Waiting Out the Flood in the Bar

The New York Times features the denizens of Strick's, a bar where the last residents of Eagle Lake, Mississippi wait out the flood:

Every night they sit in this mostly empty bar, throwing back some beers and eating a communal dinner of hamburgers or crawfish or whatever was brought in by the last person to visit a grocery store.  They tell stories, watch television and talk about any number of things, but usually about the latest measurements of the river, the state of the levees on which they depend for survival and their disappointment in the less hardy souls who took off at the first hint of danger.

“A bunch of people are real sorry they left,” said Tim Stennett, 52, a building contractor who took over the bar when Strick himself — Mike Strickland, formally — handed off the keys.
Mr. Stennett’s wife, Sheryl, became the bartender, though the Stennetts leave the keys with anyone who wants to drink late. Drinks are paid for on the honor system. In keeping with the handwritten admonitions posted throughout the bar, overnight tabs are frowned upon.
The Eagle Lake community, which sits between an expanse of cornfields and picturesque Eagle Lake itself, is a popular spot for fish camps and weekend homes. But most of the residents live here full time, making the 35-mile commute into Vicksburg for work.

If you have to wait out the flood, this seems like a good way to do it.  I'd guess if I were in the town, the chances are better than 50-50 that I'd be hanging out there.

QE II Visits Guinness Brewery

Photo from Boots in the Oven. http://www.bootsintheoven.com/boots_in_the_oven/2006/08/dublin_day_one_.html

No, it doesn't have anything to do with the Federal Reserve:

Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip resisted the temptation to sup the perfect pint of Guinness on a visit to the Irish cultural icon's home brewery on Wednesday. The royal couple were given a tour of the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, one of Ireland's top tourist destinations, as part of the queen's historic first state visit to the Irish Republic.
All eyes were on whether they would get stuck into a jar of the black stuff -- an indelible part of Irish life.
Up in the seventh-floor Gravity Bar, designed to look like the head on a pint, they were shown round the commanding 360-degree views over Dublin.
Master brewer Fergal Murray then took the royal couple through the stages of pouring a perfect pint of the stout, one of the world-famous cultural symbols of Ireland.
Prince Philip, who is known to like a pint of bitter, seemed in his element and asked if it was made with water from Dublin's River Liffey.
"No! Pure and pristine from the hills!" Murray replied, dismissing the "urban myth". The Guinness website says water for the brewery comes from springs in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains.

If they didn't drink a pint, they shouldn't have gone to visit, geez.  I could damn well care less about the Queen herself, but I do like being able to get Ireland into some posts, and she's definitely been providing that opportunity.

Milwaukee and the Braves

From the SI archive in 1998, after the Brewers switched to the National League, a look back at the Braves run in the city:

