Beer and Women

Catching up with Stan's blog: a few days ago, he commented on a recent wave of writing-about-women-and-beer (that's my abbreviated version of his content). Worth visiting to see his comments and links to others'.

I'll just add: ain't nuthin' new under the sun. Since beer came back 74.5 years ago (the 75th anniversary is coming up in April), brewers have wrestled with the women-and-beer problem: Market to women-as-the-household's-main-shopper? Market to women-as-women? Market beer-with-food and thus to the people who do most of the household cooking? Sell the beer in seven-ounce-cans? (Idea being that women have smaller stomachs...) Sell the stuff in pink cartons? (One brewer tried that in the 1950s; the carton was shaped and designed like a small gift, complete with printed ribbons. So cute....)

Many brewers in the 1930s hosted cooking demonstrations and luncheons in department stores, hoping to persuade women that beer was dignified, wholesome, and fashionable. Others touted beer's virtues as a hair conditioner, hoping that women would buy one six-pack for the bathroom and one for the frig.

And of course the whole "low calorie" thing began life in the 1930s as a way to persuade women that beer was not fattening.

So the brewers really have been there, done that. But mostly what they've done is market beer to (very) young men, and do so using tits and tanktops. And the reason they've done so is because Americans infantalize drinking. And as long as that remains true, well, I doubt marketing -- for or to women or anyone else -- will change much. But we can hope.

Meat and Going Green

Meat is much on my mind these days, thanks to my work-in-progress, a history of meat in America from just after the Civil War to today. (Tentative title Carnivore Nation: Meat and the Making of Modern America, or something like that...) Anyway, there was a fascinating piece by Mark Bittman in yesterday's New York Times, "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler." Check it out. (It's amazing that the Times is so generous with its content. That newspaper is a national treasure.)

New Beer Book, Part Two

Several months ago, I noted that another beer book was due out soon. It has now been published and the final version has a different sub-title than was advertised pre-publication: It's BREWING BATTLES: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN BEER, by Amy Mittelman. As near as I can tell, it's a POD book and apparently only available from the publisher or from Amazon. But hey, Amazon is one of the greatest creations of the past century, sooooooooo............

Anyway, the book is out, and the first eight or nine pages cover colonial brewing, something that will make many people happy.

Hmmmm.... That Budweiser Commercial Sounds Familiar....

I don't watch much football (as far as I'm concerned, the game is a cure for insomnia). But my husband watches playoff games, and yesterday he watched the game in Green Bay. (Packers versus some other team. The other team won.) I was in the room, but I was reading the Sunday newspapers and not paying much attention to the game. Until an Anheuser-Busch commercial came on.

"Hey," he said. "You need to watch this!"

I watched the commercial in question. And then I put down the newspaper and watched the rest of the game, waiting for more of the A-B ads to air. I don't know the final score of the game, but I can tell you ALL about those Anheuser-Busch commercials.

The theme of this particular campaign (which A-B rolled out just a few weeks ago) is "The Great American Lager." It's a bit of a departure from the usual A-B ads in that it features a guy in a suit who does nothing but talk. No farting Clydesdales. No cute dogs or animated frogs. No babes in bathing suits. Just a guy talking about the company's oldest brand, Budweiser. You can read some press coverage of this new ad campaign here and here. (And probably plenty of other places as well; just google.)

So what was the guy saying? If you've read my book Ambitious Brew, his words sounded, um, familiar. The company pioneered the use of refrigerator cars. Check. Lager's translucence leaves no room for error. Check. Bud is a superb example of a national classic, the American-style lager. Check. And so on. Large chunks of the script sounded like they'd been lifted straight out of the book.

Sure, a few words had been changed here and there so that the text sounded more conversational -- but the gist of it is all there in chapter two. In that chapter, which is based on substantive and original research, I argued that a handful of nineteenth-century brewers, most notably A-B and Pabst, developed a unique American style of lager. That Anheuser-Busch (and Pabst) was a prime mover in the shift away from Bavarian lagers and to American-style beers. I also argue that Budweiser was, and is, a pioneering masterpiece of this particular style of beer. Even people who hate Bud (and A-B) have to admit that it's not easy to achieve the kind of consistency that A-B achieves with every batch of Bud.

I hasten to add that I'm NOT accusing A-B of stealing my work. It's not like the people there didn't know all of this already.

But it's almost as if the book, written by an outsider with no connection to the company, served as a kind of affirmation that freed them to promote Bud in this specific way, with this specific, coherent narrative that, well, comes right outta chapter two. Or maybe my narrative worked as a kind of light bulb: "Oh! We've now got this other story we can tell about Budweiser." (And yes, for those of you who are wondering, many A-B executives have read the book. Carefully and thoroughly.)

Soooo.........for the first time in my life, I'm planning to watch the Super Bowl. I have no idea who's playing, but I can't wait to see the commercials.

Cows in Space

I'm not keen on passing on internet sites, because god knows there are too many and too many people emailing each other links to sites -- but even I thought this was way too funny to pass up. Cow abductions! Tip 'o the mug to my buddy Danielle Schaaf. Who can also be found here. (Although not often enough... she's a very funny woman.)

In One Nostril. Out the Other

I'm not much on you-tubing, passing on funny stuff, or the internet in general. But I gotta pass this on from my buddy Jay Brooks. As he says, once the image is in your head, it ain't goin' nowhere. It's at Jay's blog as an entry for January 8th titled "Rhinodrinking." But here's a direct link to the video. After I watched it, I googled the "idea" and discovered there are entirely too many people in the world with too much beer and time on their hands. Warning: do NOT watch while ingesting liquids.