That's the marketed, romanticized side of the booze industry. The reality is more like this:
A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries.
Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes.
Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown.
Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house.
Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality.
Indeed, I've tried several MGP-sourced ryes (knowing that they came from MGP), and found them to be good products. What bugs me, though, is the marketing BS that's thick enough to lay on with a trowel.
The central problem, though, is that whiskey is an unpredictable business, compounded by the necessity of aging the product. Rye lurked in the shadows for a long time, then suddenly became trendy. The result: crazy price jumps, proof reductions (I'm looking at you, Wild Turkey), and everybody and his brother jumping on the bandwagon. Unfortunately, that results in a proliferation of me-too products, and separating what's real from what's BS can be a chore.
I'm still wishing I had gone with my gut feeling and bought a case or two of Rittenhouse Bonded rye back when it was cheap.
Are you saying all Frank Lin products are made with the same grain ethanol and just different flavourings? I'd be astounded if that's the case. I thought things labelled as for example 'wine' or 'rum' had legal definitions. Can you really sell flavoured grain ethanol as unqualified 'wine'?
If you look at their site, it's all college rot gut, and well liquor level stuff. It's the brands that you go and get a giant 1 Gallon handle for 10$. Which makes sense given their business model.
This is the stuff you'll get at a corner bar when you say "I don't care." When they ask what kind of vodka you want.
And about three seconds' thought would tell you: "GeorgeBeech, no idiot running a 'premium' liquor brand would allow their product to be featured on a bulk purveyor of flavored methanol products manufacturer website."
Brand appearances are tightly controlled. The message is as much about what you want to be known as what you want to be concealed.
Skyy Vodka was featured on the Frank-Lin web site back in 2006.[1] "One of our current contract customers is Skyy Vodka. We are very proud to mention that we bottled the first bottle of Skyy for Maurice Kambar and have bottled every single bottle for him since." That was in 2006. Campari later bought out Skyy, and moved production to a Campari facility.
It's all ethanol, water, and flavoring. Deal with it.
Coca-Cola's "Dasani" is tap water that's been run through a deionizing plant and had some minerals added.
Same deal with the "Scotch" and "Cognac" appellations. They're protected by law.
The thing to remember is, there's plenty of completely crappy Scotch and, presumably, Cognac. It's not mixed from pure ethanol - the countries who control the use of the appellations have laws about how the stuff can be made - but every drink industry has its bottom of the barrel stuff that it needs to get rid of somehow...
As far as I know "Scotch" and "Cognac" are only protected in the EU.
In any case, the parent claims that Frank-Lin Distillers just uses pure ethanol to produce all of it's products. Given things such as bourbon permit the addition of "neutral grain spirits" those products make sense. I was curious about the Canadian whiskey case since it is explicitly one of the few protected spirits in law and appears to at least require production and aging in Canada.
> As far as I know "Scotch" and "Cognac" are only protected in the EU.
That's an interesting thought. I'm aware of France fighting misuse of its wine appellations overseas but I don't know about the rest. They're pretty aggressive, though.
> In any case, the parent claims that Frank-Lin Distillers just uses pure ethanol to produce all of it's products. Given things such as bourbon permit the addition of "neutral grain spirits" those products make sense.
The "bourbon" label is protected in the United States: you need to use certain ingredients to make bourbon, or rye, or tennessee whiskey, or whatever. With bourbon, for example, an ethanol distilled all the way up to azeotrope wouldn't be legal in the United States. The limit you can use is 160 proof.
In the parent's defense, "flavored ethanol" isn't a bad way of describing a lot of vodkas. Some of the better vodkas come out of industrial continuous distillation. The parent is just overstating his case, and in a small way, missing the point. A lot of that cheap stuff would be BETTER if it were pure ethanol and an additive...
Wine is fundamentally different from liquor, but he's probably referring to fortified wine, which is cheap wine with neutral grain spirits added to it.
It's an open secret in the wine industry, though, that a large quantity of grapes for California wine -- even of Napa Valley product (though I'm not sure how strict the rules are for appellations) are sourced from elsewhere in the state, much of it from near Fresno and Clovis. There simply isn't enough acreage within Napa Valley to supply production.
How much individualized production Frank-Lin does would be quite interesting to establish.
Do they do work for Diageo? It looks like the list of products, at least on their site, isn't something I really encounter in advertisements, promotions or really at any bars I've gone to.
