Industry Marketing – Page 11

Cream Ale: I Hate Records Revisited…

Adjectives from another time. How irritating. I mentioned this the other day somewhere folk were discussing steam beer. One theory of the meaning is it’s a reference to the vapor from opening the bottle. Another says something else. Me, I think it’s the trendy word of the year of some point in the latter half of the 1800s. Don’t believe me? Just as there were steam trains and steamships, there were steam publishers. In 1870 there was a steam printer in New Bedford, Massachusetts. A steam printer was progress. Steam for a while there just meant “technologically advanced” or “the latest thing” in the Gilded Age. So steam beer is just neato beer. At a point in time. In a place. And the name stuck. That’s my theory.

Cream is like that. Folk think it has a specific meaning. Static in time. The general theory is that cream ales started as top-fermented ales that receive an extended period of cold-conditioning or lagering. Another source closer to the ground tells me that cream ales are now just blends of basic pale ales and basic light lagers. Could be. But that up there is an ad from 1830. It’s from New York Evening Post from 13 August 1830, well before lager was a twinkle in an Empire State brewer’s eye. Mr. Swan of Roosevelt Street had some for sale. So other than the seemingly odd juxtaposition of street name and date – what does it mean? There are two obvious first choice. Cream is rich and it also rises to the top. Hmm.

Six years later, the first or perhaps just leading American brewing industrialist John Taylor was placing ads for his Albany Cream Ale. Here is an ad that was placed in The Ulster Republican of Poughkeepsie, New York from 25 May 1836. Three years later, Taylor is advertising his Imperial Cream Ale and add the tag line “No mistake as to its superior quality.” Here is an example from the Albany Evening Journal of 4 April 1839. Which is interesting. Not a call to strength. A call to finesse. Ten years later, in an article about a new sarsaparilla works, Taylor’s Cream Ale is mentioned in the 21 July 1849 edition of the Plattsburgh Republican as an example of something the new sarsaparilla maker exceeds in production. It’s become common parlance for quantity as well as quality. Half a decade after John passes away, his sons are still prominently advertising their Imperial Cream Ale, now fit “for family use” as you can see was stated in the Albany Argus of 20 January 1869.

These are just snippets but they do show something of either an arc of meaning or perhaps a versatility. A claim more than a descriptor. Superior stuff. Was it creamy? I have no idea. I hate records.

Divisive “Local” Craft Culture Clash Marketing

My own favorite local.

Stan linked to this story a few days ago. It got me thinking… but not fast, “get me to the keyboard” thinking. It was this bit at the beginning that got me mulling:

I was watching a video online when it was interrupted by a commercial for Budweiser. The name of the spot was “Do You Know Where Your Beer Is Brewed?” Soft guitar music played while clips of idyllic landscapes and sunrises peaking over breweries slid across the screen. Nothing out of the ordinary there. The gentle voice of the narrator says, “With 12 breweries spread all across the United States, your next Budweiser is closer than you think.” Budweiser hangs its hat on the fact that it can produce the same beer at 12 facilities and it will always taste exactly the same no matter where you drink it. No small feat, to be sure. But then the voice adds, “You might even say we’re America’s largest local brewer.” My eyes narrowed and my brow furrowed. ‘What in the heck is this?” I exclaimed. “That is our word!”

Our word? There’s a lot of weird words in there. Not the least of which is “our” – whose the hecks is that referring to? Don’t get me wrong. I like the work of the author Jeff Baker just fine. He’s the manager of the Farmhouse Bar and Grill in Vermont. Nice place. Real nice. Just not my local. Because “local” can mean that, too. The distance of the drinker from the drink.

But that’s not his point. It sorta illustrates mine but that’s not really the goal of where I am going. He is asking about local ingredients. If you want that world, go back 200 years and have a look at the Vassar day book with local beer being made of local grain and hops being sold back in small batches to the farmers and tavern keepers of the central Hudson Valley just getting back to some sort of normal after the devastation cause by the Revolution. This is the mid-1830s book but in the 1808-11 book the economies of beer are clearly still defined by the cart horse. That is actual local brewing. Are we willing to go there? Doubt it. You don’t really want local. You want some local. Now and then. But you want the global economy beer made with the best ingredients brewed on the newest, bestest equipment. Right?

