Headlines from February 2017 on THE BEER BEAT.

Previously, I explained several reasons why this blog has gone on hiatus, and explained that my thoughts about beer will be posted alongside my utterances about everything else, at NA Confidential.

You'll find them there via the all-purpose tag, The Beer Beat. However, whenever the urge strikes, I'll collect a few of these links right here.

Here are another month's worth of them, with the most recent listed first. One of my columns sneaked in there, too.

Apologies if topicality has gone out the window. I'm still groping for a working routine.

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THE BEER BEAT: Some great ink for Floyd County Brewing Company.

Crucially for Floyd County Brewing Company, the business is a classic brewpub model. The beer is brewed and consumed in-house. It's the right model for the here and now. The object is to dial in the beer at FCBC's home base, and then become a can't miss destination for local beer lovers.

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ON THE AVENUES: A stern side view of Gravity Head, nineteen times over.

Gravity Head might be staged differently, but as they pertain to what unexpectedly has become a bona fide tradition, an array of minor and often weirdly eccentric points adds up to a greater sum.

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THE BEER BEAT: A compendium of local and regional craft beer headlines.

Once upon a time the pace of change in regional brewing circles was fast, but not so rapid as to defy the efforts of an intrepid observer or two to consistently document the phenomenon.

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THE BEER BEAT: Why not a Session Beer Day pub crawl in downtown New Albany?

With Session Beer Day 2017 less than two months away, it's time for me to decide how I'll be honoring the occasion this year, and here's what I've come up with. This year, I'd like to make my Session Beer Day stroll in downtown New Albany. You're welcome to join me.

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THE BEER BEAT: You may need pickle brine after the Stupor Bowl, or throughout Trump's term.

Welcome to the pickleback: A whiskey shot with pickle brine as a chaser. Thanks to K for the link.

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THE BEER BEAT: "There is not ONE FREAKING IOTA of truth about how AB got started in this beautifully-crafted, button-pushing, faux-sensy-poo, piece o’ trash ad."

For those readers who may be coming late to my beer-related scribblings, know that Stevefoolbody is my hero. He is so awesome that typically I have nothing whatever to add, and merely attach a link and brief teaser to encourage you to go to his page and read.

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THE BEER BEAT: It took a week to get the details straight, but BBC is leaving its current St. Matthews location after 23 years and hopes to reopen elsewhere in Louisville KY.

So, to recap: Owner Pat Hagan bowed (intelligently, in my view) to leasing and area development realities and now hopes to move BBC to a new location, one that will allow the expansion of brewing into bottling and/or canning. The 3rd Street brewery and restaurant remain open, and the 4th Street branch will reopen when the Kindred building is finished. The coming week will be a victory lap for BBC in St. Matthews, and I hope to make it over and learn the future of my Wort Mug, number 66.

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THE BEER BEAT: No selfies necessary, because localism is why I believe the impending Falls City expansion is good news.

But localism as an economic doctrine provides another way of looking at the world – capitalism with a more human face, complementary to a good beer ethos, and also a different collection of information that permits tying a singular love of mine (beer) to another (the community in which I live, and how to make it better). It offers sense and sensibility out of relative scale, and suggests differing standards of value and achievement.

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THE BEER BEAT: Tailspin Ale Fest returns to Bowman Field on Saturday, February 18.

In my view, Tailspin Ale Fest has become Louisville KY's premier beer festival, and it's the brainchild of New Albany's own Tisha Gainey.

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THE BEER BEAT: Green Mouse sez the rumors are unsubstantiated and it's business as usual at BBC St. Matthews.

If and when further information becomes available, I'll let readers know. Until then ... can someone bring daddy a nice growler of David Pierce's signature BBC APA? I've been known to pay cash for such favors.

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The past month on THE BEER BEAT.

The PC: Budweiser explains the Doctrine of Trojan Geese Transubstantiation.

The PC: Budweiser explains the Doctrine of Trojan Geese Transubstantiation.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The Super Bowl means very little to me.

Back when the NFL was all about mud, blood and grizzled steelworkers gouging each other’s eyes out – on and off the field – I sometimes paid attention, but these days, not so much.

It’s true that I've never been a diehard football fan at any level. The last college game I saw in its entirety ("watched" would be insinuating a level of unattainable sobriety) was the last one I attended in person, a University of Louisville game in the late 1980's.

Professional football has slightly more appeal to me, and yet in recent years, I've seldom bothered viewing more than a quarter or three until the playoffs start. This year, I paused long enough to watch the very end of the fourth quarter when the Packers imploded, and that’s it.

