Hoppy Halloween everybody. Here are a few spoof beer labels someone gave me recently that seemed perfect for the holiday. Enjoy.
Back Door Advertising
Several people sent me a link to ABIB‘s latest ad campaign for Bud Light Lime in a can. You can watch the online commercial below.
I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I’m generally a fan of the double entendre and the wit it often employs, but this Bud Light Lime ad seems less witty and more coarse, low-brow and unsophisticated. Klassy with a “K.” And I say that not because of its naked and unsubtle allusions to sex or because — gasp — children might see it. I’m not personally offended in any way. But regardless of what I think about Bud Light Lime, it hardly shows beer in a positive light. It may be the least respectful ad since Miller’s infamous mud wrestling ad or Bud’s recently flatulent horse.
Created by the ad agency DDB Chicago, so far the reaction has been mixed, yet both sides seem to prove my point that this is not the way to portray beer if we want anyone to take it seriously. (And before anyone chimes in with “but it’s just Bud Light,” like all advertising it accumulates to the overall perception of beer by society at large, so I believe it does matter.) On one hand, Advertising Age says In Juvenile Bud Light Lime Spot, This Butt’s for You, finding it too tasteless to be effective. They conclude:
Crude ads are, of course, nothing new in the category that brought the world the “Swedish Bikini Team,” but they’ve been a bit scarce since Miller Brewing Co.’s bottom-scraping use of bikini-clad mudwrestlers in a 2003 “tastes great, less filling” brawl.
That ad sparked wide recriminations about how lowest-common-denominator advertising turns the product into a commodity indistinguishable by any measure other than whose proprietor has lower standards. For a while after, advertisers toned it down, taking a back seat to fast-food chains and even domain registrars when it came to over-the-top ads.
But perhaps our long national nightmare of relatively tasteful beer ads is coming to an end at last.
But BrandFreak’s Kenneth Hein felt that it is the best thing Bud Light’s done in a while,” completely disagreeing with Advertising Age.
The problem with Bud Light and beer advertising in general is that brands are afraid to have fun. Sure, thinly veiled anal-sex jokes appeal to “the lowest common denominator,” but who cares? We’re talking about beer. A-B and its agencies need to have a couple and loosen up even more, because its recent run of ads have been a buzzkill.
But here’s where he proves my point. He likes the ad precisely because it’s tasteless as he writes “who cares? We’re talking about beer.” And that’s the rub. It perpetuates the perception that beer is just beer, nothing more. And that’s the belief a vast majority of people hold, which I think is almost entirely the fault of of ads like this one. Only the breweries that can afford to advertise on television nationally get their message to consumers. And for decades, that message has appealed to a lowest-common denominator ethos that’s painted beer as an interchangeable commodity. Only the brand is important, because for most of those beer companies, what’s inside is virtually the same. So you sell other ideas, and end up with a populace that perceives all beer as being the same. And that overall perception is hardly flattering. So most people tend to believe that beer is all the same; it’s just that swill that frat boys drink at tailgate parties or while binge-drinking their way through college.
And I hardly think this ad will change that. What do you think about it?
U.S. Select Beer Taste
I stumbled on the photo of a peculiar beer below while looking for another image. It was on Holy Taco, a humor website as far as I can tell.
Best I could find out is that it’s a Japanese beer made by what appears to be a fairly large global food and drinks company called SC Foods Co., Ltd. The beer is called U.S. Select Beer Taste and is fairly resplendent with patriotic imagery from using a red, white and blue palette to the U.S. flag, an outline of the lower 48 and even part of the Statue of Liberty.
It’s certainly an odd duck. But what fascinates me most is wondering what it tastes like. I mean that in an abstract sense. I know in reality it’s likely a clone of a tasteless American-style macro lager or similar low-calorie light beer. Or is it? What is the perception of the “select beer taste of the U.S.?” Is is still the former big three, or has craft beer managed to upstage that as an antiquated image of American beer?
I also can’t help but wonder, if it is an American light lager, why? The three major brands in Japan — Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo — aren’t substantially different from Bud, Miller or Coors. So if you’re going to label it U.S. Select Beer Taste, then it has to mean something to the intended consumer, which appears to be the Japanese. They have to perceive it as being something different than their own beer, don’t they? And if so, then doesn’t it follow that U.S. Select Beer Taste might be more craft-oriented in taste? It wouldn’t taste like a German, Belgian, Czech or English import. Sadly, I couldn’t find any ratings for the beer on either Beer Advocate of Rate Beer, so I don’t really know if it’s more Dale’s Pale Ale than Bud Light.
