Wednesday’s ad is for Miller High Life, from 1954, during their minimalist period. They seem to be well ahead of the curve showing a variety of different cheeses, including a giant vat of cheese sauce. We all know how well cheese and beer pair together. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Miller High Life has enough flavor to stand up to most of those cheeses, especially the blue.
Here’s a hilarious video from Down Under. Sh!t Beer Geeks Say is a video produced by the folks putting on Good Beer Week, an Australian beer week centered around Melbourne and Victoria, and also the Bridge Road Brewers. I especially love that Vinnie’s “Lupulin Threshold Shift” made it into the list of phrases used in the video.
Tuesday’s ad is for Ballantine, from 1961. While Ballantine may be one of the few American breweries in the 1960s making ales, this ad is for their Double LL, which was a “Light Lager.” You have to admit “Double LL” sounds better than light lager, even if it doesn’t quite make sense. Wouldn’t it just be “Double L” since “Double LL” would actually be “LLLL?” Either way, it’s “the ‘crisp’ refresher…”
Today’s infographic is pretty cool. It was created as design exercise, by Kris Erickson on his blog, EricksonData. It’s what he refers to as a Gephi Viz, this time with beer data. He used the bottled beers listed in the BreweryDB, “and filtered out many of the smaller US brewers (according to number of beers entered into BreweryDB).”
Click here to see the circle full size.
Monday’s ad is for Carling Black Label, from 1948. The ad is in French for the Canadian market and boasts that Carling is Canada’s most popular lager. But there’s no translation for “Mabel, Black Label!” But I’m still not sure why they’re playing tic-tac-toe on the tablecloth.
Today is the 29+16th birthday of Amy Dalton. Amy is the Advertising Manager for All About Beer magazine. As evidenced by the fact that none of the photos below feature Amy alone, she’s a consummate people person. A veteran of the newspaper industry, she’s been selling ads to the beer world now for years and, hopefully, has grown to appreciate the quirks and oddities of most of us in the beer community. Join me in wishing Amy a very happy birthday.
At the reception before the World Cup Gala Awards Dinner, with Tomme Arthur, at the 2008 Craft Brewers Conference.
Amy in between Jim Koch and Rick Lyke, along with Daniel Bradford at the far left, at a Boston Beer Brunch during GABF a few years ago.
All About Beer publishers Daniel Bradford and Julie Johnson Bradford with Amy at the 2007 Craft Brewers Conference in Austin, Texas.
Amy walking down the aisle a couple of years ago.
An interesting study recently conducted at the Indiana University School of Medicine shows a preliminary result that “[t]he taste of beer, without any effect from alcohol itself, can trigger dopamine release in the brain, which is associated with drinking and other drugs of abuse.”
The study itself, Beer Flavor Provokes Striatal Dopamine Release in Male Drinkers: Mediation by Family History of Alcoholism was published last week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. From the press release:
Using positron emission tomography (PET), the researchers tested 49 men with two scans, one in which they tasted beer, and the second in which they tasted Gatorade, looking for evidence of increased levels of dopamine, a brain neurotransmitter long associated with alcohol and other drugs of abuse. The scans showed significantly more dopamine activity following the taste of beer than the sports drink. Moreover, the effect was significantly greater among participants with a family history of alcoholism.
“We believe this is the first experiment in humans to show that the taste of an alcoholic drink alone, without any intoxicating effect from the alcohol, can elicit this dopamine activity in the brain’s reward centers,” said David A. Kareken, Ph.D., professor of neurology at the IU School of Medicine and the deputy director of the Indiana Alcohol Research Center.
The stronger effect in participants with close alcoholic relatives suggests that the release of dopamine in response to such alcohol-related cues may be an inherited risk factor for alcoholism, said Dr. Kareken.
Research for several decades has linked dopamine to the consumption of various drugs of abuse, although researchers have differing interpretations of the neurotransmitter’s role. Sensory cues that are closely associated with drug intoxication (ranging from tastes and smells to the sight of a tavern) have long been known to spark cravings and induce treatment relapse in recovering alcoholics. Many neuroscientists believe that dopamine plays a critical role in such cravings.
The study participants received a very small amount of their preferred beer — 15 milliliters — over a 15-minute time period, enabling them to taste the beer without resulting in any detectable blood alcohol level or intoxicating effect.
Using a PET scanning compound that targets dopamine receptors in the brain, the researchers were able to assess changes in dopamine levels occurring after the participants tasted the liquids.
In addition to the PET scan results, participants reported an increased beer craving after tasting beer, without similar responses after tasting the sports drink — even though many thought the Gatorade actually tasted better, said Brandon G. Oberlin, Ph.D., post-doctoral fellow and first author of the paper.
With the study only using a cohort of under fifty people, the results will probably not settle the question, and the UK Guardian’s science writer takes issue with it in Beer, dopamine and brain scans make an intoxicating mix. But it seems to be a good first step toward a better understanding of how dopamine is related to drinking and even alcoholism. The most interesting find is that it appears that dopamine is released by the brain even if there’s no alcohol present, just the taste of beer is all that the brain seems to need. If further studies bear out the findings, this could be significant.
Today’s infographic is another one from Brewer’s Friend, this one is all about Beer Style Alcohol By Volume, showing the BJCP styles with the range of a.b.v. for each.
