Monday’s ad is for Hull’s Export Beer, from “Connecticut’s only brewery,” according to the ad. Hull Brewing was founded in 1852 by Ph. Fresenius, and was bought by the Hull family when Prohibition ended, but it later closed in 1977. At one point there were at least 22 breweries in New Haven, Connecticut, so this ad must be later, after all the rest had closed.
Motley Fool has an interesting overview and comparison of the two bills regarding the restructuring of federal beer excise taxes currently before Congress, and likely to be resolved this year. The two bills, known as the BEER Act and the Small Brew Act (which Motley Fool calls the “Small Beer Act”), are both designed to reduce federal excise taxes, but in different ways, benefitting different size breweries differently. Which bill, if any, will pass is anybody’s guess at this point, but check out Beer May Be In For a Tax Break — Why This Could Be Bad for Some Brewers for one financial website’s take on them.
Pizza Port, a.k.a. Port Brewing, announced today through a press release from Ball Corp. that they will be releasing three of their beers in cans this week throughout their home market of San Diego, California. From the press release
For the first time in its 26-year history, Pizza Port will be entrusting its hand-crafted passion to a new, more portable can package. “It was a natural evolution for us,” said Pizza Port co-founder Gina Marsaglia. “Our consumers like to be outside and want to take great beer with them. The can is a portable and sustainable way for them to do that.” Vince Marsaglia, her brother and co-founder of Pizza Port Brewing, adds, “Our highest priority has always been to deliver the best quality beer to our consumers and aluminum cans help us keep our beer fresh by keeping out light and oxygen.”
Beginning this week, three of Pizza Port’s most popular beers will be available in recyclable cans throughout San Diego County. The labels will include Chronic Amber Ale (known as ChronicAle), Ponto Pale Ale and their very “sessionable” Swamis IPA that has the hoppy-ness of an IPA but is still very drinkable.
“By putting their exceptional beer in Ball cans, Pizza Port further confirms that aluminum cans are a premium packaging option for many of the best craft brewers in America,” said Rob Miles, senior vice president of sales for Ball’s global metal beverage packaging business. “Aluminum cans from Ball are helping craft brewers differentiate their products while realizing efficiencies in operating costs and energy savings.”
Here’s the three beers to be released in cans:
Swami’s India Pale Ale
Chronicale
Note: Curiously, a number of years ago Lagunitas was turned down when they submitted their amber ale under the label Kronik, which seems awfully similar. They were told it was rejected due to the drug reference, though I remember joking at the time that “Bud” was okay. Today it’s called Censored.
Ponto S.I.P.A.
Anchor Brewing announced today that his year’s season release of Anchor Bock will be the last. From the press release:
Anchor Brewing Company announces the release and final selling season of Anchor Bock® Beer, a seasonal interpretation of the strong German beers that mark the beginning of spring.
Each year, breweries in Germany celebrate the coming of spring with a strong, flavorful beer. Anchor Bock Beer, a dark satiny brew with rich hints of chocolate, caramel and roasted barley, is Anchor’s interpretation of this long-standing tradition.
Bock beers are believed to have originated in the town of Einbeck, Germany and traditionally feature a goat on the labels. The Germanic term “bock” translates to “billy goat”, but has over time come to mean a beer darker and stronger than a brewery’s “regular” brew. One with, you might say, the kick of a goat.
Anchor Brewing Company will be retiring Anchor Bock Beer in 2014 making room for several new seasonals yet to be announced.
“Anchor Bock has been a beloved seasonal not only by craft beer fans, but by the folks here at Anchor,” said Mark Carpenter, Brewmaster at Anchor Brewing Company. “In an effort to expand and innovate, as we have done for decades, Anchor will be retiring Bock after the 2014 season to allow room for several all-new brews, which we will be sharing with the world very soon.”
Anchor Bock Beer is available nationally from January through March in draught, 12 oz. six-packs, and 22 oz. bottles.
Check out their short video about Anchor Bock Beer, made last year, featuring Hazel the goat.
Today’s beer video is part five of the film The American Brew that was produced by Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s To Beer campaign in 2008. The DVD is still actually available from Amazon. Enjoy.
Sunday’s ad is for Feigenspan P.O.N. Ale, from sometime before 1943, which was when the Christian Feigenspan Brewing Co. was bought by Ballantine. P.O.N. stands for “Pride of Newark,” which is the in New Jersey city where the brewery was founded in 1875. I especially like the ad copy toward the bottom. “Don’t say a word … say P.O.N.”