On the topic of branded alcohol and mixed drinks, I got interested in the rise of both a ways back and did some digging, much of it by way of the Google Books ngrams viewer.
The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") largely date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable: http://goo.gl/EBXM87
What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s. Baccardi Rum is a notable exception showing up in the 1920s (http://goo.gl/it9vOc)
"Mixology" itself -- also largely a creation of the past 20 years: http://goo.gl/1hVsEU
And whiskey, the American version at least, was largely created to allow movement of an otherwise unusable product -- frontier grain -- to the population centres of the East Coast.
Your "sophisticated drinks" are an ad-man's creation.
That is an extraordinary conclusion which requires a bit more evidence than you're putting forward.
Another interpretation of the data is that the entire idea of a bar, pub, or corner bar was Irish by default until the 90's, when it became necessary to distinguish between different types of bars.
As an older fellow, my memory from well before the 90's is that what we think of now as an "Irish Pub" would have just been called "a bar" back in the day.
Ireland, as much of the world knows it, was invented
in 1991. That year, the Irish Pub Company formed with
a mission to populate the world with authentic Irish bar
That article manages to make its claim by focusing entirely on Irish pubs in Ireland and completely ignoring Irish-American pubs, which have been flourishing in the United States since before the Civil War.
Like McSorley's Old Ale House in NYC, for instance, which has been operating at the same location since at least the 1860s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McSorley%27s_Old_Ale_House). Most Northern cities of any size will have had similar establishments set up at roughly the same time, though it's rare to find one that's been in continuous operation for so long.
I would venture to guess that when people think of an "Irish pub," nearly all of what they're thinking of comes out of the Irish-American pub tradition. The program described in the article just takes all that stuff and wraps it into an "official Irish" package that's easy to franchise.
My God! Ireland's annexed Kazakhstan and the Canary Islands?!!!!
From TFA:
In the last 15 years, Dublin-based IPCo and its competitors have fabricated and installed more than 1,800 watering holes in more than 50 countries. Guinness threw its weight (and that of its global parent Diageo) behind the movement, and an industry was built around the reproduction of "Irishness" on every continent—and even in Ireland itself. IPCo has built 40 ersatz pubs on the Emerald Isle, opening them beside the long-standing establishments on which they were based.
The Irish pub predates that by a long way. In Ireland, that is.
As a commercial chain operation exporting an ersatz experience, the early 90s sounds right. But there have been individual establishments with an Irish clientele and atmosphere in most places where a high density of Irish emigrants ended up. See for example Doyle's Cafe in Boston.
Again, my point: if you look at the written record, "Irish Pub" emerges largely as a 1990s thing. The Slate article confirms this by noting the commercialization and corporatization of the concept.
["irish pub" site:groups.google.com] and then using more tools to select a custom date range of anything before 1995 means you get zero hits, but if you change the date to anything before 1998 you start to get a few hits, but these seem to be "pubs where Irish people drink" rather than "Irish theme pubs".
This was surprising to me because I have false memories of "Irish Pubs" (the packaged experience, not pubs with Irish customers) from early 1990.
Edit: wait - I should have probably tried this with "Irish bar"?
I am an American of Irish descent who quite enjoys the type of drinking establishment you are currently discussing. I have never once in my life called one an "Irish Pub" though I have used the expressions dive bar, corner bar, or just bar, thousands of times.
I believe it. In the little midwest town I was living at the time in the mid 90's "Irish Pubs" started appearing seemingly out of nowhere. Somehow St. Patrick celebrations and "Irish Pride Heritage" was also started to get popular.
Even some highschool people who had no Irish heritage decided they wanted to be "Irish". One hung the Irish flag in his room, smoked pipe tobacco, and wore a green kilt to parties.
> The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable.
That's not totally true - Jerry Thomas published How to Mix Drinks or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion in 1862. Punch (sort of the precursor to cocktails) has been around even longer.
Not to mention cocktail the term dates to the early 1800s.
"Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else"
Also, the Old Fashioned cocktail was created in the later 1800s to bring back the cocktails from the earlier 1800s instead of the garish concoctions that the contemporary bars were mixing. Ironic that until the craft cocktail revolution that modern Old Fashioneds included the "garbage" that the original was eschewing
I've updated my post with the ngram for "cocktail, cocktail hour, cocktail party, cocktail lounge", from 1850-2008: http://goo.gl/EBXM87
You'll find that as with the others I've cited, it shows a rapid and dramatic growth during Prohibition, to levels not achieved previously, and which have been maintained since.