Playing in the second smallest city in the majors (pop. 725,000), they became the first National League team to draw two million fans in a season. They did it annually from '54 to '57 and came up just 29,000 short in '58. And while the Braves relied on the rest of Wisconsin, as well as Iowa, Minnesota and northern Illinois, to accomplish that, there should be no doubt as to where the wellspring of love for them lay. Back then you could walk into the best restaurants in Milwaukee—Karl Ratzsch's, Alioto's, Ray Jackson's—and always find the Braves game on the radio. In the city's multitudinous taverns there were never cries of dismay when Earl Gillespie, the voice of the Braves, reported that a fan had leaped onto County Stadium's diamond; the drinkers simply started betting on how many bases he would touch before the grounds crew hauled him down.
If you ask why the drinkers weren't at the game themselves, it was probably because they couldn't get tickets. Most of the time their best shot was to hop on a tavern's chartered bus and follow the Braves to Wrigley Field, where in those days there were always plenty of empty seats. Selig paid his most memorable visit to Chicago in 1954 when the Cubs were honoring their lumbering slugger, Hank Sauer, who concluded the festivities by dropping a fly ball to give Milwaukee the win. "The Cubs had printed up these signs that said THANKS, HANK," Selig says, "and all the Braves fans started waving them."
Nobody who took those bus trips south ever got shortchanged, but Ruthie Patzke was starting to think she might be an exception when her group dragged her to a restaurant to listen to a Milwaukee Journal sportswriter. What, Ruthie wondered, could be so interesting about some joker who'd just seen the same Braves-Cubs game they had? When the sportswriter started talking, though, Ruthie noticed that his blue suit complemented his hazel eyes. So she took the trouble to learn his name—Bob Wolf—and then she wangled an introduction, and before you knew it she and a girlfriend were at a cozy little bar having a drink with him. No night of lust followed for Bob and Ruthie; this was 1953, and they were delighted just to see each other at Wrigley the next afternoon. Thirteen months later, just before the start of the World Series, Bob and Ruthie said "I do" to a marriage that is still going strong.
The love affair between Milwaukee and the Braves looked as if it would be equally enduring. No suitor courted Elizabeth Taylor, always a league leader in marriages, as ardently as this city did its baseball heroes. It wasn't just the good-time guys such as Mathews, Bob Buhl and Lew Burdette who never had to pay for a meal and always got a free car to drive. It was all the Braves. And the bounty didn't end with T-bones and Dodges, which were no small consideration during an era in which the minimum player's salary was $7,500, and raises for journeymen were measured in pennies. The players got free gas from Wisco, free dry cleaning from Spic 'n' Span, free beer from every brewery in town. "Soap powder and produce were just about the only things that weren't delivered to our door," Burdette says. It turned out to be too good to last.
There is no single explanation why. Bad news simply begot more bad news. In the early '60s Braves management barred fans from bringing their own beer into County Stadium, hardly a valentine to a populace historically as thrifty as it is thirsty. And then the first wave of crowd pleasers started getting old and getting traded. Suddenly attendance couldn't climb above 775,000, even though the Braves continued to make every season a winning one. When the first notes of Atlanta's siren song drifted through the air, the team's owners started checking flight schedules.

My favorite part of the whole article is where it says the Braves management banned the fans from bringing in their own beer in the early '60's.  So from 1953 until the early '60's, fans could carry their own beer in the game.  No wonder they got great crowds.  There is no doubt in my mind that Milwaukee is by far the most fun city in the country.  If you want any kind of festival during the summer, they have it.  If you need an excuse to drink a beer, thy've got it.  It is also extremely friendly, and has some great cheese and sausage to go along with that beer.  If you get the chance, spend a little time there.

Pabst Moves Headquarters to LA

LA Times:

Irony-loving hipsters in Los Angeles, grab a Pabst and give a toast to the maker of one of your favorite beers.

In moving its headquarters to L.A. this summer from a Chicago suburb, Pabst Brewing Co. will bring one of the older brands in the business to a bruised California that has seen quite a few corporate head offices flee the state.

The company, purchased last year for about $250 million by billionaire investor C. Dean Metropoulos, declined to comment about the reasons behind the move or how many local jobs it might create.

Pabst spokesman Mark Semer said that Metropoulos' two sons, Daren and Evan, both live in Los Angeles and run the company with their father, who lives in Greenwich, Conn.

Pabst was owned for about two decades by the charitable foundation of the late Los Angeles brewing mogul Paul Kalmanovitz. The Internal Revenue Service ordered the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation to sell the company because a federal law barred charities from owning a for-profit business for more than five years.

Well-known in food circles, the elder Metropoulos has made a fortune reinvigorating household brands such as Bumble Bee Tuna, Chef Boyardee and Ghirardelli Chocolate. Earlier this decade, he helped build Pinnacle Foods, the parent company of brands such as Vlasic Pickles and Hungry Man frozen dinners. Blackstone Group bought Pinnacle four years ago for $2.2 billion.

Apparently, they aren't relocating to get a sweet tax deal.  That's good, I can continue to enjoy a PBR on occasion, as well as a Schlitz, a Blatz, an Old Style, a Grain Belt, a Stroh's, a.............

Life in the Infield at Churchill Downs

From the SI archive, a story about the NFL's Will Wolford's love of horses and the Derby:

"My goal was to play football long enough so I could own horses comfortably," Wolford says. "Treat them as an outlet, as a way to relax. It's not, 'Oh, gee, this horse has to win today because I got to pay bills.' I played five years in the league before I bought a horse. It's strictly done for fun."
Since Wolford was a boy growing up in Louisville, where Moe was a saloonkeeper-cum-horse-player, the Kentucky Derby has been his life's immovable feast. When Will was seven, on the family's way to Churchill Downs for the 1972 Derby, his parents dropped him off at a party of 20 other kids set amid a grim posse of baby-sitters. "We sat in front of the TV and watched Riva Ridge run around the track," he says. His ensuing Derby experiences extended through his four years at St. Xavier High and through four more at Vanderbilt University. The Kentucky Derby is a River City rite of spring, and for years Wolford partook of its rituals from the Catholic encampment in the infield at the far turn.
"If you went to a Catholic high school in Louisville and you went to the Derby, that's where you hung out," Wolford says. "It's a gigantic party. Everything and anything you want to do is in the infield at the Derby. You never see a horse when you're out there. Every once in a while there would be a wave, like at a football game, and everybody would scream, but you had a hard time seeing the horses. It got pretty wild. Drink beer and jungle juice—all kinds of juices mixed with grain alcohol. We used to hide it in the bottom of the coolers. In gallon jugs. Line the bottom of the coolers with beer, and line that with towels and ice. I always had a pint or two in my underpants."
Of his various physical accomplishments while attending St. Xavier, none is remembered more fondly than his last notable feat as a high school student. Wolford used to attend the infield bacchanal with a passel of athletic teammates—guys nicknamed Squirmy and Jaybird, Pygmy and Skinny—and at 9 a.m. on Derby Day of 1982, in the spring of their senior year, the boys found to their dismay that the lock was jammed on the trunk of the Mustang that held the day's ambrosia. The infield was beckoning. Chris Kurtz, one of Wolford's best friends, recalls that everyone looked to Will, then a buff 230 pounds, and began exhorting him: "You can do it, Will. You can do it!" Reaching under a corner of the trunk, he performed one prodigious squat thrust. It popped like a cap on a bottle. "He ripped the trunk right off," Kurtz says. "Amazing." To a chorus of cheers, of course.

This story reminds me of a friend's story about attending the Derby.  He said they took in 3 or 4 bottles of water, of which 1 or 2 were actually vodka, 3 or 4 bottles of orange juice, and then they poured vodka into the ice of the cooler.  When they wanted some vodka, they'd open the drain of the cooler and hold the cooler over a glass.

Grain Belt Brewery in Minneapolis May Become Housing

Grain Belt Brewery

MPR:

Minneapolis city officials are asking developers to propose a reuse for a portion of the historic Grain Belt Brewery complex in northeast Minneapolis. The city says it will sell two parcels of the site, including the Grain Belt office building, "as is." Minneapolis City Council Member Diane Hofstede, whose ward includes the area, said neighbors appear to favor housing on the site.
"We've just added one of our most recent parks along 13th Avenue along the riverfront so this parcel will be along a riverfront park," Hofstede said.
The Grain Belt brewery closed in the 1970s, and the property deteriorated. In 1989, the city of Minneapolis stepped in to save it from demolition.

Grain Belt is now brewed by the August Schell Brewing Company in New Ulm, MN (more German brewers).  Histories of Grain Belt Beer here and here.  I had a couple of Grain Belts at the Twins game last year.  Not too shabby, but it was a damn hot day.

Grain Belt Beer sign on Nicollet Island in Minneapolis

Inflation in Food

Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, via Mark Thoma:

Among the causes of the recent world food price surge are weather-related poor harvests of staple crops such as wheat and some coarse grains. Affected heavily by drought in Russia and excessive rains in Canada and Australia, world wheat production for the 2010–11 marketing period is on track for a decrease of 5 percent compared with the 2009–10 period. World production of coarse grains (corn, sorghum, barley, rye and oats) is on pace to fall 2.5 percent.[4] Export bans by some countries, increased stockpiling by others and higher input costs—especially for energy in the production of fertilizer—likely also contributed to diminished supplies of many agricultural commodities.[5]

A basic principle of economics is that decreased supply increases a good’s relative price—that is, its price in terms of the other enjoyable things one must sacrifice to acquire the good. The number of theater tickets or MP3 downloads or haircuts one must sacrifice in order to enjoy a steak dinner increase when the relative price of steak increases. So too, does the number of hours one must work—and forgo leisure—to obtain a given amount of steak.

This is true in a world where money is used to facilitate the exchange of goods and services and would be true in a world without money (and thus without monetary policy).

