Monday’s ad is an interesting ad by famed Swiss illustrator Herbert Leupin. I’m not sure what beer this ad is for or when it was created, though he worked mainly beginning in the late 1930s and then took up paintings around 1970. So we can safely say it was between those dates. I love the simplicity, though, and the cartoonish hand holding up the umbrella.
I was really hoping to avoid writing about the Occupy Oakland horrors currently going on in the city I used to call home. But last Thursday, Oakland Police apparently injured yet another war veteran — two tours, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan — simply trying to walk to his home, rupturing his spleen in the process and refusing him medical attention for eighteen hours! It turns out the man, Kayvan Sabeghi, is a co-founder of Elevation 66 Brewing, a new Bay Area brewpub which opened in nearby El Cerrito this past September. As a result of his beating, Sabeghi ended up in intensive care fighting for his life, but nobody knew about it until Friday, because the police that beat him bad enough to give him a lacerated spleen and a few broken ribs ignored his pleas for help, instead hurling insults at him and calling him a heroin addict, an alcoholic and a diabetic, none of which were true.
So that means the police injured not only another war veteran, but also a small business owner — in right wing parlance a “job-creator” — who according to what I’ve read posed no real threat to the peace at all. What’s perhaps most disturbing of all is the comments on news websites where many are suggesting his story is not true, or he deserved it or simply applauding the police for hurting him. That people can be so cruel is not exactly news to me, but it’s still pretty hard to stomach.
The Daily Kos posted a story, now updated three times, on Friday, which includes an interview with the victim’s sister. There are also reports on the UK’s Guardian, Reuters and the Huffington Post.
The El Cerrito Patch also covered the incident, as they’d previously written about his brewpub, Elevation 66, in Made-In-El Cerrito Beer: Elevation 66 Brewer Describes New Pub’s Approach. In addition to the brewpub’s website, their Facebook page also has updates about Sabeghi’s progress. Let’s all wish him a speedy recovery. And if you’re hankering for a beer, perhaps a trip to El Cerrito is in order.
The Denver Post has breaking news about a 2-alarm fire at the New Belgium Brewery “in what appears to be a grain silo.” Apparently some of the employees have been evacuated and hopefully no one has been injured. More details will be posted here as they emerge.
UPDATE: Dave Butler, a.k.a. Chipper Dave, is reporting that the “fire is put out” and that it was “empty grain silo caught fire as worker was dismantling it. No affect to other brewing operations.”
UPDATE #2: ABC Channel 7 has an update on the story, and posted the photo below on their website, taken by Major King.
This week’s works of art is an early work by the renowned Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, though technically Johannes Vermeer. In fact, the Swiss Berger Foundation claims it’s Vermeer’s very first known painting, though others disagree. It’s most often known as The Procuress, though occasionally it’s called The Go-Between. Painted in 1656, today the painting hangs in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, which is in Dresden, Germany. I saw the original when I visited the nearby Radeberg Brauerei a number of years ago, as we stayed in downtown Dresden.
In “Vermeer: The Complete Works,” author Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr, describes the painting:
Few of Vermeer’s paintings are as provocative as this fascinating scene of mercenary love, which, in its subject, as well as in its momentary gestures and expressions, seems to differ from his earlier biblical and mythological scenes. Here, behind a balustrade covered by a richly decorated rug, a procuress looks approvingly at a soldier, who offers a young woman a coin while fondling her breast. Holding a glass of wine in one hand, she willingly accepts his proposition with her other.
Wikipedia has its own page for the painting. And Essential Vermeer also has analysis of the painting from additional sources. They also have a very cool interactive Procuress where you hold your mouse over different parts of the painting to get detailed information about that area. For our purposes, here’s what they have to say about the beer in the picture:
And here’s the information about the Römer glass referred to above:
You can read Vermeer’s biography at Wikipedia and at ArTable. There are also endless resources at Essential Vermeer. To see the rest of Vermeer’s paintings, the Essential Vermeer has a complete collection or check out the Web Museum, the Web Gallery of Art or the Artchive.
