Thursday’s ads are for Carling Black Label, both featuring beer and cheese. The first, which appeared in Life magazine in April of 1963. Nice to see even that far back someone was putting cheese and beer together.
The second appeared in a June 1962 issue of Life, and featured a different cheese. Both are part of their series using the slogan “People like it.”
According to a new poll taken on behalf of the Rasmussen Reports by Pulse Opinion Research, When Americans Drink Beer, They Go Domestic, or as the St. Louis Business Journal spun it, America’s Favorite Beer is Bud. (And thanks to James L. for sending me the story.)
I’m sure the poll is statistically accurate, they are professionals and this is their business, but it’s a little hard to swallow that a survey of 345 people can truthfully speak for 311 million Americans. But here’s what they claim to have learned from the answers to four questions gleaned from those 345 random adults, as reported in the St. Louis Business Journal.
Nearly seven in 10 American beer drinkers are choosing domestic beers over imported ones, while only 22 percent like imported beers more.
However, those people are more evenly divided when it comes to what kind of beer to drink: 49 percent prefer a light beer, while 46 percent prefer a regular one.
When given a choice, 25 percent said say they are most likely to drink Budweiser. Second choice is Miller (19 percent) and third place went to Sam Adams (7 percent). Coors, Heineken, Corona, Pabst and Guinness are next, in descending order, with each garnering between 3 percent and 6 percent. Another percent choose some other brand.
Miller is the top choice of 26 percent of male beer drinkers, while one-out-of-three women prefer a Bud.
Here’s how it shakes out.
But most of the conclusions of this little polls seem odd, almost misleading, given the questions and the way in which they were asked. Here’s what people heard when Pulse phoned potential participants with this survey.
Question one seems fine (51% home; 38% in a bar or restaurant; I don’t know where the other 11% are doing their drinking, maybe both?), but it’s fairly straightforward.
For question two, the language used seems strange. Few people outside the industry use the term “domestic,” I would think, to describe American beer. But within it, it has a very specific meaning. It’s essentially beer made by one of the big brewers, as separate and distinct from craft beer. 69% said they prefer domestic, while 22% said imported, with another 9% holding a least a third choice. But what that really means, given the muddled definitions, is hard to tell.
Question three is simply personally obnoxious, because I utterly hate the very notion of low-calorie light beer. To me it’s an abomination, albeit a very popular one. So the fact that “49% choose a light beer, while 46% prefer a regular one,” is probably right but it’s just sad to me, not to mention a triumph of marketing.
But the last question is quite telling. By giving just eight choices in a multiple choices fashion, the survey leads the people being polled to pick one of the those beers, even if it’s not their favorite. Most people likely chose one from among the eight, as opposed to their favorite among the literally 10,000+ beers brewed or sold in America. That they didn’t even offer an “other” choice further makes this question somewhat misleading, and I can only imagine how a multiple choice question differs from a more open one. But what’s perhaps more interesting is that even trying to pigeonhole the answers to question four, 25% said they’d “choose some other brand.” So while the St. Louis newspaper spins this poll by claiming American’s “top choice is Budweiser” (and curiously omit the percentage number who chose “other”), an equal number prefer “not Budweiser,” that is some other beer not among the limited choices of the poll.
I realize that the macro brewers do continue to hold a commanding market share and in the poll does reflect that. For many years, the Top 5 selling beers in the U.S. have been the following.
After that, it changes a little bit from year to year, but usually the bottom five include some combination of Heineken, Busch and Busch Light, Natural Light, Michelob Ultra Light and Miller High Life. Samuel Adams, Guinness and Yuengling usually fall somewhere in the 11-15 rankings. So the poll does reflect beer sales, which is what you’d expect. “Favorite” and “best-selling” are not exactly the same, but I’d argue that sales is how people vote for the favorites. In the real world, outside polls, people vote with their wallets.
So in a somewhat accurate poll that reflects current market share patterns, one in four respondents eschewed the eight choices given them (which wasn’t even an option) and chose a beer not on the list, which was equal to the top vote getter, Budweiser. It seems to me the headline should have been more along the lines of “Equal Number of Americans Prefer A Beer Other Than Bud As Pick Budweiser As Their Favorite.” Or even better, as suggested by James Wright, “35% of Americans prefer NOT Bud, NOT Miller and NOT Coors.” Alright, they’re both a little unwieldy, but to me that’s the biggest takeaway from this poll.
