This Monday we’re still celebrating beer in the Bay Area during SF Beer Week. That’s nothing new of course, as evidenced by this last century beer poster entitled Hurra! Bier!. That translates as “hooray beer,” and that’s our sentiment for this week, as well.
It only seems like yesterday that BrewDog’s 32% a.b.v. Tactical Nuclear Penguin captured the title of world’s strongest beer, besting German brewer Schorschbrau’s 31% beer. But now the German brewery has retaken the title with a whopping 40% monster of a beer. Schorschbrau describes the beer as follows:
The currently Strongest Beer in the World: 40% Alcohol
Available in 0.33 liter ceramic bottles, personally signed and hand-numbered by the Braumeister himself. Each bottle is sealed with wax by hand and comes in a wooden case with a transparent window on one side.
August Beer Examiner Lonnie Best has the full story as Germany wins another victory in the extreme beer wars.
Friday’s ad is for Brauerei Münchner Kindl, a German brewer. As far as I can tell, Vivator was a brand of beer sold by the brewery. There’s a small signature block in the lower right corner that appears to be where the artist’s signature would be, but I can’t find a large enough version of the ad to read it. I love how exuberant the man is, stein in hand, singing in what looks like it could be snow, with the Munich skyline behind him.
Today’s works of art is a stained glass sign from the late 19th century. It’s online because a professional photographer, Lar Matre, owns the sign and photographed it. It’s difficult to photograph stained glass, at least in my experience, and it is a great photo, but for my purposes I’m more impressed by the artistry of the signmaker. And I love stained glass, always have. But I imagine seeing the original of this, especially in the context of being at a German bar, would be stunning.
According to Matre, on his website, his “great grandfather bought it in the late 1800s in Germany, or so [he’s been] told.” The photograph itself can be purchased online at Fine Art America.
You can see much more of Matre photos at his website and his Flickr page. As for more stained glass, start with Wikipedia. But there’s also the Corning Museum of Glass, Vidimus and the Stained Glass Museum.
Reuters is reporting that the impending sale of Beck’s by Anheuser-Busch InBev has been scuttled, by ABIB. According to the weekly German magazine WirtschaftsWoche, the 1.7 billion Euro ($2.54 billion) contract was ready to be sign by purchaser U.S. buyout firm Bain Capital when ABIB walked away from the deal. WirtschaftsWoche is speculating that the earlier “sale of 13 eastern European breweries for 2.2 billion euros in October eased Anheuser-Busch InBev’s debt burden enough for the brewing giant to call off the Beck’s deal.” That’s all that’s known so far, but I’m, sure we’ll learn more on Monday.
The artist for today’s ad was born in the Alsace, in 1873, in what is today part of France. But two years before he was born, it belonged to the German Empire, who had annexed it after the Franco-Prussian War that began in 1870. Why is that relevant? Because Jean-Jacques Waltz, better known as “Hansi,” grew up hating the Germans and early in his career drew editorial cartoons poking fun at them. This won him few friends in Germany and in fact he even spent time in jail, “imprisoned several times by German authorities for making fun of the German military and professors.” In addition to putting down his captors, he wrote and drew scenes extolling Alsace’s virtues. One of his most famous works was a history of Alsace for kids by “Uncle Hansi,” L’Historie d’Alssace. The ad today features a girl in the traditional costume of the Alsace, and in fact it shows up in a number of Hansi’s works. I’m not sure if the illustration is advertising for a specific brewery of just beer from the Alsace generally. There is a brewery in Luttenbach (near the border between France in Germany in the Alsace) today known as Les Caves de la Brasserie. The date in the star, 1648, seems to suggest an older brewery, one that perhaps is no longer with us.
Today’s work of art is straight out of Germany’s history pages, and in fact I found it at the German History in Documents and Images website. It was by a relatively obscure German artist named Ernst Henseler. About all I could find out about him is that he was born in 1852 and died in 1940. Though I called it “Beer Evening” above, today’s painting is really titled Bismarck in Conversation with Reichstag Deputies at a Parliamentary Soirée and is believed to have been painted in 1894.
