Our 102nd Guinness ad harkens back to a bygone era, when knights in shining armor battled fire-breathing dragons to rescue damsels in distress. When it’s really from, I have no idea. But when St. George prepares to battle the dragon in the distance, his squire first brings him pint of Guinness. “Guinness For Strength” reads the tagline and, somewhat humorously, a smaller dragon is also bringing the big dragon a pint of Guinness, too. Still, my money’s on St. George.
I’m not exactly sure why this appears to be such big news, but it seems to be everywhere. Beer Marketer’s Insights is reporting that, based upon estimated numbers for 2011, Coors Light has overtaken Budweiser to become the 2nd best-selling beer in America. According to the report, “[t]his is the first time in almost 20 years, since 1993, that AB didn’t have top 2 brands.” But I note that according to IRI data, Miller Lite held the #2 spot at least as recently as 2007. Though to be fair, it’s true that Bud Light and Budweiser have enjoyed the top two spots, if off and on, for quite some time.
But the story isn’t so much about Coors Light being up (they were, but only 0.8%). What’s more interesting is that Budweiser was down 4.6%, which had more to do with the switch in positions. InBev seems to be struggling with the A-B core brands ever since they took over Anheuser-Busch. It can’t help that they’ve laid off countless employes, bullied suppliers and lost a great deal of goodwill through their cost-cutting way of doing business. They don’t seem to have the same relationship with consumers that the company did when it was run by the Busch family. And while the big breweries are losing ground to craft beer overall, ABI seems to losing more. So it makes sense that another brand would pick up the slack, catapulting Coors Light into the number two position, a spot Avis once upon a time used to great effect in their advertising. Maybe we’ll see Coors do something similar. “Coors Light is No. 2 in beer. We try harder.“
Friday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1960. They seemed to focus on this nostalgia theme around that time, as if the 1890s or so was the best time ever for beer. I doubt that’s true, but it’s usually safe to make such a claim when few people who lived then are still around to compare or disagree. Anyone who was 20, and drinking beer, in 1890 would have been 90 in 1960. And the goofy expression with the sandwich in one hand, holding a beer up to his lips is priceless.
According to new estimated beer sales data for 2011 from Beer Marketer’s Insights, Yuengling Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania has now eclipsed the Boston Beer Co. (makers of Samuel Adams) to become the biggest American brewery. Yuengling’s area newspaper, the Lehigh Valley’s The Morning Call, had the story this morning. The numbers shake out like this:
Yuengling sold 2.5 million barrels of beer in 2011, up 17 percent from the previous year, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights in Suffern, N.Y., a magazine that tracks the beer industry. Boston Beer sold 2.4 million barrels in 2011, the magazine estimated.
Boston Beer, a public company, has yet to release final sales for 2011. Beer Marketer’s Insights based its estimate on Boston Beer sales in the first three quarters and the company’s own sales forecast for the fourth quarter.
Even if Boston Beer had a surprisingly good fourth quarter, it wouldn’t close the gap with Yuengling, said Eric Shepard, editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights.
The Morning Call also created the chart below to illustrate the shift in sales between the two companies over the last five years.
If you’re in the brewing industry, and especially if you’ve entered your beers in the Great American Beer Festival and/or the World Beer Cup, then you no doubt know Danny Williams. He’s worked with the Brewers Association at GABF for a number of years, and since 2001 has been in charge of the beer for competition judging. It’s his job to see that it arrives, is maintained under the proper conditions, and eventually makes it into the hands of the judges. Last year there were 3,930 beers judged at GABF. So it’s quite a task.
Danny Williams and Lindsay Husted, also from the Brewers Association, at the World Beer Cup dinner in Chicago two years ago.
Unfortunately, Danny cannot work these days. He’s recently been diagnosed with cancer, and has cancerous legions all over his stomach and pancreas, which tragically is a type of cancer that typically has a very low survival rate. The pain he’s enduring is so great that he is simply unable to work, and he’s chosen not to attempt to treat it since the prognosis is so bleak and recovery unlikely. Danny’s decided instead to enjoy what time is left to him with his friends and family as best he can.
Danny is only 52 and has two grown kids from his first marriage. He also has an 8-year old son, Fletcher, from his most recent. As you might expect, not being able to work, having mouths to feed, and medical bills to pay, has left him in dire financial straits. At the moment, he is in danger of losing his home and the infamous “beer mine” — a former gold mine, sadly with no more riches — where he ages his beer collection. It’s even been mentioned in the New York Times. His friends and family are trying their best to make sure he can stay in his home during his remaining months and, if possible, that it can stay in his family after he’s gone. I can’t stress enough how precarious his situation really is.
