Colt 45 neither cheapest nor fastest way to get drunk. Franzia wine in a box beats it like a rented mule.

I am always frustrated at how much better, more creative, and more funny beer ads are than liquor ads. Is it just budget? Or are spirits makers afraid to go a little gonzo for fear of blue-noses pitching a hissy?
Regardless, here is Heineken’s latest masterpiece of fun social commentary on men, women, and reality TV:

The workers at the Carlsberg beer company in Denmark have gone on strike… because the company has removed the coolers of beer which used to be scattered throughout the factory. And yes, the drivers are joining the strike, even though their three beer a day allowance has not been cut.

Like most Americans, I hate ads. Unlike most, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship.
Long-time readers (all three of you) may remember my writing incessantly about Tanqueray Gin’s spokescharacter, Tony Sinclair. His silly, exotic adventures on television and YouTube were the stuff of booze ad legend.
For a while now, I’ve been similarly enjoying Dos Equis’ ad campaign that features The Most Interesting Man in the World. This mysteriously unnamed man has much of same vibe as the apparently shelved Sinclair, having incredible adventures, and improbable successes.
The difference between the two is that Sinclair always had an undertone of British Eccentricity, whereas the Most Interesting Man has a Latin Cool about him. I like both, slightly preferring Tony, if only because he promotes a liquor rather than a beer. But it is impossible to not be a fan of a Man so Interesting that he, lives vicariously… through himself.
A recent profile of The Man’s actor, Jonathan Goldsmith at Lushangeles (H/T: Jacob Grier) is an interesting and rewarding read. In discussing the ad campaign, the author notes what I think is the most striking and effective aspect of the whole campaign: The Man is not a Dos Equis fanatic.

I don’t always drink beer.
But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.

Here is his iconic ad, which ends with the quote above. Note how effective the soft sell is.

For Americans today, the assumption is that class means cosmopolitan tastes, not slavish devotion. We are unlikely to fully buy into Dos Equis being so magnificent a creature’s only thing, but we can eagerly accept the concept that it is one of his favorite things. When I first saw this ad campaign, I had to remind myself that I frankly don’t like Dos Equis much, and didn’t need to pick some up. It took but a few seconds to realize how effective the soft recommendation is.
There is much fun to be had at the Man’s website, and I embed a few more of his favorite hits below the fold!
(more…)

I stumbled across a blog post recently that made me go back and look at my own draft folder. E.E. Southerby of Points in Case is a wrong-headed individual who reminds me of my own younger self, only with a better writing ethic. He has a regular feature he calls “Rejected Column Ideas“, in which he does a collection of short blurbs about posts he never finished. Gizmodo does something similar. I took a look at the 34 posts in varying degrees of decomposition in my draft folder, and decided I ought to give the idea a shot.
You are welcome.

First up, I have two booze stories from far-off, fading Avalon.
Number one is about beer. I don’t blog about beer, so I set this one aside. But I just gotta say that if you are going to brew 64 proof beer, “Tactical Nuclear Penguin” is a pretty good name. (H/T: Ace)
Number two is about Scotch. The English have introduced a whisky of their own. Apparently the only reason Scotland has not declared war (yet) is that they spell whisky correctly. Me, I just am hoping for a sample bottle of $75, three-year-old scotch to come from the Liquor Fairy….

A while back, I had a moderately well-read post on a recent IP dustup about Gosling’s Black Seal Rum and the Dark ‘n Stormy (which can only legally be called thus if you use Gosling’s). Among the several others who also wrote on it was Jacob Grier, who plots to storm the Trademark Bastille with a yet to be invented, “Dark ‘n Sue Me“. I love Jacob, but I suspected he had his head lingering dangerously near the wrong parts of the anatomy on this one. While I usually do not shy away from a good Rule 4 dust-up, I did here because… well, Jacob and his crew sound much better educated on the subject than I do. And it is less than fun to get into a public debate with people who appear more educated than I.
Even when I am, of course, right.

Descending from the rarefied air of intellectual property rights to the Basement Bar, I bring you these things for the PeTA member who hungers for an old-school, drawing room-type mancave:

A company named Cardboard Safari has a whole raft of these things, up to and including a full sized, whole body rhino. (H/T: Streetlevel, via Asylum)

I was thinking about one of these for my Basement Bar a while back, when I was noticing a slight shrinkage in the waistbands of many of my trousers (a condition that has yet to abate). Behold the Stationary Bike Blender Kit!

