![\"Peter,](\"http:\/\/www.appellationbeer.com\/images\/20070815-ppm.jpg\")
Had Coors Blue Moon White been a folk artist in the 1960s would it have been Peter, Paul & Mary?<\/p>\nHad Coors Blue Moon White been a folk artist in the 1960s would it have been Peter, Paul & Mary?<\/p>\n
Wait, before you flip the dial, consider these alternative questions:<\/p>\n
– Was the group P,P&M more like Pete Seeger or Trini Lopez?<\/p>\n
– Is Blue Moon White more like a so-called craft beer or mass market beer?<\/p>\n
Among the teens I went to school with in the ’60s the argument about just how “authentic” Peter, Paul & Mary was invoked far more passion than any one about “authentic” and “craft” beer. In one camp you had the “Dylan wrote Blowin’ in the Wind<\/em> and Pete Seeger wrote If I Had a Hammer<\/em> and those are the guys that have the right to sing them.”<\/p>\n In the other you had the “P,P&M sound as good as The Weavers<\/a>, they are singing great songs and they are what we want to sound like around the campfire. They are miles better than Trini Lopez (who also sang If I Had a Hammer)<\/em>.”<\/p>\n History sorted this out for us. The group was at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream Speech” and its members spent the next 40-plus years (sometime together, sometimes on their own) on the right side of causes. In fact, they turned out to be more political than Dylan.<\/p>\n They wrote excellent songs of their own, but just as importantly generously helped promote many other songwriters. They sounded prettier than Dylan singing Blowin’ in the Wind,<\/em> but that allowed them to broadcast a political messages to far larger audiences than the Weavers every reached. <\/p>\n I don’t mean to equate a lowly beer with the politics of the 1960s, but my friends who labeled P,P&M the equivalent of Trini Lopez were wrong. Will those who dismiss Blue Moon as a craft wannabe be just as wrong?<\/p>\n I’m not saying it’s my first choice of beers when it comes to those inspired by Pierre Celis – or even my first choice at Coors Field, where White is still brewed to the original recipe in the SandLot Brewery. I’d rather be drinking one of the all-grain lagers there.<\/p>\n But if you based your investment decisions on my tastes you’d have been dirt poor long ago. Instead recognize that tons of drinkers prefer Blue Moon to just about any<\/em> so-called craft beer – and would likely describe it as craft when ordering it. <\/p>\n Earlier today the Brewers Association announced that craft beer sales are still rockin’<\/a>. But the numbers aren’t as impressive as the Associated Press reported in conversation with Coors’ Keith Villa<\/a>, the guy who created Blue Moon White.<\/p>\n Blue Moon sales were up 79% in 2005 and more than 100% in 2006. A couple months ago at the National Homebrewers Conference, Villa said: “We’re closing in on Sierra Nevada (meaning the Pale Ale as a single brands) and next year we should get close to Sam Adams (Boston Lager, the brand).”<\/p>\n The Brew Blog<\/a>, meanwhile, has tossed out the possibility of a Blue Moon light beer, called Pale Moon or Pale Moon Light. This could also be the Chardonnay Blonde that won a medal last year at the Great American Beer Festival, which isn’t “light” in any traditional sense.<\/p>\n Villa promised that beer, which includes Chardonnay grape juice on top of a wheat base and checks in at 7.1% abv, will be back at GABF this year.<\/p>\n I’m not looking to turn this into a conversation about if Blue Moon White is a craft, genuine or authentic. We’re not settling that one. Just read the interview<\/a> with Villa, or at least this much:<\/p>\n Q: What has allowed Molson Coors to build this craft-style brand without reinforcing the beer’s connection to a large brewing company?<\/p>\n A: The first thing really comes back to the taste and the quality. The second thing is the credentials. I have a doctorate in brewing from Belgium. So it’s not like a group of American brewers got together and did some consumer research and found the best recipe and then developed that. This is right from the ground-up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Perhaps not Dylan, certainly not Seeger, but maybe Peter, Paul & Mary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Had Coors Blue Moon White been a folk artist in the 1960s would it have been Peter, Paul & Mary? Wait, before you flip the dial, consider these alternative questions: – Was the group P,P&M more like Pete Seeger or Trini Lopez? – Is Blue Moon White more like a so-called craft beer or mass … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[292],"tags":[345],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing","tag-blue-moon-white"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-4G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10092,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/10092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}