Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Anchor Christmas Ale 1979

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xmas-christmas-ale
It’s day five of my jolly jog to Christmas featuring all 42 labels from Anchor’s Christmas Ale — a.k.a. Our Special Ale — all different beers (well, mostly different) and all different labels, each one designed by local artist Jim Stitt, up to and including this year’s label.

1979 was the fifth year that Anchor made their Christmas Ale, and it was similar to the four previous year’s beers, another variation based on Liberty Ale, with no spices added. This fifth label was “[i]nspired by the Original Christmas Ale Tree.”

Anchor-Xmas-1979

Anchor Christmas Ale 1978

By

xmas-christmas-ale
It’s day four of my marathon run to Christmas featuring all 42 labels from Anchor’s Christmas Ale — a.k.a. Our Special Ale — all different beers (well, mostly different) and all different labels, each one designed by local artist Jim Stitt, up to and including this year’s label.

1978 was the fourth year that Anchor made their Christmas Ale, and it was similar to the three previous year’s beers, a variation based on Liberty Ale, with no spices added. This fourth label was “[i]nspired by an evergreen in the Sierra Nevadas.”

Anchor-Xmas-1978

Anchor Christmas Ale 1977

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xmas-christmas-ale
It’s day three of my mad dash to Christmas featuring all 42 labels from Anchor’s Christmas Ale — a.k.a. Our Special Ale — all different beers (well, mostly different) and all different labels, each one designed by local artist Jim Stitt, up to and including this year’s label.

1977 was the third year that Anchor made their Christmas Ale, and it was similar to the two previous year’s beer, a variation based on Liberty Ale, with no spices added. This third label featured a “Douglas Fir,” or “Pseudotsuga menziesii.”

Anchor-Xmas-1977

Anchor Christmas Ale 1976

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xmas-christmas-ale
It’s day two of my march to Christmas featuring all 42 labels from Anchor’s Christmas Ale — a.k.a. Our Special Ale — all different beers (well, mostly different) and all different labels, each one designed by local artist Jim Stitt, up to and including this year’s label.

Although that’s not entirely true for 1976. Anchor’s historian, Dave Burkhart, explained that for this year the label was done by a different artist, Richard Elmore. “Fritz’s original idea was to use a different designer each year to design the new label but, although he has a great longtime working relationship with Richard to this day and the 1976 label turned out beautifully, he saw the wisdom and ease of just changing the tree and recipe each year and continued with one designer — Jim Stitt — from 1977 on.” A few years ago, Burkhart asked Stitt to draw another Giant Sequoia for a label so in that way, now it is possible for Jim to say, even though he could never say he designed all the Christmas labels, that he’d drawn all of the trees.

1976 was the second year that Anchor made their Christmas Ale, and it was similar to the previous year’s beer, which itself had been based on Liberty Ale, with no spices added. This second label featured a “Giant Sequoia,” or “Sequoiadendron giganteum.”

Anchor-Xmas-1976

Anchor Christmas Ale 1975

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xmas-christmas-ale
With 41 days until Christmas, 42 including today, I thought it would be fun to work through all 42 labels from Anchor’s Christmas Ale — a.k.a. Our Special Ale — all different beers (well, mostly different) and all different labels, each one designed by local artist Jim Stitt, up to and including this year’s label.

Jim-Stitt-and-Fritz-Maytag-1979-250
Jim Stitt and Fritz Maytag in 1979.

1975 was the first year that Anchor made their Christmas Ale, and it was apparently based on another beer they’d released earlier the same year, Liberty Ale, with no spices added. This first label featured a very simple silhouette of a Christmas tree.

Anchor-Xmas-1975

Möbius Beer

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mobius
Today is the birthday of mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, for whom several mathematical items are named, although the most famous is certainly the Möbius Strip. Although the Möbius Strip was discovered by two different mathematicians around the same year, 1858, it bears his name and not fellow German colleague Johann Benedict Listing.