But then I got one of these, and I decided to look elsewhere for exercise. Especially since I’d only use it enough during Tiki Month. (H/T: OhGizmo)

Speaking of Tiki Month, here’s my favortie item I did not get to: How to make your own, Tiki-style paper umbrellas! ( H/T: Camper)

The next item really ought to be it’s own post, but I’m sticking it here because, well, I’m on a roll and it has been in the queue for almost a year.
Understanding Cocktails pointed out that one of the exploding trends in 2008 was cocktails, so much so that Google’s Zeitgeist report for 2008 gave us a list of top ten drinks searched for as one of its featured lists.
I used Google Trends to check a few other search histories and found that our area of interest is as fresh and new in the public consciousness as we think. But I am dismayed to see that it is not growing as much as I’d like. I searched for Cocktail Bars, Mojito, Manhattan, and Martini. Only Mojito goes back before 2005 as even a blip on the radar. The others all appear out of the blue around 2005-2006, but don’t grow much from there. We cocktail bloggers are not doing our jobs, folks!

And last, what would a post like this be without a video? Here is the finest (IMHO) in the Cooking with Andy series from YouTube. Beware FoodBuzz types! This is the way a lot of people out there view food bloggers!

UPDATE: Ack! Apparently my dashboard ate my previous version of this post for no reason. I hate technology…. If this version of the post sucks more than the first, I apologize.

There is a blog I’ve been watching for a while called IKEAhacker. It is all about projects you can do and things you can make by repurposing stuff from IKEA. I’ve been reading it in part because I’m a sucker for IKEA stuff, and in part because I knew that ideas I could use for this blog’s Basement Bar Design series would show up there in due course.
Apparently, I’m psychic….

IKEAhacker’s latest post, Cheers, it’s a Kegerator! shows how to use a few miscellaneous items from the scratch and dent bin at IKEA to dress up an old commercial refrigerator into a very nice cardiovascular system for a beer-centric home bar. You should visit IKEAHacker to see the products they use, and to just look around.
The post is useful, but I thought I’d do a little digging around to help you out with the one thing that Jules doesn’t go into, the tap mechanism itself.
There are lots of conversion kits available on the web that will accomplish this end. At a minimum, a kit will need a keg tap, hoses, a faucet, a regulator, and a CO2 tank. Make sure you get the last, as it is not included in all kits.
There are two different types of pouring faucets: Door mount, and tower. The kind pictured above is a tower, and mounts to the top of the fridge. The larger fixture will make a kit of this type cost about eighty dollars more than a door mount, but a door mount on a short appliance like this would require a suppler back and sturdier knees than I for one posses. If you are converting an old full or apartment sized fridge, go for the door mount.
The cheapest kit I found was a door mount that, with gas tank, would cost about $140 from Beverage Factory.
The tower kits come with either one or two spouts. Since a fridge of the size shown would not likely have room for two kegs, I assume the person who made it went the two faucet route because of appearance, or because it was what was at the store. A base, one spout, tower kit can cost as little as $214 from KegWorks.
There are also deluxe kits that come with better components, and more importantly, with maintenance materials. A tower kit of this nature goes for $490 from KegWorks.

You ought to consider going with a deluxe kit, unless you are a fan of sticky counters and bacteria.

I would be remiss in any Basement Bar Design post if I did not link to myself with some thoughts from previous posts. First off, how can I say this… The handles on the faucets you see on all these kits are… well… plain.

They are boring!

OK, they are boring. Consider investing in something like this to show some personality. And if you don’t have the money, space, or cordless drill needed to go the custom kegerator route, you could still use one of the tabletop mini kegerators you can buy for a couple hundred bucks.
If you are going to go this route, Beverage Factory has a free manual on how to convert a fridge to a kegerator. I’d advise reading it before you even think of buying any components.
If that is to dry for you, or you are still in the decision phase, Kegworks has a great demonstration video, featuring Bob Villa Robert Hess, that is less detailed and complete, but gives a more intuitive view of what this project would take:

If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:

• Basement Bar Accessories #10: The NewAir Portable Ice Maker
• Basement Bar Accessories #6: DIY Kegerator
• Basement Bar Accessories: Herbal Assault Part 1
• Basement Bar Design #0: Introduction
• Basement Bar Design #1: Where, What, and Why.
• Basement Bar Design #2: Refrigerators
• Basement Bar Design #3: Ice Supply
• Basement Bar Design #4(a): Essential Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(b): Supplemental Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(c): Buying Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #5: Water and Washing Up
• Basement Bar Design #6: My Own Basement Bar
• Basement Bar Design #7: Bar Top and Countertop Surfaces
• Basement Bar Design #8(a): Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8(b) More Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8: Artwork
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #1: Lit Backbar Walls
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #2: Holiday Glassware Giveaways
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #3: Beer Dispensing from Heineken and Elsewhere
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #4: Branded Beer Taps
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #5: Pure American Ingenuity
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #7: The Man Wall
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #8: The Arkeg
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #9: Global Domination
• Basement Bar Design Accessories: Hidden Lairs
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere #2
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #1: Sheds
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #2: Dangerous Party Invitees
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #3: Irish Pub in a (really big) Box
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #4: Mr. Blendtec, activate the defenses!
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #5: 1800 Tequila's Mancave Contest
• Basement Bar Design, Things to Consider #1: The Bargain
• Basement Bar Design: A Tour of the Parade of Homes
• Bulletin, Bulletin, Bulletin!
• Christmas Idea: Martini Shaker
• I Saved at Least $10,000 Because of Cocktail Blogging...
• New Basement Bar Contest From Grant's Whisky
• The Sixth Day of Christmas
• Tiki Timeout: Bar Building and BlogBarCrawl Update
• Trader Tiki's Basement Bar in the News
• Wow, They Even Have Black Friday Sales In the Cocktail World....

Thanks to Mætenloch, guest posting at Ace of Spades:

My snarky comments in my last post about scientific studies came back to me this afternoon, as I perused my iPhone at the park.
A week ago I read (and I bet a lot of you did too) an article in the New York Times, entitled Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It. The article addresses controversy over a recent discovered, but uncontested statistical fact: Moderate drinkers live longer than heavy drinkers, but they also live longer than Teetotalers.
If no one contests the fact, why is it controversial?
You don’t follow politics much, do you?
Here is what lots of scientists are saying to argue that the obvious advice that arises from this fact should not be given:

“The bottom line is there has not been a single study done on moderate alcohol consumption and mortality outcomes that is a ‘gold standard’ kind of study — the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new pharmaceutical agent in this country,” said Dr. Tim Naimi, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This a completely valid scientific point, but also a terrible basis for debate. How’s it both? Well, the central assertion that correlation is not causation is critical to good science. And that critical rule is the most often ignored best practice in science, by both lay people and scientists themselves. So it certainly is reasonable to say that you should not take this statistical fact alone as advising moderate drinking.
But there are numerous other studies that show more direct causation between alcohol consumption and a variety of specific health benefits and risks. How do we balance them? Dr. Naimi’s suggestion that we employ a process similar to the FDA’s approval process for new drugs is flawed for various reasons. First, as the article notes, the only sponsor for such a test that might allow the results to be trusted by both sides would be the Feds. And they won’t pay for such a process because whichever side comes out behind will hate them. Further, I would suggest that using a process that would reject Aspirin or Penicillin as possessing too many risk factors to be allowed, would certainly find against alcohol. Which is more an indictment of the government’s process of approving drugs than it is of alcohol. The fact is, like everything else on Earth, alcohol has benefits and risks. If we want to know how those sides tend to balance, I’d suggest that we have a study already done, to the goldest of standards, about how those risks tend to balance. The sample size is humanity….
To be fair, the argument Dr. Naimi and some others (don’t you just love when reporters use the phrase some scientists say…?) make against my last point is this:

…the two groups are so different that they simply cannot be compared. Moderate drinkers are healthier, wealthier and more educated, and they get better health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being.

The problem I see with this distinction is that the scientists seem determined to believe that these sociological differences could have no causative relationship with alcohol consumption. This is of course ridiculous. No one claims that alcohol use can and does change people’s life circumstances, at least in the case of heavy use or abuse. Why should we reject out of hand the notion that moderate alcohol use might actually promote some of those social advantages the researchers say distinguish moderate drinkers?
I’m not saying this is certain, but I contend that the differences they are discussing can’t legitimately be used as control factors since income and education may also be affected by alcohol use. In fact, a Forbes article by Arthur Brooks cites a study that purports to show such a relationship.

Moderate drinkers are richer than teetotalers, too. In 2001 the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics found that light drinkers (one to two drinks a day) had a mean income of $49,000, versus $36,000 among teetotalers. This is a nuanced statistic; drinking may be associated with other variables (like education) that influence income. So the researchers did their best to strip these other causes out. If two adults were identical with respect to education, age, family status, race and religion, except that the first had one or two drinks each night after work while the second was a teetotaler, the drinker would tend to enjoy a “drinker’s bonus” of about 10% higher income.

Is this correlation or causation? Again, who knows? Especially since in this area we are leaving medical science and entering sociology. And sociology ain’t science, guys. Sorry, but it isn’t.
Finally, another article in Forbes (the one I was reading in the park while my kids played on the swings) makes a logical argument that in many ways trumps the entire debate. The article, by Jeff Stier is entitled I Choose Risk. And no, the fact that the term bikini waxing is found in the subtitle is not why I was reading it. Stier’s article is a general condemnation of how we are becoming increasingly, riskily, adverse to… well… risk.
Most of his article is devoted to the fish pedicures, video games, and the aforementioned bikini waxing, but he ends with linking the Brooks article and saying this about the correlation/causation question.