Subsequent peaks in 1953, 1985, and 2002.
I'm aware that "appearance in print" is only a proxy for cultural prevalence. But it's a good one.
Part of the problem here is that cocktail meant a fairly specific band of mixed drinks in pre-prohibition days, but it grew into a generic catch all. Drinks which would have had a specific term back them (e.g. Flip) would show up on a cocktail list today
Are you aware of another widely-used signifier for mixed drinks that could be used?
I'm aware of some European uses (mostly liqueurs) that may date to earlier. Premium, or even non-premium, alcohol consumption habits really aren't a personal specialty.
Hi - in the 100-200 year ago range you'd probably need to search for all the subcategories which today would just get pushed under "cocktail". I don't know of a single term which would embody that concept from back then.
> What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s.
I can't cite, but I've read that before Prohibition, you pretty much went to a bar and ordered "whiskey", "rum" or whatever booze by style, but not by brand name. There wasn't much in the way of differentiation in the market. But during Prohibition, drinking random booze had a real risk of getting you sick, blinded or dead.
This was because 1) A lot of alcohol was still being produced for industrial uses. 2) To enforce Prohibition, that industrial alcohol was treated with additives to make it disgusting and poisonous to drink. 3) To fill the still-existing market for booze, some people sold alcohol that was made to be industrial but later had the additives (mostly) extracted.
During that time, having a trusted source of quality booze (booze that won't kill you) was suddenly very valuable. Good sources started the branding process to capitalize on that new market demand. Those who branded well grew. And, the rest is history.
Using the Google Books ngram viewer doesn't seem to be the best source for determining the age of alcohol brands. The dates you present are no where near the actual ages of the brands. Smirnoff and Bacardi were both founded in the 1860s, Beefeater and Jack Daniels the 1870s, Gordon's is from 1769, and Remy Martin is from 1724 (source: Wikipedia).
The ngram viewer, you're correct, doesn't clearly indicate the origin date of several of these names.
But you can bet your patootie it shows you when they emerged into common and popular usage. And that's the point I'm making here.
Yes, some of those brands "existed" going back through history to dates earlier than U.S. Prohibition. I explored that aspect in an earlier question to reddit's /r/AskHistorians, and from what I could glean from that, while the names existed they were largely as small and local establishments. Not the national conglomerates we've got today.
Most large alcohol brands underwent a revolution in the post-WWII era. Many far more recently than that.
You're putting far too much faith into the contents and completeness of Google's searchable archives. Newspapers and a selection of contemporary books may be a reasonable guide for broad trends and significant events, but in no way can they be relied upon to contain every little detail of the world around them.
Wouldn't a lot of that be due to globalization? No sense in advertising Remy Martin to people in revolutionary New York when the cost of transporting a bottle there would have been obscene.
Wait, are you saying that the concept of "globalization" didn't exist prior to the late 1990s? Most historians seem to agree that it has existed as far back as ancient Greece if not further.
If you are just measuring how frequently the word appears in popular usage, I don't see how that really has any bearing on the actual phenomenon. I don't think you are going to dispute that gravity existed and had a major impact prior to 1616 are you?
(Side note, if you put your search term in quotes it generates totally different results than if it's alone, in any case, I'm pretty sure that gravity existed before it started to take off in the media in the 1650s.)
One of the key differences before and after prohibition was who controlled the sale of what booze.
Before prohibition, a majority of saloons were 'tied-houses', meaning they bought from a single brewery. (Part of this was due to the massive industrialization of brewing by a few highly successful companies) Fierce competition between local saloons ensued, and larger brewers would fight marketing and price wars against local competitors, driving them out of the market.
Their marketing and sales tactics also contributed to the abundance of 'social ills' that were part of the argument for prohibition in the first place. The Anti-Saloon League was actually the most powerful lobby for prohibition, beating out both the Women's Christian Temperance Union and Prohibition Party combined.
To combat the problems brought by saloon monopoloy, new legislation after prohibition required brewers to be separated from the retail operation by the requirement of wholesalers for distribution. Once brewers no longer had a monopoly on a given retailer, all earlier concepts of branding and marketing changed. No longer would you go to a 'Pabst saloon' (which was the only viable saloon in town), but instead just any local saloon, tavern or bar, and select one of the local brews.
