Wednesday’s ad is from 1954, and is for Ballantine Ale. With the slogan “Where hospitality is a fine art it’s Ballantine Ale 4 to 1, I can’t help but think the art they’re using to illustrate that point could have been better. Ah, well, I guess everybody’s an art critic.
Tuesday’s ad is from 1959, and is for Schaefer, when they were playing around — pun intended — with their round logo with the slogan “What d’ya hear in the best of circles.” Showing a round plate, a round hamburger and the round top of a beer can, it’s “Schaefer all around!”
Here’s some surprising news. Jennifer Talley, the award-winning brewer from Squatter’s Pub Brewery in Salt Lake City, Utah, is moving to Washington to take over brewing for RedHook at their Woodinville brewery. Specifically, her title will be “brewing operations manager.” Talley had been with Squatters for at least 20 years. According to Pro Brewer, who broke the news yesterday, “Squatter’s produces about 1,250 barrels of beer a year. Redhook? About 170,000 barrels of beer annually.”
More from Pro Brewer:
When Squatters opened a microbrewery in 1994, Talley became head brewer when the previous head brewer moved over to Salt Lake Brewing’s sister company, Utah Brewers Cooperative, which makes Wasatch Beers.
Talley got her first award — a gold medal at Denver’s Great American Beer Festival for a Vienna lager — in 1997. She proceeded to name her daughter Vienna when she was born two years ago. Since then, she has won numerous awards at the GABF, including another gold last weekend for Squatters’ Fifth Element ale. Squatters will search nationally and locally for a new head brewer.
Congratulations to Jennifer on the new gig.
Jennifer Talley (2nd from the left) after a panel discussion at GABF on women in brewing in 2007. From left: Carol Stoudt (from Stoudts Brewing), Talley, Natalie Cilurzo (from Russian River) and Teri Fahrendorf.
Monday’s ad is from 1957, and is for Budweiser, from their “Where There’s Life … There’s Bud” series. The woman playing cards has at least a king of hearts but she’s more interested in watching the beer being poured over her Ray-Bans to worry about concealing her cards. It is a nice looking pour, but doesn’t it look like if he doesn’t stop right now — and it doesn’t look the bottle’s anywhere near empty — it going to start pouring over the edge of the glass.
No, that’s not a judgment call on my part. I love Lagunitas. But that is the name of their new seasonal ale for 2011; Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale. They’re calling it that because the new beer is a temporary replacement for their popular — and usual holiday seasonal — Brown Shugga’, which they won’t be able to brew this year due to the installation of their new 250-barrel brewhouse.
From the press release:
It is a sad day at Lagunitas when we have to tell you that our favorite seasonal — Brown Shugga — will take a year off and come back in full force in the fall of 2012 after the installation of our new brewhouse.
A brand new beer that’s sure to please is our “Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale”….. it’s our BrownShugga’ substitute.
This beer is a Dry-Hopped ‘Cereal Medley’ of Barley, Rye, Wheat, and Oats…. full of complexishness from the 4 grains, and weighing in at 7.6% abv, it is mondo-dry-hopped for that big aroma and resinous hop flavor.
The entire project has a self-deprecating air about it, including the label notes, which are always written by Lagunitas founder Tony Magee. To wit:
This sad holiday season we didn’t have the brewing capacity to make our favorite seasonal brew, the widely feared BrownShugga’ Ale. You see, we had a couple of good years (thank you very much) and so heading into this season while we are awaiting a January delivery of a new brewhouse we are jammin’ along brewing 80 barrels of IPA and PILS and such every 3 hours. A couple of months back we realized that since we can only brew a mere 60 barrels of Shugga every 5 hours, that we were seriously screwed. For every case of Shugga’ brewed, we’d short 3 cases of our daily brews. The new brewhouse will help insure that this kind of failure never happens again. It’s a mess that we can not brew our BrownShugga’ this year and we suck for not doing it. There is nothing cool about screwing up this badly and we know it. Maybe we can sue our sorry selves. There is no joy in our hearts this holiday and the best we can hope for is a quick and merciful end. F*@& us. This totally blows. Whatever. We freaking munch moldy donkey butt and we just want it all to be over ….
My guess is that the new Lagunitas Suck Holiday Ale will be so good that we’ll all forgive them and Santa will not bring them all a lump of coal this Christmas. They do seem to be appealing to Santa’s better nature but putting a yummy-looking Santa cookie on the label. Perhaps they’ll leave some of them out on Christmas Eve so when Santa comes down the brewhouse chimney, he can eat himself.