Wednesday’s ad is for the third, and last, one of Anheuser-Busch’s series of beers they marketed under the name “American Originals,” beginning in the fall of 1995. This one was Muenchener, a “Munich Style Amber.” Here’s what a press release said about it at the time:
Muenchener was first brewed in 1893 — and called “Columbian Muenchener” at the time — after Adolphus Busch challenged his brewmasters to develop the world’s best muenchener-style beer. Until then, the world’s best muenchener beers were brewed in Munich, Germany, but Busch set out to change that. His brewmasters succeeded, and Busch’s Columbian Muenchener was awarded a gold medal at the 1893 Columbian World’s Exposition in Chicago.
Muenchener is a medium-to-full bodied beer with a deep, copper color. It possesses a rich, creamy and roasted malt flavor, and its aroma is malty, with a light roast and spice characteristic.
“In brewing Muenchener, we use five varieties of malt, including Munich-style malt and other roasted barley malts, as well as a blend of seven domestic and imported hops,” Kahn said.
Apparently prom season and graduation time is coming up, because the scary statistics that always accompany this time of year are also starting to appear. Now before the angry comments start filling my queue, I’m not encouraging drinking at either, and especially not drinking and driving, no matter what the occasion. There are, however, some curious features about this time of the year about how we still try to scare our kids into staying sober for prom and graduation that bear scrutiny.
The first missive of Spring comes from Join Together, with the requisite scary headline School Nurse: It’s Not OK to Give Teens Alcohol for Prom and Graduation. Apparently, we’re more likely to listen up if it’s coming from the school nurse. And while I recognize that in many states it’s actually illegal to give your own underage kids alcohol, I’m pretty sure that these days it’s almost always illegal to give alcohol to kids who are not your own. But that’s all year round, and I have to believe that most adults who engage in purchasing or furnishing alcohol to their kids or their kids’ friends at this time of the year, do so with the full knowledge that what they’re doing is not acceptable in today’s social climate, not to mention its illegality.
But here’s the thing, the news report by the school nurse is based on another study, by an insurance company no less, and that headline is Study Shows 90 Percent of Teens Admit Stronger Likelihood of Drinking and Driving on Prom Night, Yet Less Than One-Third See Dangers. According to Liberty Mutual’s study, in “a national survey of more than 2,500 eleventh and twelfth graders, 90 percent of teens believe their counterparts are more likely to drink and drive on prom night and 79 percent believe the same is true for graduation night. Yet, that belief does not translate to concern, as only 29 percent and 25 percent of teens say that driving on prom night and graduation night, respectively, comes with a high degree of danger.” They claim that’s “new research,” as if we didn’t know teenagers believe themselves immortal and are likelier to take risks than the more mature segment of the population. It’s one of the features of being a teenager. But okay, it’s not bad advice to remind teens about the difference between perceived risks and reality, but it’s just so heavy-handed, so black and white. They’ve been using the same scare tactics since I was going to prom over thirty years ago. Here’s the latest version:
[T]here were 380 teen alcohol-related traffic deaths during prom and graduation season (April, May and June) in 2007, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports 1,009 total teen fatalities (alcohol and non-alcohol-related) in motor vehicle crashes during those same months in 2008.
Alarmingly, parents may be unwitting enablers of teen drinking and driving: more than one in three teens (36 percent) say their parents have allowed them to attend parties where it is known that alcohol will be served, and 14 percent say their parents have, in fact, hosted such teen gatherings.
But it just strikes me as the razor blade in the apple. Every Halloween, that story gets trotted out to scare kids into being responsible about accepting candy from strangers during the holiday that’s designed for just that. As a kid, I remember being nervous about that the first year, but after hearing it over and over again, and never once seeing any real proof of a razor in an apple, any meaningful fear tended to dissipate. I can’t be the only adult who remembers that as a child there was a great sense that adults were constantly lying to us about the dangers of the world, among many other things less threatening.
But let’s look at those scary statistics. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2008, there were 21,469,780 prom-age teenagers in America. So that means 0.0017% died in “alcohol-related traffic” accidents and 0.0046% in “alcohol and non-alcohol-related” traffic accidents. Now as a parent, I agree that even one needless death is too many, and I’d be inconsolable if it happened to one of my children. But the point is that the danger is relatively low compared to other dangers every person in the world faces every day. That seems so obvious to me I’m not even going to go looking for those, because any rational person should recognize that.
Yet here we are again chastising parents for trying to do something about it that’s not just the knee jerk “just say no” total-abstinence policy that we’re so fond of here in the U.S. Our response is simply disproportionate to the true danger, and I can’t help but believe the reason is because it’s — gasp — alcohol and we’ve lost the ability to be rational about it.
The fact that according to the scary news reports, this is still claimed to be a huge problem nearly 30 years after MADD supposedly set everybody straight and awareness of the issue of drunk driving is at an all-time high, should convince anyone that there is nothing we can do to stop people, even underage kids, from drinking. Prohibition didn’t work. More awareness didn’t work. The “just say no” campaign didn’t work. Kids are still drinking now, as they did nearly 35 years ago when I graduated from high school.
