention is primarily applicable to beer, and the term beer is used herein to designate generally any of a variety of alcoholic beverages made by the fermentation of hopped malt wort; it thus includes within its scope ales, lagers and stouts. Beer itself is normally dispensed with a head, but there are also other beer-like beverages that are, like beer, bright and without haze and that are normally dispensed with a head to which the invention is also particularly applicable, these including beverages which include little or no alcohol but otherwise resemble beer quite closely.
Their claims for the patent are also listed as follows:
1. A method of modifying or improving beer or other beverage, the beverage being bright and without haze, which method comprises the step of incorporating in the beverage concerned an additive enabling the beverage to have a head formed on it or to improve the quality of the head that can be formed on it, the additive comprising protein fragments made by the partial hydrolysis of protein material, and the method being characterised in that the protein material comprises egg albumen and is added in an effective amount to improve or cause head formation without inducing haze formation.
2. A method according to claim 1 characterised in that the additive is formed as an aqueous solution.
3. A method according to claim 2 characterised in that the additive also contains a minor addition of ethyl alcohol.
4. A method according to any one of the preceding claims characterised in that the additive comprises fragments of protein material separated from any remaining unsevered protein material.
5. A method according to any one of the preceding claims characterised in that the beverage is made by a process including a fermentation stage and in which the additive is added at a stage later than the fermentation stage.
6. A method according to claim 5 characterised in that the beverage is beer.
Today in 1897, US Patent 592295 A was issued, an invention of George C. Kaohel and Henry Sager, for their “Bung and Faucet.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:
This invention relates to new and useful Improvement in Bungs and Faucets, of which the following is a full, clear, and exact description.
without destroying the keg or cask, as frequently occurs under the old process, the faucet employed being particularly adapted for this purpose.
A further object of the invention is to provide a bushing and barrel to receive the faucet so constructed that the kegs or casks will be practically as clean when returned to the brewery as when taken therefrom, since all the liquid may be drained from the receptacle.
The invention consists in the novel construction and combination of the several parts, as will be hereinafter fully set forth, and pointed out in the claims.
Sunday’s ad is for Falstaff, from the 1960. I figured the “Best picnic in a month of Sun days” would have to be on a Sunday. The other tagline is “Good Times are better with Light, Refreshing Falstaff.” Picnicing by the side of a stream, it looks like they’re having a good time. But it’s a little racy for 1960, with the woman hiking up her skirt to stay dry as one of the men in the scene tries to steal her beer.
Today in 1977, US Patent 4055202 A was issued, an invention of James Albert Greene, for his “In-Case Bottle Filling Apparatus.” Here’s the Abstract:
A bottle filling device which raises in-case bottles to be filled to engagement with a fill valve assembly which controls fluid communication between a fill tube inserted into each bottle and a pressurized fill tank. Cup members, which engage the bottle openings in fill position, communicate with a vacuum line, such that the combination of pressurized fill source and air-evacuated bottles realizes extremely fast filling. The fill tubes are the shafts of respective double acting fluid pressure operated cylinders of simple construction which position a port in the fill tube upper wall extremes within the fill tank confines or within pressure sealing cylinder end bushings to define respective open and closed fill-valve conditions.
Although I was blissfully ignorant of CAMRA in its earliest days — drinking American beer in Pennsylvania while in junior high and high school — my understanding is that it was not always as popular as it later became. And it certainly wasn’t universally beloved by many breweries, since they were moving toward keg beer which was much cheaper to produce and away from cask-conditioned beer, or real ale. It took a small dedicated group to convince brewers, and many ambivalent consumers, that real ale was worth preserving so British beer didn’t end up tasting like America of the 1970s. But there were critics of CAMRA almost from the get go, as recently detailed in a post by Boak & Bailey entitled A Brief History of CAMRA Bashing.
I didn’t follow all of Boak & Bailey’s thread on Twitter this morning, apart from finding part of a script from what they believed was a “c.1978 anti-‘real ale’ propaganda film starring Bernard Cribbins.” They were fishing to see if anybody might have more information about the movie.
It turned out the film was from 1973, and a follower (thanks Cliff) found the actual film online, courtesy of the East Anglican Film Archive . The film is titled “I Know What I Love,” which is curiously very close to the title of a song from the Genesis album Selling England By the Pound, also released in 1973. That was “I Know What I Like,” but still, it was my first thought since I was a big fan of the band back then.
It’s a fairly goofy film, but also very interesting the way beer and brewing is presented. Bernard Cribbins, a reasonably well-known British character actor plays all of the major parts, explaining how beer is made. If you watch a lot of British TV or films, you’ve probably seen him. He’s made appearances in “The Avengers,” “Fawlty Towers,” “Doctor Who” and “Coronation Street,” and was in the films “The Railway Children,” “Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River,” the 1967 Bond film “Casino Royale” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Frenzy.”
Here’s the description from the film’s webpage at the EAFA:
Presented by The Brewers’ Society and featuring Bernard Cribbins in multiple roles, the documentary explains the process of brewing beer, from the pasture to the pint.
After ordering a pint at his local and taking a sip, the actor Bernard Cribbins sets out to explain the brewing process, with a little help from some of his ‘relatives’ in the industry, all played by Cribbins himself. One ‘cousin’ explains the malting process, where barley is germinated and malted, whilst another talks about hops, which contribute to the flavour of beer. His ‘uncle’, who works in a traditional brewery, explains the process, from the spurging of barley in mush tuns to the addition of hops, followed by yeast to aid fermentation, before the beer is conditioned and siphoned into casks.
Brewing on an industrial scale is also explained by Cribbins, with the help of one ‘relative’ who grows large amounts of barley, and a ‘distant relative’ who works as a technician at a large brewer. The film concludes with a glimpse at pub life, with a variety of environments catering for a range of tastes, but linked together by one thing: beer. With the process explained, Cribbins heads back to the bar for another pint, which is pulled by the governor, his ‘father’.
It was created by the Rank Short Films Group and sponsored by the Brewers’ Society. The director was James Allen from a script by Michael Barnes and the only actor credited is Bernard Cribbins. It doesn’t strike me as particularly anti-real ale, but maybe there’s some nuance I’m missing. They certainly try to allay fears that stainless steel, and modern brewing methods didn’t change the beer they produced. The humor seems a little forced, and not particularly witty, more mildly amusing than funny.
Unfortunately, the archive doesn’t allow their films to be embedded but you can go to their website and watch it online, which I highly recommend. It runs around seventeen minutes, and is certainly an interesting look at brewing at a particular time in recent history.
