Thursday’s ad is for Schaefer, in the “smart new package.” When the ad is from, I’m not quite sure, but based on the can, probably the 1950s or before. It’s a simple ad, but for some reason — most likely nostalgia — I’ve always liked the Schaefer branding.
Today’s info graphic is titled the Rocket Science Behind Hangovers, from Rahul Desai’s Blog, showing how alcohol effects particular parts of the body, and how they lead to a hangover.
Click here to see the poster full size.
The Oakland Tribune is reporting that a settlement has been reached in the wrongful death suit brought by the family of beer writer and journalist William Brand, who was struck and killed by a Muni train in February of 2009. The report says that at $900,000, the “settlement is one of the largest in recent years for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.” While it’s not enough to bring Bill back, hopefully it will be of some comfort to his family that a certain amount of justice has prevailed and that they may hopefully find some peace of mind over his loss. You can read the full story by the Tribune at SF transit agency approves settlement in Muni crash that killed Oakland Tribune journalist.
Bill was a great advocate for craft beer in the Bay Area, and we’ve continued to toast his memory at both the opening and closing events for SF Beer Week each year.
Here’s to you, Bill.
Wednesday’s ad is for Schlitz, from 1948. I love the look on her face, like she’s about to play a trick on someone, instead of simply delivering a beer. I know it was 1948, but it’s hard not to notice the servant/slave and husband/master relationship depicted in the ad. At least she looks happy in her subservience. He just looks clueless.
I’m not exactly sure why this is news at all. It’s part of a series of what I call “so what” or “duh” studies that the neo-prohibitionists use to promote their anti-alcohol agenda. Really, it can best be termed “joke science,” and frankly, even using the word science is giving it too much credit. It’s more “agenda science,” propaganda masquerading as science, where the conclusion comes before the “study,” and the results fit the agreed upon conclusion every time. This one’s from CAMY, the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, as anti-alcohol a group as you’re likely to encounter. Here’s what they did.
[R]esearchers at CAMY and the Boston University School of Public Health conducted an online survey of 1,032 youth ages 13 to 20. Participants were asked about their past 30-day consumption of 898 brands of alcohol among 16 alcoholic beverage types (are there really that many well-delineated types?). They answered questions about how often and how much of each brand they consumed. The study appears in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
In a million years, you’ll never guess what they found out. Ready. Sitting down? They discovered that underage drinkers consume the same popular brands as most adults! Woo hoo, drop the balloons. What a surprise! Among the top ten brands reported, four were beers:
Well, now let’s look at the top selling beer brands overall, as of Dec. 2, 2012:
And note that Coors Light showed a better than six-percent increase, while Budweiser slipped almost three percent, so when the survey was conducted they most likely lined up, one, two, three.
According to the press release. “Of the top 25 consumed brands, 12 were spirits brands (including four vodkas), nine were beers, and four were flavored alcohol beverages.” Since they haven’t released the full list, we only know the top four brands of beer.
So however much money and resources they spent on this, what they paid for bought them the news that what adults drink and what their kids are sneaking a drink of match up almost exactly. And while most thinking adults would look at these lists and just shake their heads, the anti-alcohol CAMY sees this as revealed wisdom.
“For the first time, we know what brands of alcoholic beverages underage youth in the U.S. are drinking,” said study author David Jernigan, PhD, CAMY director. “Importantly, this report paves the way for subsequent studies to explore the association between exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing efforts and drinking behavior in young people.”