I mentioned this recent study in another post, but it’s worth highlighting all on its own, especially because it contradicts much of the prohibitionist propaganda about how awful it is for kids to see alcohol advertising and how it corrupts their immature little minds, turning them into raging alcoholics. GfK Roper Consulting, which characterizes itself as “one of the world’s leading research companies,” recently released its annual Youth Report, Influences on Youth Decisions about Drinking. Having conducted the same survey since 1991, they note that parents have the most influence on whether or not kids drink before they’re 21. And not only has that been the case for over twenty years, but it’s actually been increasing steadily since that time, up 33% (one-third). During that entire time, advertising has been at or near the bottom the entire time, and is currently at a mere 1%, down 80% from when it was 5% in 1991. This while at the same time, prohibitionists have been complaining about the danger of underage minors just seeing advertisements for alcohol, and doing everything in their power to limit them to the supposed times when kids won’t see them, which is, of course, never.
Parents, as has been the case since they began conducting the survey, are the biggest influence by a wide margin. But prohibitionists have even managed to make it illegal in some states for parents to educate their own kids about alcohol, believing that they can do a better job with such programs, in California at least, as Red Ribbon Days and making up scenarios in high schools where one of their fellow students has been killed in order to scare them into not drinking, putting them through the very real emotional pain of dealing with a killed friend.
Second only to parents are best friends, but even their influence plummeted beginning in 2008, and is now only about 8%. So even peer pressure is waning. Third used to be teachers, but they’ve dropped below all media (defined as TV, radio, magazines, and Internet). In fact, all influence other than parents and friends are 2% or less, making them almost statistically irrelevant.
Going on all during this same time period from 1991 to the present, has been a slow but steady decline in the overall amount of alcohol people are drinking. So not only has the advertising become less effective, especially as younger generations are more media savvy, but people and kids are drinking less and less. But it’s harder to raise money from donations if things are improving from these anti-alcohol organizations’ point of view. So what should be good news like this is virtually ignored by them. Good luck trying to find anything about this survey on their websites. If they really cared about stopping underage drinking or keeping drunks off the road you’d think they’d be arming parents with the tools they need to educate their children about responsible alcohol consumption, but actions speak much louder than words, and their actions are all about sounding alarm bells and raising money.
The proverbial ivory tower of academia, where some intellectuals live and work in an insulated world separate from the real world, was never more on display than in this “study” about which alcohol brands are mentioned most often in popular songs. Conducted by Boston University and Johns Hopkins, their survey of popular music, Alcohol Brand References in U.S. Popular Music, 2009–2011, was published in the December issue of the journal Substance Use & Misuse. The researchers looked at the Billboard charts in four music types — Urban, Pop, Country, and Rock. Here’s the abstract:
This study aimed to assess the prevalence and context of alcohol brand references in popular music. Billboard Magazine year-end charts from 2009 to 2011 were used to identify the most popular songs in four genres: Urban, Pop, Country, and Rock. Of the 720 songs, 23% included an alcohol mention, and 6.4% included an alcohol brand mention. Songs classified as Urban had the highest percentage of alcohol mentions and alcohol brand mentions. The context associated with alcohol brand mentions was almost uniformly positive or neutral. Public health efforts may be necessary to reduce youth exposure to these positive messages about alcohol use.
Because most journals require you to pay large sums to read them (or be an academic yourself), most of the information about this one comes from an article about the study, Music Artists Love to Sing About These 4 Alcohol Brands, which appeared on Futurity, a website covering “research news from top universities.” In it, the researchers reveal how out-of-touch they are with their subject. Of the more than one-thousand alcohol labels sold today, they noted, “only four brands show up often in the lyrics of popular songs.” Those four were Hennessy, Grey Goose, Jack Daniel’s and Patron; a cognac, vodka, tequila and whiskey. “They accounted for more than half of the alcohol brands named in songs from Billboard’s most popular song lists in 2009, 2010, and 2011.” Here’s the insights from one of the researchers.
“You would expect there would be hundreds of brands that are randomly mentioned,” says Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “But we found that those top four accounted for 52 percent of all the brand mentions. That can’t be coincidental.”
Are you sure?
Apparently, they also found that “alcohol use was portrayed as overwhelmingly positive in lyrics, with negative consequences almost never referred to.” I don’t think they listened to enough country music which, traditionally at least, was all about the consequences of drinking too much. But all kidding aside, why would a singer sing about any negative aspects of drinking? They’re not PSAs. The goal of pop music is to entertain, period. It’s not to educate or warn kids about the dangers of overindulging. They also seem worried because — gasp — kids also listen to the same music as adults, which the researchers found “alarming” because in their mind that meant the music was “promoting” drinking.
