BEER BEHIND BARS
(From July 21st Wash Post, story by Linda Wheeler) The 4th of July celebration on the Mallenforced a no-alcohol policy imposed to combat fights and drunkenness and ended with 50 casesof confiscated beer. Major J. J. McLaughlin of the Park Police said the beer will be held for 90days in case it needs to be used as evidence and then destroyed. Suggestions to donate it to thehomeless or having the police drink it have been rejected. McLaughlin promised to notify themedia when the beer is destroyed so there can be witnesses to its demise.
FROM THE "365 BOTTLES OF BEER FOR THE YEAR CALENDAR
July 16th - the Baltimore inventor of the "crown top" bottle cap, as it is called, was a WilliamPainter; he did this dead in 1891. July 30th - possible origins for the word "beer": Bere, the Saxon word for barley; bibere, Latin for"to drink"; bre, a root on which the Hebrew world for grain is based, and beor, associated withthe malt brew offered up by the monks of northern Gaul.Also, the July 22nd entry featured Delaware's Blue Hen beer.
FROM THE ALE BREWSGRAM
China's largest beer producer, Yanjing Brewing, has entered the Shenzhen stock market to raisemoney. The U.S. Army has slashed its beer rations for its 39,000 GIs in South Korea to only 8cases a month from the previous 30 [a month!] to crack down on black market sales. Foster's hasexported its millionth case to its market of foreign workers in the non-alcohol-drinking MuslimMiddle East (Bahrain, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Egypt and Qatar). And in its continuing questto rule the world, Anheuser-Busch will exercise its option to purchase another 13.25% of GroupaModela, makers of Corona, Pacifico, Negra Modelo and Modelo Especial, bringing its total to acontrolling 50.2% [which means I probably oughta boycott the Negra Modelo I favored atMexican restaurants].
A DIFFERENT KIND OF BEER PUBLICATION
In the July 13th Wash Post Book World, Jonathan Yardley reviewed "Beer Blast: Twenty Years ofFads and Follies in the Battle of the Brews," written by Philip Van Munching and published byTimes Business. The author's family once distributed Heineken, and the author has first-handexperience of the "self-destructive machinations of the American brewing industry." Notsurprisingly, it is the story about how the Lousy American Beer Makers came under the control of"marketing exports" who know nothing about the product but think they can sell anything theywant to the public. The result is one commercial success (lite beer) and a long string of failures(dry beer, ice beer, clear beer...). [And, as Yardley failed to mention, the craft-brewingmovement.]