Really? We finally know what kids are drinking, do we? Thank goodness somebody finally thought to ask them, by conducting a poll. And while most reasonable people might question what these results mean, CAMY immediately leaps to the conclusion that this proves an “association between exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing efforts and drinking behavior in young people.” Holy moley, can these people spin a yarn. Without any evidence of causation whatsoever, they declare these findings show there is an association. But all it reveals is that kids drink the same brands that their parents do, that they drink the beers they have access to (i.e., can pilfer from their parents’ stash or get an older brother to buy for them). Guess what I drank when I was unable to walk into a store and buy my own beer? Whatever I could get. Do they really think that underage kids are determining in advance what brands they decide they want to drink, and then do whatever’s necessary to insure that’s what they actually get? Pul-leeze. They’ll drink whatever they can get, and be happy about it. You can’t be too picky at that age. So it’s a good thing most teenagers haven’t yet developed a discerning palate, otherwise they’d be mightily disappointed on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, the danger with this sort of junk science is that it’s then used like real science to promote a particular agenda and change public policy. For example, when the Partnership for a Drug Free America reported on it, in Study Finds Underage Drinkers Prefer Top Alcohol Brands, they concluded with this quote from CAMY director David Jernigan:
“This research will lead to insights that will inform public policy,” he says. “Everybody has gut sense that some brands are appealing to kids more than others. Now we know for which brands that is working.”
Except that there are no real insights in this at all. That it’s even in a “scientific journal,” albeit “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research” — not exactly the journal Nature — is baffling. Here’s the “Background” from the abstract: “Little is known about brand-specific alcohol consumption among underage youth.” Really, we don’t currently know what brands underage kids are drinking? Seriously, how can they print that without losing all credibility. Neo-prohibitionists have been complaining about what kids are drinking for decades, if not longer. But until we asked 1,000 teenagers to take an online survey, we had no idea which brands? Are they kidding? What a joke.
Then there’s the “Conclusions,” which frankly I’m surprised is plural, as if there is more than one conclusion. But here it is: “Underage youth alcohol consumption, although spread out over several alcoholic beverage types, is concentrated among a relatively small number of alcohol brands. This finding has important implications for alcohol research, practice, and policy.”
I can’t wait to here about the “important implications” to which they believe that future “alcohol research, practice, and policy” will be altered by the groundbreaking news that kids are drinking the same stuff their parents are drinking. Why isn’t this on the front page, above the fold, of the Grey Lady herself? But really, the question ought to be why is it news at all.
I wonder how CAMY would process this Brazilian brand created to warn about the dangers of underage drinking?
Today’s infographic, The Case For Beer: Why You Should Enjoy It & Enjoy It Right, comes to us from Frugal Dad, who tells us: “There are times when learning a few key pieces of information about something can help you to maximize the value you get from it.” And that was the goal with this, offering some basic information for the person new to beer.
Click here to see the infographic full size.
Wow, this is big news. Grub Street has the exclusive news that Sierra Nevada Brewing is planning on opening a taproom on Fourth Street in Berkeley, and will be located at 2031 4th Street, by University Avenue. Someone from the brewery told them that “it will be a full-time tasting room with food, though there won’t be a full brewpub or restaurant.”
I learned the following details from Sierra Nevada. They will operate the space, which they describe as “a small unit alongside other streetside venues.” They’re looking to open later this year, assuming all permitting, licensing, construction, etc. goes smoothly (do they ever?). They anticipate serving light snacks like pretzels, so it appears the focus of the place will be more on “enjoying and learning about the beer.”
Tuesday’s ad is for Miller High Life, from 1953. With the tagline “Recipe for Pleasure,” they’re pushing the radical notion that seafood and beer might well be enjoyed together. Who knew?
Today is the birthday of William Bradford, who was born March 19, 1590 and was aboard the Mayflower on its journey to found Plymouth Colony in today what is part of Massachusetts. Although not initially a leader, he became governor of the colony, a post he held for thirty years, and is generally credited with creating the first Thanksgiving.
Bradford kept a journal covering the years 1620 to 1647, which was later published in a variety of forms, including in Of Plymouth Plantation and Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Within the world of beer, Bradford is best known for his diary entry suggesting that the colonists dropped anchor in Plymouth Bay because they’d run out of beer, though he put it quite a bit more elegantly; “we could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.”