There are older cocktails - e.g. the Sazerac, the Gin fizz, and related drinks which were refined in the late 1800s. The Mint Julep (which you may not accept as a cocktail) goes way back further.
It is probably true that fussier drinks are more recent, but there are probably plenty of specialty drinks that have simply been forgotten.
If you are researching names you know, you will probably come up with a newer pedigree.
Also it is unfair to be lumping cocktails together with "branded alcohol", though it is true the brands have had a hand in pushing cocktails, they didn't invent the idea.
Also the gin and tonic, a result of British Imperialism encountering Tropical Disease.
Again: the historical record, indicated by prevalence in the Ngram viewer, suggests a fairly recent emergence in the general public discussion of both cocktails and branded liquor.
Bombay Sapphire is a product of the 1987. I had always assumed it was some sort of old liquor back from when India was controlled by the Brits. I'm sure that was their goal.
I was first introduced to the concept of alcohol branding by way of the wine industry (at one point Pepsi, by way of Diageo, owned a number of Napa Valley properties). The "fake rustic / family / small one-off" vibe of a great many wineries, breweries, distilleries, bars, etc., is little but a show.
Though yes, there are also genuine family-owned outfits. They just don't have hundred-million-dollar advertising budgets. Well, except for the Gallos.
On Diageo's holdings: "Diageo's brands include Smirnoff (the world's best-selling vodka),[7] Johnnie Walker (the world's best-selling blended Scotch whisky),[8] Baileys (the world's best-selling liqueur),[9] and Guinness (the world's best-selling stout).[10][11] It also owns 34% of Moët Hennessy, which owns brands including Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Hennessy.[12][13] It sells its products in over 180 countries and has offices in around 80 countries."
Speaking of Veuve Clicquot, another fun rabbit hole to go down is to examine all the holdings of its majority owner, LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LVMH
They own everything from Louis Vuitton to Dom Pérignon to Veuve to Fendi and beyond.
The company has (very wisely) somewhat cornered the market on goods for the aspirationally wealthy. And the people who aspire to be apirationally wealthy. I've got a bottle of JW Blue and Veuve right now.
You know you're kind of being played when you buy it, but they provide a nice experience and a nice looking product, in addition to a decent to good product.
Guinness has quite a long ngram history, and I suspect that most of it is due to the stout. It goes down during Prohibition, though if you switch to British English it continues upwards during that era.
FWIW, http://www.pre-pro.com/midacore/snyder.php says there wasn't a national trademark protection before 1905. That would have given only 15 years for a national brand to assert itself before prohibition.
Apparently there were plenty of brands pre-prohibition. So I think what you're seeing is that the most popular drinks now don't have a long history, not that brands are a result of prohibition.
what you're seeing is that the most popular drinks now don't have a long history, not that brands are a result of prohibition.
That's a possibility. And prohibition certainly put a lot of established liquor companies out of business. Though that doesn't address the question of why the sudden rise to prominence of brands from 1950 onwards -- 17 years after repeal.
The repeal took place during the Depression, and then there was World War II. That's not going to help market expansion. Plus, national brands used to be harder to establish. In the early 1900s, transportation costs were much higher. While there were national brands, glass bottles and water are heavy. Plus, bottles used to be reused. See http://refillables.grrn.org/content/americas-experience-refi... :
> As soon as packaged beer became popular in the mid-1930s, cans competed with refillable glass bottles for the market. The figure and table show how the rise of metal cans and a fluctuating but significant demand for one-way bottles concurred with the decline of refillable bottles. One-way containers helped national beer companies conquer the U.S. market, and their conquest further diminished the use of refillable glass bottles.
> Budweiser had its glory days in the 1950s when Anheuser-Busch helped strengthen its national brand by sponsoring shows featuring Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, and Frank Sinatra. It also promoted its beer by sponsoring sporting events and branding stadiums. By the 1980s, Budweiser was synonymous with American culture.
Here's an essay about the decline of regional breweries in Cincinnati - http://www.wcpo.com/entertainment/local-a-e/cincinnatis-rise... . It shows that regional brands were popular pre-Prohibition, and my summary of it is that decreasing marketing and transport costs gave more weight to the economy of scale for the national brands.
http://tapsmagazine.com/in-this-issue/the-rise-of-national-b... might be useful, but non-subscribers like me only see "The 1950s witnessed the emergence of national brands, as the nation’s biggest brewers aggressively promoted their flagship beers from coast to coast."
