Month: February 2015

9 ‘Hard Way’-free beer links

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 02.09.15

I don’t know about you, but I’m glad I got those links out of the way last week. So to other stuff …

Vintage Sapporo Beer poster

Prewar Japanese beer posters: the most beautiful ads ever made?
Before World War II “Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo were not known for their richly flavorful product, but could command richly evocative imagery for the posters and postcards that promoted it.” No kidding. Truly beautiful. [Via Boing Boing]

On Local Beer (And A Sudden Recant).
Zak Avery asks a question I don’t know how to answer in his conclusion (sorry, no spoilers). Maybe you can. [Via Are You Tasting the Pith?]

Watch the Draught Burton Ale promotional video
Glimmer of hope for Draught Burton Ale from boss of Carlsberg.
New Draught Burton Ale aims to be ‘close to original’
Engagement matters (see “On Local Beer”). [Via Burton Mail and Morning Advertiser, h/T @zythophiliac]

How Women Brewsters Saved the World.
Tara Nurin (official historian of the Pink Boots Society) explores the history of women and beer from prehistoric times up through Prohibition. More recommended reading on this topic: “Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World.” [Via Craft Beer & Brewing]

Over a barrel.
Real Ale’s Erik Ogershok tells The Austin Chronicle smaller brewers are finding it hard to obtain barrels in which to age their beers. Several other brewers have been saying the same thing for a while — prices are going up and they are expected to return barrels after using them. This isn’t universal. Ogershok points out breweries with large barrels programs are able to get them in volume. Barrel-aged beers aren’t going away. [Via the Austin Chronicle]

Growers Are Making Bank on This Green, Fragrant Bud. No, Not That One.
Another example of how hops grown outside the American Northwest are attracting attention. Most striking visually is to compare the chart labeled “Where hops are grown” with the one labeled “Hops in new places.” Same data, different scale. [Via Mother Jones]

Lexington Gets a Release.
Jeff Rice on lines. “The craft beer revolution grants us the right to stand in line in order to buy goods to consume like we do elsewhere in capitalist culture. Craft beer therefore, liberates us to be like any other consumer. The most basic aspect of any liberation movement – in theory – is not to overthrow and replace, but to be accepted as the rest. In that sense, craft beer lines equate lines to buy special video game releases or to rush a Walmart cash register the day after Thanksgiving. We’re just the same as everyone else. We like waiting in line.” [Via Make Mine Potato]

The Session #96: Beer festivals and context

Oregon Brewers Festival attendees map

The SessionYou learn something every day. Joan Villar-i-Martí, host of the 96th gathering of The Session (which means it has been around a full 8 years), explains in her his own post the difference between beer fairs and beer festivals in Spain. Context always matters.

Backing up a moment, Joan has asked us to write about “Festivals: Geek Gathering or Beer Dissemination?”

Now back to the value of context, this time from John Duffy in Ireland. The Beer Nut points out they are both in his home country, but then writes about “The third way” and “I’ve found them to be a great way of learning about any particular country’s brewing…. Even smaller ones like Borefts or Quartiere In Fermento, in my experience, really help with understanding what’s happening with beer in other places.”

The photo at the top was taken at the Oregon Brewers Festival last July. The pins mark the places festival attendees come from (or say they do — it’s not like they are checking passports). It would seem many people travel a long way to attend OBF in Portland. This must at some level qualify them as geeks.

Joan writes about the role beer fairs play in dissemination, praising “proselytism in its purest state.” But even without proselytism, I think OBF provides context — which may be different for somebody visiting from Spain, from Missouri, or from eastern Oregon — that results in dissemination. And the context matters to both geeks and whatever you call the other people.

Returning to the context of Spain: “The following editions of BBF (Barcelona Beer Festival) attracted 25.000 people each, drawing some international attention too. Our internal estimates (I joined the organisation team just after the first edition) tell us that 95% of the attendees are general public. The other 5% wear Rock Band black t-shirts or have a hop tattooed on their body. That means lots of people experiencing that there’s a world beyond Estrella, which is not appealing to some of the big guys.”

(This is probably the wrong thing to type here, because it detours back to the topic already overanalyzed this week, but were a large brewing company to film a commercial at the festival to portray the people not drinking its beer guess which 5% would end up in the final cut.)

What happens in New Haven, Mo., or New Ulm, Minn., or [pick another town and another country] isn’t necessarily on the scale of BBF and OBF. That doesn’t make it any different. Dissemination is where you find it.

*****

Visit Blog Birraire to read more contributions to The Session.

Getting the Bud links out the way and moving on

MONDAY WEDNESDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 02.04.15

Ah, the madness of Budweiser has delivered upon us. Rather that devote another set of Monday links to one topic, as happened two days ago, I’m jamming all the links related to the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial into this one spot. If other water cooler worthy posts show up in the following days they’ll be parked here as well.