In context, of course, the meaning is changed somewhat:
That night we returned againe a ship board with resolution the next morning to settle on some of those places. So in the morning, after we had called on God for direction, we came to this resolution, to go presently ashore again, and to take a better view of two places which we thought most fitting for us; for we could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our Beere, and it being now the 19. [new style 29th] of December. After our landing and viewing of the place, so well as we could, we came to a conclusion, by most voyces, to set on the maine Land, on the first place, on an high ground where there is a great deale of Land cleared, and hath beene planted with Corne three or four yeares agoe, and there is a very sweet brooke runnes under the hill side, and many delicate springs of as good water as can be drunke, and where we may harbour our Shallops and Boates exceeding well, and in this brooke much good fish in their season: on the further side of the river also much Corne ground cleared: in one field is a great hill, on which wee poynt to make a platiforme, and plant our Ordnance, which will command all round about; from thence we may see into the Bay, and farre into the Sea, and we may see thence Cape Cod.
Author and beer historian Bob Skilnik has pointed out that the myth of beer being the sole catalyst for the Pilgrims has been well documented, though still it persists. (BTW, anyone heard from Bob lately?) I’ve written about this before (but the link to the newspaper article is down) and also Don Russell wrote one of his columns about it, Don’t believe the Pilgrims’ beer myth, a few years ago, saying “it’s absurd to believe the Pilgrims anchored simply because they had run out of beer. Aside from making them sound like drunken frat boys on a transatlantic beer cruise, historical documents indicate they had other priorities. ‘In actuality, there was plenty of beer still on board for crew members who had to make the return passage to England,’ said Skilnik, author of “Beer & Food: An American History.'” As Skilnik discovered.
Expeditionary crews sent from the anchored ship had been checking the lay of the land for weeks, looking for a suitable place to build homes. Yes, food and supplies had run low. But more importantly, Skilnik noted, the cold was brutal, passengers were dying and the ship’s crew wanted to return to Europe. Meanwhile, there was fowl and fresh water waiting on shore. It wasn’t the shortage of beer that finally prompted the Pilgrims to give up the ship, Skilnik said. It was plain common sense.
The fault, Skilnik contends, begins with a full page ad in the Washington Post from January 8, 1908 taken out by Anheuser-Busch for Budweiser. This was just as the forces for prohibition were intensifying their efforts, and the breweries were finally starting to recognize the threat. Damage control was initiated, but most historians see it it now as “too little, too late,” and this ad was most likely a part of that effort to show beer in a better light. The fake newspaper page contains stories about beer through history, including the pilgrim’s tale.
The pilgrims appear in the story in the second column from the left, at the top.
That was the beginning. Before, and after Prohibition, advertising continued to make the connection, in fact tried to make it even stronger. As Russell continues, “After Prohibition, the message grew even slicker, with an annual Thanksgiving publicity campaign from the U.S. Brewers Association. Each Thanksgiving throughout the 1930s and ’40s, newspaper readers were treated to features with headlines like, ‘Beer, Not Turkey, Lured Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock.'”
Bradford may have written it, but hundreds of years later, it’s not quite the smoking gun we’ve been let to believe.
Statue of William Bradford in Plymouth Rock State Park, Massachusetts.
But Bradford’s journals also contain additional references to beer. Here’s a few more Bradford quotes with beer in them.
November 15:
In the morning so soon as we could see the trace, we proceeded on our journey, and had the track until we had compassed the head of a long creek, and there they took into another wood, and we after them, supposing to find some of their dwellings, but we marched through boughs and bushes, and under hills and valleys, which tore our very armor in pieces, and yet could meet with none of them, nor their houses, nor find any fresh water, which we greatly desired, and stood in need of, for we brought neither beer nor water with us, and our victuals was only biscuit and Holland cheese, and a little bottle of aquavitae, so as we were sore athirst.
Mid-November:
Again, we had yet some beer, butter, flesh, and other such victuals left, which would quickly be all gone, and then we should have nothing to comfort us in the great labor and toil we were like to undergo at the first. It was also conceived, whilst we had competent victuals, that the ship would stay with us, but when that grew low, they would be gone and let us shift as we could.
Christmas Day:
Monday, the 25th day, we went on shore, some to fell drink water aboard, but at night the master caused us to have some beer, and so on board we had divers times now and then some beer, but on shore none at all.
Today’s infographic comes from the homebrewing book Beer Craft: A Simple Guide to Making Great Beer, by William Bostwick and Jessi Rymill. Dwell magazine did a profile of the book, including this page with their Field Guide to Hops.
Click here to see the field guide full size.