If you have young kids, then this is their day. First, you have to strap them into the super hero or cartoon character costume that they excitedly picked out last weekend. Then you herd them out the door and into the street where you cautiously lead them from neighbor’s house to neighbor’s house and send them forth for candy - which you will pick through for razor blades and broken glass later at home. Or if you’re really anal you’ll load them into the minivan and head down to the local civic center or mall where every bit of fun and adventure of a kid’s Halloween has been stripped away for safety’s sake. Or if you’re extremely anal, then you’re heading off to church to pray for us sinners as we celebrate this satanic holiday.
But, if you’re a childless heathen like me, then you get to go have some real fun. Either you’re throwing a party or a friend has invited you to his. You get to go check out your boss’s trophy wife dressed in her slutty cheerleader costume or spend the night getting drunk and smoking cigars by a bonfire. My wife and I attend such a party each year. A friend of ours hosts it at her house in the country. It’s nice and big with plenty of places to crash for the night if the booze and merriment flow a little too freely to make the drive home reasonable.
BYOB is the standing rule for this party. One regular attendee and I always try to bring the hoppiest beer. Well, usually. This year I’m bowing out of the contest. I’m bringing a split sixer of Founder’s Dirty Bastard Scotch Ale, the perfect bonfire-side, cigar puffing beer. Rich, chocolaty and caramelly with an 8.5% ABV that tastes way boozier than that giving the beer a strong backbone. I’m also bringing Avery’s IPA - not the hoppiest beer in town but a very nice ale. My wife, not being a fan of either of those beers, is bringing her usual six-pack of Woodchuck Pear Cider. She can drink that stuff like it’s water.
So those are our plans. What’s your Halloween tradition?
Let me start out by saying that I don’t know anything about the Horny Goat Brewing Company except that it is a brewery in Wisconsin and a really creative marketer works there. I had never heard of it before stumbling across this blog entry about the free condoms.
Naturally, I had to check out their website. It’s a slick-n-sexy tour of the brewery, the beers and a sign-up form for a newsletter and the free condom. Yes, I signed up; this is just the sort of thing one can’t turn down if for no other reason than the giggle factor.
One note, despite the wild, fun attitude the website communicates, the selection of beers is pretty tame - a light ale, a hoppy pale ale and a Belgian wit. Yup, a brewery with the goatiest marketing and branding that I’ve seen in a while doesn’t brew one bock.
Nevertheless, the site is great fun and, despite my beer geek misgivings, makes me want to visit the brewery and try their beers.
It might not be the most obvious combination. When a lot of people think of jazz they think of the bebop era in the ’50’s or the swing period of the ’40’s, a low point for American beer. In these decades the beer industry was dominated by just a few companies and one would have trouble finding any but one style of beer, light lager. The craft beer renaissance was still years away. Looking back it seems like everyone was drinking martinis and elegantly puffing cigarettes.
Okay, so perhaps my image of mid-Twentieth century American culture may be a little off. I’m no sociologist.
But I dig jazz and I really dig beer. So I tend to take note with the two come together as they have recently on both coasts.
On the west coast we have Brother Thelonious, a Belgian style abbey ale. If you don’t know Thelonious Monk’s music then there’s a big piece of your soul missing. Stop reading this blog right now, go to the nearest record store and buy the first Thelonious Monk album you can find. Don’t download one song from Itunes, you have to get the whole album.
Anyway, back to the beer. North Coast Brewing has produced a really nice beer here. It’s big and chewy - very nice. When you buy a bottle of BT you are not only getting an excellent beer but you’re helping out the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. The Institute offers free jazz training to young musicians and a portion of the sales of BT go to it.
Then on the east coast we have the Harlem Brewing Company and Celeste Beatty. She’s been brewing her Sugar Hill Ale for a long time now and listening to jazz even longer. She says that she named her beer Sugar Hill Ale because it “was the neighborhood where my family lived and it was also where a lot of musicians and personalities came from that defined Harlem.”
Now she’s joining forces with World Market, which is opening a store in Harlem, for a free jazz series on Friday nights. The events will feature local musicians as well as beer tastings and food pairings. Sounds like a great way to spend a Friday night.
