That Super Bowl Ad

There are two kinds of customers that come into our place, & I can often tell what category someone falls into as soon as they walk in the door.  It usually has to do with how they move.  There are those who take their time, look around, want to scope everything out, ask questions.  They tend to move slowly, contemplate decisions.  Maybe they’re new to this & want some suggestions, or tried something they really liked & are looking for something similar, or want to know what’s new.  They’re frequently open to trying something different & know we have plenty of “different”. 

Then there are those who walk in the door, walk straight to the cooler, grab their brand, usually a 12-pack or tallboys, & head straight to the register.  They move quickly, deliberately, & only hesitate if they’re having a hard time visually locating their staple.  The latter group I’ll refer to as “monovores”; the former, “polyvores”.   Monovores know what they like & stick to it.  Why complicate things?  Polyvores want to expand & see what’s out there.  Maybe they’re just breaking into the wide world of beer, or maybe they’re already craft drinkers & are just mulling over the myriad options presented to them.  If you’re reading this, you probably know who you are.

I choose the (made-up) term “polyvore” as opposed to “omnivore” because a polyvore doesn’t necessarily drink everything.  They do, however, deviate from course at least once in a while.  Maybe someone drinks Classic Ice 90% of the time, but will pick up a Pumking in fall, or a Framboise once in a while.  They’re a polyvore.  And there are no craft drinkers who aren’t polyvores, who stick to just Abita Turbo Dog & nothing else, for instance.  Monovores can become polyvores, but the transition almost never works the other way.

We all know that ad - the one Budweiser aired during the Super Bowl.  That ad pissed a lot of people off.  Hell, it still kind of pisses me off.  But I don’t think it was designed to piss people off, at least not in the way it seemed.  It was aimed at the monovores, and was a call to arms, an appeal to the core.  It aimed to divide, celebrating “us” by contrasting and alienating “them”.    It’s a tactic used in politics constantly, by the Tea Party AND the Occupy movement.  This ad was a rally, a DNC or RNC.  The Two Americas.  This is why you like us, this is what we stand for.  This is why you are us.  And not them. 

Polyvores (like me) bristled at being classified as an “other”, dismissed wholesale as being ponderous & navel-gazing.  But it really wasn’t saying anything negative about craft beer, just reaffirming what everyone knows already & throwing it into sharp relief, proudly.  “This is what we’re about, take it or leave it.  THEY can do what they want.  That’s not US, man.”  And it’s nothing that the craft beer movement hasn’t done a MILLION times already.  How many times have you heard that craft beer is “not just for getting drunk” or “not just to slam”, which implies that pale American lager IS those things.  American lager still has a flavor, & people drink it for plenty of reasons more dignified than the craft world gives them credit.  Since its birth, craft brewing has had to paint big beer as an “other” to sell itself & gain exposure.  To some extent, this implicated big beer’s fans by association, & there’s at least as much of a vibe of exclusion in the perception of craft beer – what it isn’t – than trying to appeal to the monovores.  “We don’t drink like THOSE idiots.  WE CARE about how our beer tastes.”

This ad gives the polyvores a taste of their own medicine.  But it’s also a validation that the “other” is significant enough to be worth reinforcing the division.  Craft is a threat, & big beer needs to rally the base.  By implicitly acknowledging the threat (& by being dicks about it), Budweiser may have actually opened a few people up to craft.  Believe it or not, since that ad aired we’ve gotten requests for Budweiser Pumpkin Peach Beer from people who like the sound of it!  I’m sorry, Budweiser doesn’t make a pumpkin peach beer, BUT can I suggest… 

I find that comedians can often make my point in a way more poignant & succinct way.  Patton Oswalt’s one of my favorites, & one of his most known bits is skewering KFC’s Famous Bowls.  This bit got so much traction that a magazine interviewing the CEO of Yum Brands (which owns KFC) asked how he felt about Patton calling the menu item a “failure pile in a sadness bowl”; the CEO gave a blithe response about how he wishes Mr. Oswalt could “see the smile on people’s faces when they dig into one of our Famous Bowls”.  In a follow-up bit, Patton recounted this interview, with the quip that “I’m actually on the CEO’s side.  All he had to do was say, ‘Who the f*** is Patton Oswalt?  I’m a BILLIONAIRE!’”  See the parallel?  He says it so much better than I do.  I wonder if Budweiser did themselves a disservice by not just continuing to ignore the threat & pretend it didn’t exist, at least on a marketing level.  It’s still the status quo & may have just rocked its own boat.  “Don’t think about a pink elephant, Bud fans.”

