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?

More from the front lines combating the sad scourge of swill.

You will recall that on Sunday, I described a revolutionary discovery in the emerging discipline of beer drinking psychology.

The Kubler-Ross model and the sad scourge of swill.

During the course of my long career in selflessly assisting beer drinkers to overcome their attachment to mass-market swill, I’ve received many comments, and these suggest that the process of surrendering long-held (although sadly errant) beliefs about beer indeed brings many people to a place resembling that of the "Five Stages of Grief".

Some readers detected a note of self-congratulatory smugness in this comparison … and they are quite correct in noting it. I take a certain pride in my ability to influence lives. Wouldn’t you?

But I digress. Prior to last night’s “makeup” fundraiser for Jeffersonville Main Street at Kye’s II, a gathering necessitated by an ice storm in February that caused the postponement of the originally scheduled event, I dropped into Buckhead’s Mountain Grill on the waterfront in Jeffersonville. The ostensible reason I did so was to reconnoiter the barroom terrain for future reference, something I’ll have more to say about at a later date, because after years of uncertainty, we’ve decided to sell NABC beers to Buckhead’s.

However, this strictly mercantile factoid is not the real point of my thoughts today. Rather, I’m still thinking about the notion of recovery from swill, and how unintentionally hilarious the process can be from the perspective of the attending therapist -- which, of course, would be me.

Specifically, I was seated at the Buckhead’s bar, and eventually looked to my right. There sat a man who for many years has come into my own pub and loudly praised the craft beers we sell.

However, yesterday he was caught in the act of hoisting a bottle of Miller Lite in much the same fashion as the actors in the brand’s current spate of television commercials, during which the manufacturer of this eternally insipid liquid encourages the adoption of something approximating the Mussolini-era fascist salute to celebrate the many medals Miller Lite wins in an international beer competition that has written its category guidelines to exactly describe the stunning negation of anything approximating beer flavor, something that Miller Lite has always represented.

Of course, it all has far less to do with “style” than with the fact that Miller annually joins its fellow megabrewers in underwriting the competition.

Back at Buckhead’s, with my lapsed customer spiraling downward less than ten feet away, it might have been an awkward moment, except that he looked away from me every time I tried to make eye contact. Knowing that the key is to hate the sin and love the sinner, I wasn’t offended at all. Rather, I was flattered at his obvious discomfort.

Then again, perhaps he just dislikes me apart from my choice of beer, and that doesn’t bother me, either. Sometimes those of us in the vanguard are vilified. It happens, and there’s always Belgian ale as solace.

The Kubler-Ross model and the sad scourge of swill.

The Wikipedia juggernaut helpfully defines the Kübler-Ross model:

The Kübler-Ross model describes, in five discrete stages, the process by which people deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness. The model was introduced by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book "On Death and Dying". The stages have become well-known as the "Five Stages of Grief".

During the course of my long career in selflessly assisting beer drinkers to overcome their attachment to mass-market swill, I’ve received many comments, and these suggest that the process of surrendering long-held (although sadly errant) beliefs about beer indeed brings many people to a place resembling that of the "Five Stages of Grief".

The five stages of grief that pertain to the tragedy of swill are:

Denial: "It just can’t be happening that my ice-cold Bud Light no longer lights my fire."

Anger: "Why me? It’s not fair that Roger made me drink that good, expensive beer … and now my Silver Bullet tastes awful!"

Bargaining: "Just let me enjoy one more evening at (insert name of preferred dive bar, meat market or sporting venue) so I can give my Miller Lite a proper, respectful goodbye."

Depression: "I’m so sad, why bother drinking beer at all, good or bad?"

Acceptance: "It’s going to be all right, and swill is no longer a part of my life. Thank you, Roger."

You’re all quite welcome, thank you.

It makes me feel good that you’ve navigated these stages of grief, and have come to terms with swill’s absence. Good beers are a bit more expensive, to be sure, but just think of your enhanced self-esteem and increased fluency in the realm of genuine quality.

