{"id":6418,"date":"2011-04-21T13:44:55","date_gmt":"2011-04-21T19:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=6418"},"modified":"2011-04-21T13:44:55","modified_gmt":"2011-04-21T19:44:55","slug":"beer-or-wine-telling-the-truth-a-good-place-to-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/beer-or-wine-telling-the-truth-a-good-place-to-start\/","title":{"rendered":"Beer or wine: Telling the truth a good place to start"},"content":{"rendered":"

Curious timing. Today Evan Benn (St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/em>) asks the question, “What’s in your beer? Labels should tell you.”<\/a> And at the Wine Spectator<\/em> website columnist Matt Kramer asks something that it turns out to be related: “If You Owned a Winery … What would you do differently?”<\/a><\/p>\n

Benn looks at a government proposal for beer labels that small brewery owners don’t like. He’s not buying their objections. Good for him. Granted, it’s complicated, there may be issues I don’t know about and the whole “standard-drink” discussion confuses it further. <\/p>\n

However, even though Kramer writes about wine, his discussion about labels is just a relevant to beer. Take a quick look at this photo (from shortly after La Cumbre Brewing in Albuquerque opened in December). <\/p>\n

\"What's <\/p>\n

A lot of facts, stuff that a lot of people don’t care about. Ask the person pouring beer a question and he or she may provide even more information — about the ingredients, or about process, or just what the brewer was thinking. Again, stuff of interest to a relative few. But if you do want to know you can find out. Labels should provide useful information and honest stories. And QR codes further extend that opportunity. <\/p>\n

Here’s the CliffNotes version of Kramer’s list.<\/a> You should be able to figure out where to plug in the word beer.<\/em><\/p>\n

* I Would Tell the Truth.<\/strong>
\n“This may seem overly simplistic. But I’m here to testify that it’s nothing less than astonishing to see the number of times a winery sidesteps, obfuscates, or flat-out lies about its practices in the winery or its reasons for pursuing a particular course of action.”<\/p>\n

* I Would Speak Up.<\/strong>
\n“The key point is not to hamstring yourself, but rather differentiate yourself from those who want your artisanal image but are not willing to pay your price.”<\/p>\n

* I Would Recognize That My Label Is Really a Portal. <\/strong>
\n“I would redesign it in recognition that the label is\u2014or should be\u2014an invitation to the prospective customer to acquire yet more information about what’s inside the bottle.”<\/p>\n

* I Would Always Hire Wine People.<\/strong>
\n“There’s a trend, especially among very big wineries or small producers seeking to break into the luxury category, to hire people from fields other than wine.”<\/p>\n

* I Would Ask Myself, “Am I A Me-Too Winery?”<\/strong>
\n“The only way to become above-average is to impose a demand that what you offer is indeed superior.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Curious timing. Today Evan Benn (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) asks the question, “What’s in your beer? Labels should tell you.” And at the Wine Spectator website columnist Matt Kramer asks something that it turns out to be related: “If You Owned a Winery … What would you do differently?” Benn looks at a government proposal for … 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":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beer-wine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-1Fw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6418","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=6418"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6438,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6418\/revisions\/6438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}