His good friend, Ben Spencer — who’s the head brewer at Magnolia in San Francisco — recently went to Colorado to spend some time with Danny. Talking with Ben, I think it was rough on him seeing his friend in such a difficult situation. It’s hard for a lot of people to deal with such tragedy. I know. I went through something very similar with my own mother when I was in my early twenties. Ben reflected on seeing Danny last week and asks that you help out his friend, and your friend, as best you’re able.
Danny is a great man, and an amazing advocate of the craft brewing movement. He has affected all of us in many ways. I understand that times are tough, but please help my brother out. He needs us now.
Please donate what you can to help Danny. If you’re a brewery or other business and want to make a more substantial donation, there is a fund set up at First Bank in Boulder, Colorado under the name the “Danny Williams Fund.” Contact me or Ben Spencer for the account number and routing information. Or just post a comment below and one of us will send you the information.
To make a smaller, or really any amount, donation, we’ve set up a simple PayPal donation that’s very easy to use. Just click on the button below, fill in any amount you wish and follow the on screen instructions. Thank you.
Below are some photos of Danny enjoying life, which is how he should be remembered.
Tom Nickel (owner of O’Brien’s in San Diego), Nancy Johnson, Director of GABF and Danny at Slow Food Nation 2008 in San Francisco.
Danny in the former goldmine beer cellar.
Danny’s Angels, after a BA event.
Be an angel, too. Please donate generously to make Danny’s remaining time as comfortable, enjoyable and stress-free as possible; and help secure a future for his family after he’s gone.
Also, while I don’t usually condone plagiarism, this is a special circumstance. If you write a blog or website, feel free to take any or all of this content, text, links and photos, to help spread the word to help out Danny. The more people we can reach, the more we can help. Thanks.
In honor of Bikini Appreciation Day, Thursday’s ad is for Colt 45, from 1974. Showing the backside of a raven-haired woman in a white bikini playing the board game Bottoms Up while a side-burned lothario is looking way too intently at the game, which is especially odd since Bottoms Up is not exactly a game of strategy. In fact — believe it not — the game was commissioned by Colt 45 in 1970 and figured prominently in their advertising for a number of years. It was, not surprisingly, a drinking game. The couple here is drinking, of course, Colt 45.
The game was produced by Taurus Creations and sold for a number of years. It was even advertised in more mature Men’s magazines without the bikini.
If you’re a homebrewer in Wisconsin, be careful not to leave the house with your beer. When they call it home brew, they really mean it. Apparently there’s a growing strict interpretation of the state’s laws regarding homebrewing — similar to what went down in Oregon recently — that could prevent homebrewers from taking their beer to competitions and homewbrew club meetings, or indeed just sharing it with friends. I first heard about it from Jason Heindel, the President of the Beer Barons of Milwaukee Cooperative, a local beer enthusiast and homebrew club. He’s written up a nice overview of what’s going on, which you can read below, modified slightly by me for the web:
“As some of you may be aware, there have been some developments in the past year with how the WI Department of Revenue interprets the current State Statues relative to homebrewing. The current statutes can be found here. If you take a strict interpretation of those statues, the only place one can make or enjoy your own home brewed beer is at your home or farm. This means you could not legally brew a beer and hand it over your fence to your neighbor. The Wisconsin statues are outdated and not conforming with the overall Federal statutes regarding homebrewing. One of the highlights of the Federal Statute is the following section:
§ 25.206 Removal of beer.
Beer made under §25.205 may be removed from the premises where made for personal or family use including use at organized affairs, exhibitions or competitions such as homemaker’s contests, tastings or judging. Beer removed under this section may not be sold or offered for sale.
All of those activities are not allowed by Wisconsin statute. So the State Fair beer and wine competitions would not be allowed, tastings and homebrew club meetings would also not be allowed.
A group was formed earlier this year to address these problems. The AHA formed the Wisconsin Homebrewer’s Alliance. The group was comprised of a member from as many homebrew clubs as we could find contacts for, homebrew shop owners, etc. This group has worked to introduce legislation to the Wisconsin Senate to correct these deficiencies. We have been asked to voice our support to our State Senators and Assembly members in support of this legislation. Take a look at the proposed legislation.