Two other points before I wrap this up:  The ad wasn’t hypocritical.  It was an ad for Budweiser, not Anheuser-Busch InBev (& its acquired ex-craft brands).  It was just promoting the “us, not them” angle while a whole bunch of “them” happened to be watching.  And yes, the “brewed the hard way” slogan is bullshit, as illustrated by this counter-ad.

Thanks for tuning in for another timely blog post.  We’re happy to accommodate both the polys & the monos, & trust that you know where you stand.

Top Shelf Thursday, February 2015: Revenge of Valentine's Day

Shaping a tasting theme around a holiday is always a fun challenge.  Each holiday has different associations with it, some of which are more or less conducive to curating a line-up.  Halloween’s easy: chocolate, evil.  We covered that last October – AND the previous October.  This past November was our first “Thanksgiving”-themed tasting, centered around different food stuffs in beer.  There hadn’t been a Valentine-themed Top Shelf Thursday in a couple years, & then we covered chocolate & wine, in the various ways it presents in beer (wine hybrids, wine barrel-aged, barleywine).  Figured it was about time to recycle the Valentine’s theme, but since Halloween was not long ago, decided to push other aspects unique to Valentine’s Day – wine again, but also flowers, & love.  With a small group of beer lovers in attendance, we were all set for a magical evening.

The first in our bouquet of beers for the evening was also one of the few gruits we’ve featured at Top Shelf Thursday: Fraoch Heather Ale from Scotland’s Williams Brothers Brewing.  Based on a recipe millennia old, this ale was low on the hopping, seasoned instead with heather & bogmyrtle, another flowering shrub, & ginger, coming across dry & herbal with a definite ginger twist.

Lost Abbey’s Devotion Ale fit in name, though the devotion referenced is more of the monastic spirit.  A tribute to beers made by Belgium’s hop field-adjacent abbeys, this pale ale struck a nice balance between Belgian esters & a bright, floral character. 

We just got in AleSmith’s My Bloody Valentine less than a week ago, so I couldn’t NOT throw it into the flight, right?  A cousin of Evil Dead Red, this west coast amber ale had prominent piney hop notes, supported nicely by a malt profile that brought subtle dark chocolate & caramel flavors.

Hops are the female flowers of the eponymous plant, so I’d feel remiss if there weren’t a couple IPAs in the mix (plus I just wanted to try these).  Hardywood Park’s RVA IPA had a restrained bitterness & hop character for an IPA that said “east coast” from top to bottom.  Only fitting – the hops for this beer were sourced from the community, grown by Virginia home hop-growers in their own gardens!  

And Stone & Smuttynose joined forces to resurrect the recipe for the original Ballantine IPA, from shortly after Prohibition (WAY before IPAs were all the rage).  Using maize & some old school hop varieties like Cluster & Bullion, Cluster’s Last Stand was a cool look at what the granddaddy of modern IPAs might’ve tasted like.

The remainder of the night was spent in wine territory of one stripe or another, starting with Allagash’s Interlude.  A Belgian strong with a secondary fermentation by brettanomyces & aged in red wine barrels, this definitely satisfied our sour-&-funky pangs for the evening.  And we dug into another collaboration with Terra Incognita (get it – dug?), from Sierra Nevada & Boulevard.  The third iteration of a beer originally brewed for the SAVOR festival, this was quite a mélange, with a portion of dry-hopped young, blended with ales aged in wine & bourbon barrels.  I believe there was some estate-grown pale malt & a wild yeast in there as well, but the result was a well-rounded, malty beer, somewhere between a weizenbock & a barleywine, with a nicely tempered bourbon edge.

We hit the slopes with a pair of barleywines next, first with the Quebecois Brasserie Dieu du Ciel!  Their American-style barleywine, Solstice d’Hiver, had developed some wintergreen notes from the roughly half-year the brewery ages it prior to release.  Uinta’s Cock-Eyed Cooper, aged in bourbon barrels, was sturdy & robust enough to stand up to the wood.  The group concensus was that both of these could have used a bit more age to mellow out the alcohol heat – good candidates for cellaring!

