musing

Blue Moon: Peter, Paul & Mary or Trini Lopez?

Peter, Paul & MaryHad Coors Blue Moon White been a folk artist in the 1960s would it have been Peter, Paul & Mary?

Wait, before you flip the dial, consider these alternative questions:

– Was the group P,P&M more like Pete Seeger or Trini Lopez?

– Is Blue Moon White more like a so-called craft beer or mass market beer?

Among the teens I went to school with in the ’60s the argument about just how “authentic” Peter, Paul & Mary was invoked far more passion than any one about “authentic” and “craft” beer. In one camp you had the “Dylan wrote Blowin’ in the Wind and Pete Seeger wrote If I Had a Hammer and those are the guys that have the right to sing them.”

In the other you had the “P,P&M sound as good as The Weavers, they are singing great songs and they are what we want to sound like around the campfire. They are miles better than Trini Lopez (who also sang If I Had a Hammer).”

History sorted this out for us. The group was at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream Speech” and its members spent the next 40-plus years (sometime together, sometimes on their own) on the right side of causes. In fact, they turned out to be more political than Dylan.

They wrote excellent songs of their own, but just as importantly generously helped promote many other songwriters. They sounded prettier than Dylan singing Blowin’ in the Wind, but that allowed them to broadcast a political messages to far larger audiences than the Weavers every reached.

I don’t mean to equate a lowly beer with the politics of the 1960s, but my friends who labeled P,P&M the equivalent of Trini Lopez were wrong. Will those who dismiss Blue Moon as a craft wannabe be just as wrong?

I’m not saying it’s my first choice of beers when it comes to those inspired by Pierre Celis – or even my first choice at Coors Field, where White is still brewed to the original recipe in the SandLot Brewery. I’d rather be drinking one of the all-grain lagers there.

But if you based your investment decisions on my tastes you’d have been dirt poor long ago. Instead recognize that tons of drinkers prefer Blue Moon to just about any so-called craft beer – and would likely describe it as craft when ordering it.

Earlier today the Brewers Association announced that craft beer sales are still rockin’. But the numbers aren’t as impressive as the Associated Press reported in conversation with Coors’ Keith Villa, the guy who created Blue Moon White.

Blue Moon sales were up 79% in 2005 and more than 100% in 2006. A couple months ago at the National Homebrewers Conference, Villa said: “We’re closing in on Sierra Nevada (meaning the Pale Ale as a single brands) and next year we should get close to Sam Adams (Boston Lager, the brand).”

The Brew Blog, meanwhile, has tossed out the possibility of a Blue Moon light beer, called Pale Moon or Pale Moon Light. This could also be the Chardonnay Blonde that won a medal last year at the Great American Beer Festival, which isn’t “light” in any traditional sense.

Villa promised that beer, which includes Chardonnay grape juice on top of a wheat base and checks in at 7.1% abv, will be back at GABF this year.

I’m not looking to turn this into a conversation about if Blue Moon White is a craft, genuine or authentic. We’re not settling that one. Just read the interview with Villa, or at least this much:

Q: What has allowed Molson Coors to build this craft-style brand without reinforcing the beer’s connection to a large brewing company?

A: The first thing really comes back to the taste and the quality. The second thing is the credentials. I have a doctorate in brewing from Belgium. So it’s not like a group of American brewers got together and did some consumer research and found the best recipe and then developed that. This is right from the ground-up.

Perhaps not Dylan, certainly not Seeger, but maybe Peter, Paul & Mary.

Great Taste might be the best taste

Great Taste of the Midwest Jack Curtin laments that he would have liked to have been in San Francisco this weekend for the celebration surrounding the Toronado’s 20th anniversary.

Agreed it would have been fun, but not where I would most liked to have been yesterday.

Nor was the Great British Beer Festival.

First choice would be the Great Taste of the Midwest, held in Madison, Wis. and the second-longest running beer festival in the country after the Great American Beer Festival. Here’s an early report from The Potable Curmudgeon. And an account of our 1999 visit.

We haven’t been back since 2000. Need to remedy that.

Mindless drinking: The label can fool you

Your beer choiceThe authors of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think also have a little bit to say about mindless drinking – in this case wine. And it seems like the results of one study could be relevant to beer.

