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Pirate Parade To Feature Float Of Recycled Beer Cans

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The annual Gasparilla Pirate Festival in Tampa, Florida also includes a parade as part of the festivities. The parade takes place this afternoon, and usually features the Budweiser Clydesdales. But this year, instead they had local artist Terry Klaaren create a float using nothing by recycled beer cans. Klaaren called his work “re-cycle-dales” and it’s a sculpture of two life-size Clydesdale head figures that took him about six weeks and 3,000 beer cans to construct. According to a local news story:

“Every beer can was hand flattened with a wooden mallet,” Klaaren said. “We punched a couple of holes in it and then sewed it onto the mesh with stainless steel wire. I found beer cans to be a great sculpture medium.”

Gieseking said the vision for the float was Clydesdales emerging from a wave of water collecting recyclables in the wake.

“Just a nice image of taking the garbage out of the water,” Klaaren said.

Unfortunately, this is the only photo of it I can find. Perhaps there will be more views after the parade takes place later today.

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Beer In Ads #1081: What The Duchess Saw

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Friday’s ad is for Whitbread, from 1965. It seems to be a play on “what the butler saw, ” instead it’s “What the Duchess Saw,” through the keyhole, which is in fact the butler pouring himself a bottle of the Duke’s Whitbread beer. He sure looks happy, doesn’t he? Hopefully he’s off the clock.

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Jane Austen, Brewer

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I suspect I’m not the only man in the world whose wife loves Jane Austen. And I further would not be surprised to learn that I’m not alone in not feeling quite the same level of joy at every new film or television adaptation of one of her works. (Is that enough “nots” in one sentence?) Oh, I’ve enjoyed a few of the costume dramas, I confess. I thought “Clueless” was quite enjoyable. So I don’t want you to think I’m an irredeemable boor. I’ve suffered through — ahem, I mean seen — most of them, and it’s not been as horrible as, say, “Dallas” or “Knot’s Landing” or any of a number of similar dreck.

But my interest in Jane Austen just shot up 99%, thanks to an article posted by BBC Magazine yesterday, Beer: The Women Taking Over the World of Brewing. It’s a great article all on it’s own, one of the few to treat the subject of women in beer with a decent amount of respect, for a change. But what caught my attention was a sidebar about Jane Austen by alcohol historian Jane Peyton.

It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged — Jane Austen not only drank beer but brewed it too.

As a teenager she would have learned how to make beer by helping her mother in the Hampshire vicarage where she grew up.

Brewing was part of household duties and even the women of genteel 18th Century families such as the Austens would know how to do it, even if the chores were sometimes delegated to domestic staff.

In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane wrote “and I that have the great cask, for we are brewing spruce beer again….”

As in most houses small beer (low alcohol) was served at the Austen dining table as a safe source of drinking water for all members of the family — children too — so Jane would certainly have tasted the results of her labour.

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It certainly makes sense, though I’d never really stopped to think about it before. Austen apparently mentioned her brewing efforts in letters to her sister Cassandra. In one of them she mentions small beer while in two others she talks about her spruce beer.

Austen also mentions spruce beer in her 1815 novel, “Emma.”

“But one morning — I forget exactly the day — but perhaps it was the Tuesday or Wednesday before that evening, he wanted to make a memorandum in his pocket-book: it was about spruce-beer. Mr. Knightley had been telling him something about brewing spruce-beer, and he wanted to put it down….”

And according to “Cooking with Jane Austen,” when the Austen family lived at Stoneleigh, her mother wrote about the “mansions ‘strong beer’ and ‘small beer’ cellars.” And Mrs. Austen also “brewed beer at Steventon in the last years of the eighteenth century and at Chawton cottage many years later.”

It almost makes me want to read her again … nah. Still, she’s now a bit more interesting.

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Beer In Film #24: ElbowSkin’s Beer Song

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Today’s beer video is a wonderful song created for Melbourne’s beer week, Good Beer Week. It was written and performed by Dave Elbow and Ernie Skin of the duo ElbowSkin. I’m sure some people will find something to be offended by in the song, but it’s pretty damn funny. It’s also very catchy with some great quotes like “unleash the beast” and “it’s like drinking god’s tears.”