Back in those dark ages, it was quite common for parents to be at high school parties where alcohol was being served, at least where I grew up in suburban Pennsylvania. And most of the other parents in the community were not only aware of it but supported it. I have to laugh when the modern reports refer to such situations as making the parents “unwitting enablers” when there was not one driving fatality from the dozens and dozens of such events I attended in my youth. Parents took keys, and wouldn’t let anyone drive home if they were unable to. It made things safer, despite this weird notion today that the opposite is true.
I recall one of the several graduation parties I went to as an 18-year old, the parents had a few kegs and even entertainment for us. The girl’s father was a movie projectionist and had a movie theater set up in their basement, and he was showing Young Frankenstein, which was only a few years old at that time (and this was in the days before videotape). It was great fun. I walked home that evening, retrieving my car the next morning. No harm, no foul. No one at that party got into any trouble. Imagine that?
Just lucky? Maybe, but I don’t think so. It was most certainly a different time, but that doesn’t mean the parents in my youth didn’t care about their children every bit as much as today’s parents. It feels quite insulting to read today’s adults, who were raised no doubt by loving parents, imply otherwise. You read these press releases, studies and propaganda and start to get the impression that any parent who gives their kid a drink is a monster. These same reports seem to see parents giving alcohol to kids in only one way, as completely irresponsible. But as with the other recent study I wrote about last week, there’s no suggestion that education could be part of it, or that parents might be better judges of how to raise their own children. Or that a party with alcohol that’s supervised could be preferable to kids drinking completely unsupervised, underground. Yet how could it not?
Yes, there’s no doubt our job as parents involves keeping our children safe, during prom season, graduation and every other time of the year, throughout their entire lives, really. But when it comes to alcohol, I’m quite tired of how the anti-alcohol abstinence policy seeps its way into every nook and cranny, particularly when it’s so ineffective. It doesn’t work on college campuses, where all it does is drive underage drinking underground, where it’s unsupervised and as a result far more dangerous. There’s no reason to believe it works any better at the high school level, either. High school kids often struggle with where they fit in society. They’re not really children anymore, yet they’re not quite adults, either. They often want to become adults faster than their parents and society will allow. It’s only natural. They see adults celebrate all manner of occasions — holidays, births, deaths, birthdays, achievements, good news, etc. — with alcohol. For them, the prom and graduation are reasons to celebrate. They want to be adults, they want to act like adults. So they want a drink, too. But many, if not most, are not ready to handle the personal responsibility that comes with drinking alcohol. In part, that’s because no one has taught them anything about how to accomplish that, and in fact even teaching them about alcohol is forbidden in many places and jurisdictions.
So when we instead keep creating policies that keep that status quo, in fact make it harder for parents to be in a position to supervise or educate their own kids about alcohol, I can’t help but wonder what’s really going on. It has to be more about control or ideology or something, because it’s not what’s best for the kids, despite being framed that way. It’s that old “it’s for the kids” canard that’s become so popular in anti-alcohol propaganda. But this goes even a bit further, as it tells parents not only to talk to their kids, not buy them alcohol and don’t let them drive after drinking — all good advice — but also that they shouldn’t do what they feel is best if it deviates from the party line (or perhaps “no party line”). It presumes all adult supervision is bad, and then tries to back up that claim with nonsense. It creates a black and white ideological world where only abstinence is approved. But it doesn’t matter how many more flawed studies or well-meaning advice from school nurses is doled out, “just say no” just doesn’t work. Could we please stop pretending it does, ignoring other approaches that might have a better chance at being effective? Why don’t we try “just say know” for a change. After all, school is supposed to be about learning, about preparing kids to become independent adults, productive members of society. Why not let that include a little alcohol education, too. That might go a long way toward keeping our youth safe on prom night and graduation, too.
Tuesday’s ad is for another one of Anheuser-Busch’s series of beers they marketed under the name “American Originals,” beginning in the fall of 1995. This one was Black & Tan, a “Porter.” Here’s what a press release said about it at the time:
Adolphus Busch’s Black and Tan was first brewed in 1899 as an American porter, and was particularly popular on draught in saloons. Black and Tan is a full-bodied porter with a bit more malt to soften the flavor, and it has a deep reddish-brown color. It is a hearty, rich and dark ale that features taste characteristics of roasted malt, chocolate and coffee. Its aroma combines roasted malt, chocolate, fruity and slightly floral characteristics.
Black and Tan is brewed using a true English ale yeast, a blend of chocolate, caramel and two other varieties of roasted malt, and a combination of Washington State hops and imported hops.
