Today’s beer film is a hilarious, gentle spoof of the Discovery series Brew Masters that Sam Calagione and the folks from Dogfish Head made in 2010. This one, Brew Minions, was made by Dave Thibodeau and his minions at Ska Brewing in Durango, Colorado. Besides making some funny swipes at he Brew Masters series, it’s also a good documentary on the brewery and their making a beer for the 30th anniversary of one of their favorite ska bands, The Toasters.
The Shifting Definition Of Sober
Once upon a time, the word “sober,” meant simply “not intoxicated or drunk,” but over the past few decades, the term has been “hijacked” by AA and the addiction/recovery community to instead refer to “a state of being—one you can only achieve through total, lifelong abstinence if you ever drank alcoholically.” In other words, if you’re an active drinker of alcohol, you’re not sober as far as AA is concerned. Essentially, that’s turning the definition on its head, making it the opposite of its ordinary meaning, twisting it into doublespeak. Orwell would have been proud.
Reason magazine has an interesting article about this phenomenon, The Hijacking of Sobriety by the Recovery Movement, by psychologist, attorney, and psychotherapist Stanton Peele. Peele begins with how one celebrity was referred to by the media after revealing that after years as an alcoholic, she taught herself to have one drink per day without falling into ruin, something the abstinence-based medical community insists is not possible.
According to AA and the recovery movement, no former alcoholic can drink moderately. Any drinking whatsoever, according to these absolutists, and you’re no longer “sober.” One might think that a person who drinks regularly in a controlled, non-intoxicated manner is obviously not an alcoholic. Wrong!
When I suggested to my AA friend Ken (not his real name) that [a famous former alcoholic who’s learned to have a drink a day] shows one-time alcoholics can control their drinking, he objected strenuously. For Ken, “the fact that she has to limit herself to one drink a day proves she’s an alcoholic.” That’s right, drinking in a controlled manner proves you’re an uncontrolled drinker.
Not surprisingly, there’s mounting evidence that they’re wrong.
According to the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) — a massive government study of 43,000 Americans’ lifetime alcohol and drug use — about 75 percent of people who recover from alcohol dependence do so without seeking any kind of help, including specialty rehab programs and Alcoholics Anonymous. And only 13 percent of people with alcohol dependence ever receive specialty alcohol treatment. (Note that 13 percent is the upper figure for 12-step recovery, since ever participating does not mean the person recovered due to AA or rehab.)
The NESARC study also revealed that these recovered alcoholics don’t as a rule abstain. “Twenty years after the onset of alcohol dependence, three-fourths of individuals are in full recovery,” it notes. “More than half of those who have fully recovered drink at low-risk levels without symptoms of alcohol dependence.”
I especially love Peele’s conclusion. “For recovery absolutists, no one recovers from alcoholism without AA, just as no one can recover without giving up drinking forever. What arrogance! Who gave these self-appointed experts the power to tell everyone how they must achieve recovery?” Give the article a read and, more importantly, let’s stop letting AA and the medical community focused on making a buck off of people trying to cope with their own drinking problems frame the terms of the debate. I’m sober as I write these words. Later tonight, with any luck, I may not be. But tomorrow morning when the alarm clock reminds me of my daily obligations, I will be sober again. And that’s how it should be, not some Orwellian world where everyone who ever drinks a drop a beer is forever branded as a drunk, and alcoholic or free from soberness.
Beer In Ads #1138: Eckert & Winter’s Bock
Saturday’s ad is for Eckert & Winter’s Bock, from 1877.The brewery only lasted for twelve years, from 1868 to 1880. Afterwards, it became the George Winter Brewery/Brewing Co. The poster was created by a B. Flemm out of Baltimore. It shows a crowned figure (King Gambrinus?) astride five goats, holding up a mug of Bock beer. He’s riding out from two very large brewery buildings in the background. WHat an awesome sight!