Trendy brands are fashion items with limited product histories? Who would have guessed?
In any case, it's instructive to look at old menus and wine lists to get a feel for what was actually on offer way back when. For the most part, cocktails as we know them don't show up until the 1940s or so. Though it's worth noting there aren't a lot of speakeasy menus around.
On the other hand, generic types of liquor like "old tom gin" or "rye" date back well into the 19th century.
Wine brands certainly date back even further, and interestingly it's the champagnes that have changed very little in the top brands for centuries. Some beer brands, particularly Guinness and Bass have been popular on American menus for a long, long time.
Browse the New York Public Library's historic menu collection here- http://menus.nypl.org/
If it's not something you think much about, the history can be pretty surprising. I happen to have spent much of the past few years rummaging about in the archive closets of the Industrial Revolution -- its emergence and development. Part of that story is of development of technologies and products, some is how those came to be branded and merchandised.
It's fascinating history.
James Burke in his 1979 series Connections dates modern consumer goods to Wedgwood China in the 18th century.
The first real "personal appliances" -- consumer mechanical products -- were the bicycle and sewing machine, both emerging in the 1880s.
Edward Bernays and principles of modern PR and advertising would make another excellent topic of exploration.
All of which goes over and elucidates a tad more than snark.
I was looking for something on r/askhistorians I saw a while back about a hot sauce bottle found in Virginia City ruins, indicating a brand that had gone national in the 1870s or so.
Haven't found it yet, but did find this- a discussion of the saloons of the city, which mentions the Irish bar in town a few times, as well as Tennent's Ale, which was a growing global brand at the time.
In any case, I spend a fair amount of time browsing 19th century American magazines and newspapers (for fun, I suppose), and you can see the early national brands growing over the decades. The railroads were what made it all possible, they really did transform daily life in substantial ways. Certainly in places that were directly connected, but also even in more remote towns. Goods moved much more quickly, and growth hacking of all sorts was rewarded quite handsomely.
I don't think your comment on whiskey fits in with your thesis. Whiskey is the answer to "what should we do with all of this left over grain?" throughout the Western world.
The routes were overland (rivers have a hard time crossing mountains), this was pre-railroad (let alone highway). There was significant grain production, that couldn't be moved feasibly by other means.
I was specifically addressing the case within the U.S., not the rest of the world, though yes, you're generally correct. Fermenting (and sometimes distilling) grains, fruit, potatoes, etc., is a way of storing surplus production in a form that's resistant to rot or other decay.
I still don't see what that has to do with what I see as your thesis: Your "sophisticated drinks" are an ad-man's creation.
I pointed out US whiskey because the circumstances of its existence were not manipulated by marketers, but was the "natural" consequence of the limitations of the time. Further, that fits in with whiskey throughout the Western world, so the US is not unusual.
To expand on this, distillation also solves the logistical problem of "how do we transport fruit (e.g. apples) hundreds of miles without the use of trucks, refrigeration, or pesticides?". Answer: we turn it into applejack!
It's easy to write an article poking fun at fern bars and pseudo-naughty drink names like Slippery Nipple. People in the past and their absurd habits - so unbelievably shallow. So unlike you and I, who have discovered genuine connoisseurship concerning drinking habits.
But history is unforgiving, and the laugh will be on us. In a few years the term "mixologist" and the whole discourse concerning bitters, muddling, and artisanal gin is going to be ripe for the comedic shredder. I look forward to it.
Dare I say it is already here. The mixologist is a pretentious name for a bartender. Though I'd argue there is nothing wrong with bitters, muddling or artisan liquers.
I can go to any number of bars in Sydney where a 'mixologist' can't make a simple Belvedere Vodka, a bit dirty (not slutty). Go to a place that has a bartender, and at least you've got a shot at something half decent.
When I worked as a bartender, if we didn't know what a particular drink was, and the customer didn't know what was in it, we just asked "What color is it?". We usually came up with something satisfactory!
Not just mixed drinks: Prohibition killed decent American beer & wine as well, and led to decades of industrialized, homogenized mediocrity that we are still recovering from.
Go into any neighborhood liquor store, and in addtion to the Big Three and the other inexpensive pale lagers and pilsners, you'll also see something from one of the major craft breweries (Samuel Adams, New Belgum, et. al), -- a couple amber ales, and at least one pale ale or wheat ale. Go into a larger liquor store, and in addition to the above, you're likely to find beers from other craft breweries local to your region, all of them offering various ales and lagers ranging from very pale and light to very dark and heavy, and plenty of points in between.