A Möbius Strip “is a surface with only one side and only one boundary,” so that it looks like it turns in on itself, but if you could walk around on top of one, you’d never come to the end. “The Möbius strip has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It can be realized as a ruled surface.”

mobius-strip

I recalled seeing a famous beer label using a Möbius Strip, and a quick search revealed the one I was thinking of was Arizona Brewing’s flagship beer “A-1,” which used a multi-colored version.

A1-Label

Beer History has a good article about the brewery, A-1: The Western Way to Say Welcome
by Ed Sipos. The original A-1 label had an eagle on it, but by the 1950s Anheuser-Busch, which was spreading their tentacles nationally, decided to sue Arizona Brewing claiming the eagle on their label was too close to their own, and Arizona couldn’t afford to defend the lawsuit, and decided instead to simply change the label.

A-1-can
A can of A-1 from 1965-66.

And not too long ago, Tuscon-based Nimbus Brewery introduced a new version of A-1 Beer, though I’m not sure if it’s still being brewed.

Apparently there’s also a Mobius Infused Lager that looks like a gimmicky contract beer. It appears to be a generic lager “infused with taurine, ginseng, and caffeine.” Ugh, does that sound like a bad idea.

Harry Potter Beer

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harry-potter
Today, June 26, in 1997, the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in the United Kingdom. If that title looks wrong to you, that’s because in America it was titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone because the publisher “thought that a child would not want to read a book with the word ‘philosopher’ in the title.” They may have been right, but it’s still a little sad. At any rate, in the seven novels there was something called “Butterbeer,” described as a drink that “can be served either cold with a taste similar to cream soda or frozen as a slush with a butterscotch-like foam on top.” Basically, it’s fake beer for kids. More interestingly, a Los Angeles artist or designer by the name of Anita Brown did a series of imaginary labels for beers based on the titles of each the seven books.

harry-potter-beers

And here’s each title in order:

HP-stout

HP-amber

HP-pilsner

HP-lager

HP-porter

HP-hefe

HP-hops

A fun exercise, with some fairly clever names. I wonder if the beers she chose would pair with the individual stories themselves? I only read the first two books, but didn’t really care that much for them; they never really grabbed me the way they did a lot of people. Another, somewhat similar, series that was published around the same time, the Golden Compass and the His Dark Materials trilogy was, in my opinion, was far richer and more interesting, but Harry Potter certainly was a phenomenon and anything that gets more people reading is a great thing in my opinion. Happy Harry Potter Day.

Odds & Ends For The Next Session

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session-the
For 101st Session, our host will be Jack Perdue, who writes Deep Beer. For his topic, he’s asking us to look beyond what’s in the bottle, and to the bottle itself, along with the crown, the label, the carrier, the mother carton and all of the odds and ends, or detritus, that go into the beer’s packaging, or as he explains what he has in mind for the July Session, the “Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus,” which he describes below.

There are many great creative people involved in the beer industry: the brewers designing and creating the stuff of our attention, marketers bringing the product to market, graphic artists making the products attractive and informative and writers who tell the story of beer. The list goes on. And thus, many great products, that may or may not get your attention. The focus is on the liquid inside the bottle, can or keg, and rightly so. What about all the other products necessary to bring that beer to you? What about the things that are necessary but are easily overlooked and discarded. This months theme is, “Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus”.

Detritus, according to one definition in the Merriam Webster Dictionary is “miscellaneous remnants : odds and ends”. While the number and quality of our beer choices has certainly improved over the recent decade, have you paid any attention to the rest of the package. Those things we normally glance over and throw away when we have poured and finished our beer. These are sometimes works of art in themselves. Bottle caps, labels, six-pack holders, even the curvature of the bottle. For this month’s The Session theme, I’m asking contributors to share their thoughts on these things, the tangential items to our obsession. Do you have any special fetish with bottle caps, know of someone that is doing creative things with packaging, have a beer bottle or coaster collection.

