Beer as the star on the newsstands

One thing you notice when you don’t have an address you can have your magazine subscriptions sent to is which magazines, including those about beer, have the best presence on newsstands.

Beer Advocate, for instance, has none — by choice. Brew Your Own and Beer Magazine are particularly strong (with the latter appearing in gas stations across Canada). You can count on finding DRAFT and Imbibe at most Borders and Barnes & Noble, while All About Beer is a little more hit and miss. Which is why I still haven’t seen the AABM with Santa on the cover, but yesterday tracked down the January-February DRAFT.

So a bit of news. After putting a personality such as Leslie Nielsen or Jeremy Roenick on the cover for its first 14 issues DRAFT went with a big old glass of beer. Interesting given yesterday’s reports that brewing giants Anheuser-Busch and Heineken have hired new celebrity spokesmen for their beers.

Good to see beer as the star. The cover says “The Best of Beer” with 2009 in large numbers behind the glass. The words promote “25 Beers of the Year,” “200-plus Top Beer Bars” and “35 Ways Breweries are Going Green.”

I’ve already rambled on enough about the silliness of “best” lists, so do what you want with the link. Instead I’ll confess there is one end of the year best I look forward to. That’s Stephen Beaumont’s Taste of the Year. I don’t always agree but he seems to get it right two years out of three and this is one of them.

The beer? Go look yourself. You’ll see it’s from the same brewery as two other beers on the DRAFT list.

 

Should you, do you, the smell the cork?

Lost Abbey corkI do like the sound of bottle of beer being uncorked, the pop followed by the lively sound of carbonation, or perhaps . . .

“Oh, bleep, we’ve got a gusher.”

Not to harp on the beer versus wine thing but that’s one thing beer has over wine (Champagne excepted). I thought about this a couple of weeks ago when I watched a waiter hand a customer in the restaurant a cork after he opened a bottle of wine. The man sniffed the cork and nodded, then the waiter poured a bit of wine. The man swirled and sniffed, then nodded again. The waiter went on to pour two full glasses.

Was there a point to this? I understand that sommeliers will sometimes smell a cork for a sign that a wine might be “corked” but it is hardly dependable. And beer is susceptible to the same problems with tainted corks.

But I don’t think you are going to catch me smelling the cork next time we have a bottle of Ommegang or Saint Somewhere or some other beer sold with a cork-and-cage top. Just doesn’t feel right.

 

The one-second tasting note?

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.

 

Monday musing: What constitutes drinking alone?

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?

 

Next round is on me, buddy

Drinking buddies

There will be no “Where in the beer world?” this week.

I want to share this photo taken Saturday along the Anhinga Trail in Everglades National Park, but not to imply in any way that somebody has been sneaking beers to the alligators.

Still, don’t these guys just have that “happy hour” look?