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Beer In Ads #489: For Pure Drink Get Rainier Beer

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Thursday’s ad is another ad for healthy beer, somewhat similar to yesterday’s Budweiser ad. This one is just a few years later, from 1907, and was sent to me by fellow blogger Lisa Grimm from WeirdBeerGirl (thanks Lisa). The ad is for Rainier Pale Beer, from Seattle Brewing & Malting Co., and shows a group of children using a giant beer bottle as a Maypole. Mother can be seen in the background, arriving on the scene with a tray full of beer bottles and glasses. Again, can you just imagine that ad today? The copy is equally interesting.

Pure Air, Pure Food, Pure Drink are essential to healthy growth … for Pure Drink get Rainier Pale Beer

Another beautiful sentiment.

Rainier-1907

Beer In Ads #488: The Ladies Home Journal Endorses Beer As Opposed To Patent Medicines

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Wednesday’s ad is a Ladies Home Journal (LHJ) ad from 1904 for Budweiser. It’s an interesting ad. First of all, check out the cage and cork on a Bud bottle. That’s not something you see every day. And the endorsement by LHJ is priceless. Can you imagine this today?

Mr. Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, in a page article in the May issue gives a list of 36 medicines, with official analysis, asserting them to contain 12 to 47 per cent. of Alcohol!

The ad goes to suggest the reader think of beer, with a mere 2 to 5 percent, is nothing compared to many of the medicines that mothers might give their child, some of which are “stronger than whisky.” At this point, Budweiser suggests that their beer is much healthier even than water with its low alcohol content.

Budweiser contains only 3-89/100 per cent. of alcohol. It is better than pure water because of the nourishing qualities of malt and the tonic properties of hops.

Budweiser is pre-eminently a family beverage; its use promotes the cause of true temperance—it guards the safety of health and home.

Now that’s a beautiful sentiment.

1904Budweiser

Beer In Ads #486: Geo. Winter Bock Beer

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Monday’s ad is a 19th century ad for a New York brewery, the Geo. Winter Brewing Co. According to the ad itself, the brewery was located on 55th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. It’s from around 1900, plus or minus. The ad shows “Columbia raising a glass of beer, posed with a keg and a billy goat, the symbol of bock beer.”

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Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia

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Peter Damerow, from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin, has published online a lengthy paper about the origins of Sumerian brewing. Entitled Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia, it’s part of The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). The opening sentence gives a flavor of its purpose. “The following paper is concerned with the technology of brewing beer in the Sumerian culture of ancient Mesopotamia, which we know about from cuneiform texts of the 3rd millennium BC. and from reminiscences in later scribal traditions which preserved the Sumerian language and literature.”

It’s broken down in to seven sections:

  1. Introduction
  2. Overview of the sources
  3. Beer types and ingredients in proto-cuneiform documents
  4. Beer types and ingredients in the Old Sumerian period
  5. Beer types and ingredients in the neo-Sumerian period
  6. The brewing of beer
  7. What kind of beer did the Sumerians brew?

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Fig. 1: Impression of a Sumerian cylinder seal from the Early Dynastic IIIa period (ca. 2600 BC; see Woolley 1934, pl. 200, no. 102 [BM 121545]). Persons drinking beer are depicted in the upper row. The habit of drinking beer together from a large vessel using long stalks went out of fashion after the decline of Sumerian culture in the 2nd millennium BC.

I confess I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I did download the pdf of it so I can put it on my iPad. Still, just from skimming it appears fairly interesting, and a worthy piece to read over the holidays.

Real Bar Flies Prefer Pale Ale

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A new study was reported last week by NPR about research into why insects are drawn to beer. When I was a kid, I remember my Great Aunt placing beer in shallow bowls and laying them on the floor around her house to attract, and drown, pesky insects. I’d always assumed that was because of the sugars in beer and the fact that many, if not most, insects are drawn to sweet flavors.

So scientists in Southern California looked closer at this phenomenon and published their results in Nature Neuroscience. The article, inscrutably titled Evolutionary Differences in Food Preference Rely on Gr64e, a Receptor for Glycerol, finds insights “into the molecular mechanisms of feeding acceptance of yeast products and raise the possibility that Gr64e contributes to specific evolutionary variations in appetitive selectivity across Drosophila species.”