Over periods of a few years (and, of course, over longer horizons), central banks can exercise considerable control over the rate at which the prices of an economy’s goods and services rise or fall, in units of money. An important point, though, is that—with a few qualifications—monetary policy affects money prices for goods and services in general, not the terms at which goods and services exchange for one another.[6]

Monetary policy can slow the rate at which food prices (together with all other money prices) rise; it cannot make food—or any other particular good or service—more affordable in terms of other goods and services.

Also, it includes a chart with the food components of CPI, beer is one.

Ready for the Weekend

I think this song summarizes my mood, and it was also my grandma's favorite song toward the end of her life.

So Blast is a Pabst Product?

Didn't know that.  LA Times:

-- California has joined at least 14 other states in calling for Pabst Brewing Co. to stop marketing a high-alcohol beverage touted by rap star Snoop Dogg as a "binge in a can." State officials led by Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan wrote a stinging letter to Illinois-based Pabst, maker of fruit-flavored malt beverage "Blast by Colt 45," urging the beer giant to lower the 12% alcohol content. "Alcohol abuse among young people is a serious and alarming epidemic," Madigan said in the letter. "A product like this only serves to glamorize alcohol abuse and promote binge drinking, threatening the safety of those consuming it." Madigan's office says the high alcohol content of a 23.5-ounce can of Blast makes it equivalent to drinking an entire six-pack of beer. An ad for the brew has Snoop Dogg saying "What a blast, huh!?" Not so much. Pabst should do the right thing here.

I'm much more likely to drink a Blatz than to drink a Blast.

Good News at the State Fair

From the Canton Repository:

Ohio State Fair visitors will be able to sip on wine and beer this summer for the first time since the 1880s.

The Ohio Expositions Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to allow alcohol consumption at two locations at the Ohio Expo Center in Columbus during the July 27 to Aug. 7 fair.

Commission spokeswoman Alicia Notestone says wine made with at least 90 percent Ohio-grown grapes will be available at the Taste of Ohio Cafi, and wine and Ohio-produced beer will be sold at the Celeste Center during adult concerts.

Notestone says the commission hopes to give new opportunities to Ohio breweries and wineries.

She says alcohol was served when the fair was held at a site that is now Franklin Park, but has not been permitted since the fair moved to the Expo Center in 1886.

They ought to sell beer and allow it to be carried around the grounds, but this is a start.  Now we need some more of the county fairs in western Ohio to start serving beer.

Beer Consumption Charts

Felix Salmon looks at beer consumption around the world, especially in the developing countries:

How do we know that the world is getting happier? It’s drinking more beer! Here’s the chart, from a new paper by Liesbeth Colen and Johan Swinnen:

What we’re seeing here is largely the China effect — and, more generally, a world where poor people, once they reach a certain minimum income, start hitting the hops.

The U.S. is holding its own, but Germany is cutting back some.

The Lager Beer Riot

Another example of German immigrants' love of beer, and how it shaped U.S. history:

The Lager Beer Riot occurred in Chicago, Illinois in 1855 after Mayor Levi Boone, great-nephew of Daniel Boone, renewed enforcement of an old local ordinance mandating that taverns be closed on Sundays and led the city council to raise the cost of a liquor license from $50 per year to $300 per year, renewable quarterly. This move was seen as targeting German immigrants. On April 21, after several tavern owners were arrested for selling beer on Sunday, protesters clashed with police near the Cook County Court House. Waves of angry immigrants stormed the downtown area and the mayor ordered the swing bridges opened to stop further waves of protestors from crossing the river. This left some trapped on the bridges, police then fired shots at protesters stuck on the Clark Street Bridge over the Chicago River. A police captain from Hyde Park lost an arm in the riot. Rumors flew throughout the city that some of the protesters were killed, although there is no evidence to support this. Loaded cannons set on the public square contributed to these rumors. The following year, after Boone was turned out of office, the prohibition was repealed. This riot concluded in one death and sixty arrests.