Pat yourself upon the rump. You’ve arrived. Feel good. Swill won’t be around any longer to diminish you. The monster’s gone; he’s on the run, and your Publican’s here.

In fact, this swill recovery program might prove to be a whole new (and lucrative) revenue stream for me, not to mention the self-help book … and the required drinking materials.

Anyone seen that bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru that I stashed in the basement?

Harvest Homecoming's "swill walk" an emblem of clashing demographics.

I'll be cross-posting this essay later in the week at NA Confidential.

New Albany’s annual Harvest Homecoming festival started life quite small and inconspicuously four decades ago, and it has since grown into what its organizers claim is the second largest gathering of its type in the state of Indiana, trailing only the Indianapolis 500 celebration.

There are numerous themed events for two weeks preceding the yearly parade, then four “booth days” during which streets in the heart of New Albany’s historic business district are closed, yielding to want amounts to an enormous food court with games, information and music thrown in for good measure. At its best, the ideal of Harvest Homecoming is civic-minded and predominantly local in nature, with generations frequenting the same rolled oyster booth or chicken dinner emporium run by the same church or charity.

When Harvest Homecoming took its embryonic shape in the late 1960’s, and unbeknownst to most people living at the time, New Albany’s downtown was about to commence a long, painful and degrading descent into dormancy. As my ruminations today are not intended to constitute an essay about the familiar phenomenon of inner-city urban decay, I’ll leave it at that, and observe that Harvest Homecoming’s governing committee might plausibly say that for a long period of time, certainly by the 1990’s, the festival’s four-day, early October run was about the only game going downtown.

Consequently, Harvest Homecoming has been planned accordingly. Now, with stirrings of downtown revitalization far too strong to be ignored, the plan likely will have to be modified in coming years. Unfortunately, a case can be made that Harvest Homecoming’s demographic and the demographic spearheading downtown revitalization are heading in opposite directions, with potential difficulties that might as well be addressed now rather than later.

For those who have glimpsed a bit of the planet outside New Albany, and who have had the good fortune to be exposed to post-secondary education and its expansion of consciousness, there almost inevitably exists a measure of ambivalence about Harvest Homecoming as the institution has evolved – some would say “devolved – over the years. This ambivalence does not imply rejection of it, but simply a recognition that sometimes the closer one is to something, the harder it is to see how it really looks.

The festival’s stewards are “lifer” volunteers who work hard year-round, and while any fair critique of their performance might point to a deeply ingrained conservatism and a general reluctance to think outside the Bud, their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable.

Admirable, yes, but certainly not easy to ensure, and no single Harvest Homecoming “event” grandly compromises the committee’s goal of a family friendly festival like the Friday afternoon “beer walk,” which might be termed the “swill walk,” and so I think I will.

From the outset, make no mistake: The official Harvest Homecoming committee is no friend of the swill walk, and bristles when people contact the organizers for information about it. Although in the past, I merely shrugged and considered the committee’s attitude toward the swill walk to be an extension of its customary stodginess on other matters, this year I made it a point to observe the swill walk in progress.

The committee is right on target. It isn’t a pretty picture. In fact, the swill walk is a civic embarrassment, and as part and parcel of a litigious society, it’s probably only a matter of time before something ugly occurs and the torts begin flying. Speaking personally, at a time when many in my sector of the beer business are trying to raise the bar when it comes to responsible beer consumption, the swill walk sadly reminds us that neo-Prohibitionists occasionally have something approximating a valid point, and that the activities of the nation’s mass-market swill merchants are as much of a daily threat to our ability to offer the populace a changed paradigm as those who would eliminate alcohol entirely on grounds of its intrinsic “evil.”

Like many other aspects of life, there surely are evils intrinsic to the consumption of beer. Most of us are devoted to the ideal of lessening these, so why encourage their exaltation?

