Monday’s ad is another one for Rheingold Beer, this one from 1955, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Nancy Woodruff. In this one, Nancy’s wearing a wide grin and a hat that would look better on Gilligan. In her left hand, she’s raising a letter “D” and she’s holding a letter “R” in the other. I wonder what she’s trying to spell?
Sunday’s ad is again for Rheingold Beer, this one from 1957, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Margie McNally. This one shows her sitting by the side of a pond next to a birch tree in a striking light blue dress with white polka dots, holding a matching hat in her hand. Behind her there’s a white swan gliding by. Despite the idyllic setting, for the second day in a row there’s not a hint of a beer anywhere to be seen.
Here’s a pretty cool historical artifact, from the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. It’s a print that was created in 1808 by London publisher Thomas Tegg. It’s printed on woven paper, an “etching with stipple” and is hand-colored. The “plate mark is 25 x 35.2 cm.,” on a sheet of paper 27 x 28 cm, and the plate is numbered 151 in the upper righthand corner. When new it sold for one shilling, but I’m guessing it goes for a bit more now. It’s title is “Sir John Barleycorn — Miss Hop — (and their only child) — Master Porter” and is further “dedicated to the publicans of London.” Ah, they had a baby and named it Porter, too. Small world.
Saturday’s ad is for Rheingold Beer, from 1956, and features Miss Rheingold from that year, Hillie Merritt. Wearing a lovely pink ensemble, she’s tending quite the colorful garden of yellow tulips and other spring flowers. After filling her basket with freshly cut flowers, I hope at least she’ll be going to get a beer now.
Friday’s ad is for Whitbread, from 1965. It seems to be a play on “what the butler saw, ” instead it’s “What the Duchess Saw,” through the keyhole, which is in fact the butler pouring himself a bottle of the Duke’s Whitbread beer. He sure looks happy, doesn’t he? Hopefully he’s off the clock.
I suspect I’m not the only man in the world whose wife loves Jane Austen. And I further would not be surprised to learn that I’m not alone in not feeling quite the same level of joy at every new film or television adaptation of one of her works. (Is that enough “nots” in one sentence?) Oh, I’ve enjoyed a few of the costume dramas, I confess. I thought “Clueless” was quite enjoyable. So I don’t want you to think I’m an irredeemable boor. I’ve suffered through — ahem, I mean seen — most of them, and it’s not been as horrible as, say, “Dallas” or “Knot’s Landing” or any of a number of similar dreck.
But my interest in Jane Austen just shot up 99%, thanks to an article posted by BBC Magazine yesterday, Beer: The Women Taking Over the World of Brewing. It’s a great article all on it’s own, one of the few to treat the subject of women in beer with a decent amount of respect, for a change. But what caught my attention was a sidebar about Jane Austen by alcohol historian Jane Peyton.
It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged — Jane Austen not only drank beer but brewed it too.
As a teenager she would have learned how to make beer by helping her mother in the Hampshire vicarage where she grew up.
Brewing was part of household duties and even the women of genteel 18th Century families such as the Austens would know how to do it, even if the chores were sometimes delegated to domestic staff.
In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane wrote “and I that have the great cask, for we are brewing spruce beer again….”
As in most houses small beer (low alcohol) was served at the Austen dining table as a safe source of drinking water for all members of the family — children too — so Jane would certainly have tasted the results of her labour.
It certainly makes sense, though I’d never really stopped to think about it before. Austen apparently mentioned her brewing efforts in letters to her sister Cassandra. In one of them she mentions small beer while in two others she talks about her spruce beer.
Austen also mentions spruce beer in her 1815 novel, “Emma.”
“But one morning — I forget exactly the day — but perhaps it was the Tuesday or Wednesday before that evening, he wanted to make a memorandum in his pocket-book: it was about spruce-beer. Mr. Knightley had been telling him something about brewing spruce-beer, and he wanted to put it down….”
And according to “Cooking with Jane Austen,” when the Austen family lived at Stoneleigh, her mother wrote about the “mansions ‘strong beer’ and ‘small beer’ cellars.” And Mrs. Austen also “brewed beer at Steventon in the last years of the eighteenth century and at Chawton cottage many years later.”
It almost makes me want to read her again … nah. Still, she’s now a bit more interesting.
Thursday’s ad is for Schlitz, from 1967. I can’t be the only one who finds clowns creepy, and in fact I had a roommate in the late 1980s who was completely terrified of them. So I have to wonder about the logic of using them to sell beer. I guess some people actually like them, don’t they? But I especially like this confusing statement. “The beer that takes 1,174 careful steps.” I can’t wait to see their brewing manual. It must be a phone book. How on earth could they have that many specific procedures?
Wednesday’s ad is also for Budweiser, this one from 1967. I understand the logic to their game of checkers, but the way I see it, everybody loses.
Tuesday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1944. Showing an old railroad scene and the tagline. “When Buffaloes Stopped the Iron Horse … Travelers Were Patient.” In the upper righthand corner, there’s also a box that says. “Travel Only When Necessary,” because of restrictions on vacations to save resources for the war effort. But read the copy and it’s almost funny to hear them equate not complaining and being patient with being “a good soldier.”
Today’s beer video is a short film about prohibition and its effects. Entitled Prohibition: The Forgotten Crusade, it was created by Jared K. Productions. They originally uploaded it in 2007 but because it uses old footage, it looks much older than that, so when it was actually produced I can’t say.