Beer In Film #81: People Under The Stairs’ “Beer”
Today’s beer film is a 2009 music video by the band People Under the Stairs, a hip hop duo from L.A. As an old white suburban dude, it’s not a style of music in heavy rotation on my iPod, but give it a listen and watch the video. Part of it was shot at the Odell brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. The song is pretty catchy, and while it starts out with the typical stuff about getting drunk and malt liquor, keep listening. They drop quite a few references to better beer. While they do name drop such hipster brands as OE and PBR, I heard several mentions of craft beer and Belgian imports. See if you can pick them out? I counted nine. Did I miss any?
Baseball Teams’ Favorite Beers
Beer In Ads #1137: Pabst Rose Window
Friday’s ad is for Pabst, from 1896. I don’t know if it was intended as an advertisement or something else, but it’s a beautiful piece of art. The only name attached to the image is “rose window,” which is what it resembles, of course, a popular stained glass design.
Beer In Film #80: The Muppets Share A Beer With Sylvester Stallone
I’m off to see the new Muppets movie which opens today. I’ve been a huge fan of the Muppets since I was a kid, so today’s beer video is an odd one, from the original Muppet Show, which was a pun-filled variety extravaganza that ran for five seasons between 1976-1981. Each show featured a celebrity guest star, and this one come from Season 3, Episode 20, which aired in February of 1979. The guest star was none other than Sylvester Stallone, just a few months before the release of Rocky II. In one of the segments he sings (yes, sings, and his musical abilities are every bit the equal of his thespian prowess!) a rendition of “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” while holding a mug of beer. Accompanied by Rowlf on piano, with Fozzie, Gonzo and some additional Muppets singing along, at least a couple of them also have mugs of beer. Sadly, no one takes a drink during the sad song, but I’m amazed they were even allowed to show beer at all on television in the late 1970s.
Beer In Ads #1136: The Industrial Worker
Thursday’s ad is for O’Keefe’s, from 1948. Part of Carling O’Keefe’s “Moulders of ‘Canada Unlimited'” series, whatever that means, the ad features a painting by Rex Woods showing the stereotypical “industrial worker” taking the bus to work. According to the ad, they’re the men “moulding a new era for Canada.”
Beer In Film #79: Megafactories — Budweiser
Today’s beer video is from the National Geographic channel series Megafactories (a.k.a. Ultimate Factories). This show features one of the breweries making Budweiser, and aired in 2007. It was Season 1, Episode 4 in the series.
New Study Reveals We Can Identify One Trillion Distinct Smells
A new story in the Washington Post’s Health, Science & Environment section, entitled Human nose can detect at least 1 trillion odors — far more than thought, says study of smell, appears to upend conventional wisdom about the number of smells that humans can identify. The general number has been around 10,000 as long as I can remember. By contrast, we can see “a few million different colors” and our ears can take in around 340,000 different tones. So while smell used to be a lot farther down on the sensory spectrum, this study would appear to rocket our sense of smell to the front of the line. For beer lovers, that can’t be a surprise, because our nose conveys so much more about a beer than seeing or hearing it can, and not even tasting it comes close, as any person who’s had a head cold can tell you, after trying to taste a beer without a working sense of smell.
The study itself, Humans Can Discriminate More than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli, will be published in the journal Science. Here’s the abstract:
Humans can discriminate several million different colors and almost half a million different tones, but the number of discriminable olfactory stimuli remains unknown. The lay and scientific literature typically claims that humans can discriminate 10,000 odors, but this number has never been empirically validated. We determined the resolution of the human sense of smell by testing the capacity of humans to discriminate odor mixtures with varying numbers of shared components. On the basis of the results of psychophysical testing, we calculated that humans can discriminate at least 1 trillion olfactory stimuli. This is far more than previous estimates of distinguishable olfactory stimuli. It demonstrates that the human olfactory system, with its hundreds of different olfactory receptors, far outperforms the other senses in the number of physically different stimuli it can discriminate.
It will be very interesting to see if further studies corroborate this finding, but frankly it makes a lot of sense (no pun intended).
Science also has a short interview with Andreas Keller, one of the scientists who worked on the study, where he explains some of the reasons his team thinks that their study has shown we’re capable of so many more aromas than previously thought.