The way it works is this. Every year on the Friday afternoon of Harvest Homecoming, a style show is held at the riverfront “beer tent” (“swill tent” is more like it) during lunchtime, and the show’s conclusion is the unofficial signal for hundreds of people to begin, or in many cases to continue, drinking while traversing a jagged route through the blocked-off and humanity-packed downtown streets where food and activity booths hold sway.

The ubiquity of gratis Anheuser-Busch advertising paraphernalia, which is generated in-house at the local wholesaler at a scale that would humble the propagandistic Communist and Fascist regimes of old, provides ample evidence as to the underlying grease that lubricates the phenomenon of the swill walk, namely, that the local A-B wholesaler has agreed not to cash the checks written to pay for two-story stacks of Bud Light until the week following the festival’s conclusion, something that is of borderline legality in the state of Indiana.

Meanwhile, duly oiled, the denizens of the swill walk surge through the most congested harvest Homecoming area, participants stumbling from one bar to the next, slamming liquor shots and chugging beer from cans that are seldom recycled while screaming obscenities in proximity to children, then urinating in places that even someone like me – a veteran of Oktoberfest in Munich and Pamplona’s festival of San Fermin – is hard pressed to imagine.

Once I saw a port-a-can being nearly toppled by drunks. Around the corner, bikers clad in ominous black costumes queued a short block away from where this year’s “teen scene” stage was erected. How Pamplona manages to achieve a balance between its children and an invading wave of Euro trash is beyond me; perhaps we might ask, because the New Albany way doesn’t seem to be working.

The family-unfriendly effect of all this is hard to exaggerate in print, and when taken in the context of an overall festival that sadly has devolved over the decades into low, lower and lowest common denominators – a metaphor applicable to the city as a whole – it’s frustrating, indeed, to witness the chaos and know that I’m in the same business.

I’m neither naïve, nor out to bring the furies crashing down on the urine-stained drunks gracefully bellowing at each other during the swill walk. It is not my intention to frown on the profit motives of downtown bar owners, who probably reap several weeks of revenue in three days during Harvest Homecoming, and who are happy to accept largesse as offered by wholesalers eager to see the cash registers hum.

Of course, I well understand that my “good beer” segment of the marketplace is small, but I also maintain that this niche is upwardly mobile and in keeping with humanity’s constructive (as opposed to anarchic) instincts, and furthermore, that it is capable of sense and sensibility in addition to windfall weekend profits.

If NABC’s projected downtown brewing project comes to fruition, I hope to be able to illustrate that beer quality can be good, not bland, and that better beer can be consumed responsibly in a wholesome, entertaining and better atmosphere – which, after all, is the lesson any thinking human being takes away after sitting for a couple of hours drinking beer in a Bavarian beer garden, with playground equipment and young children generally in close proximity. Our future beer sales during Harvest Homecoming will be contained and controlled as far as humanly possible, and we’ll try to offer a higher common denominator. We may fail, but we’ll try.

Disclaimers aside, and in spite of my reluctance to tempt unfavorable karma by saying it aloud, the swill walk that takes place during Harvest Homecoming is aided and abetted by a blind eye to illegality, and while I can understand this coming from the local gendarmes, I find it curious that the state tolerates it.

You’re free to disagree.

Why invest in Iron City?

There’s something about this that fails to make sense.

Problems mount for bankrupt brewer (Friday, August 24, 2007; by Len Boselovic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

The proposed saviors of bankrupt Pittsburgh Brewing, who last month were given an additional 45 days to complete their takeover of the troubled Lawrenceville brewer, are confident they'll meet the latest deadline extension.

If the swill segment of the beer market remains static, and the craft segment grows at a pace of 10% a year, is it a good investment to pour millions into a brewery that brews only swill? Just think what could be done with such a sum.

(thanks to Scott for the link)

Bad call.

To my mind, the most noteworthy bastardization in mass-market beer advertising this year has been SABMiller’s garish celebration of the many awards won by its flagship, Miller Lite.