So what exactly is American Beer’s Taste perception in Japan and around the world? Among brewers and the über beer geeks certainly our reputation for quality is unsurpassed and the craft industry has staged a remarkable comeback for American beer since the low point of the 1970s. But that’s among the small, niche customer for whom beer matters. To the general consumer, I’m not so sure. Budweiser and Coors both sell surprisingly well in Great Britain and Bud is even making modest progress in Germany. What do you think U.S. Select Beer Taste is?
Fishnet Cans
First there was Nude Beer (in its many incarnations), then Wanker, Skinny Blonde Ale and now comes the latest beer to play to the basest instincts of the male beer drinker: lingerie canned beer with fishnet stockings.
At least that was my original thought. The Fishnet Cans have been blogged and re-blogged all over that series of tubes known as the internet. But, as it turns out, they are just one of a pretty big series of can designs by Russian artist/illustrator Ramm ND. It’s not necessarily his or her fault that so many chose to highlight the one prurient themed can and ignored the more poignant works. Human nature is what it is. Take a closer look at the Fishnet Cans and you’ll begin to see new details that defy it being simply to titillate. Then take a look at his entire oeuvre of cans. Some are beer and some are soda, but they’re all more interesting than I would have guessed from just seeing the one in fishnets.
In fact, going through Ramm’s entire portfolio is eye-opening. And I think he’s making some larger points. These aren’t just can designs, they’re works of art using cans as the medium.
Ramm also has another portfolio on Coroflot.
The Death Of The Coaster?
Most of us take the humble beer coaster for granted. I know I do, even though I have a casual collection of them that probably numbers in the thousands. I say casual because they’re in some boxex in the garage and I’ve never tried to organize them at all. Their formal name is the beermat, and “the first beermats made of cardboard were introduced in 1880 by the German printing company, Friedrich Horn.” Today, there are believed to be something on the order of 5.5 billion coasters worldwide. One company, The Katz Group, absolutely dominates the industry, with an estimated 75% market share.
But the economic crisis has reached the beer coaster now, too, as The Katz Group recently filed for bankruptcy relief in their native Germany. Spiegel reported that no one is sure what will happen to the market if the
Katz Group cannot successfully reorganize through the courts. Though they don’t say so, this has to be one of the worst potential side effects of consolidations and mergers that has been taking place worldwide for decades, with many, if not most, industries becoming increasing concentrated in just a few large corporations.
The BBC also has their take on the story and the ramifications, especially for collectors. The sheer ubiquity of them seems to all but guarantee their survival, but as priorities go, I also can’t see them rising to the top of anybody’s key businesses needing saving, like Wall Street or the auto industry. So if you have a lot of coasters lying around, best hang onto them for now.
Labeling the States
A custom label maker has on their website a map of the United States with a beer label for each state. For instance, California is Firestone Walker and Oregon is Full Sail. How many can you name? Some are hard to see and some are obscure choices, but it was a fun exercise. Visit etiquette systems for a list of the answers by state or a flash version of the map.
Price vs. Value
It’s been said that when you buy something, the price is what you pay and value is what you get. But if you want to get people’s attention, charge an astonishingly high price for something. Case in point, ever since Bloomberg News on Friday did a story about Carlsberg’s new $400-per-bottle beer, touting it as the world’s most expensive, it’s been burning up the blogosphere, online news outlets and forums. And with good reason. There’s a lot not to like about this story, and very little to suggest the $400 price tag is anywhere near reasonable, as many, many have already pointed out, from A Good Beer Blog’s Are You An Utter Fool? to Beer Advocate’s forum responding to the question, Are massively expensive beers good for the craft brew world?
What I find curious about this new beer is that, as far as I can tell, Carlsberg is almost completely silent about it. There’s nothing about it on their website, nothing under media or press releases. Wouldn’t you expect at least some PR information on the supposed release of something called the world’s most expensive beer? But all of the press this has gotten seems to be coming from a single source, the Bloomberg piece, which even more oddly appears to be aimed at the Latin American market.
The beer itself may be called Carlsberg Vintage No. 1, and all we know about it is that it’s 10.5% abv and “contains hints of prune, caramel, vanilla and oak tree from the French and Swedish wooden casks in which it [was] stored. It has a chestnut brown color, little foam and goes well with cheeses and desserts.” That’s according to Jens Eiken, the brewer at the Jacobsen Brewhouse (the small boutique brewery housed in the Visitor’s Center), who created the beer. Given that it’s so expensive, he’s surprisingly tight-lipped about giving any details that might convince one that it’s worth that hefty price tag. He says it’s relatively cheap, “considering the amount of time the brewery spent developing it.” Naturally he’s not saying how long that was, but does add “[w]e’re trying to raise the bar for what a beer can be,” which is maddeningly infuriating since he refuses to say how or to where he thinks this beer has moved the “bar” to.