Now is the time for all Wisconsin Homebrewer’s to take action and ask for your representative’s to support this bill. Below is an except from an email to the Wisconsin Homebrewer’s Alliance from 1/5/2012:
‘Sen. Ellis’s office and a “Dear Colleague’ letter is going out within minutes asking for co-sponsorship of our legislation. The co-sponsorship period is for 2 weeks starting from today. So, now is the time for all of our memberss to contact their respective Clubs to get them to contact both of their legislators. The most sponsors that we can get the better. The legislation is LRB 3101 The Ellis/Kaufert legislation. We can also contact breweries, distributors, homebrew shops, etc.
Dan Grady, who’s spearheading the legislation, did give Heindel some words of warning. ‘Time is running short. The January floor period is taken up already leaving only February and March. The legislature is going to shut ASAP due to the recalls.'”
Wow, that’s not good. If you live in Wisconsin and want to see homebrewing continue to flourish, find your local legislators and contact them immediately.
Wednesday’s ad is for Miller High Life, from 1960. The men drink beer (and at least one smokes) while watching the woman outs out all of the food. And it’s quite a spread. And in the inset pictures below you can see close-ups of two of the dishes. I’m both hungry … and thirsty.
This is one of those things that’s increasingly pissing me off, because it avoids real problems that some people have with alcohol in favor of trying to turn individual problems into an epidemic. It’s not. If anything, overall consumption of alcohol is decreasing. But it’s hard to get funding, finance addiction clinics and raise money to fight the scourge of alcohol if you don’t make the situation sound as dire as possible.
Take binge drinking, for example. ABC News just did a story (thanks to Julia Herz for tweeting it) about a “new” report claiming that 38 million Americans “binge drink an average four times a month.” Their story, entitled CDC: Millions of Americans are Binge Drinkers, details how the CDC is claiming that 1 in 6 “adults binge drinks about four times a month, and on average the largest number of drinks consumed is eight.” Not only that, but this is apparently on the rise. Here’s what the CDC website has to say.
New estimates show that binge drinking is a bigger problem than previously thought. More than 38 million U.S. adults binge drink, about 4 times a month, and on average the largest number of drinks consumed is eight. Binge drinking is defined as consuming four or more drinks for women and five or more drinks for men over a short period of time.
In the ABC report, Dr. Fulton Crews, director of the Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is quoted in what must be one of the most out-of-touch statements ever made on this subject. “But most people don’t realize that binge drinking is unhealthy.” Seriously? Is there anyone who hasn’t been bombarded with neo-prohibitionist propaganda, whether it’s our government, MADD, Alcohol Justice or some other anti-alcohol group. My kids started receiving the message literally in kindergarten, before they were even able to process it. There isn’t a man or woman alive who believes that drinking too much is good for you.
What people might not know is that what it means to be a “binge drinker” is not as concrete as these “reports” insist. How binge drinking is defined keeps changing, and always it’s narrowing, pulling more people into the circle of binge drinkers, not because they’re suddenly drinking more, but because how it’s defined has changed. I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but I detailed some of the history of this transformation a couple of years ago, in two posts entitled Inflating Binge Drinking Statistics and Son of Binge Drinking Statistics Inconsistencies. And the year before that I wrote about it in Inventing Binge Drinking. What’s clear is that binge drinking went from something somewhat vague — you knew it when you saw it — to ever more specific definitions, the kind that could be quantified and used to alarm people, and, by no small coincidence, be used by anti-alcohol folks in their propaganda.
So yet again the definition seems to be changing. The actual number of “too many” drinks has been somewhat fixed for the last few years at 5 for a man and 4 for a woman. But what keeps changing is the period of time. Initially it was “in a row,” then “within a few hours.” This latest CDC “report” says “in a sitting” and “over a short period of time,” which conceivably could be almost any length of time. At least the ABC report mentions this inconsistency, noting that the definition of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, says the alcohol must be consumed in “two hours or less.” That works out to a beer every thirty minutes for a woman, and for a man, one every 24 minutes.
But what’s also absent from their definition of binge drinking is weight. The definition of being considered drunk is always expressed as a calculation combining time, the amount of alcohol consumed and the weight of the person drinking it. But binge drinking never takes that into account, apart from dividing up gender, presumably under the premise that men are generally bigger than women. That reality, of course, is not true in every case. And it may be indelicate to say so, but with our obesity issues as a nation, in theory it should be taking us longer to actually get drunk today than it did twenty years ago. But the reality is that a 200-pound man will take longer to get drunk than a 120-pound man. The same amount of alcohol will effect the two differently. So why should both be defined as binge drinkers if one becomes inebriated but the other does not?
