Monday’s ad is for the English beer Brakspear Bitter. Though the ad appears old, I think It’s actually a fairly recent ad that’s designed to look retro. The glassware looks too modern, too. Perhaps one of my friends from across the pond can set me straight on that point. Still, who wouldn’t like slowing down and having a few pints by the water?
I know it’s a good thing when celebrities drink craft beer, because people tend to copy their behavior. So the more celeb’s drinking good beer, the more some people might pick it up, too. But I can’t help but find it a little sad, too. I just don’t find all the minutiae about famous people very interesting. It’s just not my thing, though I have friends and loved ones who feel otherwise, so I do tend to find out about these gossipy items anyway, sometimes whether I want to or not. Case in point, I just learned that actress Charlize Theron served Dogfish Head’s 60 Minute IPA at her house in Los Angeles during the Super Bowl. And that’s great, don’t get me wrong. Charlize Theron was, at one time, on my list of five (married men will know what I’m talking about here) so I’m certainly glad to know she has good taste in beer.
The whole thing was captured in nauseating detail in the U.S. Showbiz section of the UK’s Daily Mail in an article titled — believe it or not — We’re in for a Super night: Charlize Theron hardly breaks a sweat as she carries a case of beer to a Super Bowl party. They have five, count ’em five, photos of Theron carrying the beer from her car to the house. The running commentary is hilariously absurd, though I couldn’t help but hear it in my head as if being read by Robin Leach from Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.
To be fair, I’ve posted a photo of television celebrity Nathan Fillion drinking a Drake’s IPA through a curly straw, that my wife took during an L.A. Browncoats convention a few years ago, but somehow that seems different. Or maybe I’m just fooling myself. What I really wanted to know from the article is why she chose that beer, and how she and her guests enjoyed it. Now that I’d find far more interesting than how she managed to carry it a few feet without breaking a sweat.
In honor of today being “Beer Can Day,” the anniversary of the first beer can’s introduction by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Co. of Newark, New Jersey on January 24, 1935, here’s an amazing use of a beer can. Now this is recycling, or perhaps more correctly repurposing.
For many years, people having been making what are called “pinhole cameras” out of a variety of materials, really anything that keeps out light can be used. Essentially, they’re a very simple, homemade camera. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition. “A pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box.” But they’ve become very popular again in the last ten or so years, a kind of backlash as a result of the rise of digital photography. There’s as simple and low-tech as possible, yet still create interesting images.
At least two photographers have been in the news lately, making time-lapse photographs with pinhole cameras made from beer cans. The first, a student at the University of Hertfordshire — Regina Valkenborgh — put her beer can camera “next to the university’s radio telescope at its Bayfordbury Observatory.” According to the Daily Mail, the pinhole camera recorded the sun’s movements over a six-month period of time, “[f]rom solstice to solstice, this six month long exposure compresses time from the 21st of June till the 21st of December, 2011, into a single point of view.” How cool is that?
The second, photographer Justin Quinnell, was featured on the Discovery Channel’s website. He’s captured a variety of time-lapse pinhole images using “emptied beer cans and about 50 cents worth of other supplies, such as duct tape and regular photography paper. While the cameras only took about five minutes to build, they had to withstand six months of ‘wind, rain, hail, and being thrown in the trash.'”
When asked which beer cans he preferred, Quinnell responded. “My choice would be lager or Guinness although often, when I teach larger groups, I have to rely on what is left in my neighbors recycling boxes.”
This photo is of Saint Mary Redcliffe Church, in Bristol, England, from December, 19 2007 to June 21, 2008.
This one is of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, also in Bristol, from December 17, 2007 through June 21, 2008.
And this last one was taken by the gravestones of Blance, Grace and Dorcus, over three months in the spring 2008 in the Eastville Cemetery, Bristol, England.
You can many more of Justin Quinnell’s work at his website, pinholephotography.org, including a galley of more from the Slow Light Collection, which is where the above photos came from.
Now that’s a pretty cool use of beer cans. Happy Beer Can Day!
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.
In September, the British Beer & Pub Association released information regarding pub closures in the UK.
Back in the 1970s more than 90% of all beer consumed in Britain was bought from the “on trade” — pubs and clubs.
According to the British Beer & Pub Association this ratio had fallen to 51% from pubs and 49% from supermarkets at the end of last year. “It will cross over in the near future,” said a spokesman, possibly as soon as this Christmas.
