If you’re looking for something to do or somewhere to go election night and watch the results, Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley is hosting an Election Night Party, with specials for people wearing their “I voted” stickers. Good news (or, dare I say it, bad news) is always better shared over a beer.

The phrase “love thy neighbour as thyself” appears at least seven times in the Bible, from Leviticus 19:18 to James 2:8. It’s a pretty important tenet of Christianity and, according to All About God, it was Christ’s answer to religion.

Love thy neighbor was, in part, Jesus’ answer when the Pharisees, the chief religious sect of that day, asked Him about the greatest commandment in the Law (See Matthew 22:36-40). These religious leaders had made almost an art form of classifying all the various laws and giving them relative degrees of importance, so in asking Jesus this question, their aim was to test Him. His answer stunned them: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

Apparently, to the First Presbyterian Church of Medford, Oregon, that principle does not apply to their new neighbors who will drink beer across the street from the church where they also have a daycare center and preschool. Because in their words, “[a]lcohol and children do not mix. We have to maintain zero tolerance,” said Michael Hubbard, a church administrator. The Gypsy Blues Bar used to be located elsewhere in town, but is moving to a new location — which is zoned for a bar — across the street from the church. “Members and leaders of Medford’s First Presbyterian Church sent letters to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission asking [the] OLCC to deny the bar a liquor license — contending spirits, churches and children do not mix.”

Maybe they should of thought of that before locating the church in a neighborhood zoned for bars? This is the exact reason why the separation of church and state is so important. The church “claims” they’re not opposing the bar on moral grounds and then list the most tortured excuses I’ve heard for why they don’t want the bar across the street.

According to Reverend Joyce DeGraaff, “the church also has concerns about contact between bar patrons and people who use the church buildings. The church and its support buildings provide space for as many as nine different community groups during a typical week, including family oriented clubs, support groups and civic organizations.” Just who exactly does she think is going to the bar? Does she really think people in families, support groups or involved in civic organizations don’t drink? Is she delusional? But wait, she’s nowhere near finished making up potential situations that concern her delicate sensibilities and those of her parishioners. “It is my view that people who drink and drive and walk in the proximity of a bar often exhibit inappropriate behavior and impaired judgment. Furthermore, our young female staff walk to their cars after dark and are most concerned about who they might encounter.” What the hell kind of place exactly is Medford that she doesn’t think someone could walk safely from a church to their car if there’s a bar across the street? And she’s even worried about people drinking and walking?

But she’s still not done. “Some of the people in the groups are participating in recovery programs. New anti-smoking laws will take effect in January and increase the likelihood of contact between bar patrons and those who are attending meetings at the church, Hubbard said. The bar ‘will be turning people out onto the streets to smoke and that is going to bring out more people who are under the influence of alcohol.'” Uh, I’m pretty sure the smokers will turn themselves into the streets to smoke, the bar will only be enforcing the law. How the hell does she expect anyone to successfully make it through a recovery program if they can’t see others smoking or drinking without lapsing back into their “bad” habits? I mean, WTF? They must not be very effective recovery programs they’re putting on if they’re that worried what just the sight of a bar might do to the participants.

The bar owners, Clay Bearnson and Robin Bittinger, have said at their old location they ran a “tight ship.”

“It’s not like we’re going to have a bunch of crazy psychos throwing bottles and taunting little boys and girls at the day care,” Bearnson said. “At the old location, we didn’t get going until 9 or 10 at night. If these kids are out at that time of night, they should be talking to the parents. Not us.”

“I’m disappointed,” Bittinger said. “Our clientele is respectful and tasteful. We’re creating a socializing atmosphere where people can chill out and listen to the jukebox. Where you don’t have to hang out with a bunch of drunk meatheads.”

As Bearnson points out, it’s “day” care, when the bar is either not open or has only a few patrons. And most bars I know really don’t want rowdy patrons. Those kind of problems are simply not worth it to them. And if you’re a regular reader of the Bulletin, you know how much I hate people using the “it’s for children” gambit to further an agenda. The way the church is painting the problems the bar will bring to the neighborhood suggests they’ve never set foot into a local bar.

