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.
Goodness, this is a fast moving world, whether you are biting news off in 140-character chunks or something longer.
In the time between when I collected and read rss feeds (last Friday) and could post some thoughts (today, Monday) most of what I might have added to the conversation about the Twitter Taste Live featuring Chimay and Westmalle beers on Saturday those comments seem redundant.
So just look at what Andy Crouch had to say in advance, something of a replay from beersage and Alan McLeod’s thoughtful recap.
(Friday I talked with Jay Brooks a bit about this, so I suspect he may soon have commentary worth your time.)
Fact is that had we not happily been enjoying how bright the stars were deep in the Florida Everglades (camped where there were no electrical or water hookups, with zero bars showing on my phone) and had it been physically possible I would have dropped in on this “event” to see if were any different than chat room tastings that have been around much longer than Twitter. And to find out what people got right and wrong when discussing Trappist beers.
Anyway, sll this discussion left me with a question: What constitutes drinking alone?
I would say that a trip to a bar in which your only conversation includes ordering beer, followed by taking notes, followed by posting them online counts as drinking alone. No matter what follows on a discussion board.
But what about at an event such as that at Twitter Taste Live or in a chat room?
Where does virtual reality end and enlightened conviviality begin?