The recent so-called beer summit had a lot of people talking about beer in public. This is really kind of unusual in the US where we love beer but we’re supposed to be a bit ashamed of it. Whenever we do talk about beer in public we are required to make nervous little jokes about it, use words like “suds” and make little self deprecating quips that prove we’re cool with it.
Bollocks!
With that I’d like to say that I’m now a fan of Representative Jared Polis. I don’t know a lot about the congressman; I’d never heard of him before seeing this clip. But I like the casual way he accepted doing a beer bong on camera. Sure it’s a little juvenile to funnel a beer but you have to appreciate the way he just rolled with it. He’s clearly comfortable with beer and doesn’t need to consult a focus group before drinking one in public. Bravo, Jared!
But it doesn’t stop there. Beer and wine might have naturally occurring benefits but what if more were infused into the beverages. Vitamins and herbs found their way into our adult beverages. And now they are seeping into the hard stuff.
What the hell? Why can’t I just have a drink because I want a drink? In this multitasking world in which we live, it apparently isn’t enough to want to relax and unwind a little at the end of a day. We have to be nourishing ourselves at the same time.
Well, not me.
If there happens to be incidental health benefits to the beer and wine that passes my lips then that’s just great. But I declare here and now that I will not drink nutritionally amped-up booze. A line has to be drawn and this is where I draw mine. You can keep your ginseng infused vodka; I’m going to have another straight bourbon.
For days, beer lovers and political junkies with too much time on their hands have wondered which beers would be chosen for President Obama’s so-called beer diplomacy meeting. (In case you’ve been sleeping for the past two weeks this is about an arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white Cambridge police officer that Obama felt compelled mention in a recent press conference.)
So both the president and the policeman brought up the idea of discussing the issue over a beer. Since then every journalist and pundit have gleefully rolled out every tired joke about beer drinking. And they have endlessly speculated about which beers would be chosen.
Now they have. The president will be drinking a Bud Light; the policeman a Blue Moon; the professor a Red Stripe.
With just a little coordination they could have scored red, white and blue beers. But Obama’s choice screwed that up. If only he’d gone for a White Rascal from Avery!
But setting symbolism aside let’s consider these choices. The professor chose an offbeat light lager. I find it impossible to dislike Red Stripe. Those stubby little bottles are positively adorable as is Red Stripe’s “Hooray, Beer!” ad campaign. The cop chose Blue Moon, the light and gently spicy beer that is often served with an orange slice. And the president chose the most innocuous, inoffensive beer imaginable. No doubt he spent some time with his political consultants to come up with that choice.
What would you choose? Imagine that your choice of beer would be broadcast to the world for some reason. Which brew would you pick?
Scottish brewer BrewDog recently came out with a high alcohol beer called Tokyo. The ale is made with jasmine and cranberries. Champagne yeast helps push the alcohol percentage to 18.2 which makes it the highest alcohol beer available in Britain today.
And, naturally, the neo-prohibitionist groups are competing to out-panic one another. They claim that the new beer will lead to increased binge drinking, degradation of public health, social harm and cats and dogs living together.
This craft beer may be big on alcohol but it is also likely big on flavor. Unlike thin lagers like Stella Artois and Carling that really do lend to Britain’s binge-drinking problems, this big beer forces the drinker to slow down. Besides, the cost, 9.99 GBP per standard sized bottle, make the idea of slamming one after another a little absurd.
But what always gets under my skin about hand wringing over higher than average alcohol beers is this. While these levels may indeed be high for beer they are nothing for wine and a liquor issued with 18.2% would be an embarrassment.
While I have never heard the reasoning behind targeting beer for criticisms of alcohol content while exempting other forms of alcohol I can imagine at least one. On the wine side no doubt critics are relying on the better class of people that they perceive as wine drinkers to exercise the self-control to keep their alcohol consumption under control. As annoying as that argument might be it does carry some merit. I would argue that anyone drinking a craft ale brewed with jasmine and cranberry is likely of equal or higher respectability than the average wine drinker. These are not the same beer drinkers who drink cheap lager by the case.
Anyone with a passing interest in beer has probably heard how English pubs are closing at an astonishing rate. The latest numbers say that they are going down at a rate of seven a day.
There are some general culprits that everyone seems able to agreed upon. Increasing taxes on beer, rising unemployment, the smoking ban and increasing prices have driven many a British beer drinker out of the pub and into his home where he can drink beer bought at the store.
