Tuesday’s holiday ad is for Falstaff, from 1950. With a great tagline, “Falstaff’s Got Something!, I also love how they characterize the beer. “It’s Dry, Light but Lively.” And it sure looks that couple has been hitting the bottle as they put up their decorations. A wink and a nod ….
Today is the birthday of Rick Sellers, former beer director of DRAFT magazine and former parter with brewer Peter Hoey in the Odonata Beer Co., which sadly didn’t quite get off the ground. These days he’s back writing online at Pacific Brew News. Join me in wishing Rick a very happy birthday.
Rick with Odonata partner Peter Hoey at GABF in2009.
At the OBF media tasting: Rick, Merideth and Chris Nelson, the The Beer Geeks, and Meagan Flynn (at right) with her assistant, Annalou, publisher of Beer NW during the 2007 Oregon Brewers Festival.
Rick, with me and J.J. Jackson tasting beer for a segment of a TV show that was done for KVIE, the PBS station in Sacramento.
Me and Rick at the Bistro’s Double IPA festival in 2008. (Thanks to Bryan Kolesar from The Brew Lounge for sending me the photo.)
Yet another new brewery is apparently coming to San Francisco next year. According to the San Francisco Chronicle and SF Weekly, the Mission Rock Cafe, in China Basin not to far from the stadium where the Giants play, will soon become a brewery. Local publican Peter Osborne, who currently owns MoMo’s, Pete’s Tavern and Pedro’s Cantina, will take over the waterside restaurant on January 1. He’ll then start renovating it with an eye toward re-opening it sometime during the summer as Mission Rock Brewery and Oyster Bar.
On the deck at Mission Rock Cafe during the Beerunch there during SF Beer Week in 2010.
This was created back in May, but it escaped my notice. April Kuhn created a cool poster for Drink Philly entitled The Philadelphia History of Beer. According to the website, “[w]hile it doesn’t cover everything that’s occurred in Philadelphia since its founding, it does cover a lot — and it shows why this truly is one of the world’s greatest spots for beer.” If you’d like one of the poster for your very own, they’re on sale online for $10 right now.
Monday’s holiday ad — it’s Boxing Day — is from 1930s Britain and is, I believe, an industry advertisement extolling the virtues of beer. And this one is suggesting that even for festive occasions, beer is best. Happy Boxing Day.
Today’s work of art is another painted by David Teniers the Younger, a Flemish artist born in Antwerp. The painting is known as Peasants Dancing Outside an Inn. The painting is in the Royal Collection at Windsor, which I believe means the Queen of England owns it. It was completed around 1645, although the Royal Collection lists the date as 1641.
The Web Gallery of Art describes the painting:
The painting, which would appear to date from the mid- or late 1640s, is essentially a genre scene of a type that had been pioneered by painters like Jan Brueghel the Elder, Frans Francken II and David Vinckboons. The broad characterisation of peasant types by Teniers is to some extent derived from Adriaen Brouwer, but the squat proportions of the figures, with their large heads and big feet, are typical of the artist’s style. Not all the figures, however, are peasants. The couple in the left foreground, accompanied by a child and a dog, are bourgeois types. So too is the woman nearby being helped to her feet. Dress and coiffure suggest social distinctions that may give the painting extra meaning.
The inn in the left half of the composition occurs again in a painting in Dresden, but the general layout of the composition with buildings on the left, a tree with or without a fence marking the centre, and a distant view on the right is a well-established format in Teniers’s work. Otherwise it is the range of observation and contrasting actions that holds the attention. The bagpiper leaning against the tree, the man vomiting, the man near the centre leaning on his stick, the dancers, the woman looking out of the window of the inn are all memorable figures in a painting of varied emotions and changing rhythms. The figure helping the woman to her feet anticipates Watteau, who was a keen admirer of Teniers. Genre, landscape and still life are all combined in this composition, which provides abundant proof of the artist’s skills.
The second painting of the same Inn they’re referring to appears to have been done around 1660 and is also titled Peasants Dancing Outside an Inn, though it’s often referred to as Peasants Dancing Outside An Inn II
To learn more about David Teniers, Wikipedia has a good overview and there’s also a more detailed biography at the National Gallery and the Web Gallery of Art. You can see more of his work at the Web Museum, Olga’s Gallery and the National Gallery. There are also additional links at ArtCyclopedia
Here’s yet another beer bottle Christmas tree, this one from 2007. It was “built from 1050 stubbies (250ml bottles), equivalent to 462 pints. Tied together with 300 meters of wire and decorated with 200 lights, with a bubble lamp in the centre, the tree stands 2 meters high and 1 meter wide at the base.” Hoppy Christmas.
Our 99th Guinness ad is a black and white print advertisement that ran in Life magazine in December of 1940. Showing a tuckered out store Santa Claus being torn apart by the little kiddies hoping to tell him what they want for Christmas. I’m not sure how that behavior squares with needing to be good, for goodness sale. But the ad suggests, “When you’re Tired enjoy a Guinness.” And I love their description: “Guinness looks, tastes and is different from every other malt beverage. It is dry, racy — hearty and nourishing!”
This isn’t exactly new, but it’s still pretty cool, despite using green bottles. They may not be great for keeping UV light out of the beer, but they do work great for building Christmas trees. Completed in 2006, 2000 Heineken bottles are controlled by animated lighting equipment built by the homeowner.
Friday’s holiday ad is for Rhode Island’s Narragansett Beer, which has made a come back in recent years. It originally “appeared in the December 23, 1945 issue of The Boston Herald.” Offering “Holiday Greetings from Narragansett,” and also featured a wonderful painting of an idyllic winter scene.
According to Narragansett’s blog, the “painting is titled, ‘On The Post Road,’ and was created by artist, Harold Breut.”
