Wednesday’s ad is for Genesee Beer, from 1961 — 50 years ago. Showing a very odd-looking couple in front of an antique car — Model T? [What I don’t know about cars would fill a book.] They just look way too happy, especially him. He looks deranged. Great copy: “Reward yourself with Genesee: enjoyment pure and simple. Beer with a bracing bonus of brightness in every bottle to make it fresher and friendlier … naturally more refreshing.”
Tuesday’s holiday ad is for Falstaff, from 1950. With a great tagline, “Falstaff’s Got Something!, I also love how they characterize the beer. “It’s Dry, Light but Lively.” And it sure looks that couple has been hitting the bottle as they put up their decorations. A wink and a nod ….
This was created back in May, but it escaped my notice. April Kuhn created a cool poster for Drink Philly entitled The Philadelphia History of Beer. According to the website, “[w]hile it doesn’t cover everything that’s occurred in Philadelphia since its founding, it does cover a lot — and it shows why this truly is one of the world’s greatest spots for beer.” If you’d like one of the poster for your very own, they’re on sale online for $10 right now.
Monday’s holiday ad — it’s Boxing Day — is from 1930s Britain and is, I believe, an industry advertisement extolling the virtues of beer. And this one is suggesting that even for festive occasions, beer is best. Happy Boxing Day.
Our 99th Guinness ad is a black and white print advertisement that ran in Life magazine in December of 1940. Showing a tuckered out store Santa Claus being torn apart by the little kiddies hoping to tell him what they want for Christmas. I’m not sure how that behavior squares with needing to be good, for goodness sale. But the ad suggests, “When you’re Tired enjoy a Guinness.” And I love their description: “Guinness looks, tastes and is different from every other malt beverage. It is dry, racy — hearty and nourishing!”
Friday’s holiday ad is for Rhode Island’s Narragansett Beer, which has made a come back in recent years. It originally “appeared in the December 23, 1945 issue of The Boston Herald.” Offering “Holiday Greetings from Narragansett,” and also featured a wonderful painting of an idyllic winter scene.
According to Narragansett’s blog, the “painting is titled, ‘On The Post Road,’ and was created by artist, Harold Breut.”
I kept forgetting to post this nice piece about King Hammurabi, the Babylonian ruler responsible for mankind’s first set of laws, known as the Hammurabi Code. It ran in the San Francisco magazine Drink Me, in their October 2011 issue. The article, Hammurabi: The King Of Beers, goes into some deatil about the laws in the Hammurabi Code dealing with beer:
The Code contains dozens of edicts concerning the growing, harvesting, and sale of grain. Thus it pertains to beer, since grain had been domesticated and farmed for only two reasons:beer and bread. But the laws which deal specifically with those happy suds are numbers 108 through 111.
Law 108 reads as follows: “if a tavern-keeper (female) does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.” There are a couple of important things to clarify here. First, it is of interest that the regulation goes out of its way to specify that the hypothetical tavern-keeper is female.
In ancient Babylon, almost all tavern-keepers (not to mention brewers, generally) were women.
Men hunted and made war; women grew food and made beer. And second, “shall be… thrown into the water” does not mean that the offending tavern-keeper was merely tossed in the nearest river and left to sputter. It meant that the guilty party was thrown into the nearest river and held there until she stopped sputtering. Additions to Babylonian law made after Hammurabi’s death did away with the drowning of offending barkeeps and replaced it with mutilation of the woman’s breasts. Sheesh…
Like most despotic rulers, Hammurabi was seriously paranoid that his subjects were plotting against his authority. One of the central meeting places for average citizens in Babylon was the beer hall. These were, or were thought to be, hotbeds of sedition, which inevitably led to the creation of Law 109: “if conspirators meet in the house of a tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court the tavern-keeper shall be put to death.” The method of execution favored here was to drown the wrongdoer in a barrel of her own beer. Given the amount of political sniping that goes on in our bars today, we can be thankful (I think) that Law 109 has gone the way of the dodo bird.
And then there were the nuns. Called “sisters of god,” they were holy women dedicated to one of the numerous gods that populated Babylonian mythology. The nuns were expected to behave according to a quite rigid set of moral protocols, and the punishments for failing to do so were, to say the least, horrifying. As an example we need look no further than Law 110: “if a sister of a god open a tavern, or enter a tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned to death.” Given that the Law specifically prohibits the sisters from not only drinking in a beer house, but going into business as a beer entrepreneur, we can only imagine that these actions were routinely undertaken by Babylon’s holy ladies. And the menfolk must have really hated them for breaking with the norm. Burning a woman alive for having a drink? Wow.
The final Law governing alcohol is 111, and it reads thusly: “if an inn-keeper furnish sixty ka [a unit of measure similar to a bushel] of drink to the city, she shall receive fifty ka of corn at the harvest.” It is a rather dull little edict; Babylonian capitalism in action. But at least no one gets drowned or burned.
Thursday’s holiday ad is for Stag Beer, from 1958. Maybe it’s just me, but a treasured stag traditions doesn’t sound too wholesome to me, especially when the ad shows a comely lass standing under the mistletoe holding a beer in her hand. So if I understand this scene correctly, a beautiful woman is offering me a beer, and by taking it I’ll be under the mistletoe, so I’ll also have to kiss her, as well. Okay, I take it all back; now that is a treasured tradition.
Wednesday’s holiday ad is for Falstaff, from 1914. Nice to see that after Santa came down the chimney, he had something other than milk and cookies waiting for him.
Tuesday’s holiday ad is for the Canadian beer Dow Ale, which until around 1966, was the most popular beer in Quebec. This ad looks to be a little earlier, probably in the 1950s. Given that red is he only color (apart from black, of course) in the ad, it’s curious that they didn’t make Santa’s suit red, too, but I suppose they wanted to keep the focus on the beer. “Look what they’ve left me me!” I hope every home didn’t leave Santa a case. He’d never get to all the houses in one night, or he’d probably get pulled over by the air force for flying erratically.