This would be a watershed moment for Britain’s beer industry, a culmination of long-standing change in consumers’ drinking habits as well as confirmation that the recession has caused people to stay at home more.
The figure came as a report from the GMB union highlighted how the high price of beer has caused the destruction of thousands of neighborhood pubs, in turn damaging many working class communities. It said that local pubs, many of which had survived the Blitz and the great depression of the 1930s, were now being destroyed by the recession.
Pub closures hit a record rate of 53 a week at the height of the recession. Last year, 26 a week closed their doors, leaving just 52,500 pubs in Britain, nearly half of the level at its peak before the World War II.
The Beer & Pub Association blamed competition from the supermarkets, which often sell beer as a “loss leader” to drive customers into their stores, and above-inflation increases to beer duty. The GMB blamed large pub companies putting up their prices because they were struggling with too many debts.
Last week, they released a new statement, Sticking to the facts on pub closure numbers, which said, in part:
The BBPA has moved to set the record straight over conflicting analysis in recent days of UK pub closure figures. It is absolutely clear from CGA data, says the BBPA, that free trade pubs have been closing at a much faster rate that tenanted and leased pubs in recent years. The BBPA has published its full analysis of the data on its website, today available from the link below.
From January 2009 to June this year, CGA figures show 3,444 free trade pubs closed, compared with 2,239 tenanted and leased pubs over the same period. As the free trade sector has considerably fewer pubs, their closure rate over the period was almost double that of the tenanted and leased sector, at 16 per cent, as compared with 8 per cent. Taking new openings into account, there was a 9 per cent net reduction in free houses, compared with a 6 per cent reduction in tenanted and leased.
Free trade closures are higher, despite the considerable numbers of pubs being sold into the free trade from the tenanted sector. The reason that there are more free-trade pubs now than there were at the start of 2009 is that companies have sold tenanted/leased pubs to private owners, where this has been deemed appropriate.
“Pub closures are caused by a huge range of issues — the greatest of which we can influence are undoubtedly punitive rates of taxation and the high cost of regulation. And though there is still some way to go to halt the decline, we should all welcome that the latest figures show that the net closure rate has fallen significantly.”
Still, net closures are 14 per week. That’s two a day! But really, it’s 28 pubs closing each week or four a day, which is even more alarming. I’ve been told by Brit friends who know more about this than I do that it’s the bad pubs that are closing, but I have a hard time believing that’s all it is. With that many closing, there must be some good ones, or at least just average ones, that can’t survive as well.
Overall closures are declining since their all-time high (or low) in 2008, as are openings as well, so you can see why there is some reason for optimism. When things are going poorly, you tend to focus on whatever positives you can. Everyone who was involved in craft beer in the mid-1990s will know what I mean. But I’d still be more pleased if the British pub was to regain its footing by opening more pubs than are closing.
BBC Magazine published online a couple of weeks ago an interesting piece on cultural anthropology as it relates to drinking patterns, entitled Viewpoint: Is the Alcohol Message All Wrong?. While the article itself I found compelling on its on, the way in which it was attacked in the voluminous number of comments is at least as interesting, too.
It was written by Kate Fox, a co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC). As for Fox’s ideas, she begins with the media-driven perception that Britain is “a nation of loutish binge-drinkers – that [they] drink too much, too young, too fast – and that it makes [them] violent, promiscuous, anti-social and generally obnoxious.” She suggests that those very perceptions are deeply believed among people living there, but that they are wrong.
In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, “Oi, what you lookin’ at?” and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, “Hey babe, fancy a shag?” and start groping each other.
The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol.
There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call “ambivalent” drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.
There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours — cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life — about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as “integrated” drinking cultures.”
Seems reasonable enough, almost common sense really. And it’s certainly consistent with my own personal experience. Some people are bad drunks, they use the idea that alcohol will make them act badly to act badly. I’ve seem many examples of such people growing up and through the present. But they’re the minority. I’ve also seen countess people who don’t believe that drinking alcohol will alter their moral compass in the least, and for those people — easily the vast majority of people I know — it doesn’t. The effects of alcohol in such people are largely benign. They don’t don’t turn into assholes. They may get more chatty, more open, more sleepy perhaps; but they don’t become “violent, promiscuous, anti-social and generally obnoxious.”