Chicago's rapid growth in the 1840s and 50s was due in large part to German and Irish Catholic immigrants. These immigrants settled in their own neighborhoods, German immigrants congregating mainly on the North Side, across the Chicago River from City Hall and the older, Protestant part of the city. The German settlers worked a six-day week, leaving Sunday as their primary day to socialize; much of this socialization took place in the small taverns that dotted the North Side. German-language newspapers, the Turners, and German craft unions gave the German population of Chicago a high degree of political cohesiveness; the Forty-Eighters among them were used to demonstrations as a political tool.
As in much of the rest of the country, distrust of Catholic influence produced a backlash in the form of the “Know-Nothing” movement. In the election of 1855, the American Party (the party of the Know Nothings) gained control of Chicago's government, with Levi Boone as mayor. Boone, a Baptist and temperance advocate, believed that the Sabbath was profaned by having drinking establishments open on Sunday. Boone's actions were in anticipation of Illinois enacting by referendum a Maine law that would prohibit the sale of alcohol for recreational purposes. The referendum failed in June 1855, by a statewide vote of 54% to 46%.

German immigrants and their love for beer also became a target of the Prohibition cause during World War I:

National prohibition was advocated as a wartime measure after the US declared war on Germany in April 1917 and the prohibition amendment passed Congress and was sent to the states for ratification late in 1917. The wartime prohibition act was passed in 1918 at the very end of the war; but the Lever Act August 1917 had already banned distilled spirits production for the remainder of the war and reserved supplies of grain for food production, and by 1919, just before the Volstead Act went into effect nationally, 27 states had enacted full prohibition laws. Anti-German sentiment worked in the interests of extending prohibition in wartime because most of the breweries had been founded in the 19th century by German immigrants to the US, and retained German names. Thus wartime hostility toward Germans helped the rise of prohibition. But more fundamentally, the movement drew upon an anti-alcohol culture long instilled among middle-class people in city suburbs and small towns, the Protestant churches and their allies in the rural population in the south and west, and some urban progressives who saw alcohol as a source of inefficiency, poverty and social disputation in American life. The war simply gave these disparate groups an opportunity to align their movement with wartime nationalism and its crusading spirit of self-sacrifice.

The Anti-Saloon League, which, unfortunately, was founded in Ohio to try to end the German and other mostly Catholic or Lutheran immigrants' embrace of saloon and beer garden culture, took the demonization of U.S. citizens of German extraction who enjoyed their beer to a new level:

National Prohibition was defended as a war measure. The amendment's proponents argued that grain should be made into bread for fighting men and not for making liquor. Anti-German sentiment aided Prohibition's approval. The Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee's brewers "the worst of all our German enemies," and dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew."

This bigotry and religious zealotry helped kick off the most widespread era of law-breaking and organized crime in U.S. history, until sense was restored in 1933.  Lesson learned: don't get between a man and his beer.

The German Triangle and U.S. Beer History

The German Triangle, between the cities of Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati, was the destination of a large percentage of German immigrants in the middle and late 19th century.  When they came, they brought with them their love for beer, especially lager beer. 

Map of German Population in 1900

 So it is not an accident that two of the three cities would become home to the largest breweries in the United States.  All three have a rich brewing history.  Besides being the home of Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis was also home to William J. Lemp Brewery, which brewed Falstaff.  At one time, there were 40 breweries in St. Louis.  Also, Belleville, Illinois, outside of St. Louis was home to Stag Brewery.

Milwaukee was home to Miller, Schlitz, Pabst and Blatz.  At one time they were four of the largest ten breweries in the world.  Over the years, more than 40 breweries operated in Milwaukee. 

Cincinnati was home to Christian Moerlein, Hudepohl, Red Top, Schoenling, Burger and Wiedemann, among dozens of breweries over the years. In 1860, Cincinnati had 36 breweries.Cincinnati also had a prodigious saloon culture:

Taverns-Bars-Saloons-Beer Gardens-Cafes, call them what you will Cincinnati and beer were synonymous with each other in the 1800's and early 1900's. In 1840 Cincinnati had 8 breweries to satisfy a population of 46,000 people. By 1860 there were 36 breweries for 200,000 people. Beer production in 1870 was 354,000 barrels. Ten years later it rose to 656,000 barrels and in another ten years it had soared to 1,115,000 barrels. This equates to a staggering total of  35,700,000 gallons of beer of which a little less than 1/2 was exported. The rest was consumed locally. The per capita consumption of beer nationally in 1893 was 16 gallons. In Cincinnati an incredible 40 Gallons for every man woman and child was consumed. In 1887 there were an amazing 1,837 saloons for a population of 225,000. In 1890 it dropped to only 1,810 for a population of 297,000. This meant since only adult males used saloons there were, in 1890, ONE SALOON FOR EVERY 37 MEN. In 1890 there were 34 saloons on Court St., 41 on Liberty St., 55 on both Walnut and Main Sts. Central Ave. had 100 saloons, but the all time high was Vine St. with 136. On Fifth St. between Main & Sycamore Sts. (1 block) 20 saloons flourished. A corner location was preferred because it gave the bar the most exposure to potential costumers, and if it were illegally selling beer on Sunday, it was easier to spot the police.
  Carrie Nation arrived in Cincinnati in 1901 with her famous hatchet to wage battle with demon alcohol. Most tavern owners knowing Carrie's propensity for taking her ax to glass windows, ordered new glass ahead of her visit. Carrie was asked later why she had not broken any windows was heard to say: "My goodness, child, if I had undertaken to break all the windows of all the saloons on your Vine Street I would have dropped from exhaustion before I had gone a block". Before leaving the Atlantic Garden, a woman lush laid her head on Carrie's shoulder and cried. She then left promising  the temperance leader she would mend her ways and lead a better life. Ten minutes later Carrie noticed that her earrings were missing. Carrie forgave the woman for lifting them.

Unfortunately, today Anheuser-Busch is merged with InBev. Miller is owned by SAB. Hudepohl, Schoenling, Burger and Christian Moerlein are trying to carve out a regional niche, and Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz are shadows of their former glory in a combined Pabst Brewing Company amongst a large number of formerly well-known brands, including Falstaff and Stag.

Schlitz

A little history of Schlitz from wikipedia:

The Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company was an American brewery based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and was once the largest producer of beer in the world. Its namesake beer, Schlitz, was known as "The beer that made Milwaukee famous" and was famously advertised with the slogan "When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer". Schlitz first became the world's top beer producer in 1902 and enjoyed that status at several points during the first half of the twentieth century, exchanging the claim with Anheuser-Busch multiple times during the 1950s.
The company was founded by August Krug in 1849 but acquired by Joseph Schlitz in 1858. Schlitz would eventually be bought by Stroh Brewery Company in 1982, and subsequently be sold again along with the rest of Stroh's assets to the Pabst Brewing Company in 1999.

The company flourished through much of the 1900s, starting in 1902 when the production of one million barrels of beer surpassed Pabst's claim as the largest brewery in the world. Schlitz was continuously in competition as one of the top breweries in America for the next 70 years. While prohibition forced the suspension of alcoholic brewing, the company changed its name from Brewing Company to Beverage Company and adapted its slogan to "The drink that made Milwaukee Famous."
Popularity of Schlitz's namesake beer, along with the introduction of value priced Old Milwaukee in 1955, kept the brewery on a strong financial footing. However, changes implemented in the early 1970s led to its eventual fall.
Faced with the need to meet large volume demands while also cutting the cost of production, the brewing process on Schlitz's flagship Schlitz beer was changed in the early 1970s. The primary change involved using high-temperature fermentation instead of the traditional method. Schlitz also experimented with a continuous fermentation process. even designing and building a new Baldwinsville, New York, brewery around the process. The reformulated product resulted in a beer that not only lost much of the bite and taste of the old formula but spoiled more quickly, rapidly losing public appeal.
Schlitz remained the No. 2 brewery in America as late as 1976, but ongoing problems with formula changes continued the downfall. The ultimate blow to the company was a crippling strike at the Milwaukee plant in 1981, which led to serious financial difficulties and acquisition by Stroh Brewery Company of Detroit, Michigan, after a lengthy 1982 legal battle.
What remained of the historic Schlitz Brewery complex in Milwaukee was transformed with Tax Increment Financing and other government support into a mixed-use development called Schlitz Park.

During the reformulating period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the original Schlitz formula was lost and never included in any of the subsequent sales of the company. Through research of documents and interviews with former Schlitz brewmasters and taste-testers, the 1960s formula was reconstructed; the new beer, along with a new television advertising campaign, was officially introduced in 2008.

Schlitz was my beer of choice throughout college, because at $6 a case, I couldn't beat the value.  It was also cool in that time frame when they brought out old style cans in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of WWII, when Schlitz was provided to soldiers, and was also the #1 selling beer in America.  I didn't realize that Schlitz introduced Old Milwaukee.  I thought it was always a Stroh's beer.  I guess it doesn't make sense that a Detroit brewery would start another beer named Old Milwaukee.  Here is a link to a detailed history of Schlitz from 1933-1969.