Craft beer and macro are not all that far apart in this respect. Brewed on computerized stainless steel to a scale and upon a recipe that meets the needs and budgets of their respective clients. The only actual local thing that is reliably present at the brewery is the staff. Hard to be a brewer who lives over 45 miles from the brewery. There’s a hint by the way. If the person discussing the beer in your glass doesn’t live about that close, not a brewer. Sales guy, likely… owner, sure… but that’s all. Both use good foreign malt and distant, shipped in hops. Both tweek their water and yeast to match those found elsewhere. Don’t get me wrong. I like “local” just fine. It just means, for me, the bok choi and beets I have growing out there in the yard. Not beer.

When anyone in beer – whether Bud or craft – claims a word like “local” or “small” or “real” there is marketing going on – even if only to a small circle. Even if only to the speaker. It’s all unnecessary. When I think of Bud, I think of the brewery at Baldwinsville, New York to my south where local people earn a decent wage. If I have a decent hoppy IPA, I think of the three nations and seven generations needed to make the beer exist. Beer is global and has been since at least the 1400s when the Hanseatic League was beginning to ship Baltic brewed hoppy beer to the Low Countries. Except for odd examples like postwar agricultural collapses like Vassar faced in 1808. Except for that, it’s been beer or large parts of it hauled out from the hold as often as not since the Dark Ages. Good non-local beer.

Yet Another Way Craft Will Kill Itself?

It is probably fair to say that my prediction of the demise of craft due to the stupid craft v. crafty mess was not entirely correct – unless we consider the health of its moral core. Could it be the smell back in late 2012 was the sign of things to come? Jeff may be getting his suspicions:

Ezra’s comments about the new Stone launch follow an interesting article Stan linked to yesterday, by an Atlantic writer wondering if craft beer has gone too far. They have a point. Stone’s corporate identity has always threatened to bleed over the thin line separating satire and self-importance, so maybe it’s not the best example of craft beer’s direction. The Atlantic piece drives the point home more pointedly: “So is this the future of U.S. beer consumption – a country that stumbles over itself to buy beer made with wild-carrot seed, bee balm, chanterelle mushrooms , and aged in whiskey barrels?” It go me thinking. If the craft beer market has become a contest over the most outrageous, has craft beer finally grown up and become its nemesis, mass market beer?

Now, this may all sound like the sky is falling but these things do happen. I was writing about Ontario’s brew on premises fad of the late 80s and early 90s and read how they held 3% of the retail market for all beer by 1996. Then they went away. Mostly. People didn’t want to pay the taxes once applied but, also, it smacked of recession in a decade of increasing prosperity when imports and micros became more and more the thing. Maybe the point is not that good beer will go away. After all, its not like beer is going out of style as the saying goes. But craft can over extend itself, can make itself a joke. People will move on to the next thing, the next good beer.

Which is exciting. What will it be?

Ti-Jos: Something That Won’t Make The Beer Book

Somethings just won’t make the book on Ontario’s beery history that I am writing with Jordan. I am working my way these days through the period after our version of prohibition ends in 1927 until, roughly, the beginning of microbrews in 1985. Jordan is back there somewhere untangling the Victorians.

This image is one from a regular series of serial cartoons placed in Ontario newspapers by Labatt during WWII under the pen name Ti-Jos. They are obviously patriotic but there is a theme of moral economics that flows through the set. They are set largely in the home or shops but the message is about what citizens need to do on the home front to aid the war effort. In this edition, you better damn well not be spreading rumours if you don’t want shortages.

Which is my message for each of you today, too.

Big US Craft Apparently Has Bifurcated Lobbyitus

Interesting piece on the impending decisions to be made in relation to Federal excise taxation for beer in the US over at MSN Money today:

…The Brewer’s Employment and Excise Relief (BEER) Act, which is promoted by Washington-based beer industry group The Beer Institute, is expected to be introduced later this year and would reduce excise taxes on beer produced by brewers large and small. Past versions of the bill recommended cutting the tax from $18 per barrel to $9 for large brewers while also cutting the tax for small brewers from $7 per barrel to $3.50.

The competing Small Brewer Reinvestment and Expanding Workforce, or Small BREW Act, promoted by craft beer industry group The Brewers Association would cut the federal excise tax on beer from $7 a barrel to $3.50, which is placed on a small brewer’s first 60,000 barrels produced per year. After that initial 60,000 barrels, small brewers must pay $18 per barrel, which would be lowered to $16 under the bill. More importantly, it would expand the tax code definition for a “small brewer” from one that produces 2 million barrels or less to one that produces 6 million or less.