Our 57th Session brings us into the confessional, courtesy of our host, Steve Lamond, from Beers I’ve Known, who magnanimously agreed to fill in for the recently pilfered Pete Brown. Stephanos — Steve’s alter ego — has chosen the topic Beery Confessions: Guilty Secrets/Guilty Pleasure Beer, which he describes as follows:
One of the things I most enjoy about blogs and personal writing in general is the ability to have a window into another’s life, in a semi-voyeuristic way. So I’d like to know your beery guilty secrets. Did you have a particularly embarrassing first beer (in the same way that some people purchase an atrocious song as their first record) or perhaps there’s still a beer you return to even though you know you shouldn’t? Or maybe you don’t subscribe to the baloney about feeling guilty about beers and drink anything anyway?
You’re also welcome to write about bad drinking experiences you’ve had as a result of your own indulgence or times when you’ve been completely wrong about a beer but not yet confessed to anyone that you’ve changed your mind.
Its fairly wide open, take your pick. Variety is the spice of life as they say (and I hope there’s more than 57 of them…)
Since Stephanos says he likes discovering personal things about his fellow beer bloggers, getting “a window into another’s life, in a semi-voyeuristic way,” I’ll recount my own, vaguely embarrassing first taste of not beer, close in a way, but actually “Near Beer,” non-alcoholic beer that was, believe it or not, aimed at kids when I still was one. In fact, my mother bought me some when I was around twelve and my friends and I tried it one day. It was so bad it’s a wonder I ever tried beer again.
I wish I remembered more details about it. I thought the can was silver in color, but I also remember bright colors. Of course, this was the early 1970s so bright colors were everywhere. I’ve written about this before, though I thought I’d remembered more details than I can now, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. Back in November of 2006 I participated for the third, and final time, in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a great exercise for writers. Every November for over a decade, it challenges writers to complete a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. That works out to 1,667 words a day, every day.
That year, I wrote Under the Table, A Fictional Memoir of Growing Up With Beer, the first draft of which is still online. As far as I know, the only people to actually read it were my mother-in-law and Shaun O’Sullivan, from 21st Amendment, who was sick for a good portion of that November in 2006 and needed something to do. The story was a mostly true account of 24 episodes in my life, from the first memories of my parents drinking beer — I grew up with an alcoholic, psychotic stepfather — to my own adventures drinking in New York City in my late teens and early twenties. I chose 24 chapters because that’s a case, and each chapter starts with a particular beer remembered from my childhood as a starting point for my admittedly self-indulgent reminiscences.
Chapter 7, Not So Close, ends with the time my friends and I first tried the truly awful Near Beer.
This was also the same time that I first tried near beer. I don’t remember why my mother bought it for me, but it was in the basement refrigerator with the rest of the real alcohol. Perhaps she was afraid that my stepfather’s influence might turn me into an alcoholic, too, who knows? But some friends and I tried it one afternoon when I was in my early teens, probably around twelve or so. It was truly awful, as I remember it, and I wasn’t the only one. We all hated it. If this was what beer tasted like, I didn’t understand why adults seemed to drink so much of it. But it did seem like so many other aspects of the life I’d imagined for myself. It was as close to beer as my life was to being normal, not even close.
Happily, I didn’t give up on beer and found that it was much better than that first near experience. I continued drinking the somewhat bland regional lagers available in 1970s Eastern Pennsylvania. They offered not much in the way of variety but in retrospect were more varied than beer became in the following decade when consolidation, mergers and takeovers gave us “The Big 3,” with little else to drink. But after joining the Army Band out of high school, I was stationed in New York City. For a musician, the city was a great place to be at that time. It offered endless places to see live music. Although I liked rock & roll, I was a bigger fan of jazz, especially big band. And there was some terrific places to see jazz, a number of them in the village. There were even these private loft clubs in some warehouse district that I couldn’t find today if my life depended on it, but we knew people who knew people and thus had the address to some of these unmarked jazz clubs. Many of the jazz clubs in New York were selling beers like Guinness, Bass and Pilsner Urquell, beers utterly different than anything we had back home. That’s actually the genesis of my own love affair with beer and was also detailed in Chapter 23 of Under the Table, Jazz in the Dark.