The painting is an illustration for the section of the GHDI entitled “Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany (1866-1890)” and under the sub-heading “Parties and Political Mobilization.” This also included the following description of the events in the painting:
This painting by Ernst Henseler (b. 1852) shows a parliamentary “beer evening” in the Imperial chancellery. These soirées provided Bismarck with an opportunity to convince parliamentary friends and foes alike that his policies deserved support. Sometimes consensus-building flowed in the opposite direction. Note that beer was more plentiful than food on such occasions, perhaps to the disappointment of one of Bismarck’s dogs, who was also on the invitation list.
The name Franziskaner today is most often associated with the Bavarian weiss beer brewed by Spaten, but originally it was a separate company known as Franziskaner-Leist-Bräu. The word “Franziskaner” means Franciscan, which is why there’s a monk on the labels nowadays. They merged with Spaten in 1922, so today’s ad is undoubtedly before then. Poster companies selling a reproduction of today’s ad all say it’s circa 1930, but given the earlier merger I’m not sure that can be right, unless of course it continued as a separate brand in their advertising. The artist’s name is either Maurus or Maueus, but that’s a close as I can pin it down.
My son Porter, being a somewhat typical 8-year old, loves all things that have to do with destruction. But unlike most kids his age, he has a fascination with historical disasters, especially the Titanic and the Hindenburg. He has at least two dozen books about the Titanic and other sea disasters and three about Zeppelins and the Hindenburg, along with several more general aviation books that include airships. So it was with great joy that I told him today that a bottle of beer that was salvaged from the Hindenburg disaster was going to be auctioned this Saturday.
Apparently, on the morning of May 6, 1937, firefighter Leroy Smith fortuitously came upon six bottles of Lowenbrau beer and a silver-plated pitcher. Thinking quickly, he buried them, returning later to dig up his booty. He gave five of the bottles to colleagues and kept one, along with the pitcher, for himself. Most of the rest have been lost, though one ended up in the Spaten museum in Munich (and I saw that one a few years ago when I visited Spaten). In 1966, Smith’s niece inherited the two Hindenburg souvenirs, and will now be auctioned by Henry Aldridge and Son of London. Coincidentally, they also specialize in items from the Titanic.
According to the BBC, the burnt Lowenbrau bottle is expected to fetch around £5,000 (or $8,337). The auction catalog for the bottle has the following information:
Hindenburg memorabilia: An extremely rare bottle of Lowenbrau Beer recovered from the wreck site of the Z129 Hindenburg, May 6th 1937 when it crashed at Lakehurst Naval Air Station. It was recovered by local Fire Chief Leroy Smith of the Matawan Fire Department New Jersey, along with 5 others which he handed out to each of his colleagues. The whereabouts of all of these bottles with the exception of one is unknown. He presented one to the Lowenbrau brewery in 1977 where it remains to the present day. The example being offered for auction is sealed, with some of its original label and shows evidence of heat damage. This lot is sold with a provenance package which include correspondence from the Lowenbrau brewery regarding the bottle of beer donated to their Museum, press cuttings and signed copy of a letter of provenance and an account of how Fire Chief Smith came to acquire the bottle.
All of the accounts of this story, such as by the BBC, the New York Post and ABC News each claim this will be the highest price paid for a bottle of beer, but in August of 2007, a bottle Allsopp’s Arctic Ale that sold on eBay for $503,300.
Here’s a better view of the Lowenbrau bottle.
Today’s beer ad is from Germany. I saw an original of it framed at the Franconian Brewery Museum in Bamberg when I was there a couple of years ago. It was originally an advertisement for Gaffel Kolsch. The text reads “Durst wird durch Bier erst schon,” which Google translates as Thirst Is Only Through Good Beer. That’s the best-sounding one I came across, though I suspect it’s closer to something like “Thirst Is Only Quenched Through Good Beer.” Other translators came up with “thirst becomes through beer first already,” “thirst becomes by beer only already” and “thirst with beer is just been.” If you’re fluent in German, let me know what a better translation is. Still, I love the idea of being out in the desert and the mirage you see is a giant glass of beer. What better sight could there be under such circumstances?
It was also sold as a poster without the text.