Aged Bourbon

Fortune Magazine:

Bourbon runs deep in American lore. David Crockett swigged it. Harry Truman liked a glass when playing poker. Screen star Tallulah Bankhead was famed for being able to polish off a bottle of the stuff in under 30 minutes. Not all bourbons, however, are alike. Aged bourbon, it turns out, attracts an almost cultlike following. This brew has been carefully distilled and then sits in oak barrels for years -- sometimes for nearly a quarter of a century -- until ready to drink. When that much time and care go into making a product, it means it is expensive and hard to find. And that's just the way Julian Van Winkle III, 61, the president of a small, premium Kentucky bourbon company, likes it. He calls it a strategy of scarcity.
Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, with 2010 sales of $2 million, markets only about 7,000 cases a year -- puny by liquor industry standards. Van Winkle not only is able to sell out his inventory -- he says he could unload two or three times what he makes -- but can also raise prices just about every year. That allows his two-person firm (his son Preston, 33, is marketing manager) to stay profitable while competing with giants such as Maker's Mark and Wild Turkey.
Van Winkle's approach is a good game plan for any small business that goes head to head with big competitors. Companies often get into trouble when they try to grow too big too fast. Van Winkle believes that if you make a great product and keep production low, you'll never get stuck with big inventories when the economy turns tough. "That's been the downfall of a lot of bourbon producers," he says. "They just make too much of it. It loses all cachet and is not as special."

Hopefully aged bourbon is much better than the 6 year stuff.

Have a Beer and Celebrate

On April 7,1933, the Cullen-Harrison Act went into effect.  From Wikipedia:

The Cullen–Harrison Act, named for its sponsors, Senator Pat Harrison and Representative Thomas H. Cullen, enacted by the United States Congress March 21, 1933 and signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt the following day, legalized the sale in the United States of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2% (by weight) and wine of similarly low alcohol content, thought to be too low to be intoxicating, effective April 7, 1933. Each state had to pass similar legislation to legalize sale of the low alcohol beverages in that state. Roosevelt had previously sent a short message to Congress requesting such a bill. Sale of even such low alcohol beer had been illegal in the U.S. since Prohibition started in 1920 following the 1919 passage of the Volstead Act. Throngs gathered outside breweries and taverns for their first legal beer in many years.

Prosit!

Since I quoted the song, I ought to play it, too:



I didn't realize until I searched YouTube that the tune is also the University of Iowa Hawkeye Victory Polka.

Craft Beer Market Growing

Chicago Tribune:

A homegrown revolution that took root in the 1980s, the craft beer industry grew from a handful of pioneers to more than 1,750 breweries in 2010. Early leaders included Sierra Nevada, Samuel Adams and Anchor Brewing, which was sold last year to the Griffin Group, a private-equity firm.

Leveraging local roots, flavorful, sometimes fanciful, products and quirky marketing, craft beer accounted for 5 percent of beer sales nationally in 2010. With mainstream sales flat, some analysts think that share could reach 20 percent within the decade.

"Craft beer is kind of a rising tide right now," said Benj Steinman, president of Beer Marketer's Insights. "It's really in the sweet spot of where more consumers are going, and that seems to be toward the sort of innovation, flavor and variety that the craft brewers are epitomizing."

Craft beer sales came in at just under 10 million barrels in 2010, an 11 percent annual increase, while total U.S. beer sales were down 1 percent, to 203.5 million barrels, according to the Brewers Association. Some 30 percent of craft beer is sold on tap, three times the industry average.

With a higher price point — most sell for about $9 per six-pack — craft beer revenue is relatively stronger, accounting for $7.6 billion out of $101 billion in total beer sales last year.

This is a bright spot in an otherwise weak beer market.