But after all that fretting, professor Michael Siegel admits that no “causal connection” was found between the music actual consumption, stating “further research is needed.” He also mentions that they also found that some of the artists — gasp — had sponsorship deals with some of the alcohol brands. To the researchers, that means that listeners are being marketed to, because in the ivory tower that simply has “to be recognized as marketing, not random chance.”
This so-called “study” examined (really, examined? They just listened to some music, didn’t they?) 720 songs. Of those, less than one-quarter (23.2%, or 167) mentioned alcohol. And just 6.4% (or 46 songs) dropped the name of a specific brand of alcohol, of which 51.6% mentioned one of the top four brands; Hennessy, Grey Goose, Jack Daniel’s and Patron. Of the four music genres they surveyed, alcohol was mentioned most often in “so-called urban songs (rap, hip-hop, and R&B, with 37.7 percent), followed by country (21.8 percent), and pop (14.9 percent).” They further discovered that “Tequila, cognac, vodka, and champagne brands appeared more prevalently in urban music (R&B, hip-hop, and rap), while whiskey and beer brands were more common in country or pop music. Surprisingly, there was no alcohol referred to in the rock-genre music examined.” Maybe that was Christian rock, because I can name more than a few rock and roll songs about beer alone, but maybe they’re not popular right now.
Is anyone not living in the clouds surprised by that? But let’s take a closer look at reality regarding these brands. Hennessey is hands down the best-selling brand of cognac in not just the U.S., but worldwide. Likewise, Grey Goose is the best-selling vodka. Jack Daniel’s is the best-selling American whiskey worldwide, too. At this point, you probably won’t be too shocked to learn that Patrón is the biggest selling ultra-premium tequila in the US. So when the researchers say it “can’t be coincidental” that “those top four accounted for 52 percent of all the brand mentions,” it’s not, but it’s not a conspiracy, either. They’re each the most popular brands of their type, which is the more logical reason why they’re the ones most often mentioned in songs. You don’t need a slide rule to figure that out.
As long ago as when I worked for BevMo, and saw sales figures for spirits on occasion, those were popular brands, especially among the same demographic as might listen to urban music. The brands were, and most likely still are, status symbols in some communities, which would also account for their popularity in song lyrics. That’s the reason these companies are looking for sponsorship opportunities with musicians and music events, not the other way around.
The researchers, showing just how biased their thinking is, claim that their concern over advertising stems from a belief that “[a]t least 14 long-term studies have found that exposure to alcohol marketing in the mass media increases the likelihood that young people will start drinking, or if already drinking, consume more.” And yet a recent GfK Roper Youth Report on the Influences on Youth Decisions about Drinking clearly shows that since at least 1991, advertising is at the very bottom of the reasons that influence kids to drink, age 13-20, accounting for just 1%, though for all media (defined as a including TV, radio, magazines, and Internet) it’s twice that, but of course that’s still only 2%. It’s hardly the scourge that the prohibitionists continue to insist it is.
It’s hard to see this as anything more than researchers out of touch with the real world of music or alcohol, making pronouncements from their ivory tower without really understanding the context of what they’re commenting on, mis-analyzing the results as a consequence. For example, professor Siegel suggests that “[o]ne intervention would be to teach young people ‘media literacy skills’ that would educate them about marketing techniques.” That’s rich, considering most young people are probably far more media savvy than the average college professor.
But beyond that, the idea that music made by and for adults, but also listened to by children, is rarely, if ever, the danger it’s believed to be. Or that adults singing about adult situations, in this case alcohol, for adults to listen to should not be permitted to do so on the off-chance that kids might hear it too. But that’s typical of the ridiculous lengths and logic to which the prohibitionists will go in promoting their agenda with junk science. This type of thinking suggests that they believe there should be two worlds, one that’s exclusively adult, walled off completely lest the kiddies be corrupted by seeing and hearing adult entertainment. That advertising is so often the bogeyman, despite it having so little actual influence, has more to do with the strategy that prohibitionists have employed since the day after prohibition was repealed. Every generation, they claim, is being corrupted and ruined by alcohol advertising. And yet, each generation seems to turn out just fine, don’t they? Those same youth from the previous generation grew up to become among the next generation of researchers claiming how this next group of kids will be ruined by being advertised to by alcohol companies, and each time they miss the irony that they, too, grew up seeing alcohol advertising, as well. Maybe it’s the air up in their ivory tower that makes them so forgetful, that along with being detached from reality. Can I assume Michael Bolton, Kenny G and Barry Manilow are playing on the radio?
Today’s beer video is part four of the film The American Brew that was produced by Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s To Beer campaign in 2008. The DVD is still actually available from Amazon. Enjoy.
Saturday’s ad is for San Miguel, from 1958. A smiling woman reaches out for a glass of Pale Pilsen, the most popular beer in the Philippines.