And frankly, there’s another elephant in the room that troubles me, but is rarely, if ever, talked about. If you’re an adult and choose to drink 5 beers in a row, are not driving, and are not in any other way putting yourself or others at risk, why shouldn’t you be allowed to go a little crazy once in a while? You are, actually. It’s not illegal. Although neo-prohibitionists might not like it, there’s nothing to stop you from going on a bender if you feel like it. You shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about it. If it gets out of hand, your friends and family will likely step in. If it doesn’t so what? Who are you hurting? But every time these “reports” come out, the implication is that binge drinking is bad no matter what. But not all bingeing is the same, especially as they now define it. The average beer dinner runs to at least five courses (unless Sean Paxton is doing it), meaning that every single person attending such a beer dinner is considered a dangerous “binge drinker” by the CDC and other government agencies. Is that rational or realistic? Of course not. That’s entirely different from a person who bellies up to the bar and downs five shots of rotgut in rapid succession. Yet both are considered equally dangerous and costing society untold millions of dollars. It’s absurd.
Here’s some more of the statistical data, which it should be noted was complied through a telephone poll, from the CDC’s press release:
As reported in this month’s Vital Signs, the CDC found that those who were thought less likely to binge drink actually engage in this behavior more often and consume more drinks when they do. While binge drinking is more common among young adults aged 18–34 years, binge drinkers aged 65 years and older report binge drinking more often—an average of five to six times a month. Similarly, while binge drinking is more common among those with household incomes of $75,000 or more, the largest number of drinks consumed on an occasion is significantly higher among binge drinkers with household incomes less than $25,000—an average of eight to nine drinks per occasion, far beyond the amount thought to induce intoxication.
Adult binge drinking is most common in the Midwest, New England, the District of Columbia, Alaska, and Hawaii. On average, however, the number of drinks consumed when binge drinking is highest in the Midwest and southern Mountain states (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah), and in some states— such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—where binge drinking was less common.
But perhaps where this absurdity becomes most evident is in one of the CDC’s suggestions on how to combat binge drinking, which they list under the heading “what you can do.” Here’s the suggestion: “Follow the U.S. Dietary Guidelines on alcohol consumption; if you choose to drink, do so in moderation — no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men.” Except those are NOT the most recent USDA dietary guidelines. Not even close. The 2010 guidelines “defines ‘low-risk’ drinking as no more than 14 drinks a week for men and 7 drinks a week for women with no more than 4 drinks on any given day for men and 3 drinks a day for women.” So that’s two government agencies that can’t agree on safe levels of consumption, and one that’s essentially lying about it to bolster their own point of view. The UK has had similar problems with their guidelines, when it was revealed a few years ago that their government just made up the safe guidelines, which then became carved in stone for the next twenty or more years, despite being literally plucked out of thin air.
Before the angry comments start flooding in again, I should point out that I don’t believe that binge drinking is always a good idea, or that people should do it all the time. I’m not arguing in favor of it. However, I do believe one does have the right to go on a binge if they feel like it (and as long as they’re being safe and aren’t doing so frequently enough to alarm those people closest to them). I do believe that how the CDC and others define binge drinking is ludicrous and does more harm than good. By making almost everyone a binge drinker through their ever-narrowing definition, they’re avoiding dealing with the serial binge drinkers who really are hurting themselves, and possibly others around them. This does nothing to combat the people who really need help. All it does is demonize all alcohol drinkers, making us all the same, which even the most jaded neo-prohibitionist has to admit, we’re not. It’s not how many drinks one has, or over what period of time, it comes down to how one handles themselves in that situation. If you’re a safe and responsible drinker, none of the rest of that even matters. Drink by example, that’s my new motto.
UPDATE: One of the biggest problems with studies like this is how uncritically they’re reported by the mainstream media. The most common way a press release like this one is used is by taking it and maybe changing around the words slightly but essentially just regurgitating it wholesale, not doing any follow up or critically examining it, and accepting all of it without question. That’s not what journalism should be, but in many cases that’s what it’s become, sad to say. Case in point is The Daily’s piece on it, Binge There, Done That. On the plus side, there’s this cool infographic they created based on the data from the telephone polls that the CDC conducted. On the negative side, there’s no key to the data, but the report mentions that it’s the “percent of the population” that are binge drinkers.
Tuesday’s ad is for Carling Black Label, from 1960, from their “People try it … and they like it” series. The ad simply shows a glass of Carling Black Label being poured into a glass. I’m thirsty. But does that glass look striped? Like it’s a crystal glass with vertical indentations? Hmm. Something is making it look that way, but I can’t quite figure out why.