The recent story:

Forty-one diners at the Spice Box restaurant in Urbana, Illinois were given a free glass of Cabernet Sauvignon to accompany a $24 prix-fixe French meal. Half the bottles claimed to be from Noah’s Winery in California. The labels on the other half claimed to be from Noah’s Winery in North Dakota. In both cases, the wine was an inexpensive Charles Shaw wine.

Those drinking what they thought was California wine, rated the wine and food as tasting better, and ate 11% more of their food. They were also more likely to make return reservations.

It comes down to expectations. If you think a wine will taste good, it will taste better than if you think it will taste bad. People didn’t believe North Dakota wine would taste good, so it had a double curse – it hurt both the wine and the entire meal. “Wine labels can throw both a halo or a shadow over the entire dining experience,” according to Cornell Professor Brian Wansink (Ph.D.)

Wansink is Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, where they do all sorts of these fun studies, including one that shows which glass shapes make us drink too much.

Think this couldn’t happen with beer?

In 1968 J. Douglas McConnell had consumers evaluate the quality of three bottles of beer over two months. Each bottle contained the same brand but drinkers were told there were three different ones priced at 99 cents, $1.20 and $1.30 per six-pack (the good old days). After repeated taste tests, consumers evaluated the highest-price brand to be of highest quality by a wide margin.

In a similar study one brand of beer was falsely labeled as four different brands, but the researches found that “all the subjects believed that the brands were different and that they could tell the difference between them.” Additionally most of the 250 participants “felt that at least one of the four brands was not fit for human consumption.”

[Both studies are cited in The U.S. Brewing Industry: Data and Economic Analysis , which is about as light-hearted a read as the title would imply.]

That research is from the 1960s and ’70s reflect the beer monoculture that prevailed when you could pick up a case of Stroh returnables for $1.99. These days we’ve got a tad more choices, but I’d still suggest you give it a little thought before grabbing your next six-pack or 750ml bottle.

More on the power of the label.

Don’t drink the Mild Kool-Aid

Brace yourself now that Hobsons Mild, at 3.2% a session beer if there ever was one, has won Champion Beer of Britain.

We’ll be reading about how great Milds are. Same with session beers. And so on.

Take it all with a grain of salt. This is not a Turning Point. It will not change what we drink in America one bit.

The American beer revolution has been powered by what Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey Brewing fondly calls flavor-driven beers. They don’t have to be 12% abv, but generally they are stronger than 3.2%.

Consider these top sellers: Samuel Adams Boston Lager (4.9% abv), Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (5.6%), Blue Moon Belgian White (5.4%), and New Belgium Fat Tire (5.3%).

Not extreme, not low alcohol. Seems to be working pretty well.

Hard as it is, I’ll stop there.

Looking for the local beer

We’re on the road right now – ah, the lengths we’ll go to to find just the right fruit beer for The Session – but I took the time to read Lew Bryson’s monthly Buzz so you should be able to as well.

ESPN columnist Norm Chad is looking for a new regular beer, to replace Rolling Rock, and Lew has plenty of useful friendly advice. Nice and complete, so I don’t really want to add anything.

However, one point of clarification. Chad has an these ABC’s for choosing beer and the first is:

Availability. It can’t just be sold in some tri-county area of North Dakota. Couch Slouch has to travel a lot. And when I’m on the road, I don’t want to have to fall back on Michelob or Miller Lite.

Lews writes, “I want to be able to get my choice of beer anywhere, because I travel a lot too” and later “I’ve got a beer philosophy that’s never failed me in 26 years, and I’m going to lay it on you: there is more than one beer in the world.”

The way I connect the dots that means the best choice doesn’t have to mean exact same beer. What’s best in Amherst, Mass., may not be best in Durango, Colo. I pick those two towns because both have bars known for their beer selections. The Moan and Dove in Amherst and Lady Falconburgh’s in Durango.

I was shocked that the Moan and Dove doesn’t offer anything from nearby Berkshire Brewing – “Because we’re ‘the local beer,'” Berkshire co-founder Gary Bogoff explained, which sounded so counter-intuitive my brain briefly shut down. And that Lady Falconburgh’s recently had beer from only one regional brewer, Ska Brewing (good choice, though).

I’m happy to find Victory HopDevil on tap only a few hours from our house and the selection at Moan and Dove will make anybody who appreciates beer drool, but those are beers I can find elsewhere. So credit goes to those proprietors for making this happen, but when the local beers are really good – and in these cases I know they are – they are going to be my first choice.

I’ve likely wandered off topic, and there are tourist things to get to today, so to get back on track read Lew’s column.