Two new culprits were added to the list this week. The British ale advocacy group CAMRA issued a press release this week putting some of the blame on the beer tie system. Under this system pubs are under contract with a bigger company, often a brewery, to share the costs of running the pub. The system allows the company to set prices for the pub owners and, according to CAMRA, they often set prices at higher rates than what exists in the market. This makes the pubs prices higher for consumers and hurts the pubs ability to compete.
The other culprit identified this week in an article from the BBC is the publicans themselves. According to the article pubs are simply failing to give the consumers what they want and are generally unfriendly.
I have to wonder if the writer of that BBC article recently got pissed off because some bartender didn’t serve him quite as quickly as he wanted.
No one knows exactly how to stop this trend. One thing is for certain, a British institution is slowly dying.
According to a recent Gallup poll Americans are choosing beer over wine once again. It was a tight race there for a while but, if one is to believe the results of this survey, beer is back on top.
Why? Oh, sure, let’s go ahead and speculate. For a few years wine was gaining ground as less expensive bottles of not-bad wine were becoming more widely available all of the time. And this to some pretty clever, eye-catching labels and wine was giving beer some pretty stiff competition.
In the meantime the big beer companies were focusing on new ways to sell the same product. (Sure, craft beer was showing impressive growth and exciting the pants off beer geeks like me but in terms of sheer sales dollars it accounted for very little.) Remember the beer case that seconded as an ice chest after the top was ripped off? Or how about the label that turned blue when the beer was cold enough? Somehow, Americans weren’t all that excited by the same watery beer repackaged.
Then the big brewers remembered flavor. They could have looked to craft brewers and maybe they did but as soon as they started added flavor back into their beer their numbers started picking up. Sure, those flavors might be lime, salt and an apologetic imitation of British ale but at least beer is starting to taste of something again.
There is a belief out there that beer is recession proof. Proponents of this idea point to the smaller recession in recent decades where sales of beer improved while the rest of the economy retracted. The idea is that as money gets tighter people want to continue to drink - or drink more - and the cheapest way to do so is to buy cheap beer. Nothing like a sixer of Stag to forget your shrinking 401(k), right?
But this monster of a recession that we’re in now has all of us rethinking that meme. Is beer really recession proof or is it just recession resistant? Every couple of weeks a new report or study comes out conflicting the previous studies - beer is improving, beer isn’t improving, this or that segment of beer is improving while the other isn’t. It’s basically a lot of economic mumbo-jumbo where statistics can be and are used to explain any particular position.
I’ve tended to take a bigger picture approach to this. Before the recession beer sales were generally stagnant or in some years even in decline. Wine and spirits were giving beer the sort of competition here in the US that it simply wasn’t used to. After ruling the liquor industry for so long beer was starting to have self-esteem issues.
But within that trend there was a dynamic that I, as a good beer lover and tireless promoter, found particularly heartening. While big beer here in the US struggled to figure out how to increase or even maintain their position, craft and import beers were going gangbusters. Year after year the craft beer segment showed double digit increases in sales. My analysis is that Americans were finally realizing the truth of the old joke: American beer is like having sex in a canoe; it’s fucking close to water.
Given that the fact that we’re getting mixed signals from the beer market now during this recession isn’t really all that earth shattering. Big beer continues to languish while craft beer continues to improve. Some are calling the improvements in craft and “above-premium” beer sales a desire for “affordable luxuries” among American drinkers.
That might be. Or it could be that beer really is recession proof. The trend of shrinking big beer sales and improving craft beer sales has continued unabated despite the recession. This is what it was doing before and this is what it’s doing now. Had the recession not have happened would the beer sales picture be any different? It’s tempting to think that it wouldn’t be.
But, if you’re a childless heathen like me, then you get to go have some real fun. Either you’re throwing a party or a friend has invited you to his. You get to go check out your boss’s trophy wife dressed in her slutty cheerleader costume or spend the night getting drunk and smoking cigars by a bonfire. My wife and I attend such a party each year. A friend of ours hosts it at her house in the country. It’s nice and big with plenty of places to crash for the night if the booze and merriment flow a little too freely to make the drive home reasonable.