As an aside, it occurs to me that my disinterest in football has been cemented by the increasingly well-documented phenomenon of brain injuries and the regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by players. We have ever more concise medical insight into these injuries, and how they impact lives after football, often explaining erratic adulthoods and the onset of dementia at impossibly youthful ages. How can anyone watch this sport without pondering the human toll?

That said, it’s the Super Bowl, and just as one stands for rote readings of the Pledge of Allegiance without ever thinking about what any of it really means, or whether the content actually matters at all, I watched a few minutes of the first half. Periodically I’d glance at the Twitter feed in my usual, once-yearly and entirely futile effort to comprehend the phenomenon of mass market advertisement envy.

It transpired that at some point during the first half, there was a Budweiser commercial with a puppy. I yawned and gulped my gin even faster.

Seeing as I’d already booked my own Super Bowl halftime show via the good offices of YouTube (Kasabian at Glastonbury, 2014 – an excellent choice), the television volume was turned all the way down, and so I didn’t catch what Carlos Brito’s mutts were doing or saying, although in the predictable time warp of my cultural appreciation, ancient notions of forcibly neutering Spud McKenzie came bubbling to the surface.

Thus aroused to wax cynical, I posted a tweet and went to bed to read a damned book.

And while you're scoffing at Budweiser's ads, always remember -- and never forget -- that Goose Island IS Budweiser! #trojangoose

On Monday morning, I groggily awoke to mass annoyance over AB InBev’s Super Bowl ad, as summarized in this tweet from a friend:

If Budweiser thinks craft beer is pretentious, why are they buying up all those craft breweries?

I was confused.

Were the puppies I'd silenced actively denouncing Jim Koch, or more likely, urinating into a Lagunitas tumbler?

Neither, because as it turns out, my throwaway #trojangoose tweet proved unintentionally prescient. During the second half, AB InBev lobbed a potshot at what Ad Age ineptly describes as “fruity micro-brews and beer geeks.”

Budweiser stole the Super Bowl pregame with a cuddly, cute puppy. But the King of Beers came out swinging in its second Super Bowl spot with a hard-hitting approach that proudly declared the nation's third-largest beer as a "macro" brew. The ad, which aired for the first time during the game, also revived the old "This Bud's For You" tagline that will anchor a new campaign to replace "Grab Some Buds."

The campaign's debut ad is notable for its swagger. The spot, by Anomaly, takes what appear to be shots at fruity micro brews and beer geeks. Bud is "brewed for drinking, not dissecting," the ad declares over footage of three men who are caricatures of beer snobs. Then comes this: "Let them sip their pumpkin peach ale, we'll be brewing us some golden suds."

Fans of better beer immediately took to social media to return AB InBev’s backhanded compliment, showering the multinational brewing conglomerate with amusing abuse centering on the notion of all-encompassing hypocrisy, because after all, AB InBev possesses its own product lines brimming with fruity mockrobrews, and besides, it is conjuring Zombie Craft beer subsidiaries (those pesky Trojan Geese again) faster than GOP presidential hopefuls book their flights to Iowa.

But why is anyone surprised? It's not like AB InBev ever possessed a moral compass. The Pour Fool explains:

… In their everyday actions at limiting the growth and distribution of craft beers, AB/InBev shows the hollowness of their claims of being a friend of brewers everywhere and big fans of craft beer. They’re fighting craft on dozens of fronts simultaneously, from Florida’s ongoing dust-up over allowable growler sizes (Bud and its associated brands and not, of course, growler-fill items) to its bloodthirsty attempts to obfuscate the issues in South Carolina’s bid to get a Stone satellite brewery and pub in Charleston. Anyone who thinks for a second that AB’s goal in acquiring Elysian, Goose, 10B, and Blue Point is anything other than an attempt to either control or kill craft beer simply doesn’t know history or is so spiritually vacant that they can easily rationalize away all that messy fluff like business ethics and morals and customer loyalty and independence and American entrepreneurship and what’s right and wrong. For those empty meat sacks, “It’s all about the beer, man!” and they areexactly the brain-dead geese AB relies onto keep their markets profitable and their ink black.

This part will be on the test: When I issued my random tweet last night prior to the offensive ad, I intentionally capitalized the word “IS,” and am underlining it in today’s column, because it helps to clarify AB InBev’s seeming hypocrisy. Think of it as the doctrine of Trojan Geese Transubstantiation.

Transubstantiation (in Latin, transsubstantiatio, in Greek μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is the change whereby, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, the bread and the wine used in the sacrament of the Eucharist become, not merely as by a sign or a figure, but also in actual reality the body and blood of Christ.

Consequently, it isn’t at all hypocritical of AB InBev to savage “craft” beers and beer geeks, because the products AB InBev peddles from its own specialty portfolios are no longer “craft” beers even if “beer geeks” still embrace them. In actual reality, they ARE Budweiser. The evil empire’s theological rationale is impeccable, and by the standards of multinational corporate logic, even unimpeachable.