So drink the beer, but then think about what’s left over when it’s gone.

bottles-colors

Let us know about the bits and pieces from your point of view. To participate in the July Session, leave a comment to the original announcement, with , on or before Friday, July 3.

beer-crown-rainbow

Patent No. 2710818A: Method And Apparatus For Simultaneously Washing Containers And Removing Labels Therefrom

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patent-logo
Today in 1955, US Patent 2710818 A was issued, an invention of Ralph J. Winters, assigned to Ballantine & Sons, for his “Method and Apparatus For Simultaneously Washing Containers and Removing Labels Therefrom.” There’s no Abstract, although in the description it includes this summary:

My present invention relates to the automatic washing of containers carrying labels and more particularly to a method for simultaneously washing such containers, removing and disposing of the labels as well as apparatus for carrying out the same.

In the art of packaging products, particularly products intended for human consumption, highly complex and expensive equipment for substantially automatically handling the containers has been provided. This is especially true in the brewing industry where machinery capable of handling many thousands of bottles per hour has been provided for automatically washing the bottles. In this industry containers such as bottles are used over and over again. Before each use each bottle is scrupulously cleaned. It is conventional for each bottle to have affixed thereto a paper label which washes off or otherwise becomes detached from the bottle during the washing process and settles downward in one or the other of the compartments of the washing machine. While the machines are provided with a dead space at the bottom of such compartments, nevertheless the accumulation of labels is so rapid that in a relatively short time they extend upward sufficiently far to impede the passage of the bottles. To avoid damage which may result therefrom, it has been customary to put the washing machine out of operation to permit manual cleaning and removal of the labels. Manual cleaning is, of course, time consuming and costly. Furthermore, because of the highly caustic washing solutions commonly utilized, care must be exercised in carrying out the removal of the labels to avoid injury to personnel during the operation.

Untitled
Untitled

Reservoir Dogs Beers

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reservoir-dogs
The debut film of auteur filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was the violent heist film Reservoir Dogs. I remember being blown away by it when I saw it in the theatre when it was released in 1992, and especially the stylish opening credits scene with the principal characters walking down an alley in slow-motion to the nearly forgotten 1970s hit Little Green Bag by the George Baker Selection.

One of my favorite devices is that the six characters involved in the heist are each given code names so they won’t accidentally reveal their names during the diamond robbery and be able to give away each other’s identities should they be caught. Here’s the main cast, in order of their appearance in the slow-motion opening credits:

  1. Harvey Keitel as Lawrence Dimmick: Mr. White
  2. Michael Madsen as Vic Vega: Mr. Blonde
  3. Chris Penn as Eddie Cabot: Nice Guy Eddie
  4. Steve Buscemi: Mr. Pink
  5. Lawrence Tierney as Joe Cabot
  6. Edward Bunker: Mr. Blue
  7. Quentin Tarantino: Mr. Brown
  8. Tim Roth as Detective Freddie Newandyke: Mr. Orange

reservoir-dogs-white
Earlier this month, Brazilian art student Peter de Andrade, for a school project created a series of beer labels based on the film, using “cães de aluguel,” which translates in Portuguese to, of course, Reservoir Dogs. The artist created the labels as if they were brewed by the Brazilian brewery Cervejaria Wäls, which each label and type of beer based on the film character’s code name color. As far as I know, Wäls was not involved and isn’t planning on making the Reservoir Dogs beers. Coincientally, there is a Reservoir Dogs Brewery in Slovenia.

Mr. White, a Pilsner
mr_white_beer___by_dandrade89-d8khyi4

Mr. Blonde, an Ale, presumably a Blonde Ale
mr_blonde_beer___by_dandrade89-d8khye2

Mr. Blue, a Weisss beer
mr_blue_beer___by_dandrade89-d8khyfr

Mr. Brown, a Stout
mr_brown_beer___by_dandrade89-d8khygh

Mr. Orange, an Amber Ale
mr_orange_beer___by_dandrade89-d8khyhg

It’s a pretty cool idea, and I’d love to see the actual beer made. There’s really only one question about all of this. Where the hell is Mr. Pink?