Beer News Blog

The Miller Lite brand of the Miller Brewing Co. has hit a homerun amongst male beer drinkers in the US.  The first time I saw one of the commercials featuring the “Men of the Square Table” (including Burt Reynolds, Jerome Bettis and other male icons) I wasn’t sure what I thought of it.  But lately I’ve been noticing strange behavior amongst my beer drinking brethren.  In bars, at weddings or while hanging around the camp fire “Man Laws”, as determined by the “Men of the Square Table”, have begun to take effect.

I first noticed it a couple of weeks ago when I was at one of my favorite bars after work.  Some co-workers and I were sitting at the bar enjoying some cold brews when we saw the waitress pick up about six beers.  When she lifted them off the bar we were horrified by the sight of her sticking her fingers into the necks of the bottles to carry them.  One of my co-workers pointed at her and yelled, “NO! Man law violation!”  His exclamation caused a loud roar of laughter from men in the bar, followed by a multitude of, “I love those commericials, man!”

The second, and more interesting, example of the “Man Law” phenomenon occurred last weekend at a wedding.  After the ceremony, when the beers came out and the fun began, I started noticing awkward toasting going on all around me.  Instead of the usual cheers, with people touching their beer’s neck to a friend’s, men were all tapping the bottom of the beers as a sign of friendship.  Some of the gentlemen were confused by this, but I knew exactly what it was, a “Man Law”!

Call me crazy but research groups show that the “Man Laws” created by the “Men of the Square Table” are getting the attention of male viewers.  IAG Research, an advertising research firm, has concluded that the Miller Lite ads do “a better job at cutting through the beer advertising clutter than current work for Bud Light and Coors Light.”  If you haven’t seen these ads and you can’t wait until they are included in a commercial break from your favorite TV show, you can see a good selection of them at YouTube.com:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=I85vo9FTG8s&mode=related&search=miller%20man%20laws

In the history of mankind there have been many great two-somes, duos, duets and partnerships - they are the things we can rely on to go hand and hand.  How could we eat Oreos without milk?  What would peanut butter be without jelly?  When would we rock if we had Guns but no Roses?  Where would Roscoe be without Chicken and Waffles?  Who would Tinnelle be without her Captain?  But the most important question of all might be - Why would we play softball without beer?

And yet that is the decision the Knox County Commission came to this week regarding the upcoming Air National Guard softball tournament.  Theorizing the sale of beer would be a major boost to revenues of the national invitational event (HELLO!), Lt. Col. Don Johnson asked the Knox County Beer Board for a temporary permit to sell beer.  Before a decision could be reached, however, hundreds of phone calls came flooding in demanding that the permit be denied.

But why?  Why such a heinous decision?  I’m quite sure many of the players attending have never even played a game without beer.  In fact, they may be much worse without drinking it.  It could be pandemonium: nobodies defeating favorites, benchwarmers becoming heroes, people talking out issues, using good judgement.  What gives?

It appears that right across the street from the ball fields there is a Baptist Church.  Seeing as how the event does take place on a Sunday, members of the church were a little concerned about coming out of mass on Sunday to find some less than pious out-of-towners camping out in their backyard.  Although personally I would have liked to see the 800 members of the church take a Sunday off to observe the miracle that is softball, I have to lean to their side of the debate. 

For those of you who have signed up for the event and are planning to make a road trip of it, don’t lose hope just yet.  One of the fields involved in the tournament will be serving!  Half of the games will be played at Caswell Park in East Knoxville, an area pre-designated by the city to have a beer permit.  Should make for an interesting show down between the teams that have been drinking all day and those who have been forced into sobriety.

During my many years as a tavern-keeper, when a customer came into my pub and asked for the “coldest beer in the place…how ’bout that bottle frozen to the coils in the bottle box?”, my reaction was one of thinly-veiled condescension.

“Sir, we sell only draft beers, which are served at temperatures befitting them…at least 40º,” I would reply, only letting the tiniest itsy-bit of beer snob scorn show.

But I’ve got good news for all those guys whose egos I surely must have bruised over the years. The Coors Company finally listened to you, and has just unveiled a brew called Coors Sub Zero. Two things about this are surprising. One is that it took a major brewer so long to develop a beer like this, and the second is even more surprising: it was developed in the UK, famous for its tradition of warm beer.

It required over 8 years and 50 patents to get it right, and also $18 million. Conceptualizing that much money may be difficult, so picture this: it’s happy hour and your local pub is selling beer for $5 a pitcher. Now imagine drinking 3.6 million pitchers of beer between 4 PM and 7 PM. Total cost—$18 million, plus a $2.4 million tip to the bartender. That’s a little easier to grasp, isn’t it?

And Coors is not just kidding around…this stuff is going to be cold, and somehow it remains liquid throughout the entire process. It’s held in special tanks at 23º, and after being drawn through its serving apparatus it’ll come out at 28º—4 degrees BELOW freezing. A special turntable is used to spin the serving glass and spray it with cold water, bringing its temperature down to about 41º. The brew takes about 20 seconds to pour, then it’s hit with a sonic pulse, creating bubbles which form large ice crystals. Voila!—the coldest beer in the world you don’t have to eat with a spoon.