See, this is how relationships end. As the article describes, brewers like Boston Beer Co and Sierra Nevada are active members of both the Beer Institute and the Brewers Association which are lobbying for distinct and conflicting tax regimes. Not sure that this in itself is enough to create “a rift in the beer industry that could signal last call for the ‘craft’ title” as the author suggests but the implications are interesting. First, the government has to decide the matter one way or another. There cannot be two systems of the one excise tax. Second, the actual small craft brewers who make up the majority of the Brewers Association may soon have to decide whether being led by big craft brewers who look a lot like big macro brewers makes any sense. Either way, it won’t be controlled by big craft.

It would be comforting to know that this question was actually being discussed at the Craft Brewers Conference but the Twitter feed for #CBC13 has all the diversity of first night at summer cult camp. Crazy kids. They just can’t stop marketing – even to each other! One can hope that Congress’s governing leaders will have the sense to reject the idea of including the expansion of 2 to 6 million barrel definition of “small”. It is all fun and stuff but, given the state of the nation’s finances, buying into that sort of belief system isn’t very helpful especially given the clear focus offered by the Beer Institute’s characterization of the implications as “a giveaway to a handful of brewers that each are worth more than a billion dollars.” A billion? That’s a large number.

Maybe Beer Helped Create Violent Tyranny?

I find this beer “created civilization” line going around funny. Sure, it is an easy cut and paste story for bloggers needing to fill space. And, sure, it is an easy story for a newspaper to run. But really?

Hayden told Postmedia News that “there are lots of implications” of the team’s findings, and that “brewing was just part of the picture” during humanity’s pivotal shift to settled, stable communities with enough food supplies to foster more complex cultural developments. But beer-making, he added, was one factor “that we think was important in making feasts such powerful tools for attracting people and getting them committed to producing surpluses.”

Attracting people? Getting them committed to producing surpluses? Such verbs we choose for such things. How about rounding them up, enslaving them and forcing them into labour to provide an oligarchical hierarchy based on grain monoculture with the rich rewards of being the enslavers going entirely to the enslavers. How about the slaves were perfectly happy in their outlying tribal hunter gatherer lives beyond the fields of horror filled with barley they will never taste and certainly never chose to grow. It is lovely to hope and wish and, sure, springtime is upon us giving us thoughts of baseball and everything but is there any evidence that the step towards brewing-focused agriculture in any way formed the basis what we value today as “civilized”? Maybe it just occurred as a crop contemporaneous with, say, turnips.

Did turnips found civilization? Could well be. Like mostly anything could well be. Like shackles and whips.

Who Is Afraid Of Facts On Beer Bottles?

Interesting if light-ish article from the publication The Drinks Business on the question of labeling beer with their caloric content:

According to public health minister Anna Soubry, officials have been in talks with the drinks industry about the possible inclusion of calorie content on labels. Ministers are hoping that displaying the calorie content in beers, wines and spirits could encourage those who are watching their weight to drink less. Most manufacturers already include information on units of alcohol on labels in a voluntary agreement with the Government. A recent study by the Drink Aware Trust has linked the large amount of calories in alcoholic drinks to people being overweight and obese.

Makes perfect sense to me. Every box of crackers in the cupboard tells me how many calories are in a handful already. I can look up the calories in meats and other ingredients because they are fairly standard measure as these things go. But a beer is not a beer is not a beer. Who knows what people are sticking in there and what it means over the long term? Some of the big bombs out there might as well be mugs of piping hot icing and should be handled with great care. And the drive to have more proper sessionable low alcohol beers might get a kick if the truth about stronger stuff were wildly known. Makes sense.

And why stop there? One thing that drives me a bit nutty are abstract standards like the UK’s absolutely silly use of “units” as a measure of alcoholic strength. What we need on a bottle is the actual ml of pure alcohol. A 500 ml can of 7% of semi-DIPA has 35 ml. Two of these innocent pals are well within the ball park of a 750 ml corked top bottle of that swell 10% beer but far less, err, red flaggy. Is it too much to ask for a universal standard based on a standard that is basically universal?

Is there pressure to keep this sort of information away from the beer buying public? Or do you actually just not want to know. Are they, like price, things of no interest to the… umm… passionate?

What Does A Critique Of Beer Culture Look Like?