If you spend time with the links that follow you will see that although it is worth being concerned about the underlying context there is definitely some overthinking about the intended message. It is important to remember that AB InBev has an audience it wants to connect with. Reassuring current Bud drinkers it is OK to keep buying the beer is important, as is firing up its sales force. But getting the attention of the forty-four percent of drinkers 21 to 27 who have never tried Budweiser is a priority. I’m pretty sure 44% have tried a beer brewed by a Brewers Association member. I don’t understand how the commercial might convince the beloved millennials to try Bud, but do know they are important to AB InBev.

Not to fall into the over analyzing trap, but . . .

a) Doesn’t it seem AB InBev underestimated the blowback and forgot how fast that can happen on the Internet (including videos)? MillerCoors sure figured it out, as did people selling T-shirts and homebrew kits.

b) Even though you can understand that the company creating the agency wouldn’t know AB InBev was about Elysian Brewing (when the footage was shot) and that Elysian made a pumpkin peach beer that reference still shouldn’t have happened.

and c) how in the world do you not secure the BrewedTheHardWay url in advance? (And cheers to Focus on the Beer for its generosity.)

Now the links.

Why the pro-macro beer Budweiser ad is so dangerous.
The Beer Babe

How the ‘Proud to be macro’ Budweiser Super Bowl ad got it all right.
Los Angeles Times

Analyzing Budweiser’s Hypocritical, Anti-Craft Beer Super Bowl Ad.
Paste

Making The Case For Budweiser.
The Federalist

Bud Finds Its Voice?
Beervana

Budweiser Super Bowl ad: Threatened much?
Denver Post

Craft beer lovers: Get over that Bud ad, and yourselves.
The Gray Report

Craft brewery co-founder not happy with Super Bowl ad snark.
Chicago Tribune

Another one from Twitter

Dear Budweiser.
Beer Makes Three

The whine of the craft-beer children.
Hey Beer Dan

Yes, Anheuser-Busch InBev Hates Your Beer.
Stephen Beaumont

About That Ad.
Fuggle

Budweiser Ad Declares War… On Itself?
Via BeerGraphs

Angered by the Budweiser Super Bowl ad? You’re missing the point…
The BeerCast

The PC: Budweiser explains the Doctrine of Trojan Geese Transubstantiation.
The Potable Curmudgeon

Craft Beer Boom Benefits Wine Industry.
Grape Collective (Trust me, it is related)

Budweiser’s Anti-Craft Subtext.
Beer Graphs

Budweiser Takes a Shot at Craft Beer in Super Bowl Ad, Faces Pumpkin Peach Blowback.
Westword

Videos

The number is growing, but I’m going with just two (reserving the right to cross that out and make it three or four later).

All Elysian, all craft (or not), all day

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 02.02.15

Silly me. Last week I provided links to three stories related to the sale of Elysian Brewing to AB InBev and figured that was enough of such chatter. This is a topic a lot of people have a lot to say about. So here you go, starting with basics of the deal itself, but moving on because this turned into a debate about what constitutes “craft” and moved on to the business of beer.

This week, of course, there will be plenty of chatter about this Budweiser Super Bowl commercial. I was busy tweeting with Alan McLeod about hop acreage at the time, but comments lit up my Twitter feed lickety split and bitching about it cleverly looked like an automatic 123 retweets.

Meanwhile back to the links in hand. This quote was in a footnote for a story Charles Pierce wrote about the college football playoffs. It reflects the bias I bring to this conversation. You may find it relevant or not. “If there were one concept I could purge from modern discourse, it is the notion that everything, and everyone, is a brand. There is something fundamentally dehumanizing in the idea that the primary purpose of so many things, and so many people, is to maintain their ability to sell themselves to the suckers. ‘Protecting the brand’ has become the all-purpose excuse for treating people as though they were pieces of equipment, as though they were products.”

On to the links.

Inside A-B InBev’s acquisition of Elysian Brewing.
[Via Brewbound]

Elysian founders discuss sale, Loser, exit strategy.
[Via All About Beer]

Life after craft: Elysian adapts after buyout by Anheuser-Busch.
[Via MarketWatch]

Craft Beer, Elysian and Emmanuel Goldstein.
[Via St. John’s Wort]

AB-Inbev: Why it matters who owns the brewery.
[Via I Think About Beer]

The real problem with Anheuser-Busch InBev takeovers.
[Via BeerGraphs]

The great craft beer swindle.
[Via Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog]

A Consolidation dialectic (or why buy-outs do sort of suck).
[Via Beervana]

The Distance: The case for craft.
[Via Chris Hall| Beer Writer]

Why brands matter.
[Via All About Beer]

Danny’s Liquors urges customers to stop drinking ‘Gooseweiser’.
[Via Chicagoist]

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