Fox goes on to suggest that there’s little difference in the amount of alcohol consumed, as it makes little difference at all. What matters is the cultural norm, the attitudes of the society that, at least in part, dictate the consequent behavior. And she says there are numerous studies that prove just that. These “experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol” even if given placebos. She continues:
The British and other ambivalent drinking cultures believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when in these experiments we are given what we think are alcoholic drinks – but are in fact non-alcoholic “placebos” – we shed our inhibitions.
We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.
Our beliefs about the effects of alcohol act as self-fulfilling prophecies — if you firmly believe and expect that booze will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. In fact, you will be able to get roaring drunk on a non-alcoholic placebo.
And our erroneous beliefs provide the perfect excuse for anti-social behaviour. If alcohol “causes” bad behaviour, then you are not responsible for your bad behaviour. You can blame the booze — “it was the drink talking”, “I was not myself” and so on.
She then explains that it may be our attitudes toward alcohol and what it does to us, or what we believe it allows us to do, that we should focus on changing. If the people who use alcohol as an excuse to act badly instead acted like the rest of us and believed otherwise, there might be less bad drunks. That doesn’t sound too radical to me, but judging from the 1000+ comments made in just 48 hours after the article was posted, you’d think she was suggesting we kill puppies and children.
Many of the commenters complain that the author, Kate Fox, is a shill for the alcohol industry because her organization, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) receives funding from companies who sell alcohol. And that does appear to be the case, although the total funds they receive appear to be from a wide variety of sources, many of which (in fact it would appear a majority) are not alcohol companies. Their funding page does include Diageo, Greene King and the Wine Action Trade Group. But those three are the only ones among 56 donors listed, some of which are very big companies indeed. SIRC’s stated mission is “SIRC is a non-profit organisation that conducts research and consultancy across a wide range of topics, including on-going monitoring and analysis of social trends and related issues.” And given the wide and varied sponsors, it would appear that they’re not exactly in the pocket of big alcohol, as their critics seem to insist.
The main charge lobbied at them is that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) attacked them in a study entitled “how seriously should journalists take an attack from an organisation that is so closely linked to the drinks industry?” But that appears to be in response to SIRC criticizing journalists for publishing stories on health scares so in a sense it seems the BMJ was responding to being criticized by criticizing them. Most commenters seem to believe that the BMJ, and “academic journals” in general, are unassailable, which I’ve found is hardly the case. They’re as open to misuse as anything or anybody. My point is that while it can be important to look at who’s behind any study (and I do it all the time) I find that it’s done far more routinely when it’s a business interest than an anti-alcohol group. If this was an anti-alcohol piece, the media would be falling all over itself in acceptance of it as fact, despite that what comes out of anti-aclohol groups is every bit as much self-serving propaganda as what they’re accusing SIRC of, and without any actual proof, either; just character assassination.
The vitriol in the more than 1,000 comments is staggering, and just the number of comments removed for violating their house rules — language presumably — is higher than I think I’ve ever seen. There’s so many that are just emotional responses, and very little beyond she’s wrong, he’s wrong and I know best kind of opinions. It may well be that SIRC is not to be trusted, but the dismissal of the substance of Fox’s arguments or a seeming unwillingness to either understand or address them, or indeed just remain civil, says more about the fanatical commenters than anything else could.
Particularly interesting is that in the final paragraph Fox concludes that “[o]ver the past few decades the government, the drinks industry and schools have done exactly the opposite of what they should do to tackle our dysfunctional drinking.” That doesn’t exactly jibe with her alleged image of an alcohol industry shill.
So while I don’t believe her theory is the only reason that some people behave badly when they drink, I certainly think it can account for a lot of the problems that are currently being blamed on alcohol. Shouldn’t we at least be able to talk about alternatives to the one way we now think about alcohol in society? Especially when you consider that the very organizations against it keep saying that the problem is growing and all their efforts are for naught. You’d think the neo-prohibitionists would welcome another way to combat what they perceive to be the biggest problem to hit society since the plague. But judging by this article’s critics, I can’t help but think they’re not going to change the way they think about alcohol anytime soon.
This week’s work of art is by the English artist William Frederick Witherington, who was known for his landscapes and depictions of small incidents of everyday family life. One of these was The Hop Garland, painted in 1834 and today hanging at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Described on the V&A’s website simply as “[a]n oil painting depicting a girl in a hop garden placing a garland of hop blossoms on the head of a younger girl as a boy looks on,” but an art journal from 1851 adds additional details about the painting.