When you drink Bourbon County Stout, you ARE drinking Budweiser.

However, the situation is not without consolation. The doctrine of Trojan Geese Transubstantiation points to a noticeable flaw in ad agency thinking, because in this scenario, lifted straight from Aquinas's scrolls, beer “geeks” are not being pretentious.

Just painfully naïve.

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Last week's column: Getting our SHIFT together … again.

The week before: Ripped straight from the pages of an Onion satire: “13 white males not really so eager to discuss issues like racism and sexism.”

Loathing of prohibitionists comes first, and only then print magazine ads for booze.

I was under the impression that the real problem in our current electronic age was the abject refusal of Young America to pay the slightest bit of attention to magazines and print media of all types.

Not only that, but I was under the impression that this condition is why we must go to ridiculous lengths to appease prohibitionist fatwah issuers by requiring age verification on beer websites, which in a land brimming over with cowardice and stupidity might be the single dumbest bureaucratic requirement yet invented.

Now I'm told that not only does youth still voraciously consume print, but it is being unduly influenced by what it sees in the pages of magazines seldom opened.

Does the world of corporate alcohol vending seek to influence future choices of youth? Of course. Is this any different than it ever was? Of course not.

Tempest, meet teapot. I'm no friend of bloated multinational business, but one needs to maintain healthy priorities, among them a balanced hatred of prohibitionists.

Are America’s biggest alcohol brands targeting the country’s underage youth?, by Roberto A. Ferdman (Washington Post)

Underage drinkers — those between the ages of 18 and 20, most specifically — are more heavily exposed to printed alcohol advertisements than any other age group, according to a new study. And it's America's biggest booze companies that could be to blame. The makers of Bud Light, Smirnoff Vodka, Coors Light, Absolut Vodka and a number of other popular drinks were among those whose advertisements were most heavily exposed to the underage drinkers.

Jesse Williams stars in new NABC ad.

Here's the recent ad that Tony designed for the Louisville Restaurants Forum, including the best photo of NABC's brewer, Jesse Williams, ever viewed hereabouts.

The joy of venting, or why civilization is at a standstill.

Perhaps the classic Coors Light television ad of recent years depicts a mumbling husband transfixed by the shiny blue mountains on his revolutionary cold-activated bottle of beer. His wife tries in vain to share the results of her similarly color-coded pregnancy test, no doubt gleaning a fresh perspective on the veracity of her chosen sperm donor. We can only hope that she does the right thing before it’s too late.

In keeping with this winning theme, which epitomizes the strange and ultimately self-defeating megabrewing marketing strategy of making its target audience look as much like blithering idiots as possible (come to think of it, such honesty may actually be commendable given the excesses of advertising … and the reality of the audience) the Silver Bullet now boasts a new twist.

It’s venting.

This time, the attractive female with Bride magazine in hand looks on sympathetically as her personally selected Ken doll concocts a flimsy excuse about a close friend in need of “venting,” which she encourages in the assumption that men actually do share hankies and their innermost secrets. In fact, the “vent” in question actually is another revolutionary development, this one a newly configured can top that “lets air in” and permits the beer to be poured far more quickly while the men watch football.

Poured into what? Here’s where this exercise in forgettable marketing become interesting. The ad shows the beer cascading from the can into the air, presumably to make the point that the carbonated urine is falling into a glass, pitcher, bucket or leftover Rally’s sack. However, our closing glimpse of the "venting" party shows four men dumping the insipid liquid directly into their mouths, as is the custom in America, the land that manners forgot.

C’mon, why even pretend?

Coors suggests that you can drink its Rockies Perrier faster if you vent. As I’ve noted many times before, lowest common denominator advertising like this one is what makes like harder for all of us, because it amounts to an open invitation to prohibitionists and health fascists to attack swill purveyor and craft brewer alike.

Even as we cringe, a new generation of Coors Light ads is hitting the airwaves: Code Blue. As the mountains turn blue, men from all walks of life answer their cell phones, drop what they’re doing, and race to become mass-market beer lemmings.

That’s just embarrassing. Is this why the world is racing ahead of us?

Maybe Miller could post yellow stars on the door so that they could tell the difference.

I’m so old that I can remember a time when Pabst Blue Ribbon genuinely was a workingman’s beer, while at the same time, Miller “Champagne of Beer” High Life sought to convey a more upscale image, albeit at a price point only pennies higher than PBR.