I’ve been thinking more and more about the framework of the beery discourse and what has gotten us to this point. Still no comprehensive US history of beer. Still we live with the very language of beer controlled by organizations with middle managers, accountants and committees. And a growing trend such that, like things polysynthetic, the task of learning and describing the state of good beer appears to include a lot of creative writing – as in creation of the thing purported to be the subject of study. Not sure these are good things. There are stands being taken. I keep coming back to a post Jeff wrote a few weeks ago called “I Feel A Veto Coming On” in which he announced his rejection of a certain sort of beer:

…I must institute a similar policy with any experimental beer using crazy ingredients. I’m going to start from the position that anything that might plausibly be sold as a candy bar, salad, or entree is not worth drinking.

See that? That’s a position being taken. And one that makes sense. If you think about it, if the experimental beer is based on the adding of “not beer” to “beer” it is clearly a distancing of itself from beer. A dilution. A covering up. A distraction. One need not inaugurate the Protz Shield and Papazian Cup to point out the weakness in a trend or a shape shifting of the market. So, I take up Jeff’s policy and ask you to consider doing the same thing. Maybe 2013 is the year we can put the focus back on the beeriness of beer.

This Is How US Craft Beer Will Kill Itself

An odd, coordinated set of press releases today from the US Brewers Association (BA) and its leading members via any number of media can be summed up in the final section of the statement:

The large, multinational brewers appear to be deliberately attempting to blur the lines between their crafty, craft-like beers and true craft beers from today’s small and independent brewers. We call for transparency in brand ownership and for information to be clearly presented in a way that allows beer drinkers to make an informed choice about who brewed the beer they are drinking. And for those passionate beer lovers out there, we ask that you take the time to familiarize yourself with who is brewing the beer you are drinking. Is it a product of a small and independent brewer? Or is it from a crafty large brewer, seeking to capitalize on the mounting success of small and independent craft brewers?

The first sensible reaction is, of course, who cares. But then you read the variation on the theme by Papazian with its needy and slightly offensive reference to Founding Fathers and blindness to the good jobs offered by the 94% of the beer market served by big beer, well, you just shake your head. Never mind that some US craft brewers are big enough to have multiple breweries and large ad budgets. Never mind that many US craft brewers use much the same processes slammed by their trade association as marks of falsity if not signs of the end times. What is most annoying is that the whole construct is based on the faulty definition of what is craft – therefore good – by the BA itself.

Whether it is the BA-named Shock Top or its step-cousin the BA-silent Matilda, each ultimately produced under the Anheuser-Bush InBev corporate umbrella, there are plenty of examples of perfectly good well priced beer made by brewers who do not qualify for BA membership. There are also plenty of duds and plenty of highly questionable value propositions placed on beer store shelves by BA members. Again, few are special, most are solid work-a-day folk and some suck. Given that, launching on another David v Goliath fight based on a questionable self-generated definition of “craft” without reference to the sort of quality and price determinations the consumer has to make when out buying beer is a dead end. It is thin stuff that most can spot. All that I can see is that I have been reminded that the bigs are making some tasty beer now at a pretty good price.

As I said, odd. But these are instructive moments. Look to see who lines up behind the press release, repeating the arguments. Ask yourself why. As long as the view of the consumer is not the focal point for the discourse, one has to be very careful about such things, sifting what is independent opinion from what is generated due to one’s job description.

Ontario: Finally A Beer Fan Video I Like

Remember a few years ago when there were all those needy videos about “I Am Craft Beer” on YouTube and everywhere else that went on and on as if all brewers were demi-gods, all good beer fans were long lost friends and lovers and craft beer was what would fuel that rocket ship that was going to get us all to Mars? I know. It’s a bit embarrassing when you look back at it, right?

Well, I have to say that this new vid-ad-eo for Ontario Craft Brewers is a far better take. No phoney hero worship or weird cult-like claims to community. It’s just about the first time you had a good beer. Sure there is that waaay over caffeinated editing but the theme is actually about something that is real – the recollection of your first good beer… the one that you can at least recall, that is. The most fun for me is that it was filmed at the Brewers Plate 2012 that I attended in Toronto back in April and features the folk I hung out with. But not Jordan. I don’t know if he was rude or all mumbly when he was asked the question on camera but he didn’t make the final cut. Josh did. Clow did. And at 1:24 you do get a semi-slo-mo Mr. B. drinking shot. That is one of the ages. They even cut the clip of him before the beer shot out his nose, too, so that is good.

Most of all you get folk who know, work with or just like good beer in action shots displaying their fondness of good beer. From goofy to earnest. No scripts. No great plan. Just the thoughts of people at the gig invited to say something for posterity. I like it.