musing

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?

I broadcast a link to this via Twitter when I saw its on Friday because I think Ron Pattinson’s “Fantasy beer history: Gose” post is a) important and b) quite interesting reading.

I’m a fan of Four Peaks Brewing but he’s right to call out their description/history of Gose as “total rubbish.” It’s not only because I’m working on this book about brewing with wheat, that I find Gose a fascinating story, that we what liked what we had in Leipzig, or even that it just plain bugs me when I reads things that are wrong.

Fact is that education has been an important element in the American craft beer revival, that the breweries have taken charge of education — think about what you read on brewpub menus or craft beer labels — and education means getting the facts right.

There’s no need to make up sexy yarns. The basic, historically correct, stories behind Gose or India pale ale or stout make for great marketing on their own.

– Good to be small? From the New York Times, “In New York, No Crisis for Niche Manufacturers.” The point: “There’s quite a market for niche products in New York City,” said Jonathan Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan research group in Manhattan, and an author of several manufacturing studies. “For a lot of the niche manufacturers, including those that are broadly appealing to the high-end market, they may be doing O.K.” Is niche beer doing as well in these economic hard times?

– Scum watch. OK, I don’t have a logical beer angle on this but had to pass this along. Daria’s brother spotted it in Sunday’s Sun-Sentintel while looking for things for us to do near his house in South Florida. The description of a Gun and Knife Show at the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale: “Protect yourself from the scum of South Florida with items from this event.”

– Which one would you rather drink? This isn’t new and it isn’t beer, but an interesting post comparing how Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast described and rated, with much different results, what turned out to be the same wine.

It’s Monday, so muse on this link from Parade magazine. Two bits of drink related information in the same story:

– The birth of the Corona-and-lime ritual. Did this trend really become a trend because a bartender wanted to see if he could start a trend?

– Oom-pah-pah, ein Deutsche bier, bitte. From the story: “British researchers played either accordion-heavy French music or a German brass band over the speakers of the wine section inside a large supermarket. On French music days, 77% of consumers bought French wine, whereas on German music days, the vast majority of consumers picked up a German selection. Intriguingly, only one out of the 44 customers who agreed to answer a few questions at the checkout counter mentioned the music as among the reasons they bought the wine they did.”

I’d have been more impressed if the customers had put back wine on German music days and gone with beer.

In fact it is Sunday as I post this, but by the time you read this Monday we should have the RV pointed south. Might not see you until the New Year. If that’s the case celebrate carefully . . .

– Will the economic slowdown dampen sales of small-batch beers? Common sense says yes.

So I read Jeff Alworth’s “When Restaurants Die” with particular interest. The story is about the restaurants of Portland, Oregon. But it’s Oregon, and it’s Jeff’s blog, so of course there is a beer ingredient.

I worry that if the best restaurants begin to die off in Portland (we’ve lost 20 this year, including renowned Genoa), the creative minds who founded them will leave. The erosion of talent in the restaurant scene is just generally bad. I don’t know that it will have immediate or long-lasting influence on breweries.

Portland has been the poster city for craft beer success. If there’s a problem there then bigger problems seem likely everywhere else.

– I did not write this. It comes from Pete Brown. I’m going to say that twice because while blogs are a wonderful for pointing to well written words sometimes people end up giving the second blog (in this case mine) credit. I wish I’d written this, but I didn’t.

It comes from Pete’s year-end roundup, interesting, though more so if you live in the UK.

Any writer writes because they have a need to be listened to, and whatever that says about our psyches and frail egos, I’m gratified that people read this blog and link to it and recommend it. I apologise to anyone I’ve offended on here – I try not to. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading most of what I’ve written, and wish you a happy and prosperous 2009.

Something of an answer to the question Andy Crouch raises about why we blog. Repeat, I wish I’d written the paragraph. I did not.

– Thanks again, to Alan and Jeff for the Yuletide 2008 Photo Contest. Winning a hat was cool, but looking at all those photos was the real fun.

– Don’t forget The Session #23 hosted by Beer and Firkins on Friday. Include a drinking note if you can, because we’re back on the road and I’m looking for interesting local beers to try between now and August.