“Black and Tan is a very hearty, rich, and dark beer that is a perfect complement to foods of a similar nature, such as meat stews, chilis and strong chocolate-flavored desserts,” Kahn said.
The biennial Toer de Geuze, or Tour de Gueuze, took place last week in Belgium. In a news report on Flemish National Television, both our own Steve Shapiro, from Beer by Bart, and Pete Slosberg, founder of Pete’s Wicked Ales, are interviewed in the piece. And Pete’s wife, Amy Slosberg, can be seen nursing her recently broken leg. Looks like they had a great time.
Monday’s ad is for one of Anheuser-Busch’s series of beers they marketed under the name “American Originals,” beginning in the fall of 1995. This one was Faust, a “Devilish All-Malt Lager.” Here’s what a press release said about it at the time:
Faust was first brewed in 1885 by Adolphus Busch for his good friend Tony Faust to serve at Faust’s renowned St. Louis Oyster House and Restaurant. The brand was initially sold only in Faust’s restaurant, but it became so popular that it was made available on a much wider basis in subsequent years.
“Faust is an all-malt lager that is brewed using only the richest two-row, dry-roasted barley and a blend of distinctive imported Bohemian and Washington State hops,” said Dan Kahn, the Anheuser-Busch brewmaster responsible for American Originals’ development.
The May 2011 standings will soon be released for Wikio’s Beer Blogs. Stan at Appellation Blog got a sneak peak at the new rankings, so here’s what happened to the Top 20 over last month:
| 1 | Brookston Beer Bulletin (+1) | 2 | Beervana (-1) |
| 3 | The New School (+1) |
| 4 | Brewpublic (-1) |
| 5 | A Good Beer Blog (+1) |
| 6 | Appellation Beer: Beer From a Good Home (-1) |
| 7 | Drink With The Wench (+/-0) |
| 8 | Seen Through a Glass (+1) |
| 9 | The Daily Pull (+1) |
| 10 | Oakshire Brewing (Not in Top 20 for Apr.) |
| 11 | Washington Beer Blog (-3) |
| 12 | The Session Beer Project (-1) |
| 13 | KC Beer Blog (+3) |
| 14 | Seattle Beer News (-2) |
| 15 | It’s Pub Night (-2) |
| 16 | brewvana (Not in Top 20 for Apr.) |
| 17 | Beer 47 (+2) |
| 18 | Beer Therapy (+2) |
| 19 | Beer-Stained Letter (Not in Top 20 for Apr.) |
| 20 | The Not So Professional Beer Blog (-3) |
Ranking made by Wikio
As usual, I added the relative movements of each blog from last month. This month, three new blogs made an appearance in the Top 20, some for the first time. Another curious change is that #1 & #2, #3 & #4, and #5 & #6 each switched places. As always, I continue to stress that this is just a bit of fun and that we shouldn’t take it too seriously, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to be back at #1 again. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
This week’s work of art is by the Dutch artist Pieter de Hooch who was active during the time period known as the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century. The painting, completed between 1658-1660, is entitled Un homme fumant et une femme buvant dans une cour a Delft (which is translated as Man Smoking and Woman Drinking in a Courtyard in Delft). The original painting is in the Mauritshuis in the Hague.
The woman looks positively modern, almost like she’s savoring the aroma of the beer before taking her first sip.
You can see more of Pieter de Hooch’s work at the Artchive, the Artcyclopedia, Olga’s Gallery and the Web Gallery of Art.
A gentle reminder that the first Friday in May is less than a week away, and that means it will be time for the next Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday. I’ll be your host for the 51st Session, and I’m making it as difficult as possible, though not on purpose, I assure you. I thought it would be fun to take things a step farther and really do something different and challenging. So check out the original announcement for the full details, but in a nutshell here’s the dealio:
That’s the easy part. Now here’s where I make things a little trickier. As soon as I can, probably Saturday morning May 7, I’ll post the round-up with a list of all the beers that every participant thought worked best with each cheese. Two weeks later, I’ll be hosting Session #51.5. Here’s how to then take part in round two:
Even with making it a tad more complicated, I think it should be great fun to really dig in and experiment and learn about how best to pair cheese and beer together. What works and what doesn’t through trial and error will always trump abstract philosophies of how to pair the two.
So spread the cheese .. er, the word. Get some cheese and some beer, and start eating and drinking the two. I hope to hear how it went next Friday, May 6, for the Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off.
* NOTE: I’ve heard that many people have had some trouble finding some or all of the recommended cheeses. Sorry about that. I really thought they’d be easier to find. But don’t stress about it, using a substitute will be just fine. Please don’t let that keep you from participating. Hopefully, all of you can find a blue cheese, an aged cheddar cheese and a goat cheese to pair with some beer for this Session. I’m looking forward to hearing about how everybody’s tastings went.