This week’s work of art is by the Flemish artist Adriaen Brouwer, who was a part of the Baroque movement and lived from 1605-1638. He was especially known for his genre works and painted scenes of everyday life, which were very popular during his lifetime. According to Wikipedia; “Tradition has it that Brouwer himself spent much time in the alehouses of Flanders and Holland. His works are typically detailed and small, and often adopt themes of debauchery, drunkenness and foolishness in order to explore human emotions, expressions and responses to pain, fear and the senses.” One well known painting of Brouwer’s, In the Tavern, done in the last year of his life, 1638.
Referred to by one art critic as “a particularly picturesque scene,” he describes the painting:
Adriaen Brower has portrayed a group of individuals seated at a table. An innkeeper is serving them. The style is remarkably direct. The figures are in various positions, notably the figure in the middle who is raising his glass of beer with gusto. The artist has paid careful attention to his details: the remains of a meal on the table; the knife sticking out of the belt of the figure with his back to the viewer; and the carefully executed jug in the foreground.
While I like it, I think my favorite is one that’s known by various titles: The Bitter Drunk, the Bitter Draught, the Bitter Tonic, and the Bitter Potion. Painted in 1635, some accounts say it depicts a man having just taken some disagreeable medicine, while based on the titles, others believe simply strong, bitter beer. But I just love the expression on his face. Who among us hasn’t seen a bad drunk with that expression?
Yet another is known as Seated Drinkers, though its date is uncertain.
Another is Peasants Smoking and Drinking, painted in 1635.
And finally, Village Scene with Men Drinking, painted between 1631-35.
You can read more about Brouwer at his Wikipedia page and his biography at the Web Gallery. There’s another biography at Art Table, and also a small gallery of more of his work. You can see yet more of Brouwer’s paintings at the Web Gallery of Art, Olga’s Gallery, Wikimedia and ArtCyclopedia.
While doing some searching yesterday for beer pioneers, I found once more the book of photographs by David Bjorkman entitled MICROBREWERS: 1981-1996: A Photo History. Bjorkman co-founded New Brewer magazine, which is today the in house trade publication for the Brewers Association. The book came out a couple of years ago, self-published as a blurb book by Bjorkman, and I bought a copy right after I got a press release about it.
It’s filled with great black and white photographs of the very early days of craft beer and includes a lot of folks still making great beer today. Here’s how the book is described at the website:
In this homage to American microbrewers, international photojournalist David Bjorkman has created a photo gallery of brewers and breweries from 1981 to 1996. This collection of rare photos captures the early years of specialty brewing as the industry began its meteoric rise into the hearts of admiring beer-lovers nationwide.
Those were heady years filled with the pure joy of brewing. Brewers with big dreams opened their microbreweries, brewpubs and contract brewing companies on shoestring budgets, and succeeded in establishing their unique place in the history of American brewing. “Hand-crafted,” “fresh,” “flavorful” were how they described their beers, and it was the start of something special.
David’s photos document the pioneers and players who came to brewing from different backgrounds and disciplines, but who all had a passion for beer. Some became industry leaders, with their names, faces and beers known to beer-connoisseurs across the nation. Some shot to fame, but for lack of money or know-how fell into history. But all were dynamic and visionary, intense and driven to give beer their best.
Here are photos of the first microbrewers in the United States; of early Great American Beer Festivals; of Batch #176 being brewed at the Widmer Brewing Co.; of the Mendocino Brewing Co. team; and of hundreds of brewers across the country.
These photos provide a veritable “who’s who” of the early microbrewing industry, a history worthy of a place on every beer-lovers book shelf.
Below is a photo-collage video of many of the photos from the book. How many people can you identify?
Our 88th Guinness shows the sun beating down on a smiling pint of Guinness. With the long slogan, “When the sun says “Morning gone” Guinness Time will spur you on.” Makes me thirsty, just looking at it.
Friday’s ad is from 1963, and is for Budweiser cans, specifically six-packs of cans. You gotta love the sixties fashion and that hairdo. Doesn’t she look happy picking up two six-packs?
Our 56th Session is a nod of the head, acknowledging the positive aspects of the big, multinational brewers that we so often admonish and criticize. Our host, Reuben Gray at Tale of the Ale, calls his topic Thanks to the Big Boys, which he describes as follows:
What I’m looking for is this. Most of us that write about beer do so with the small independent brewery in mind. Often it is along the lines of Micro brew = Good and Macro brew, anything brewed by the large multinationals is evil and should be destroyed. Well I don’t agree with that, though there may be some that are a little evil….
