Brewers aren’t afraid to take the offensive route when it comes to beer labels. That’s not a secret. Date Grape, anyone? Really? And as much as breweries claim that all labels are given approval by the female staff members, Raging Bitch continues to enrage. Maybe it’s because female staff members aren’t the only women in the world with a voice. Either way, it’s great that the Brewers Association has finally acknowledged that. Well, it’s great that the Brewers Association kind of acknowledged that.
Starting in 2017, offensive brand names that don’t meet the BA’s Marketing and Advertising code can’t use Great American Beer Festival or World Beer Cup logos when promoting award-winning beers. To be clear, those beers can still enter and still win Brewers Association competitions. If a beer with an offensive label wins, the style and the brewery will be announced as the winner, but the beer’s name won’t be said.
That’s as if the documentary, “Graphic Sexual Horror,” won an Oscar in the documentary category, but the Academy decided to only announce that Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Bell won the category instead of saying the name of the winning documentary. The academy likes well-done documentary content, but it by no means wants to have its name next to something that people might find offensive (though that hasn’t stopped them from awarding an Oscar to a sexual predator).
There’s a lot of beer out there. If the Brewers Association can’t find a single award-worthy beer that represents “the values, ideals, and integrity of a diverse culture,” then the craft beer industry has a bigger problem on its hands.
Sam Adams owes alcoholic tea. A lot.
Boston Beer Company has had a rough couple of months. The Sam Adams maker just can’t seem to get their stocks up, and its founder just can’t seem to stop blaming outside factors like big beer. But there’s a pinhole of light in the stagnant stock darkness of the Boston Beer Company brands: Twisted Tea.
What is essentially the tea version of Mike’s Hard Lemonade was up 15 percent in the first quarter of 2017. That makes Twisted Tea the best performer in Boston Beer Company’s portfolio.
Craft brewing is dead, long live craft tea. Just kidding. Boston Beer Company might not even be considered craft by 2020, anyway, and the hard tea market will never be able to match up to the beer market. But a win is a win, right?
Beer milers are impressive, beer half-marathoners are downright superheroes.
Notre Dame student Emmet Farnan decided on a whim to buy someone’s spot in the “Holy Half” half marathon race in South Bend, Indiana. Then he added a beer for every mile and finished in one hour and 43 minutes.
If this was in a sports movie, that movie would have a 2 percent from Rotten Tomatoes for being too unrealistic for a sports film. The real-life Farnan is a superhero. Don’t believe me? Just look at this quote from an explainer on his heroics he wrote for Citius Magazine:
“I will do my best to explain the training and decision process that led to this race. In short – there was none. In fact, I only officially decided to take on this challenge less than 18 hours before the race.”
He recorded the whole thing on a GoPro for the rest of us normal humans to watch on YouTube.
“Could Atlanta someday replace Asheville as Beer City, USA?”
Don’t laugh. This is a real story by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s beer and food columnist Bob Townsend.
He starts his column saying “all eyes are on the millennials,” then goes on to rave about all the great Asheville breweries and how beer-centric the city is. There are, he admits near the end of his piece, some “big differences between Asheville and Atlanta, both in terms of the relative size and hype surrounding each city’s beer scene.” But, he concludes, “given the recent changes in Georgia beer law, I can easily envision a day in the not too distant future when streams of visitors are biking from new brewery to new brewery along the Beltline.”
O.K., now you can laugh.