But unlike other efforts to “raise the bar” where the process and rationale for a higher price tag have been spelled out somewhat convincingly, making beer of great value doesn’t appear to be the point one iota. Price appears to be the driving factor, which at least explains the lack of persuasion or transparency. The $400 price is a conversion from the price in Danish kroners, which is 2,008 — a figure arrived at simply to coincide with the year. Next year, the price will go up to 2009 kroners and 2010 the year after that. The 600 bottles initially being sold in three high-end Copenhagen restaurants aren’t even very large. Each bottle is only 37.5 centiliters, which at 12.68 ounces is just north of our standard beer bottle.
The beer was created for no better reason than to “challenge luxury wines in the gourmet restaurant market and capitalize on rising individual wealth.” You can see the visible hand of marketing in every step of this project. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think the way to challenge wine’s perceived supremacy is to make beers that rival the quality of fine wines, not arbitrarily price them as if they did. Frankly, I think one of the best selling points of better beer is precisely that in many cases it really does already rival that of fine wine, and does so at a spectacularly more reasonable price and one which bears some relation to the ingredients and process of manufacture. In other words, it’s a good value. Even Utopias, at $100 or more, because we know what’s involved and how it was made doesn’t seem too out of whack. Carlsberg Vintage No. 1 on the other hand? Whack job, all the way.
Beyond that, look at the tortured way they arrived at the title “world’s most expensive.” From the Bloomberg news article:
And according to The Longest List of the Longest Stuff at the Longest Domain Name at Long Last:
But while I don’t think an accidental over-charging can be more than a footnote in this discussion, reducing it to the price per ounce, liter, or whatever measurement doesn’t really work either. The Bon Secours is still the most expensive bottle, no matter how large it is. I guess if your goal is to have the most expensive anything, and you’re a large enough company, you’ll figure out a way to make that happen. |
Is it enough that there are only 600 bottles (50 cases at 12 per or 25 cases at 24 per) to justify the price? Certainly supply and demand is a time-honored economic method of determining fair market value. But in this case while the supply is indeed low, the actual demand is non-existent, completely artificial and will have to be manufactured from scratch.
You have to wonder about what they’re not telling us, because a 10.5% beer that’s been aged on wood is not exactly newsworthy. I can find any number of beers similar to that description. There are entire beer festivals here in the U.S. devoted to wood-aged beers. I judged at the Bistro’s Barrel-aged Beer Festival in my own backyard last year and had at least a dozen beers fitting the description of Vintage No. 1, without having to travel to Denmark. So what could be so different about this one to not only justify the cost but also their claim that even at this price they’re losing money. If I wanted people to plunk down a previously unheard of amount for something I made, I’d go out of my way to justify that high price.
But I think the difference between Vintage No. 1 and other high-priced beers, like Deus, Vielle Bon Secours and Boston Beer’s Utopias is the following. I’ve talked to Jim Koch about his Utopias, their earlier Millennium Beer and even the Triple Bock they made in the 1990s. All of those beers are or were relatively expensive beers. But the fact of their high price was at best a secondary consideration, a factor of the cost or making them. Vintage No. 1, from what little we know about it, was just the opposite. The price was created first, as a marketing gimmick (being the same as the year), and specifically to fill a demand by the nouveau riche for something expensive to spend their money on. Jim Koch, on the other hand, at least was truly passionate about the beer he and his team of brewers had made. Love it or hate it — and I’m in the former camp — you have to admit Utopias really does push the boundary of what beer is and can be. Can the same be said of a 10.5% beer aged on wood, without knowing anything more about how it was made? |
To give my take on the question of whether or not expensive beer is good for the craft beer industry, I think in general it can be. I think that for the most part the price of beer has been kept artificially low for too long and has helped to maintain the image of beer as a cheap, mass-produced commodity not worthy of respect. There is something to the idea of charging a higher price for something giving it more perceived value by that fact alone. Though I think it’s gotten out of hand, wine has been using perceived value for years instead of a cost of goods to mark-up ratio to come up with a fair market price. Beer, especially among the big breweries, works on volume sales rather than a high mark-up per bottle or per package. And to keep volume up, the big breweries have kept their prices low even as their cost of manufacture and for ingredients has steadily risen. This has also forced craft brewers to likewise keep their profit margins thinner, which has had the effect of keeping perceived value lower, too. Now that there are shortages to both hops and malt, that will have to change and it will be interesting to see how consumers react. I think as long as they perceive that for the price they’re still getting a good value, things shouldn’t be too bad.
That’s where I think Carlsberg’s Vintage No. 1 goes off the rails. There’s just no sense that there’s any reasonable value for the exorbitant price they’re asking. I’m sure there will be someone willing to buy it just to show off or impress others with their success. After all, there’s never been a shortage of fools with more money than sense. That doesn’t justify the price, of course, and in this case the utter lack of perceived value could indeed damage the cause of making fine beer more highly prized and priced. I’d pay almost any reasonable price for something I highly value. But I place almost no value in being tricked into paying ten times (or more) for something just because someone thinks they can get away with it.