Anyway I want people to pick a large brewery or corporation that owns a lot of breweries. There are many to chose from. Give thanks to them for something they have done. Maybe they produce a beer you do actually like. Maybe they do great things for the cause of beer in general even if their beer is bland and tasteless but enjoyed by millions every day.
While I don’t necessarily like most of the products made by the remaining larger brewers, what they do make is incredibly difficult to brew consistently. They have perfected the science side of brewing, however in doing so I believe they have lost a lot of the artistic side of the equation. To me the best beers contain an equal mix of both the brewer’s art and science. Craft brewers are the modern alchemists, turning base materials into liquid gold. One of alchemy’s goals was to find an “elixir of life.” In craft beer’s innovation, creativity, diversity; ultimately producing a panoply of flavorful beer, I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest they have found that mythic elixir.
But the science that the big brewers bring to to the table is, at least in part, what allowed the new generation of brewers to — as Sam Calagione is fond of saying — “let their freak flag fly.” From the dawn of the industrial revolution, all of the big brewers (which, for the most part, was ALL of them) introduced innovation after innovation into the brewing process. Refrigeration became commonplace. Thanks to Pasteur, yeast was finally understood and could be controlled. Industrialization allowed for so many advancements into the process that an ancient brewer would hardly recognize one today. From the mid-1800s to the present, brewing has changed more than in the thousands of year before that time. And for that, we can thank all of the big breweries who invested heavily in improving the way their beer was made. R&D suddenly became a much bigger part of an operating brewery, and the trade literature of that time is crammed full of one latest innovation after another.
In fact, the breweries that innovated better than their competitors and adapted to the new technologies began to dominate the beer industry. While there were certainly other factors at work, it does partly explain the sharp drop in the number of breweries in America which peaked around 1873 with 4,131. After the decade of the 1870s, improved efficiencies in the brewhouse meant that breweries could serve a wider geographic territory and the more successful started swallowing up the weaker. By 1900, the number of breweries was below 1,800.
For the next century, both before Prohibition and then after (ignoring that blip of re-openings in 1933) the number of operating breweries continued to fall until around 1980, when thanks to the new microbrewery revolution they began to rise once more. By that time it was less about efficiencies and more about the bigger trying to squelch the competition. Maybe it had always been strictly about “business,” but in the 1970s and 80s it seemed more more ugly, at least to me, as I watched one regional brewery after another close all around me.
But for their part, the remaining companies did keep the history of beer alive, with many having extensive libraries, collections of breweriana and a desire to celebrate the fact that the had survived at least up to that point. By the time I joined the beer industry in some fashion, and was no longer a civilian, there were only three really big brewers, and few more remaining regionals. Like the old nursery rhyme, Ten Little Indians, “then there were three.” The Big 3, as they were often referred to. It seemed like there would always be the Big 3. I was a surprised as anyone when Coors and Miller decided to merge their U.S. operations. “Three little Injuns out on a canoe, One tumbled overboard and then there were two.” I rarely hear anyone refer to the remaining ABI and MillerCoors as the Big 2, now they’re just the big brewers. And Pabst could easily become another third, if only they’d just buy their own brewery and become a legitimate player.
So I think we have much to thank the big boys for, from the science and modern technology they embraced to their reluctant role as the keepers of brewing history. Not to mention that they could easily have stopped the legal change that gave a tax break to small brewers way back when. It was certainly within their political clout to kill it, but they worked with the small brewers instead. Whether it was because they didn’t consider them a threat or whether they genuinely welcomed them into their fraternity it unclear, but doesn’t really matter in the end.
One thing many beer geeks, I think, don’t realize is that there are many, many really good people working at the big breweries. We spend so much energy criticizing their products, their advertising, their marketing, their toxic and often bullying practices, that many people overlook that fact. The big breweries are alike with the small ones insofar as the entire industry is comprised of a nearly universal group of good people, certainly a cut above any other I’ve worked in or knew people who did. And the beer business is a people business, as much as it’s about anything else. So while I may not raise a toast to everything they do, and I may not use one of their beers for that toast, I will very much raise a toast to the people, and especially the brewers, that comprise the largest segment of the beer industry: the big boys. This one’s for you.