Beer Song by ElbowSkin from The Post Project on Vimeo.

Serious Eats: 50 States, 50 Beers They Like

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Everytime someone creates a list of the top anything, there’s always a bit of a backlash over the choices, or methodology, or something. It’s hard — strike, that — impossible to please everybody in these sort of things. People love lists (I know I do) but picking the “best” is a fool’s errand. So I appreciate that Serious Eats didn’t even try. Instead, when they chose one beer from each state, they didn’t declare them to be the top, or the best or even the most popular. For their 50 States, 50 Beers We Love, they just chose ones that they … well, loved. They may not all have even been their favorites, though I think we can infer that some of them may be a favorite. It’s a list you can’t argue with, because there’s no aggrandizing or sweeping pronouncements. It’s just what they like, pure and simple. As such, I think it has a great chance of provoking discussion, because if you love a different beer you’re not saying I disagree, you’re saying I also love this beer, too.

Take my home state of California. They chose Russian River’s Pliny the Elder. And it’s hard to argue with that. I love that beer, too. Is it the best beer in California? Who cares? It’s a great beer among probably hundreds of other California beers that I also love and could easily have made the list.

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So check out their choices. Or as they put it. “This map celebrates beers we love in every state—a beer we’d be certain to pick up at every stop on that road trip of our dreams. Some are cultworthy favorites that require camping out at the release party, while others are really well made porch sippers that you can pick up at your local store. Some evoke happy memories, while others are showstoppers that grab your whole attention.”

And start working on your list of beers you love. That’s a list I can get behind. Plus, I love this flag that Robyn Lee created for the article. This is a flag I’d run up the flagpole and although I probably wouldn’t salute it, I would drink a toast to it.

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Beer In Ads #1080: The Sad Clown

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Thursday’s ad is for Schlitz, from 1967. I can’t be the only one who finds clowns creepy, and in fact I had a roommate in the late 1980s who was completely terrified of them. So I have to wonder about the logic of using them to sell beer. I guess some people actually like them, don’t they? But I especially like this confusing statement. “The beer that takes 1,174 careful steps.” I can’t wait to see their brewing manual. It must be a phone book. How on earth could they have that many specific procedures?

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What A Surprise! Prohibitionists Hate Beer-Flavored Jelly Beans

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Hilarious. I saw this one coming. The prohibitionists — who my friend and colleague Harry Schuhmacher calls the “no fun bunch” — are already expressing their outrage that there’s a jelly bean with beer flavor. Alcohol Justice (AJ) took to Twitter today to voice their disapproval, even using the photograph distributed by Jelly Belly in their press release.

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But let’s look at their nature of their outrage. First there’s this sarcastic sentence.

Kids really need beer-flavored jelly beans.

They do the same thing any time there’s a drawing or cartoon on a beer label. They make the very wrong assumption that only kids like candy. Or that jelly beans are just for kids. I think former president Ronald Reagan would take issue with that. Reagan famously loved jelly beans and jars of them were all over the white house during his two terms. I think it’s fairly safe to assume that plenty of very serious people and politicians ate jelly beans then, and continue to do so.

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Could we please dispense with the notion that if children like something, that adults can’t (and vice versa), or that there can’t be adult versions of things that kids like, too? It frankly is absurd and surely they could come up with a better argument.

The company Jelly Belly has for decades made cocktail-flavored jelly beans. “The company first created a non-alcoholic gourmet flavor in 1977 with Mai Tai. Since then, more flavors from Blackberry Brandy to Strawberry Daiquiri were developed, inspired by popular cocktails. Over the years, favorite flavors like Piña Colada (1983), Margarita (1995) and Mojito (2010) have helped carve out the Jelly Belly Cocktail Classics® collection of six cocktail flavors.” Yet as fas as I know, this is the first whining by AJ over alcoholic flavored jelly beans. And it should also be noted that not one of these, the beer bean included, have any actual alcohol whatsoever in them. But none of us who have made it past age 21 should be allowed to enjoy any of those on the off chance that a child might eat one, or even want to eat one. Oh, the horror! What utter nonsense. If you don’t want your kids to eat the nonalcoholic jelly bean with a whiff of some of the same flavors as a hefeweizen, I think I see a way out. Don’t buy them, and don’t let them buy them either. Maybe you could just lock up your kids until they’re old enough to navigate the world on their own. I’m sure that wouldn’t be bad for them. You should definitely keep them as sheltered as possible from anything that’s of the adult world so they’ll be prepared to be adults themselves. What could go wrong? But here’s AJ’s insightful conclusion:

So very wrong.

Why? Seriously, why? What the fuck is wrong with there being adult-oriented flavors of jelly beans for adults (or children for that matter since there’s absolutely NO alcohol in them). Seriously, what is wrong with you? Can you really be afraid that it will give kids a taste for beer so they’ll want to try the real thing? Or that it “normalizes” the idea of drinking beer? Which is, may I remind you, still legal for adults 21 years and over, despite your best efforts. I’m sure there’s some perfectly logical reason why you hate this other than you just hate anything to do with alcohol. So what is it? Let me strap in. Go ahead. Why shouldn’t there be candy aimed at or made for adults? Why can’t there be nonalcoholic candy of any flavor, especially when there already has been other such flavors for decades? Why is it “so very wrong?”

Jelly Belly Debuts Beer-Flavored Jelly Bean

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The local Fairfield company Jelly Belly has made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jelly bean flavors since they debuted in the summer of 1976. But their newest one, draft beer, really got my attention.

Apparently, for decades, a beer-flavored jelly bean has been one of their most highly-requested flavors. But their “research and development team wanted to get it just right before announcing the new flavor to the world.”

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“This took about three years to perfect,” says Ambrose Lee, research and development manager for Jelly Belly Candy Company. “The recipe includes top secret ingredients, but I can tell you it contains no alcohol.” The biggest question they first had to answer was what type of beer to make into a jelly bean. “Ale or Lager? Stout? Lambic? Pilsner? In the end, the company opted to pay homage to its German ancestry with a Hefeweizen-inspired ale flavor, and Draft Beer Jelly Belly® jelly beans took shape.”

According to Jelly Belly:

The effervescent and crisp flavor is packed in a golden jelly bean with an iridescent finish. Beer connoisseurs will find the flavor profile to be clean with notes of wheat and a touch of sweetness. The aroma is mildly bready. While Draft Beer packs a flavor punch, it is alcohol free.

The new flavor will debut at this week’s Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco and ISM in Cologne, Germany, and will be released on store shelves shortly thereafter, in early 2014.

Last night they had an event at the 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco, where they handed out small packages of the new flavor. At first, I thought I could only get some banana flavors with a hint of clove in the background, but not much else, and little in the way of what I’d call “beer” flavor. But in conversations with other there at the event, what emerged was that the flavors I’d been searching for disappeared if you drank an actual beer beforehand. Several people I talked to recounted the same experience, but those who resisted the temptation to order a beer first had a very different experience with the jelly beans.

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Happily, I took a few packets home with me, and tried them again this morning before my usual cup of breakfast beer (kidding). Anyway, the theory of the night before proved true. They do actually have a subtle beery flavor with wheat and the banana and clove notes you’d expect in a hefeweizen. It’s not a strong taste, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I assume when you have actual beer in your mouth that it kills the subtler flavors in the candy.

Last night, I also spend some time talking with Rob, one of the Jelly Belly R&D guys who worked on creating the new beer flavored jelly bean. He mentioned that they’d originally considered doing a craft beer assortment but getting the first one right took so long that they abandoned that idea. I offered some suggestions, and who knows, maybe we’ll see some more types of beer turned into jelly beans in the future. I suspect many people will think of it as just a gimmick, but the company has a long history of creating original flavors that you wouldn’t ordinarily expect. So why not. They’ve done a cocktail line of jelly beans, so beer frankly only makes sense. If you see some, give them a try. Just don’t have a beer first.

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