UPDATE 1.29: I’ve found a bit more about what the bottle will look like. “Each bottle is labeled with a hand stenciled original lithographic print by Danish artist Frans Kannike, making the empties worth about $100 apiece.”
Free As In Freedom
While searching for a generic beer label for my previous post, I stumbled upon the Free Beer organization, a Danish art project applying the open source or Creative Commons idea to beer. The Creative Commons is a more open approach to copyright law, created by people who think copyright law as it exists today does more to stifle creativity than allow it to flourish. If that seems at first counter-intuitive, I would recommend you read Lawrence Lessig‘s wonderful book, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity and/or see the film Revolution OS, which has as much to do with this fascinating idea as it does with the history of computer operating systems (and it details the contributions of Richard Stallman). Anyway, the idea of a looser way to reserve some rights but allow people to build on previous efforts to collectively come up with better solutions and products because they’re designed in the open by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people working on them is at the heart of this idea. Originally, of course, this notion was applied to software. This blog you’re reading, for example, runs on WordPress, an open source blogging software that is essentially free to use and has been created by untold numbers of programmers who are working constantly to make it better.
From the Free Beer website:
The project, originally conceived by Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex and students at the Copenhagen IT University, applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product — namely the alcoholic beverage loved and enjoyed globally, and commonly known as beer.
It seems to me that homebrewers already share recipes fairly freely, and I know of instances where commercial brewers have all made the same beer (using the same hops or to celebrate Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday, for example) so I’m not sure how novel this is, but it’s still a worthwhile idea to promote, at least in my opinion.
The English version of the Free Beer label.
Mississippi’s First Bottles of Beer
If you’re a beer lover, I imagine Mississippi must not be the best place to live. During the last thirty years, while most of the rest of the country was discovering craft beer with wild abandon, less than a half-dozen microbreweries or brewpubs have opened. Of those, only two are left. And one of those, Kershenstine Diamond, is a contract brewery that makes their beer elsewhere in the Midwest. So that leaves just one brewery currently brewing in the entire state.
|
That brewery, Lazy Magnolia, is located in Kiln, Mississippi, which perhaps more famous as the hometown of Brett Favre, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. They have also recently become the first brewery in the state to produce bottled beer with the release of their Southern Pecan, a nut brown ale, in six-packs. In fact, it’s the first time since Prohibition that bottled beer has been brewed and bottled in Mississippi. From an article in a local newspaper, the Clarion Ledger:
|
The brewery sits alongside the airport runway in Kiln, a Hurricane Katrina-ravaged town of 2,000 on the Gulf Coast. The company’s warehouse building is nondescript to the point of invisibility, the kind of place you pass three times before realizing it’s occupied.
But two of the beers crafted there took podium finishes at the 2006 Beer World Cup. Lazy Magnolia’s brands hold cult status with shaggy young men and middle-aged lawyers in dim roadside bars throughout Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Henderson plans to expand to Tennessee and south Louisiana this year.
I’m sure it will be some time before we see this beer in California, but I certainly applaud their efforts in being a pioneer in their own state. Well done.
Moylan’s To Squeeze Kilt Lifter Into Six-Packs
Moylan’s Brewing of Novato, California has always had many, if not all, of their beers available in 22 oz. bottles. For the first time they’re debuting one of their beers, Kilt Lifter Scotch Ale, in six-packs of 12-oz. bottles.
From the press release:
Moylan’s Brewing Company will be sending six-pack bottles to the shelves come late January of 2008, just in time for the Superbowl in February. Moylan’s world-wide award winning Kilt Lifter Scotch Ale will be available in selected retail locations with suggested prices from $8.99-9.99. Denise Jones, Moylan’s Brewmaster, journeyed up to Sudwerk Brewing Company, in Davis CA, to work on expanding and perfecting the brewing of the ever popular Scotch Ale in a larger capacity; an agreement created partly out of owner Brendan Moylan’s respect for Sudwerk, it’s Brewmaster, and the quality of beer brewed onsite, and partly due to the desire to reach more customers with different packaging options. Moylan’s Brewing Company is excited about the reception of the new packaging and, if all goes well, plan on increasing the selection to include other award winning ales in smaller options. Curtis Cassidy, sales manager at Moylan’s Brewing Company states, “Starting off, we will be offering the new bottle size exclusively to California customers. After testing the waters with the Kilt Lifter six-packs, we plan on moving other Moylan’s beers into six-packs as well. We hope to be taking steps towards these goals by the end of 2008.”
The new Kilt Lifter in a 12 oz. bottle.
And the new Kilt Lifter six-pack carrier.