Monday morning musing: What time is the toast?

You’ve probably heard about this: Today is the 75th anniversary of when breweries could resume selling beer, although it was months later until Prohibition officially ended and full strength beer returned.

I mentioned Maureen Ogle’s excellent daily countdown a while back, and suggest you stop by if you haven’t been. Also read her opinion piece, “The day beer flowed again,” in The Los Angeles Times.

The anniversary even got a mention on National Public Radio this past weekend. I wrote last week at Real Beer about the press kit Anheuser-Busch sent out and that Noah Adams mentions in his short commentary.

For the record, I didn’t receive a six-pack of beer (as Adams found in his desk), which doesn’t bother me at all. However, this does seem relative to part of the lengthy discussion about beer criticism, etc. Adams makes something of a point of not accepting the free beer.

But back to celebrating this anniversary. We should all wish Pike Brewery in Seattle were close enough for us to visit.

– Rumors last October about Schlitz going retro turn out to be true. The press release does not make the meaning of “Classic 1960s Formula” based on the original recipe exactly clear.

The 1960s Schlitz and the original 19th century Schlitz clearly were not brewed to the same recipe. More than likely it will be made as it was in the 1960s, with adjuncts, before the brewing cycle was shortened in the 1970s and disaster followed. Philip Van Munching details this all very nicely in “Beer Blast,” calling the chapter “Number Two Schlitz Its Wrists.”

“We are going after the baby boomers who remember Schlitz when they first started drinking,” Jerry Glunz, the general manager of Chicago-area distributor Louis Glunz Beer Inc., told a business newspaper. “This is a different beer than the (current Schlitz line in the can), and this beer will stand up to its former glory.”

Pabst, which owns the Schlitz brand, has had the greatest success with retro marketing, but because Gen X (and perhaps Gen Y) drinkers embraced the brand — not by reaching out to baby boomers.

Hmmmm.

– Do you want somebody to write like this about beer?

“I’m looking for the Leon Trotskys, the Philip Roths, the Chaucers and the Edith Whartons of the wine world. I want my wines to tell a good story. I want them natural and most of all, like my dear friends, I want them to speak the truth even if we argue.”

I’m a fan of Alice Feiring and looking forward to her new book,
The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization.

I even like the notion that there’s a great story behind some of my favorite beers and that they may sometimes speak to me. But not every one. That’s why beer is not the new wine. Thank goodness.