So that’s the good news. The bad news: you’ll have to go to Canada to try it. But go ahead. It’ll cost you a lot less than $18 million.

Not so fast!  This week the Scottish city of Glasgow decided to hang on to glass in its public eateries and pubs.  In a unanimous vote Glasgow’s city council put down a measure that sought to remove glassware from pubs, replacing the centuries-old imbibing instrument with plastic cups.  Although the measure was supposed to go into effect in January, the public was prepared for legal action. 

The issue of glass has become a great concern in the city over the last few years as injuries related to broken glass attacks have been on the rise.  City officials now plan to single out pubs with the highest incidence of glass attacks, having already banned glass from pubs that stay open past midnight. 

The public was relieved by the decision.  One member of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) called the decision a victory over the “nanny state”.  Many residents of Glasgow felt the measure would have a negative impact on the tourism industry, a major part of the Scottish city’s economy.  The negative conotation of being a city too violent for glass surely would have been a blow to even the most secure Scottish ego.  

Although I certainly don’t live in Glasgow, when I think of the city I think of fun little pubs where people gather to enjoy a nice brew.  I feel like bars in Los Angeles must be more violent than bars in Glasgow.  Scottish people are pretty cool, and I don’t feel like they need to be told they can no longer have glass.  I mean hanging around a keg at a college party, drinking from a plastic cup was cool - in college.  What I’m saying is this - if I’m allowed to drink from a glass here in Los Angeles, then some Scottish guy who is probably far less violent than I should be allowed to as well.

In a stunning electoral turn, Houston County, Alabama, voters just approved a referendum to legalize the sale of draft beer for the first time in the County’s history. So instead of being actually drafted, a far more pleasant opportunity awaits—locals will soon be heading to their locals for a fresh pint of frosty draft beer.

Many devout residents of this Bible Belt community surely feel that the path to perdition is not a road paved with good intentions, but rather an ice-cold river of draft beer.

So why the change?

His Honor Pat Thomas, mayor of Dothan, Houston County’s largest city, provided the impetus. “We want a minor league baseball team here in Dothan, and knew we couldn’t get one without being able to sell draft beer at the games,” he said.

Ahh, baseball, the great consensus-building pastime. Baseball and draft beer go together like…well, Alabama and Blue Laws. In fact, although the referendum passed by a 53% to 47% margin, restrictions on alcohol sales are generally strongly supported here.

A former Floridian with whom I spoke commented, “I’m from Miami where this sort of thing is no big deal. Here, I can’t even buy a beer at a supermarket on Sunday. What do you do if you run out of beer during the Super Bowl?”

I asked Mayor Thomas that question. “The Georgia border’s only miles 14 down the Interstate,” he replied, and that’s as good an excuse for a Sunday drive as I’ve heard.

So a toast to Houston County…may your landfills be smaller, your roadsides less littered (especially the ones on the way to Georgia), and your watering holes even happier places!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a draft beer champion - Breuning be thy name!  Last week, Tim Breuning, a native of Ohio, was named the first ever champion of the Great American Beer Tour. In one short week Breuning won not only glory and the admiration of beer drinkers throughout the country, but also a trip to the 25th Annual Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado. 

The Great American Beer Tour was organized by the Brewers Association as a way to help promote American Craft Beer Week.  This year, the theme was “Visit Your Local Brewery”, and that’s just was Breuning did.  In fact, in one short week he visited eight breweries - FOUR TIMES.  In case you’re slow with your arithmetic, that’s thirty-two breweries in five days.  After the first two days Breuning, a college professor, decided to take the rest of the week off work. 

The Great American Beer Tour was set up as a way for people to get to know their local breweries and the amazing beer they produce.  By visiting the Brewers Association page individuals could enter the contest by downloading a beer passport.  Contestants then had to travel to breweries and have their passports stamped as proof of their visit.  Points were awarded on a scale from (1) to (3) based upon who stamped the passport.

So my question is this - Why the heck was I not informed that there was a beer contest going on?  I mean, had I known the title of America’s Draft Beer Champion was up for grabs I would have:

1. Cut out of the office for a week-long beer drinking romp.

2. Beat the pants off this guy by hitting up twice as many breweries.

3. Met every beer hero in the process.

The moral of the story here is, go to school in Ohio.  Not only do the college students know how to party, it appears the professors do as well.  Cheers to you Tim Breuning, America’s Draft Beer Champion!

“My sister, your grain - its beer is tasty, my comfort.”
Song of Songs, Sumeria, 2100 BC

Let’s move away from the ‘Old Days’ of the 1980s and take a look at the REALLY old days…let’s go back almost 5,000 years, shall we?

Our vision of beer and its brewing comes to us through a modern prism. We picture the huge and always consistent scientifically-based breweries of Anheuser-Busch and Coors Brewing Company. But humans have brewed beer for thousands of years, using it as an important source of nutrition and survival…and the brewers have almost always been women.