This is just so staggeringly ridiculous that it just completely pisses me off. If nothing else, a church is made up of people from a given neighborhood and I’m guessing that many, if not most, of these same church-going folks enjoy a legally permissible drink at least from time to time. Drinking is, at least for now, still legal in this country and is legally permitted to exist in the space where the Gypsy Blues Bar is relocating. They really have no basis on which to object, yet they feel they must try to impose their will anyway. That the church officials assume that this particular bar, let alone any bar, will be such a blight on the neighborhood without any evidence, without any sense of proportion, without any sense of tolerance is so fanatically reactionary that I can’t quite understand how they can even consider themselves Christians at all. The church isn’t even willing to give them the benefit of the doubt or give them a chance to demonstrate that they can be good neighbors.

From their own words, it’s obvious their objection is on moral grounds, despite how they’re spinning it. Hubbard says that he “was concerned from the moment I heard about it.” Between that sentiment and the remark about “zero tolerance,” it’s clear the rationale for their complaining came after their emotional reaction to it, and they simply made up whatever flimsy arguments they could think of, no matter how divorced from reality they were. But doesn’t the 8th commandment forbid their lying to the OLCC? The 8th Commandment “forbids misrepresenting the truth in relations with others,” which also includes lying. Is that something the Presbyterian Church would endorse?

To me this brings out the worst of how religion can be intolerant of other lifestyles and impose it’s own narrow moral code on the rest of society. The Presbyterian Church naturally has the right to believe whatever they wish and to act accordingly, but until we’re a theocracy they don’t get to dictate to the rest of the world how we must behave, where we can congregate, and where we can legally drink. That’s for the government, separated from the church, to decide. And since “the building is legally zoned for use as a bar,” they’ve already decided. The church here just doesn’t seem to respect the right of the government and believes they should decide, even though they most likely want the government to respect their rights. There’s a word for that kind of thinking, but I think I’ll try to be a good neighbor and turn the other cheek. Besides, I understand there’s a bar across the street, and I am thirsty. Now, what would Jesus brew?

Today is the birthday of Dylan Thomas, one of the modern world’s greatest poets. Thomas was born in Wales, but wrote all of his poems in English. He was a lifelong beer drinker, though developed a taste for hard alcohol later in his life. He also uttered what is one of my favorite quotations about drinking.

“An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks just as much as you do.”

           — Dylan Thomas

We’ve all heard the frightening numbers from the British Beer and Pub Association: 5 pub closures a day, 36 each week, costing 44,000 jobs in the past five years with a similar number projected for the next five. In addition, thirty-seven major breweries closed with a loss of 25% of brewery employees nationwide.

There are plenty of things to blame for this sad state of affairs. The tightening of the credit market and banks generally make the future seem even dimmer, with fewer new pubs opening every year. Then there’s rising energy and ingredient costs for brewers — everything from aluminum, barley and hops to oil and natural gas. The recent smoking ban chased away many regular pub patrons and neo-prohibitionists continue to have a chilling effect on the pub trade, too. On top of all that, supermarkets are selling beer below cost as a loss leader to get people into their stores, selling beer for less than the price of bottled water, while at the same time increased duties on beer have made a pint more pricey.

Another reason many point to is the wave of pub company mergers over the last couple of decades, creating giant conglomerates of pub companies and precious few independent ones. One such company is Enterprise Inns, who owns nearly 8,000 pubs in the UK. In 1991, they started with 368 pubs and seventeen years later have grown over 21 times larger.

One of their landlords, Colm Powell, of the Punch and Judy in Tonbridge, believes Enterprise “is trying to force him out of the pub he has run for 17 years.” He recently finished a 10-day hunger strike to protest the death of the English pub, sleeping each night in a coffin inside the pub. He’s also set up a website, Dying For the Pub Trade, that includes an open letter to Ted Tuppen, the CEO of Enterprise Inns and “A Book of Condolences” for others to tell their own stories and offer support. The Guardian has a good, in-depth story on Powell’s plight entitled Calling Time. There’s also a video of Powell stating his case at Kent Online.