Television spots that show gleaming trophies morphing into bottles of beer are a reminder of what the late Dr. Goebbels told us: Make the lie so immense that it becomes oddly believable – and sit back as the ensuing wet air is joyfully swallowed by millions.

Among these ads, I like the suitably totalitarian vision of thousands of industrially brewed Miller Lite units rolling through one of the company’s sterile beer factories as immaculately dressed employees gather to celebrate another first place finish in the World Beer Championships.

The category? American-style Light Lager, of course.

Such a triumph may seem impressive, but it helps to know how such a product comes to be declared a winner. When it comes to beer styles and competitions, various governing authorities have created made-for-mass-market-swill categories that are among the more surreal in the beer judging pantheon.

Why stoop? See “800-lb gorillas: Megabrewing division” for the answer.

The American-style light lager designation calls for the judge to carefully gauge all things that differentiate beer from soda pop – body, flavor, malt, hops – and then to determine whether the light beer in question has had each component ruthlessly purged.

Consequently, the most un-beer-like of the contestants is declared the champion … the festive banners are hoisted … and the subsequent marketing campaign chases the approbation (and dollars) 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 without it interfering with her beer.

One of A-B's arms atones for the other -- with cash.

Strictly speaking, there’s no A or B in the word “hypocrisy,” but a rich vein of disingenuousness characterizes just about everything else the bloated megabrewer does.

HI: Beer money is OK for paying to combat excessive drinking

Anheuser-Busch claims that the brewery and its 600 wholesalers have spent more than $500 million since 1982 on national and community-based programs to combat alcohol abuse, including underage drinking. The company sends that message in much of its promotional material.

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Beermaker urged to pull Spykes

Alcohol abuse prevention groups nationwide are asking beer company Anheuser-Busch to pull its new flavored alcohol drink, Spykes, off the market.

Spykes, introduced in January, are 24-proof alcohol shots in such flavors as watermelon and mango. They are sold in 2-ounce plastic bottles usually for less than $2. In addition to 12% alcohol, Spykes contain guarana, ginseng and caffeine — ingredients associated with popular energy drinks.

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Thanks to the Brewers Association for the headlines.

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?

Cash Bar Talkin' Swill Blues: Depressing, but no fault of the organizers.

On Thursday evening, I attended the Jeffersonville Main Street Chili & Beer Bonanza on Groundhog's Eve at Kye's II in Jeffersonville, and had a ball pouring generous samples (“how much would you like?”) of NABC’s Kaiser 2nd Reising and Old Lightning Rod.

It was a retro Thursday, given the pre-Prohibition and Colonial motifs, respectively, of the beers we chose to showcase.

Fellow brewers BBC (Main & Clay) and Upland also were on hand to help quench the flames and raise funds for downtown Jeffersonville revitalization. It was a first-rate event, and I look forward to participating next year, but I must confess that I saw something profoundly disconcerting while manning the taps.

You’ll notice that with the price of admission guaranteeing virtually unlimited portions of 13-14 different craft beers from three different breweries, some in attendance chose instead to pay for bottled mass-market swill at the cash bar.

I couldn’t believe my own eyes, and that’s why the camera came out.

Verily, you can lead a person to ideas, but you can’t make him or her think. Apart from my personal angle in espousing the joys of craft beer, there is a philosophical consistency to the ethos of craft beer and downtown revitalization. Consider that one fundamental purpose of a fundraiser such as Jeffersonville Main Street’s is to raise consciousness about buying locally and supporting local businesses, and yet more than one or two workers for the small businesses on hand dispensing chili, not to mention at least two prominent community “movers and shakers,” refrained from local beer in favor of paying for multi-nationally brewed Budweiser.

In effect, they were paying twice (or more, in fact) for one inferior product – hardly something to be expected from “real men of genius,” but funny in an apocalyptic sort of way.

Thanks to Jesse and Jared for setting up, and Todd for helping me tear down and corrupting the remainder of my evening.