musing

A canary in a coal mine?

Jeff Alworth has been trying to figure out how the recession is influencing craft beer sales. My gut feeling is that he’s on to something.

Look, I’m not predicting that a bunch of craft breweries are going to go out of business, but stories like this one, “Craft brew sales on the rise as more offbeat beer flavors hit Superbowl coolers,” seem a little too good to be true.

When you look at all the things people aren’t buying these days it would hardly be surprising to see a luxury, affordable or not, like craft beer on the list.

Yes, I’ve seen the reports from many brewers who say they are still in expansion mode, who are having trouble keeping up with orders. Is this, in economist-speak, a leading indicator or a lagging indicator?

Guess we’ll find out soon enough.

I really shouldn’t admit how fascinating I find most of the numbers Ron Pattinson assembles.

The particular series that has me on the edge of my seat right now are the posts like these: assessing beer quality and Barclay Perkins Porter and Stout quality in the 1920’s.

These provide some hint if quality was a reason some styles, and some specific brands, survived at various points in time and why some didn’t.

I just wish somebody could find tasting notes to go with them. (Isn’t going to happen.)

If you watch as much television as I don’t then you probably haven’t seen the Miller one-second ad that spoofs how much money Anhesuer-Busch is spending on Super Bowl advertising.

Apparently it got posted on YouTube but removed. You watch it by visiting the story Adweek posted. That article concludes, “If nothing else, Miller’s effort implicitly challenges Budweiser’s bona fides as a beer for the common man.”

I’m not sure how much the commercial has to do with beer, and certainly not the beer we’re interested in drinking, but it is sorta funny.

Pete Brown writes about Oz Clarke and James May’s televised journey through Britain in search of the “drink that best speaks for the country.” Really something you need to click over and read, but two excerpts:

You come away with a vague knowledge of brewing ingredients and processes, and that’s it. This is disappointing to those already knowledgeable, because they believe that people just need to be educated about beer and then they’ll love it.

And . . .

I’ve always argued that beer’s cultural role is far more interesting to the average punter than its taste profile, especially if you’re in a situation where you’re talking about beer rather than drinking it.

You can probably sense where he is going, so head there now.

Look — fast, I guess — for one-second Miller High Life TV commercials planned as a counterattack on the 4½ minutes of advertising Anheuser-Busch will do during the Super Bowl.

That should give them plenty of time to talk about all the flavor in High Life.

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As you can tell, Super Bowl hype has begun, because stories about beer advertising abound.

– TV ads for Miller High Life start Jan. 26 and will tweak advertisers paying NBC $3 million for a 30-second ad in the game. “If we want people to drink our beer watching the big game, then we have to advertise before the big game,” says Andy England, chief marketing officer at MillerCoors. The one-second game-day stunt ad — known as a “blink” — will air on 25 local NBC stations.

– From the Baltimore-Sun: “Anheuser-Busch’s game plan for this year’s Super Bowl is simple: More Clydesdales. The iconic symbols of the St. Louis-based brewer will likely appear in three of seven spots.”

– The New York Times asks: Is star power enough to sell beer in hard times? Heineken has hired movie star John Turturro, while Anheuser-Busch has signed up comedian Conan O’Brien.

When I saw the headline my first thought was we were talking about the star power of individual brewers or individual beers. Silly me.