There's good stuff to be had. You just have to be willing to consider beer to be more than cheap pale lager, and to go looking for it.
U.S. craft beers tend to over-represent heavily hopped styles such as the IPA. Just as sweet and sour mixers can cover up low quality spirits used in a cocktail, excessive use of hops can cover up flaws in a poorly crafted brew. There are exceptions, but they're still comparatively rare. For example, how many doppelbock's are made in the U.S.? Even less hoppy styles of beer, such as stouts, tend to be massively hopped by U.S. craft brewers.
The craft brew scene has exploded only in the last couple of decades and most microbrewers are comparatively new to the craft. Hopefully a broader variety of styles will become better represented as brewers gain experience and try to differentiate themselves from the overly hopped masses.
At present, the lion's share of my favorite North American microbrews are from Quebec. I don't know why, but the brewers of that province are hitting it out of the park right now.
> U.S. craft beers tend to over-represent heavily hopped styles such as the IPA.
Hah, well finally I am validated. I was an anti-IPA snob when IPAs became all the rage. People would tell me how great this beer is, soooo bitter. Which to me is like drinking 80 proof vodka and claiming to taste the undertones of grains in it.
It sort of became like a badge of beer connoisseurship -- the more bitter you liked them the more you knew about beer.
Anyway, my favourite are wheat ales but also like stouts.
> For example, how many doppelbock's are made in the U.S.?
Beer Advocate lists 618 Doppelbocks: http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/style/35/ and, taking a quick look down the list, it appears that at least half of them seem to be made in the US.
Interesting. I wonder how many of these were more than a small one-off batch. I've certainly never seen Samuel Adam's doppel, and they're no longer a small craft brewer!
I've noticed a slight backlash against the IPA style and its overpowering bitterness lately. A lot of craft breweries are now selling lots of other styles, like Pilsners, subtler pale ales, wheat beers, and maltier red and brown ales, porters and stouts. Ninkasi is one of my favorite breweries, their oatmeal stout and double red ale are fantastic. They have a few good lager/pilsner styles too.
IPAs are relatively easy to get right, but subtler styles like pilsner require more precision in the brewing process.
I think that's something that's relatively recent, in the last 10 years or so. Way back then, IPAs weren't as common in Seattle, there were tons of browns, ambers and darker, less hoppy varieties.
Now I'm seeing far more hoppy stuff around, but I'm also not goign to bars in Seattle anymore.
I can get all the great beer I want in the US. At this point, if people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem.
It depends on the state. In oakland California where I live the grocers have phenomenal selections of craft beers. But in Oklahoma City where I used to live the grocery stores can only sell beer with at most a negligible amount of alcohol so even the good grocers have at best Dos Equis and Bud. If you want real beer you have to go to a liquor store or if there's a session beer you really like you have to tell the beer buyer where to get it because they aren't on the state approved list of shitty industrial beers.
> If people are still drinking Coors and Budweiser and wondering if there's more to life, that's their own problem.
It is not all about taste. Marking is 50% of it. For example
Pabst Blue Ribbon is an amazing story. It went from cheap crap beer people cooked with to hipster signature within 5 years or so.
It is the same crap but marketing turned it into cool "awesome" drink that every tight-jean, flippy-hair, messenger-bag carrying self-respecting hipster would want. Or was 3 years ago and now they are drinking something else...
Anyway, a lot of it was due to very clever marketing, product placement and sponsorship.
Not just alcohol. An interesting observation in An Economist Gets Lunch (one of my favorite books on food) is that Prohibition is responsible for putting many great restaurants of the era out of business (restaurants make money on alcohol). The remaining restaurants adjusted to a more "family-friendly" palate, (think grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, and cheeseburgers) and away from more subtle flavors.
I've also heard that in some cities it increased the number of people who were unfed since many bars offered a free lunch (think bowl of today's stew) with the purchase of a drink. When you get rid of the alcohol subsidizing the food cost, suddenly finding dirt cheap food was harder.
The article ended just as I was expecting the meat. The article seemed to want us to blame women for this, but never quite dared to say as much outright.
Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one (if you're worried about the nutritional balance of your cocktail, the alcohol will kill you first). A clever name doesn't have to mean a bad drink. The disappearance of federal regulation was interesting, but it doesn't seem like it tells the whole story - it's not like those federal whiskey inspectors have been reintroduced (have they?).