When the tomb of lady Pu-Bai, Queen of the Mesopotamian city of Ur in 2600 BC, was explored, it contained a long, thin straw delicately fashioned from lapis lazuli and gold. Beer brewing back then left a preservative cap of grain and herbs on the surface and needed to be pierced by a thin tube in order to be enjoyed. Lady Pu-Bai’s official seal portrays her drinking beer from a clay vessel through just such a straw.

Today there are places these eons-old customs continue almost unchanged. In some Stone Age societies of the Amazon jungle women of the village chew on grains, mixing their saliva with them and spitting the resulting mix into a vessel to start the brewing process. This is a “mash” I’m not really keen on tasting at the moment, but it was exactly the same process in recent Japanese history—using rice as the grain—when village women were responsible for making sake.

Even now, in African vilages of Tanzania, comtemporary women brew beer in their homes and share it with other women who drink from a common vessel. And, 4,600 years after Lady Pu-Bai, these 21st Century women drink beer through…that’s right…beer-drinking straws.

The nation’s fourth largest beer company is heading back to its roots, well … sort of.  Pabst, providers of the frat-boy-favorite Pabst Blue Ribbon and street-cred heavy Old Style brands, has decided to move back to the Mid-West.  While some would assume this is prodigal-son-returns move by the formerly Milwaukee-based Pabst, in actuality they have decided to move their headquarters to Chicago suburb Woodbridge, Illinois.

Of the roughly ninety employees currently working at the San Antonio headquarters, the company estimates only fifteen or so will make the long trip north to Woodbridge.  Many of the displaced workers will remain in San Antonio and continue to work for the company in some capacity.  Pabst foresees the need to immediately hire about thirty local workers once their migration is complete.

So why exactly would Pabst uproot from a city that houses tourist attractions like the Alamo, the River Walk Mall and perrenial NBA contenders the Spurs?  The state of Illinois offered them a million bucks for their troubles.  Good enough for me.

In closing I’d just like to point out the fact that Pabst also owns Schlitz Malt Liquor.  Schlitz Malt Liquor is pretty rad, so rad in fact that my dad had a Schlitz Malt Liquor belt buckle.  He also had a blue leather belt that went with the bull-emblazoned buckle.  The belt wasn’t that rad.

In a deal that one might consider “a little tricky” King of Beers, Anheuser-Busch, purchased a stake in Chicago based Goose Island.  Last week a merger was finalized by Widmer Brother Brewing Co. (a company owned by Anheuser-Busch) and Goose Island that will give the small beer company a chance at big time circulation.  As a part of the deal Goose Island will now have access to the network of independent beer wholesalers who distribute Anheuser-Busch beers throughout the United States.

One unusual aspect about this purchase is that all three companies are family owned and operated, which probably eased the merger.  In this newly extended family, everyone will have chores.  Widmer will become a minority investor in Goose Island’s bottling plant and brewery on Fulton St. in Chicago, Illinois, helping to modernize and streamline the facility.  Anheuser-Busch, who own about 40% of Widmer Brothers Brewing Co., will lend logistical support to help their distributors realize the full potential of Goose Island. 

With the help of the both Widmer and Anheuser-Busch, Goose Island will most likely become a new “niche” beer.  Found towards the end of the beer aisle.  You know, the treat-to-your-tongue-not-to-your-wallet beers.

Although I’ve never been to Chicago nor have I drank a Goose Island, the minute I spot one at my local grocery store you bet I’ll be bringing it to the cash register.  There are few things in this world that I am sure of - one of them happens to be that an ice cold Budweiser is always delicious and refreshing.  They’ve stood by me in my times of need: children’s birthday parties, Fridays, lay-offs, promotions, Saturdays, births, deaths, boring football games, Tuesdays, great football games, Mondays as well as Sundays.  It’s about high-time I supported them!  This Goose Island’s for you Bud!

Last week, the United States Congress got together to discuss a topic most Americans have quite a bit of knowledge about.  No, they didn’t talk about the war in Iraq, Homeland Security or a woman’s right to choose.  This time they got together to pass a resolution that most of us could really get behind – BEER!  On June 7^th, 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution commending America’s craft brewers for their contributions to the nation’s communities, economy, culture and history.

The resolution is a huge triumph in the beer community, raising the profile of both brewing and craft beer.  Washington, a city that has been at odds with the beer community for decades, took a huge step forward by recognizing and celebrating the positive impact beer has had on the culture of the United States.

Representatives Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR), aided by members of beer enthusiast groups like the Brewers Association and the American Homebrewers Association, toiled long and hard to officially embrace the positive aspects of beer and the beer industry.  Let’s hope their efforts ensure them a long life in politics. Hey, isn’t their a Presidential Election right around the corner?

In closing I’d just like to take the time to make a declaration, or resolution in this case.  It sure is nice to know that every weekend when my buddies and I crack open a couple of ice cold Budweisers, we won’t just be having an awesome time, we’ll also be participating in an honored political activity. America is truly an amazing place …

“My country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet lad of liberty,
Of thee I sing!”