New beers on the market

Posted In Beers at   

– Beer No. 3 in Anheuser-Busch’s new seasonal lineup is called Spring Heat Spiced Wheat. From the press release: ” . . . an unfiltered Belgian-style wheat ale, which is naturally cloudy. Brewed with orange, lemon and lime peels; the spice of coriander; two-row barley and wheat malts; as well as a blend of domestic Cascade and Willamette hops and imported Hallertau hops, this beer is memorably aromatic and has a smooth, complex taste.” Like the first two beers in this series, Spring Heat is available only on draft.

– Magic Hat Brewing in Vermont has released its first new year-round beer in nearly three years. Circus Boy is the brewery’s take on an American hefeweizen. From the press release: “Unfiltered and unfettered, it’s a deliciously light-bodied beer brewed for wide consumer appeal and ultimate drinkability for all seasons. Each sip of Circus Boy contains a pronounced wheat malt character, yet is free of the overly spiced phenolic yeast flavors that mar the typical imported hefeweizen.” Magic Hat points out American hefeweizens experienced 15% growth in 2005 and are now the fifth.

– Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware’s seasonal ApriHop is out. Basically fruit beer meets India Pale Ale, the beer is brewed with real apricots and finished with whole-leaf Amarillo and Warrior hops. 7% ABV 55 IBU.

Spitfire beer ad escapes censure

Posted In Breweries at   

A advertisement for Shepherd Neame’s Spitfire beer has once again survived a challenge to a British advertising watchdog, despite complaints about its use of Hitler’s Nazi SS insignia.

Shepherd Neame conceded that the humor behind using the dreaded SS insignia in an ad was edgy, but argued that the insignia was the butt of a joke as part of its long-running campaign evoking the British World War II spirit at the expense of the Germans.

The brewery had a similar run-in with advertsing authorities in 2001.

Weekly Therapy: The Spirit of Sūpris

Posted In Beers, Weekly Therapy at   

Hops farmers in the Hallertau region of Germany like to call their product the spirit of beer.

Although BridgePort Brewing brewmaster Karl Ockert chose to showcase a hop from Slovenia in BridgePort’s newest beer he understands the sentiment perfectly.

SuprisOckert took a side trip to the Slovenian farms last year on the way to Munich to serve as a judge at the Brewing Industry International Awards. He was taken not just with the Styrian Golding hops that ended up in Sūpris, but the spirit of hop farms themselves.

Most are 15 to 20 acres in size – compared to the 450 acres in the Pacific Northwest – and each farmer operates an independent business. “The had their own pickers and bailers. Their kilns were about the size of my office,” Ockert said.

“They were working when we showed up, but then everything stopped,” he said. “They came out with plates of homemade bread and local meats. You got the feeling of a different pace of life, and that same feeling is in the beer.”

He decided right then to buy specific lots. By the time he headed home to Portland, Oregon, he’d made a similar choice of malt – a variety of pilsner a colleague come across while touring Bavarian malt houses – and picked out a couple of bottles of Belgian beer he particularly liked. Eventually he would harvest the yeast from them.

In the trip back he thought about sitting in Munich’s beer halls and how the flavors weren’t quite the same anywhere else. “I had all this simmering in my head,” he said. “I thought maybe we could break out of this mold people on the West Coast have, trying to make the hoppiest IPA, the amberest Amber.”

BridgePort brewed 10 test batches of the beer that would be Sūpris, ranging from 5% abv to 10%.

The final release, 6% abv, manages to showcase all the ingredients. Sūpris is notably fruity, with banana and fleshy fruits throughout, and has just enough hops at the finish to keep it from being sweet. The Styrian Golding hops mingle perfectly with spiciness from the yeast, providing distinctive aroma and flavor.

Ockert chose these particular Styrians from the Slovenian lowlands. “Another year the hills might have been better,” he said.

How will he know next year? “I hope I’ll have to go back,” he said.

That’s the spirit.

Brace yourself for Heineken Light blitz

Posted In Beers at   

The New York Times (free registration) offers an in depth look at Heineken’s $50 million campaign to launch Heineken Premium Light.

Much of the money will be spent online. To reach the intended audience of drinkers — mostly men ages 25 to 29 — Heineken USA will unleash a barrage of advertising on sites like espn.com, foxsports.com, maximcom, msn.com, stuffmagazine.com and yahoo.com. The company will also put up a separate site, heinekenlight.com, on Wednesday to complement sites for its two other brands.

The Times reports:

To woo the younger male consumers of domestic light beers, the Heineken Premium Light campaign will focus on a core attribute, smoothness. The initial ads carry headlines like “Someone smooth is waiting at the bar,” “Meet someone smooth tonight” and “Succumb to smooth.”

The goal is to entice the light beer drinker with “the notion of something a little better, a little more exciting,” said Ewen Cameron, chief executive and executive creative director at Berlin Cameron United in New York.

“It’s a relationship metaphor,” Cameron said, adding: “We talked to light beer drinkers in their late 20’s who said there’s nothing wrong with light beer, but there’s a kind of settling for it. They’re happy, but the grass is a little greener on the other side. The ‘luxury light’ idea is an exciting notion.

Who said there’s nothing wrong with light beer?

A more perfect pint

Posted In Breweries, Just for fun at   

Guinness will spend more than $4 million to promote a new “perfect pint” gadget being called the biggest revolution to hit the beer can since the invention of the widget.