And we landed on some very solid ground with Not the Stoic, a Belgian-style quad from Deschutes with a fraction aged in pinot noir & rye whiskey barrels.  Fans of Belgian quads found this one just right, not too sweet, & sporting both pinot & rye notes very well.

Thanks to all who enjoyed a most romantic Top Shelf Thursday.  Here’s hoping that you spent Valentine’s Day with that special someone, even if that someone is a glass of great beer.  See you in March!

Vanishing Eisbock

The romantic in me bemoans that there are few styles of beer that are truly seasonal.  With modern temperature control & preservation methods, brewers can pretty much make any type of beer any time they want, independent of climate or agricultural cycle.  Some styles can be traced back to their more “Earth rhythm” roots – saisons fermenting at warmer temperatures, for instance – & some just make sense based on what people want at a particular time of year.  A dark, boozy, spicy beer just feels right with Christmas.  4^th of July barbecue?  Not so much. 

A few styles come to mind as actually being seasonally, meteorologically dependent.  We covered harvest ales, made with freshly picked, undried hop cones, here.  The yeast & bugs that get lambic knocked up have less competition during the cold months, so they’re typically brewed from October to May (thanks, MoreBeer.com!).  And though, in this day & age, freezers forego the need for naturally freezing ambient temperatures, Eisbock may be the style most connected to its seasonal context. 

Legend (per The Oxford Companion to Beer) has it that Eisbock was born of a happy accident.  A Germany brewery worker was instructed to move a barrel of bock out of a cold part of the building to a warmer one.  He forgot – with delicious results.  The next morning, the beer was found encapsulated in a block of ice, having expanded & busted out of the barrel.  Fearing it was ruined, the brewer tapped into it & tasted the beer inside.  Eureka!  The freezing process had isolated a portion of the water, concentrating the sugars & alcohol & leaving a strong, sweet beer for the taking.  Its nickname is “Bavarian ice cream”, & before modern freezing & refrigeration, could only be made in the frigid winter months.  A very special beer. 

There’s some debate about whether beers that undergo this process can truly be called “beers”, as it’s seen as a form of distillation.  There are those who argue that, for a drink to qualify as beer, alcohol content should be achieved solely through fermentation.  Remember the arms race a few years ago, between BrewDog & a number of German breweries, to brew the strongest beer?  Those were all made with freeze distilling, squeezing out that meddling water & squeezing the ABV higher & higher (60% sounds about right).  Sam Adams boasts that Utopias is still the strongest beer made by fermentation alone.

But Eisbock still fits in the beer family according to most of the so-sayers who write style guidelines: the BJCP, the Brewer’s Association, etc.  It’s a beer most beer folks know about, but I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s had one lately.  Eisbocks rarely show up on our shelves – Schneider’s Aventinus Weizen-Eisbock makes an occasional appearance, & once in a loooong while we’ll get some from Kulmbacher.  Voodoo’s Trapped Under Eisbock came & went a few years ago.  That’s all I can think of.  In my life, I believe I’ve had three, myself (Kuhnhehn’s Raspberry Eisbock was a treat after buying my first house). 

So yeah, it’s strange to see a style so well-known with so little real world representation.  It brings to mind the topic of disappearing styles, & what beers might be on the endangered list or next to go extinct.  Before being resurrected by craft brewers, many styles had vanished from the landscape, presumably by natural selection.  Berliner Weiss, Gose, Grisette, Grodziskie – styles that are making a little bit of a comeback were comprised of just a handful of obscure commercial examples til a few years ago.  Makes me wonder if others will be phased out with time, & fifty years from now some craft brewer or home brewer will read about dry stout or ESB & want to take a crack at reviving this arcane animal.  Part of the beauty of having such a decentralized movement is that people are free to make whatever they want, but there’s definitely some stream-lining, a slow flow toward slightly more conformity (how many kinds of IPAs exist now?).  Some styles may get left behind, or get an identity makeover.  But that’s evolution, right?  I look forward to the day when we’re able to order an Eisbock we haven’t stocked before, but before then it’s up to some brewer to make one. 

Which brings me to a point I meant to make at the get-go – & it’s frickin’ freezing out!  Until someone takes another stab, I guess I could try making my own.