I believe that moderate drinkers have the ability to accept risk (unlike teetotalers) and manage it (as opposed to alcoholics). This is a discipline that they can deploy both at the bar and at the office. The ability to engage judiciously with risk in all facets of life may be a predictor of success–whether it’s part of a career, daily routine or society in general.

So let’s wrap up this rambling post. It is a fact that moderate drinkers happen to live longer than those who drink more or less. There are specific, well established health benefits from alcohol consumption, with more being found all the time. The are specific risks associated with alcohol use as well. In addition to living longer, moderate drinkers make more money, are healthier, and are better educated. Moderate drinking is a skill, employing talents that are valuable for success in all walks of life. And I’ll add that drinking is enjoyable and can improve our quality of life.

I’ll close with a famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that apparently was not quite what is usually reported:

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

Picture the horrible possibilities. You are at sea aboard a long endurance research vessel, for something like two months. The refrigerated storage is all dedicated to bait, or squid samples, or squid samples to be used as bait. Even if the ship’s regs allow alcohol, the total beer you could possibly get on board will last about a week. Thirsty yet?

How about now? I thought so.
Fortunately, we have a remedy for your thirst from the good folks at Southern Fried Science, two marine biologists who struggle to save the sharks. They have published a scholarly engineering treatise entitled: How to Brew Beer in a Coffee Maker, Using Only Materials Commonly Found on a Modestly Sized Oceanographic Research Vessel. (H/T: Al Dente Blog)
MacGyver has nothing on these guys. Here is a representative list of the things you need to make beer on a crowded working boat filled with thirsty, smelly, overcrowded dudes.

• Automatic Drip Coffee Maker
• Coffee Filters
• Rubber Bands
• Raisin Bran
• Vegemite or Malted Milk Balls
• Alfalfa
• Yeast from the kitchen
• Clean Water
• Two Clean Jars
• Two Hopefully Clean Handkerchiefs (this last item is the only one I call bullsh*t on finding on a research vessel)

Follow their directions, and you will end up with this:

A cool, smooth brew, flavored with whatever you found. It may be very bad, it may be good. It will be beer.
…
You are now the most popular person on the boat. Enjoy.

I love ads. There, I admitted it. I also hate them, as is required for all of us, but a really good advertisement is in my opinion high art. It is really, really hard to make a truly standout ad. Now, a lot of money is out there chasing liquor sales, so some of the cleverest people in advertising want their piece. I recently ran across some really cool ones that I wanted to share.
Let’s start with this basic gem:

I don’t get it.
What does it mean?

Heh. It’s a guy thing. Trust me, the dudes out there are laughing. The older ones are either laughing nervously, or wistfully, but they are all laughing. I think we could call this the ultimate (as in final resting spot) in Product Placement.
Next, let’s examine the new wrinkle of adding dimensionality to billboards, like this one for Heineken:

Frankly, it’s a bit creepy. but it will get your attention.
The idea with these ads seems to be a variant on the theater and movie concept of breaking the fourth wall. Except that when you do it in a performance, you are usually trying to shock the audience out of their willing suspension of disbelief for a moment. You do this to make them think about some dramatic or humorous element of the performance. Or just to get all Meta and stuff. When ad makers break out of the fourth wall, they seem to be trying to shock you into a momentary suspension of disbelief.
If the beer ads push on the fourth wall, this Maker’s Mark ad rips it completely apart:

The only way this could be cooler is with a giant recirculating pump.
But the current prize in liquor ads that come out and get the consumer goes to Jameson Irish Whiskey. (As a Scot by heritage, I am here obligated to ridicule the way the Irish spell Whisky, and bemoan the sorry state of affairs that let them impose that spelling on America) The company is running a set of ads in New York and other major cities that consist of a giant green square with a picture of a bottle of Jameson’s and a caption, projected at night onto the blank sides of buildings.

What’s so broken fourth wall about that? There is also a camera on that wall that looks back down at the people who see the ad. Said camera narrowcasts back to a control room, where an operator controls the caption, like so:

Still not impressed? Then follow these three shots:



Of course, my evil mind sees some danger in this for the building owner, if the keyboard dude dips into the Jameson’s before getting off work….

On the other hand, think of all the other ways the Jameson’s people could be there for consumers in need:

On the other hand, if Big Brother (or more likely, her big brother) gets ahold of this technology….