At the proper season, men, women, and children are employed in picking the hops, and preparing them for the market. Mr Witherington has selected for his picture a little episode in the day’s work, when the younger labourers are resting awhile from their tasks: a girl, who, from her superior style of dress, we should rather suppose to be a visitor to the garden than a ‘picker’, is decorating a younger child with a chaplet of the golden flowers. The idea is excellent; so also is the manner in which it has been carried out. The faces of the group are highly expressive, especially that of the little girl, so full of self-complacency at the honours bestowed upon her … this group, in all its parts, is admirably painted, and finished with great care; it is brilliantly coloured, yet with perfect harmony of tones … the picture is unquestionably one of the best ever painted by Mr Witherington …
And a contemporary newspaper account had this to say:
The Hop Garden presents an incident true to nature, in a little girl standing full of pride and delight, while an older one is decking her head with a crown of hops, and a lad sits in his basket laughing at the sport. The expression of the child’s face is not quite so pretty or rustically joyous as we could have wished, but it is arch and good. The boy and his drapery are perfect, both in the painting and character; the back-ground is well managed and the whole rich in harmony of colour and truth of effect.
The sitter for one of the girls was identified some years ago by a descendant as her great-grandmother, either Mrs Sarah Ancketill or Lady Selina Ker.
Witherington apparently liked the subject, because he painted it a second time, though ever so slightly differently. That Hop Garland is in the Tate Museum.
In addition, it was apparently a popular painting. An engraving based on Witherington’s painting was done for sale to a mass audience entitled the Youthful Queen of the Hop Garden by a James Posselwhite.
You can read more about Witherington at his Wikipedia page and there are some links to more of his works at ArtCyclopedia.
This week’s work of art is by English artist Clarkson Frederick Stanfield (sometimes incorrectly called William Clarkson Stanfield), and it depicts a real event that took place on May 22, 1832. I think the title says it all, which is The Burning of the Anchor Brewery. It was painted in 1832 and in 2009 it was purchased by the City of London for their Guildhall Art Gallery.
When the painting was first shown at the London Galley, a local community website had the following story posted:
The Burning of the Anchor Brewery was painted by Clarkson Stanfield and was purchased last year by the City of London Corporation.
The fire took place on 22 May 1832 when, it is believed, a lamp held by one of the employees of the brewery ignited. As the buildings were made of wood and contained very combustible material such as malt and hops, the fire spread quickly. A number of fire engines were brought in but the firemen and the brewery employees were unable stop the fire burning for many hours.
The Anchor Brewery was established in 1616 by James Monger the Elder and was then bought by Josiah Child who supplied beer to the Navy and named it the Anchor brewery. On the death of Henry Thrale, the owner in 1781, the brewery was sold to David Barclay, of Barclay’s Bank fame. Henry Thrale and his wife Hester were great friends of Dr Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first comprehensive English Dictionary and he was an executor of Henry’s will.
Henry’s brewery manager John Perkins was taken on by Barclays and the business was renamed Barclay, Perkins & Company Ltd. By 1815 it was the leading brewery in London producing 330,000 barrels a year and accommodating 200 dray-horses. Barclay Perkins were the owners of the brewery at the time of the fire.
The brewery was rebuilt and extended after the fire and it was said to be one of the sights of London. Charles Dickens featured the brewery and its beer in his novels and in The Old Curiosity Shop Dick Swiveller describes the porter as having ‘a spell in its every drop ‘gainst the ills of mortality’.
In 1955 Barclays merged with its rival Southwark brewery Courage at Shad Thames. In 1962 the site became a bottling factory and in 1970 the company was renamed Courage Ltd.
The Anchor Brewery site finally closed in 1981 and the buildings were demolished. The old brewery tap pub – The Anchor Bankside – is still open today and a plaque in Park Street commemorates the site of the brewery.
You can read more about Stanfield at his Wikipedia page and there are links to his works at ArtCyclopedia. You can also see more of his artwork at the Tate, Fine Art China, and WikiMedia Commons.
This week’s work of art is by English artist Dean Wolstenholme, Jr., which is titled Barclay and Perkins’s Brewery, Park Street, Southwark, London. It was painted between 1832-1840 and today hangs at the Museum of London.
The painting shows the brewery in a wide angle shot that also shows part of the city of London from the same year.
Unfortunately, there’s little information about the artist, Dean Wolstenholme, Jr., that I’ve been able to find.