Ohio Microdistilleries

From the DDN:

 The Dayton-based Buckeye Vodka that will start hitting liquor-store shelves in the Miami Valley and across Ohio this week is surfing the wave of a national trend of micro-distilleries producing relatively small batches of premium spirits for thirsty enthusiasts. The new 80-proof vodka is the brainchild of a family-based team that includes Jim Finke, president of The Finke Company in Moraine and co-owner and CEO of Crystal Spirits LLC, the maker of Buckeye Vodka and his brother-in-law Tom Rambasek of Kettering, who owns and operates Crystal Water Company on South Patterson Boulevard in Dayton and who also serves as president of Crystal Spirits. Finke’s brother Chris is chairman of the company.
Finke said he and his brother were looking to launch a business as a family. Throughout the recession and economic crisis of 2008-09, as NCR left Dayton and General Motors closed a truck-assembly plant in Moraine, “We saw our friends and families and their businesses take hits,” Finke said.
But they also noticed Ohioans consuming liquor in record amounts, even as many spent less on each bottle they purchased. Finke — a vodka drinker himself — and his family members came up with an idea.

There is also a liqueur maker in Tipp City which is mentioned in the article.

Joe Biden-A Guy I'd Drink a Beer With

Except Joe doesn't drink.  He seems to be one of those guys that is very interesting to talk to once in a great while, but he'd become tiresome if you talked to him every day.  Here are a couple of interesting posts about the Vice-President, both from when he was nominated for VP.  First, Alex Massie discusses Biden as the bloviator at the bar:

He's the sort of man I've met many a time in Irish pubs. Biden will tell you, at some length for sure, all about his plans for the future, how he's on the cusp of greatness just waiting for that last piece to fall neatly into place. The fact that  - stubbornly - it has never yet done so deters him not a bit. Next time, lads, next time...UPDATE: See what I mean! Priceless!
He'll often seem as though he's auditioning for the position of Official Pub Bore but then every so often there'll be a flash of wit or a moment of self-deprecation that punctures the bluster and bombast, rendering Biden warm and human.
You can picture him propping up one end of the bar for thirty years; long enough for all to be forgiven, all ancient battles and blunders forgotten as we grow older, more charitable, more sentimental. Biden's the sort of fellow who'll make a wildly inappropriate and suggestive comment about your wife. To your face. On your wedding day. But he'll do so in such a guileless fashion free from any hint of malice that, dash it and almost half despite yourself, you forgive the silly old fool. He was, you realise, probably trying to ay something complimentary.

The second post exceprts Richard Ben Cramer's 1988 campaign book, "What it Takes," talking about Biden's old mansion, and all the difficulties he has and creates for himself trying to fix it up:

Meanwhile, he planted. He liked hemlock trees. He found some old Czech guy who ran a nursery up in Pennsylvania. Joe didn't want any three-foot saplings, no. This guy had big hemlocks. Rhododendron bushes, great ones. Yews--big old yews! See, Joe had to have privacy. When he started have to sell off lots, he had to plant more, so he'd have privacy. ...
His pal Marty was with him that day: Marty Londergan, a dentist, Joe's buddy from high school. "Joe," Marty said. "How we gonna get all this shit back?"
"Get a truck," Joe said. Like everybody's brother had a forty-foot flatbed in the garage.
"Yeah," Marty said. "Who's gonna drive it?"
"I'll drive," Joe said. "Used to drive 'em all the time."

Sure enough, Marty found somebody's brother who'd lend a truck, and Joe drove the thing, overloaded, rocking and pitching, with trees hanging off the tail, down the back roads, an hour and a half, back to Wilmington. Then he started digging--a forty-five-foot trench, three feet deep and three feet wide, through blacktop and paving stones. He was out there in gym shorts and hiking boots, sweating like a pig, with the headlights of four cars shining upon his ditch, with Jill leaning out the window to yell, "Come to bed, honey!" ... while an old friend or two propped the trees and bushes up in the ditch, so Joe could wall away his realm.
"No, tighter!" Joe'd say.
"I don't know, Joe..."
"Tighter," Joe said. He had to have privacy. The rhododendrons, he planted them two feet apart. Next weekend, he's back for yews. He built a wall of yews around the swimming pool. Never mind there was no room for them to spread their roots.
"Whaddya think?" Joe asked, grinning.
Two years, of course, they're all dead.

Finally, the Atlantic sizes up Biden as VP, dealmaker and go-to guy for a different opinion.  I could definitely put up with the guy telling stories for a couple of hours some night as I drink a few beers and want to hear something entertaining.

Brought to you by Guinness

According to the Guinness facebook page:

Did you know, a pint of Guinness has fewer calories than a pint of semi-skimmed milk or a pint of orange juice? Not that we’d recommend drinking the black stuff at breakfast… but it’s good to know all the same!