Powell has run the Punch & Judy for seventeen years, but five years ago Enterprise became the owner when they bought it, and many others, from Whitbread. The large pub companies are all about the numbers and, I’m told, don’t treat their landlords as unique personalities, but see them as lines on a balance sheet. That’s one of the biggest problems with large companies in general. They may be great with economies of scale, but they can’t see things in any other way but as groups of largely the same thing. That’s one of the biggest reasons chain stores are all virtually identical. But because of their role in communities and because so much of their personality comes from within, pubs are perhaps the worst business model in the world to apply to a chain model.

According to Powell, after Enterprise took over, they began raising prices on everything from rents to kegs, and increases have taken up to 55% of his potential profits. His eviction is now set for November 11 and he’s planning another hunger strike beginning on November 1.

At 11:00 a.m. “on November 11, he will lose the business he has run for 17 years, and with it his social life and his home, because he lives above it.” Powell anticipates the end will be messy. “When they come to take me they’ll have to physically take me out in the box.”

About a month ago, you may recall a Santa Cruz graduate student in chemistry was arrested for homebrewing with poppies.

To update this story, on Friday the student, Chad Renzelman, was given a sentence of “drug diversion,” essentially parole, meaning if he “stays out of trouble for the next 18 months, the drug conviction will be taken off his record, according to his attorney.” The Santa Cruz Sentinel has the full story.

Remember those iconic “whassup” Anheuser-Busch ads from almost a decade ago? Advertisers love it when a catch phrase works its way into public use outside the original advertising because it spreads the meme far wider than advertising alone can ever manage. Whassup was one of those catch phrases that captured public attention for a brief period of time and spread itself all around popular culture, and was used referentially in a variety of contexts. You don’t hear it that often these days, but its memory still lingers in the public conscious.

The Whassup ad campaign, officially called True, ran from 1999 to 2002. The first spot aired during Monday Night Football on December 20 1999. It was actually based on a short film called True by “Charles Stone III, that featured Stone and several of his childhood friends – Fred Thomas, Paul Williams, Terry Williams, and Kevin Lofton. The characters sat around talking on the phone and saying “Whassup!” to one another in a comical way. The short was popular at a number of film festivals around the country and eventually caught the attention of Vinny Warren, a creative director at the Chicago based ad agency DDB, who took the idea to August A. Busch IV, vice president of Anheuser-Busch, and signed Stone to direct Budweiser TV commercials based on the film. Scott Martin Brooks won the role of “Dookie” when Kevin Lofton declined to audition. “Whassup!” won the Cannes Grand Prix award and the Grand Clio award, among others). In May 2006, the campaign was inducted into the CLIO Hall of Fame.” The phrase spread like wildfire and Wikipedia has a good list of where “whassup” appeared as a pop culture reference.

On Friday, a new Whassup political ad appeared on YouTube, using actors who resembled the original Whassup guys, showing where there are eight years later, thanks to current administration policies. It was created by 60 Frames, a film company that creates internet content. Whatever your political leanings, it’s a great use of satire in casting archtypes in specific light to make a point. Really, it’s as poignant and sad as it is funny. The version below was added to YouTube on Saturday and begins with the original Whassup ad, which I think gives better context to it, since you can compare and contrast the original with the newer satirical one. Genius — True.

As I wrote about last week, one of the biggest sponsors of the presidential debates via the Commission on Presidential Debates was Anheuser-Busch. The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank does both columns and video for his Washington Sketch. He made a funny video about his experiences at the last debate, and especially at the Budweiser Beer Tent, where journalists can find free food and beer. Apparently this is the fifth year that there’s been a beer tent at the debates.

I don’t have a lot of specifics, but this was too cool not to share. According to the Green Upgrader and few Asian news websites, a “Thai Buddhist temple has found an environmentally friendly way to reach nirvana, using discarded bottles to build everything on the premises from a crematorium to toilets.”

