Month: October 2009

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From the Bottle Collection

By Ken Carman

Stand amongst the mess that two lazy people can make when they don’t throw much away, you will see on my walls, surrounding you, thousands of bottles all through the house. I started unintentionally collecting in the early 70s. When I knew I had a choice either to tear off paneling and then replace the Southern humidity/mold rotted 1X3’s modulars used to be made from, or cover them up, I realized I would have a lot to write about… From the Bottle Collection.

SOMA Lemon Herbal
(I tried to find a jpeg. I’ve had better luck with ales that disappeared 20 years ago!)

I hardly remember this one and I always remember malt beverages when they’re really good, or really, really bad. I do have a vague memory of a lemon non-alcohol that was unimpressive, so maybe that was SOMA.

Bit of a Gruit, going back to when the Catholic Church pushed hops because some were putting aphrodisiacs and psychotropics in beer. Soma wasn’t that, but with no hops and plenty of spices: the moniker is a bit apt. I’m surprised it didn’t leave a lasting impression. It wasn’t all that long ago either: 2000 according to press releases I’ve found.
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Music City Brewer’s Brew-Off


This is a wonderful and very real fairy tale. Christmas is still months away, but it kind of comes early to Nashville every year. Once upon an October weekend there was a yearly affair run by Santa Hop God and his merry little band of helpers…

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Our first present, thanks to Santa Hop God and his sometimes all too merry band of helpers was our guest speaker, John Palmer, who spoke Friday night about water chemistry and beer. How was it? Well, we definitely had some “chemistry” going between audience and speaker.

As they prepared dinner for us, a few rooms down, various clubs from all over set up multi-tap exhibits. Kind of like discovering a lot of beer in your stocking. This was one of my favorites…
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(Shades of the Blues Brothers!)

Here’s how it all began…

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Beer Facts

This column is dedicated to things The Professor discovers along the way to researching other things related to beer. It will appear randomly, depending upon when material presents itself.

Surely you remember…

But did you know it was started by the Griesedieck brothers who brewed beer? The Wiki entry is a little contradictory, insinuating that they made this during the Depression but closed their doors in 1920: long before the Depression. The some of Griesediecks eventually ran Falstaff and may have had cnnections with AB. (Once again, Wiki is unclear.)

Interesting sidebar: the original recipe for root beer was proven carcinogenic and outlawed long before cigarettes.

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Beer and Television: Perfectly Tuned In

Early beer advertising icons: Utica Club’s Schultz and Dooley and Black Label’s Mabel

Written by Carl H. Miller

“Beer makers have been searching for the perfect beer commercial nearly since television exploded onto the American scene in the late 1940s. In those pioneer days, nobody–not the advertisers, not the ad agencies, not the TV stations–knew exactly what made for a good commercial. Indeed, the earliest beer commercials consisted of everything from live demonstrations of how to cook a Welsh rarebit using beer to the noisy rumble of a studio audience muddling through a rendition of the brewer’s theme song.”

“Surprisingly, it was not the nation’s largest beer makers who led the brewing industry’s charge into television. Rather, most of TV’s pioneer beer advertisers were regional brewers. In 1945, New England’s Narragansett Beer sponsored the first telecasts of Boston Red Sox games, though neither the brewery nor the baseball team seemed overly confident about the then-infant medium. In fact, Sox management granted Narragansett the sponsorship rights free of charge, telling brewery officials, ‘We don’t know what we’re doing, and neither do you.'”

Read more HERE