But the confession part of that story is that although I began to learn more and more about beer, and tried as many different ones as we encountered, I continued to drink the familiar regional lagers and even the mainstream national brands when nothing else was available. I hadn’t yet become the annoying beer snob that I am today, when I’ll politely decline a beer if there isn’t anything I deem worthy of drinking at that moment. So there was a good decade where I drank craft beer whenever I could, but wasn’t too fussy when offered something not as tasty. I regret putting social considerations ahead of my taste buds. Of course, I wasn’t as curmudgeonly then, either, and probably had more friends. Is there a connection? Probably.
And one final confession:
Our 92nd Guinness ad features the iconic seal carrying two trays of food, urging thirsty Guinness drinkers to “Have a Snack” as he balances a pint of Guinness on his nose. “My Goodness: indeed.
Friday’s ad is a 1960 ad for Budweiser cans, showing the “Smart way to buy Bud … Pick a Pair.” The ads shows a housewife, oddly backlit, picking up a six-pack of Bud cans.
Ouch. As many of you probably know, Lagunitas Brewing is in the process of installing a new 250-barrel brewhouse, but there may be a bit of a delay. Apparently the brewhouse was on its way to California, tied down on the top of the deck in the Caribbean, when a storm hit the cargo ship. As it “rolled back and forth by more than 40 degrees a crane came loose from its chains and crushed the brewhouse. The 30′ diameter lauter tun caught the blunt of the attack, and appears to be a total loss.”
This sure sounds like a fun new event. The San Francisco Brewers Guild along with City Beer Store and The Bay Bridged is putting on a beer festival and a music festival called The Bay Brewed, which is scheduled to take place on December 3, from 2-7 p.m. at San Francisco’s Verdi Club, located at 2424 Mariposa Street. Here’s some more info from the press release:
Presented in partnership with the City Beer Store and the SF Brewers Guild, a ticket to The Bay Brewed includes unlimited beer tastings from San Francisco Bay Area breweries including 21st Amendment, Anchor Stream, Beach Chalet, Lagunitas, Magnolia, Social Kitchen & Brewery, and Speakeasy, and musical performances from four excellent San Francisco bands: Weekend, Sleepy Sun, Extra Classic, and Terry Malts. Food will be available for purchase courtesy of Rosamunde Sausage Grill.
Christian Cunningham, General Manager of The Bay Bridged, explained the desire to create an event pairing local bands and local craft beers: “San Francisco’s music and beer scenes are both unbeatable when it comes to the talent and creativity of the people involved. The Bay Brewed is our way of bringing together people who like great music and people who like great beer for a unique event that couldn’t happen anywhere but San Francisco.”
Ticket prices are $45 and can be purchased online, or buy them at the door for $55. According to the ticket page, “[y]our ticket purchase includes performances by four great local rock bands — Weekend, Sleepy Sun, Extra Classic, and Terry Malts — and a commemorative mug that gets you unlimited beer tastings all day long from an array of awesome local breweries. In partnership with the City Beer Store and the SF Brewers Guild, you’ll be sampling beer from and meeting the brewers behind 21st Amendment, Anchor Stream, Beach Chalet, Lagunitas, Magnolia, Social Kitchen & Brewery, and Speakeasy, with more still to come.”
Thursday’s ad is a 1942 ad for Ballantine. Given that it’s the middle of World War 2, showing off new American technologies such as this beautiful new train engine — my son Porter would be salivating over it — makes sense, especially with that forward looking tagline: “How American it is … to want something better.”