The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple in Sisaket province, roughly 370 miles northeast of Bangkok, is better known as “Wat Lan Kuad” or “Temple of Million Bottles” because of the glittering from countless glass containers on the walls. The temple first started using discarded bottles in 1984 to decorate the monks’ shelters. This attracted more people to donate more bottles to build other buildings such as a pagoda, ceremony hall and toilets. Bottle tops were also used to decorate murals.

According to Abbot San Kataboonyo, “the more bottles we get, the more buildings we make.”

Thai monks from the have used over one million recycled glass bottle to construct their Buddhist temple.

There are a dozen more photos at the Green Upgrader and you can see the amazing ways in which the monks used the bottles to create some pretty spectacular structures.

Surprisingly, there are at least two buddha breweries in the world. The Laughing Buddha, in Seattle, and Lucky Beer, in Australia, with a very cool Buddha-shaped bottle.
 

Scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas are hard at work trying to create a beer that can fight cancer and heart disease. A student research team of six is trying to genetically engineer a beer to include higher levels of resveratrol, the chemical found in red wine that’s believed to fight diseases. It’s the key ingredient that has led to what has been dubbed the “French paradox.”

Last June, scientists at the University of Wisconsin found that giving resveratrol to middle-aged mice makes them age more slowly and has the further advantage of strengthening their heart, even when given a high fat diet. In addition, recent breakthroughs in nanotechnology at Stanford, UC San Diego and Texas at Austin with regard to heart conditions made what the Rice students are trying now possible.

So far, they’re in the “process of developing a genetically modified strain of yeast that will ferment beer and produce resveratrol at the same time.” They quickly discovered that the yeast used in the Rice lab is not particularly good for making a decent-tasting beer. So this summer, the team asked local craft brewer Saint Arnold Brewery for some of their own yeast. Apparently, resveratrol is tasteless and odorless, much like iocane powder, that poison used in The Princess Bride.

“We’re now putting these genes into the yeast,” Taylor Stevenson, one of the team members said. “We’re fairly confident it will work because all the components have worked separately.” The plan is that hopefully the genetically modified yeast could be sold to commercial breweries so that they could make healthy beer, though at this phase of the work it will likely be at least five years before a commercially viable strain is developed.

The team’s immediate plans are to enter their BioBeer in the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine Championship Jamboree next month in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rice’s news staff also has an article about the team’s efforts entitled Better beer: College team creating anti-cancer brew.

Despite the obvious advantages of a beer that’s indisputably healthy — though in truth beer today is plenty healthy, regardless of neo-prohibitionist propaganda to the contrary — my initial reaction is one of skepticism. Perhaps that’s because I don’t understand genetic engineering all that well. But the idea of a genetically modified beer or Super Beer does not strike me as the best idea to come along. I guess that makes me more of a traditionalist when it comes to food. I’m not a fan of GMOs and I don’t see how this is appreciably different. If GMOs are generally a bad idea, why would genetically modified brewer’s yeast be good?

Up, up and away. It’s Super Beer!

Although written in 2003, I just happened upon a lengthy analysis of the Simpsons’ use of Duff Beer at the Simpsons Archive to critique the then big three American beer companies on Fox’s animated television series.

It’s this sort of advertising which has, in my opinion, done much to taint the beer industry and has given the general public a quite incorrect view of what exactly beer is or could be. This , in turn, has done much harm to craft brewers’ efforts to show beer as something different and, more importantly, as a sophisticated, diverse, and flavorful beverage worthy of as much respect as other gourmet products.

From near the end of the article:

The writers effectively depict Duff as a media-crazed beer company. Duff advertises on TV and in society using similar techniques to America’s beer companies; they use political figures, athletes, humorous commercials, stuntmen, and the superhero-like Duff Man. These methods clearly appeal to the youth market, in which viewers with in the market are proved to be more susceptible to consistent drinking habits.

It’s a worthwhile read if you have the time and/or love the Simpsons and good beer.