Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

Socialize

Beer In Ads #187: Rubsam & Horrmann

By

ad-billboard
Friday’s ad is an odd one. It’s for the Staten Island, New York brewery Rubsam & Horrmann. Founded in 1870 in in the town of Stapleton. Piels bought them out in 1953 but closed the brewery ten years later. The ad’s scene is set in Cuba, so I’m guessing the ad is from around the time of the Spanish-American War, which was in 1898. The guy in the brown hat looks like Teddy Roosevelt and the on the right the white-haired man resembles either Buffalo Bill Cody or Mark Twain. But despite the navy parked in Havana harbor, they’re all toasting with Rubsam & Horrmann beer.

rubsam-and-horrmann

Beer From Early 1800s Found In Baltic Shipwreck

By

shipwreck
CNN is reporting that the World’s ‘Oldest Beer’ Found in Shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Åland Islands. The Ålands are an autonomous group of nearly 6,000 islands near Finland. The cargo ship is believed to have been sailing from Denmark, most likely Copenhagen, sometime between 1800 and 1830 possibly bound for St. Petersburg, Russia. There’s also speculation that t may have been sent “by France’s King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.”

Initially, divers found bottles of Champagne, but later found additional bottles, some of which burst from the pressure upon reaching the surface, revealing that there was beer inside them. From the CNN report:

“At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island’s ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.

“It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living.”

It will certainly be interesting to see what further analysis of the beer reveals.

Beer In Ads #185: Trinkt Sternenberg Bier

By

ad-billboard
Wednesday’s ad is for another Swiss beer, Brauerei Zum Sternenberg, from Basel. With the tagline “Trinkt Sternenberg Bier” or drink Sternenberg beer, the artwork resembles an illustration from a children’s book. The “king” sits on a throne with brewer’s stars on each arm and there’s one behind him, too. Below the throne, a triple tap fountain spills beer into a pool. The kings seems to be shouting “drink, drink” urging on the kneeling man chugging his beer. Certainly one of the odder scenes in a beer ad.

trinkt-sternenberg-bier

Beer In Ads #184: Barclay’s Lager, Light Or Dark

By

ad-billboard
Tuesday’s ad is for the London brand Barclay’s Lager. Getty Images claims it’s from around 1900 but the artist, Tom Purvis, was born in 1888 meaning he’d have been 12 then, so it seems more likely it was actually later. The ad reminds me a bit of the Blues Brothers movie, the scene at the bar where the bartenders tells the band they have both kinds of music, country and western. They serve both kinds of lager, “Light or Dark.”

tom-purvis-barclays-lager

Beer In Ads #182: Art Nouveau Beer Lady

By

ad-billboard
Friday’s ad is one of my favorite beer posters of all time, though I’ve never seen it with any text so I don’t know if it was ever actually used as an advertisement at all and, if so, for what brewery. I’ve never seen any information about the artist or even where it’s from precisely, though I suspect it’s French. Still, it’s beautiful.

beer

Beer In Ads #181: Hurlimann Bier

By

ad-billboard
Thursday’s ad is for the Swiss brewery, Brauerei Hurlimann. It was founded in 1836, and moved to Zurich thirty years later, in 1866. They’re still brewing beer today, though I don’t know when this ad was done, though I suspect it was shortly after World War 2 ended, as “Kriegs Zeit Friedens Zeit” translates roughly as “postwar peace time period.”

hurlimann-bier

Beer In Ads #180: Birra Dicitura

By

ad-billboard
Wednesday’s ad is for another Italian brewery, Birra Dicitura. It seems like it has to be later than the 1920s, because the art is less well-defined, more abstract. It almost seems unfinished, a rough sketch. And I can’t help but wonder; why the five of hearts? Dicitura, by the way, is Italian for “wording.”

birra-maquette