I don't know how you managed to pull misogynist tones out of this--author merely pointed out that, to increase patronage, bar owners moved towards more open and public spaces. It's just what the market wanted.
Some of us like sweetness, and there's no reason a sweet cocktail should be inherently less skill-based than a sour one.
So, again, you're missing the point: strong mixers (sweet or sour!) cover up bad ingredients and also cover up bartenders being incompetent. It's not a choice between sweet, sour, and whatever else in a good mixed drink; it's a bartender knowing how the flavors fit together in the drink, and knowing how the flavors vary across brands and years of theoretically the same ingredient. For example, there are several different manufacturers and brands of gin, and what works well in a gin and tonic may fail to test nearly as good in a proper martini.
It's more economical and requires vastly less skill to dump vodka or well tequila into a sour-mix and thrown in some cubes and give to a patron, than it is to pick the right tequila off a bar, pair with the right liquors, and add just a slight amount of mixer for flavor, and then serve.
FWIW it's often the bitter flavor tones (as well as the actual booze taste) which are viewed as the more True Believer flavors, not sour.
In general when you see that sort of talk decrying the "rookies" and "amateurs" they're talking about drinks designed to cover up the booze and classic booze-y flavors, and those tend to be sweet & sour mixers. And no, there's nothing wrong with those drinks, drink what you want.
It may not be the sort of thing your average SF tech worker can relate to, but for many Americans the choice between a $10-$20 mixed drink and a $2 double shot of a well liquor (with more ethanol than the mixed drink) is no choice at all.
Not sure I agree. At least around where I live (Boston) the older style ("Dark Ages" in the parlance of TFA) bars are also serving $10-$20 mixed drinks, they're just not as good.
For instance, a Dark Ages bar you'll be paying $15+ for a bird bathed style "martini" which is simply chilled vodka (martinis are not vodka, and they should have a measurable amount of vermouth) or you're paying the same for a proper 3-4 oz sized craft cocktail.
This article wasn't talking about cocktails vs slugging shots of straight liquor, rather it was talking about how wretched the state of mixed drinks themselves became.
If mixed drink sales are poor (for instance, because many consumers cannot justify the price), then there isn't much motivation for the bar to hire professional bartenders rather than college kids, or even create a proper cocktail menu. Extreme cocktail pricing made it a niche market with few businesses willing to participate in it in earnest.
Except that the trend away from quality cocktail making long predated the pricey mixed drink trend. I don't disagree with your premise but I still don't think it has anything to do with the situation described in the article
A Manhattan made with high-grade ingredients is sublime, but DIY is far more cost-effective than having someone else do it for you. Plus, there's lots of room for experimentation (maybe try different types/amounts of bitters, using rye rather than bourbon, or adding a dash of absinthe, or different mix ratios for the main ingredients).
Is this the kind of thing I'm missing out on by living outside a dinky little town out in the country? $20 for a mixed drink is insane. Who buys this crap?
A sizable fraction of the liquor on the US West Coast comes from Frank-Lin Distillers Products.[1] They used to be near the San Jose railyards, but now they're in Fairfield, with better rail access. They need rail access because the ethanol comes in by the trainload, in tank cars.[2] One of their major suppliers is MGP Ingredients in Illinois. They used to be called Midwest Grain Products, and before that, Midwest Solvents. MGP provides pure ethanol to both the beverage and gasoline industries.
Frank-Lin has their own water deionization and filtering plant on-site, to take all the minerals out of tap water and have just pure water. They do some additional processing on the ethanol to remove trace impurities. Then they mix ethanol, water, and flavoring to produce beverages. They have about a thousand different products - vodkas, gins, brandies, bourbons, rums, and wines, but only about a hundred different recipes.
Each brand has its own bottle design and label. The Ball bottle-making factory is conveniently next door. Frank-Lin has an advanced bottling line that can automatically change from one bottle to another without a shutdown.
Frank-Lin also does "contract bottling" - they will make your brand for you. They used to make Skyy Vodka. Skyy was a virtual company - everything was outsourced, like a app startup. Skyy was bought by a major distiller a few years ago, which pulled production in-house.
Once you get past the marketing, that's the reality.
[1] http://www.frank-lin.com/ [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.278159,-121.973672,3a,75y,11...