Happily, the NPR article, clears up what that means:

Since flies are well known to like sugar, it could just be that flies like beer because they can detect some residual sugar in beer. But [researcher Anupama] Dahanukar suspected that might not be the case. So she planned an experiment. She would give the flies a choice between beer and sugar water, and see which they preferred.

“We selected a pale ale, and the main reason was because pale ales have very lower sugar contents,” says Dahanukar. “So we were trying to identify other chemicals — chemicals other than sugars that taste good to flies.”

Zev Wisotsky, a graduate student in Dahanukar’s lab, actually performed the experiment. “I remember it was a Saturday,” he says. “I grabbed the beer at the grocery store, came into the lab, and performed the two-choice assay.”

The two-choice assay forces the flies to choose between a sip of beer and a sip of sugar water. The flies went for the beer.

Figure 1: Feeding preference to yeast fermentation products is reduced in Gr64e mutants.
Figure 1 FINAL 9-2
(a) Feeding preference of wild-type flies (w1118) for beer (Bass & Co., Pale Ale) in a binary choice assay. For each concentration, n = 6. PI, preference index. (b) Feeding preference for beer, tested against 5 mM sucrose, in D. melanogaster…

Once they established the fly’s preference for beer, the scientists set about trying to figure out why.

“The answer, as it turns out, was quite simple,” says Dahanukar. “It’s a molecule called glycerol, which is made by yeast during fermentation.” Glycerol is the stuff that’s used in antifreeze. It actually tastes sweet, but it’s not a sugar.

Dahanukar and [researcher Zev] Wisotsky even found the particular gene responsible for flies’ ability to detect glycerol. When they created flies missing that gene, and gave them the sugar water-beer choice, the flies went for the sugar water.

Apparently, the ultimate purpose of the research is to understand how insects perceive chemicals in the hopes of designing better insect repellents. But for my money, I love the fact that they love Pale Ale.

Beer Birthday: Crazy Dave Heist

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Today is also the 55th birthday of “Crazy” Dave Heist, former owner of Hoptown Brewing in Pleasanton, California. Dave was brewing at Santa Cruz Aleworks for a time, but is now happily retired, at least for the time being. Join me in wishing Dave a very happy birthday.

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Out in front of The Bistro in Hayward at the 2008 Wood Aged Beer Festival. From left: Jeremy Cowan, owner of He’Brew, Judy Ashworth, Dave Heist, and Zak, also from He’Brew.

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“Crazy Dave” at the Mammoth Lakes Bluesapalooza in 2007.

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Kenny Gross and Dave last year at the Bistro’s Wood Aged Beerfest.

Damaged Lagunitas Brewing Equipment At The Dock

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You may recall that earlier this month, the Lagunitas Brewhouse [Was] Destroyed At Sea. Lagunitas owner Tony Magee, through his Twitter Feed, just posted a number of new photos of the equipment as it arrived at the Port of Stockton this weekend. I’d say my usual “enjoy,” but it’s a little on the painful-to-see side.

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The Lauter Tun at the Port of Stockton.

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The most-damaged side.

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A close-up of the damage.

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And this is a shot of “the crane what done it,” that is smooshed the brewhouse lauter tun.

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And yet another damaged piece of equipment.

Beer In Art #150: Jan Luyken’s The Brewer

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This week’s work of art is by the same artist as last week, Dutch illustrator and engraver Jan Luyken. His watercolor painting, The Brewer, was originally done as a study for an engraving he was working on for a larger project, a book entitled “Het Menselyk Bedryf,” or “Book Of Trades.”

Luyken-brewer

Both the watercolor and the subsequent engraving, which is below, was completed in 1694.

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The final engraving was included in The Book of Trades, and looked like this in one edition.

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The Curious Observer, writing about Luyken’s Brewer, has the following:

At the time, low-alcohol beers, safer to drink than water, were the common everyday beverage of everyone, including children, who ate bierenbrood, bread boiled in beer.

Luyken’s image shows the brewer’s two biggest problems: barrels, and clean, fresh water. Both were scarce in Holland, the water because of textile-industy pollution and sea salt that leaked into the system of canals. Fresh water had to be imported in special ships and carefully poured into barrels.

And I also found a version of the Brewer that has been colored.

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You can read Luyken’s biography at Wikipedia or at Scroll Publishing. You can also see the rest of the engravings from The Book of Trades and you can see other works at WikiGallery. Also, his biblical set, Martyrs Mirror, from 1685, can be seen at Bethel College’s website.