Stan Hieronymus

I’m not sure (and neither is he) how Stephen Beaumont’s BeerTrends for 2008 #3: Chicks Dig Beer is going to turn out, but it looks like writing about marketing to women is a trend in the making. Witness:

– “6 women, 6 decades, 6 beers,” at brewvana, which is not about marketing but how women perceive beer. Something marketers need to read.

– Lew Bryson wrote about “One of the beer industry’s biggest oversights: not marketing to women.” And several beer blogs quickly cheered his suggestion beer execs make 2008 the year they discover women.

– Beaumont chimed in to vote for the idea, but added the disclaimer: “Maybe it will happen this year, and maybe (more probably) it won’t.”

– American Brewer magazine arrived with a story by Alan Moen headlined, “The Female Factor: Marketing Beer to Women.”

– Fort George Brewery announced a Craft Beer Appreciation Workshop for Women with Lisa Morrison, which pretty much brings us full circle. Lisa has been beating this drum longer and louder than most.

In fact, I sent her and e-mail shortly after Lew’s piece appeared to ask if it felt like this is something we’ve been talking about a long time.

“For us, yes. What Lew says has been said before,” she wrote back. “But it bears repeating until there’s actually a change.”

And then she reminded me why she’s known as the “Beer Goddess”:

“I don’t necessarily think beer should be marketed to women or men. Ads featuring women quaffing beer while scantily clad men hover around them is just as silly as the Twins/Swedish Bikini/babe of the day marketing we’ve been subjected to for decades. I certainly don’t think we need to start marketing beer ‘to’ women.”

An image comes to mind that we don’t want to see in a Bud Light commercial during he Super Bowl.

You can decide what this might mean. And “nothing” is an OK answer.

Lew Bryson writes that he’s off to Miami, where he and Stephen Beaumont are both making presentations to beer industry members at the Cheers Beverage Conference. That’s Miami, as in Florida.

I, on the other hand, soon will be bound for Minneapolis-St. Paul, as in Minnesota. It has warmed up since Sunday, when it apparently didn’t get above zero in parts of the Twin Cities, but I’m packing long underwear rather than shorts.

I’ll mostly be judging some of the 828 beers entered in the Upper Mississippi Mash-Out and hanging with homebrewers. I also will stand up and talk briefly about brewing the sort of beers included in Brew Like a Monk.

And maybe drinking a few local beers.

I had planned to muse on women and beer this morning — it seems like such a pleasant way to begin the week. But that’s going to have to wait.

We start with good news for the Beer Blogosphere: Roger Protz has started blogging. (Thanks to Jeff Bell for the heads up.)

Protz’s credentials are impeccable, and he writes in a way that makes you feel smarter just reading him. His posts are bound to be great conversation starters. Just look at Friday’s about Budvar.

It gave Evan Rail has so much to say that he put together The Truth About Budvar at Beer Culture, his view of Budvar “as it appears on the ground here in its home country.”

Must reading for a reason that Evan gets to up front: “I do think that foreign beer lovers’ emotional attachment to Budvar sometimes tends to cloud their our judgment: it’s as if we are certain Anheuser-Busch is pure evil, therefore Budvar, as its opponent, must be perfectly righteous. Of course, this line of thinking would make sense only in a comic book — in real life, situations are generally more nuanced.”

Evan carefully provides facts about Budvar and its large and small competitors you may not have seen before.

The Internet doesn’t always work this well. Misinformation abounds, but this single blog-to-blog exchange offers proof of all that Andrew Keen gets wrong in “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.”

For me and others concerned about if there is a where in our beer, Evan offers a bonus by pointing to Primátor. Not just because of the the innovative beers he describes.

With a list like that, Primátor is among the most innovative breweries in the country, and it doesn’t hurt to know that the profits go to its owner, the eastern Bohemian city of Náchod, paying for schools and roads and parks and more.

That’s a brewery I want to visit.