The plug-in “Guinness Surger” sends an ultrasound signal through a glass to separate the black body from the creamy head, just as a pint settles when poured in a pub.

When customers buy the new kit they get two cans of special widget-free Guinness, a pint glass and the Surger itself – a base unit on which the glass stands as the ultrasound passes through.

Brew Year’s Eve

Posted In Beer culture at   

How can you not like an event called Brew Year’s Eve?

On April 7, breweries all over America will raise a pint in celebration of the day that beer once again became legally available at the end of prohibition.

We Want Our Beer

While full repeal came on Dec. 5, 1933, an amendment to Prohibition legalized beer with 3.2% alcohol by weight (4% by volume) starting on April 7 of that year. From that date on, the country’s brewers were back in business and Americans enjoyed legal beer for eight months before wine and spirits were once again legitimate.

“Today more than 1,300 small, traditional and independent breweries operate in the US and because of them Americans have plenty to celebrate,” said Ray Daniels, Director of Craft Beer Marketing at the Brewers Association. “Brewers provide jobs, pay taxes and contribute to tens of thousands of community, charitable and service organizations each year.”

To celebrate repeal brewers across the country will be host Brew Years Eve parties on April 7. Details are at www.BrewYearsEve.com

A-B and Grolsch deal – why?

Posted In Trends at   

The first step?

Anheuser-Busch signed a deal to be the sole U.S. distributor of Grolsch beer, a high-end European import.

The deal will become effective in January 2007, and will give Netherlands-based Grolsch access to Anheuser-Busch’s national distribution system of 600 beer wholesalers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but an Anheuser-Busch spokeswoman said A-B will not take any ownership of Grolsch.

“I think it’s a step in the right direction, in recognizing that the company needs to partake in the import and superior premium category,” said Carlos Laboy, an analyst with Bear Stearns Equity Research in New York.

The bottom line: the move is good news for Anheuser-Busch beer wholesalers, who have been unhappy because A-B sales have been flat while microbrewed beers and imports enjoyed growth going on 10% per year.

That’s why rumors abound that A-B will make a deal with one or more American craft brewers – perhaps a distribution deal or one that include A-b taking equity in the craft brewery (or breweries – ala Redhook and Widmer). The folks pushing Bud, Bud Light and the recently popular Bud Select want to sell higher margin beers.

Perhaps Grolsch is only the start.

Gluten free beer festival

Posted In Beer culture at   

The first ever gluten beer festival held anywhere (that we’ve heard of) drew a happy crowd of 1,600 earlier this month in Chesterfield, England.

Supported by Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) it even featured cask-conditioned gluten free beer. Check out the pictures. The site comments “Not everyone in the pictures are coeliacs, some are friends and family, and others will be at the festival to drink non-GF beer. For once you cannot tell the difference! The coeliacs are as likely to have a beer before them as the non-coeliacs!

The tasting notes – peppered with comments like “I can drink beer again” – should make you smile, and include the vitals (abv, amount of gluten) for each beer.

Guinness, the blogger

Posted In Beers, Just for fun at   

Guinness is blogging. Well, sort of, and just in the UK.

Basically the marketing team will offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it does at Guinness. Here’s the premise:

Everyday we get loads of letters, photos, emails and phone calls – not just from our mums, but from other people who drink GUINNESS® too! Some of these are about specific issues – these are dealt with by our dedicated consumer helpline (the phone number is 0845 7882277 & the email address is consumerinfo@diageogb-info.com in case you ever need it).

But lots of people also send us things like suggestions, questions about what we might be doing in the future, photos of them enjoying a GUINNESS® and other stuff that we love to hear and see. The problem is that we get so much correspondence that we just don’t have time to read it all and respond. Well, to be more honest, we don’t have time to do that AND do our day jobs. (Indeed some of letters are people asking us what our ‘day jobs’ actually involve!).

The result is a blog that isn’t like most. For one thing, you’ve got to verify your age to enter. For another, they plan to moderate all comments before they are posted – and they don’t work weekends, or after 5 p.m. weekdays.

(Quick note: given the amount of spam comments we get here each day this seems like a really good idea. The spammers seem to have decided about 4 a.m. is a good time to strike – not realizing we’re just going to bed.)

It will be interesting to see where this goes. If it works for the marketing team, maybe Guinness will branch out.

Just a few breweries have embraced blogs so far. Some start and then run out of things to tell us. Let’s see where Flossmoor Station, blogging less than a week, goes.

Corona for St. Patty’s Day – What!?

Posted In Beers, Just for fun at   

Does this strike you as a little strange?

Iconic Mexican beer Corona, famous for being served with a wedge of lime jammed in the top, will launch a 15-second TV spot and a 60-second radio ad in March to boost sales of the brew in the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day, the beverage importer Gambrinus said.

The images on TV and in retail outlets show a wedge of lime carved into the shape of a shamrock. The TV spot will air nationally, and the radio ad in 40 markets.

[Via Brandweek]

Profiling Stone and Greg Koch

Posted In Beers, Breweries at   

The Union-Tribune in San Diego profiles Stone Brewing Co. co-founder Greg Koch.

The lengthy article concludes with the punchline:

“I’m going to let Stone get as big as it’s going to get, as big as it wants to be,” he said. “The only goal is to maintain our original set of standards.”

Speaking of Stone. A case (12 bottles) of Stone Epic Ale 02/02/02 recently sold for $2,500 on eBay. At that price it shouldn’t be surprising that a second immediately went up on the block.