Having long ago cannibalized High Life in order to seize the MGD demographic, the spin doctors tending to the shareholders atop the SABMiller multi-national penthouse have since busied themselves repositioning Miller High Life as an icon of numbed-down populism, and that’s ironic, since Pabst has become the hands-down favorite beer of people with money who should know better but choose today’s emasculated PBR for the very same reason that Che Guevara’s bearded visage stares out from their wristwatches.

If Miller’s latest television protagonist weren’t African-American, he might serve as body double for Ed Anger of the late and lamented Weekly World News, one eyebrow jauntily cocked as he rages at the villainy of snooty bistros and the corporate poseurs at Whole Foods, both of which are guilty of daring to vend the common man’s High Life alongside overpriced burgers, watermelon martinis and imitation tofu milkshakes.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s heartening in a way vaguely reminiscent of Erin Brockovich that humble beer truck drivers are trained by SABMiller to enforce an ideological purge of uppity establishments, but what baffles me is how the captive bottles of Miller High Life ever came to be languishing in such trendy, upscale wastelands in the first place.

Isn’t it true that the very same wholesalers now dispatching these blue-collar superheroes to rectify crucial stocking issues previously sent salespersons to the very same establishments to collect orders for the very same cases of beer?

If not, then how did these places procure their stocks? The black market?

When the truck driver reclaims the wayward cases of High Life, are refunds being issued? Isn’t he actually undoing the handiwork of a yet another poor schmuck who accepted the initial order? What of the commission, or in this case, the ransom? Couldn't the salesperson be issued with a list of characteristics to help judge the customer so as to ensure that Miller High Life reaches the proper segment of the marketplace?

Oops, ‘scuse me. I forgot that drinking, not thinking, is the final goal here.

Today’s discussion questions:

Why do mass-market breweries express open contempt for their target constituencies?

Worse yet, why do the target constituencies forever acquiesce in being insulted?

Great Taste of the Midwest program ad, 2007.

What’s a curmudgeon to do?

I tend to avoid the wasteland of television, but as a selective pro sports fan, watching the big games means witnessing more inanity than any human should be forced to endure.

This year’s NBA playoffs are being marred by what might be the single most vapid playoff jingle ever (“Right now”) run ad nauseam by ABC, leaving the sole option of muting early and often – 100% of the time when Bill Walton is doing “color” commentary …and, of course, during Miller Lite commercials.

In this year’s nominee for most consistently offensive televised beer ad, we’re shown a totalitarian vision of thousands of mass-produced Miller Lite units rolling through one of the company’s sterile beer factories as the immaculately costumed employees gather to celebrate Miller Lite’s first place finish in the World Beer Championships.

The category? American-style Light Lager.

If you’re new to all this, such a triumph looks impressive at first glance, but be aware that such made-for-mass-market-swill categories are among the more surreal in the beer judging pantheon. In essence, the American-style light lager designation as a standard in any competition calls for the judge to consider all the prime aspects of beer – body, flavor, malt, hops – and then to determine whether the light beer being examined has had each component successfully neutered, if not entirely removed.

(Drum roll please): In the end, the un-beer-iest of the contestants wins … and the banners are hoisted for the approbation of the clueless.

A female acquaintance once noted that drinking light beer is indeed comparable to love on the beach, but with no hope of orgasm – something she said was far too common in her life.

The televised world of swillocracy shilling makes the fast food, monster truck and deodorant ads seem sensible and well meaning – and that’s frightening.

But White Castle doesn't serve beer.

My sporadic forays into television viewing are reserved for big ticket sporting events, and because these come along quite seldom, I’m spared the inevitable mind softening that accompanies the tube as universal American babysitter.

Whether it’s been six months or six days between viewings, the seemingly unalterable six-pack advertising mentality of America’s bloated corporate megabrewers never ceases to amaze – apparently owing to a target consumer group’s infinite capacity for self-abnegation – or, put simply, dumbing down.

So it was that last evening I saw SAB Miller’s new High Life blurb, wherein a Miller beer truck hurries to a posh eatery to rescue cases of High Life. In such a manner is swill being duly re-globalized owing to the unpardonable sin of being sold at the kind of joint that would vend an $11.50 hamburger.

I’m so old that I can remember just a few years ago, when Miller’s own supermarket positioning and pricing decisions for High Life came very close to destroying the brand’s value, but attention spans apparently are short in American corporate brewing’s inner sanctums.

Permit me to note (yet again) that many, perhaps even most, of the neo-prohibitionist regulatory difficulties faced by all segments of the beer business stem entirely from megabrewing’s stubborn insistence on low common denominator advertising strategies: Cheap beer as the virtual guarantor of anti-social behavior.

Up market wins; down market loses. The wine people understand it. Can you name a single wine maker at any price range who would poke fun at an up-scale eatery’s decision to include it on the wine list?