A maddeningly sparse article in Denmark’s Copenhagen Post today reports that a thesis done by a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen seems to suggest that “[o]rganic beer production emits substantially more greenhouse gases than ordinary beer.” The study’s author, Jakob Majcher, compared CO2 emissions between conventional brewing and organic brewing and found that organic beer production produced 12% more. As far as I knew, the only difference between organic and non-organic beer was the ingredients used. I don’t know of any real differences in the “process” of brewing organic beer, so I’m somewhat stumped as to what might account for his findings. There’s almost no details about how he he did his study, just his declaration of the results, which is more than a little frustrating.
There is what looks to be a slightly more thorough, or at least longer, article at Information DK. Unfortunately, it’s in Danish and none of the popular web translators offer Danish. The only one I could find, InterTran, provides a translation that is almost unreadable. Hopefully, this will get picked up by English-language news outlets and we can figure out what’s really going on.
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Last year I did an annotated list of the Top 50 so I could see who moved up and down, who was new to the list and who dropped off. Four breweries dropped off the list and there are three new ones who weren’t on last year’s list. The reason that math doesn’t work out is because last year the combined breweries of Gambrinus were listed together but this year they were separated again, with two of them making the top fifty. So here is this year’s list again annotated with how they changed compared to last year.
The following breweries dropped off the list, meaning they were on the 2006 list but are not on the 2007 list of the Top 50 breweries.
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The Brewers Association just announced the top 50 breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2007, which is listed below here. For the first time, they’ve also released a list of the top 50 craft breweries based on the new definition adopted by the Brewers Association last year. Here is the new craft brewery list:
From the press release:
If you enjoyed this post or the Bulletin generally, please consider buying me a pintThe Brewers Association, which tabulates industry growth data, announced its annual list of the top fifty brewing companies. Released are both a Top 50 Craft Brewing Companies list and a list of the Top 50 Overall Brewing Companies. Statistics are based on sales in 2007.
“The majority of breweries in the U.S. are independent craft brewers who continue to push the envelope in flavor and diversity and who continue to set the pace for the beer category,” states Paul Gatza, Director of the
The Brewers Association has just announced the top 50 breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2007. Here is the new list:
From the press release:
If you enjoyed this post or the Bulletin generally, please consider buying me a pintTwenty-one states are represented in the top 50 brewing companies list, according to the Brewers Association. California hosts eight top breweries. Colorado and Oregon each host five, and Pennsylvania hosts four top producers. The remainder of the top 50 operate from Minnesota (3), New York (3), Wisconsin (3), Illinois (2), Massachusetts (2), Missouri (2), Vermont (2), and Washington (2). Alaska, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas each host one.
A new study by a Czech ornithologist, Tomas Grim, in which he studied not the birds that are his usual subject, but his fellow avian scientists … and their beer-drinking habits. The study, published last month in Oikos, was titled A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists. Here is the abstract:
Publication output is the standard by which scientific productivity is evaluated. Despite a plethora of papers on the issue of publication and citation biases, no study has so far considered a possible effect of social activities on publication output. One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking alcohol. In Europe, most alcohol is consumed as beer and, based on well known negative effects of alcohol consumption on cognitive performance, I predicted negative correlations between beer consumption and several measures of scientific performance. Using a survey from the Czech Republic, that has the highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world, I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality). In addition I found the same predicted trends in comparison of two separate geographic areas within the Czech Republic that are also known to differ in beer consumption rates. These correlations are consistent with the possibility that leisure time social activities might influence the quality and quantity of scientific work and may be potential sources of publication and citation biases.
Essentially, that can be summarized as “the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.”
The New York Times summarized the findings like this:
The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.
But as Dave Bacon, the Quantum Physicist, takes the study (and the Times) to task in a post entitled Ecologists Can’t Handle Their Beer Like Physicists, there are more than a few problems with the study and its conclusions. First of all, the paper studied “avian ecologists,” essentially bird scientists, and extended out the findings to include all scientists, a conceit Bacon didn’t think was very reasonable, writing. “I mean, come on, has anyone ever heard of bird watchers being known for their beer drinking abilities? I suspect if I had to pick the group of scientists least likely to be able to take their beer, avian ecologists would be right up there on my list. Show me a study about Czech physicists damaging their publication record by too much beer consumption, and then you’ll get my attention.”
He continues:
I’d also note that the study covers the amazingly huge sample size of less than twenty, that the beer consumption rates are huge for the outliers (Czech, burp!), that there was no description of the methodology for choosing the survey sample (were they his friends, his colleagues? Since the sample was chosen from the author’s field, it sure sounds like it), that any effect, if it is there, is coming from the very high end of the beer consumption spectra (which is fairly spectacular consumption), and certainly a linear regression seems like a spectacularly poor notion of how beer drinking has an effect on scientific output., and that no attempt to separate out the effect of different quality universities and the different geographic consumption levels was made.
It’s certainly a strange topic to be published in a serious academic journal. Since the author admits to enjoying as many as twelve beers in a single session (making him a binge drinker by American standards), it’s clear he’s not arguing for scientists to drink less. [Note to neo-prohibitionists: notice that Professor Bacon is able to drink more than you think he should and still manages to be a respected ornithologist at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. Let me know when you’re ready to concede your definition of binging is ridiculous, and wrong.] I wonder if the ornithologists only drink brands like Red Tail Ale or one of the other 300 beers with a bird on their label?
In a story related to the news that craft beer growth was up 12% last year over the previous year, the southeast region of the country — including the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina — showed sales growth of almost 32%, the highest percentage in the nation. The sales figures used are from five types of retail locations: grocery stores, drug stores, convenience stores, big box retailers (warehouse stores, club stores, etc.), and liquor stores. The data was complied by Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) for a presentation to the Brewers Association last week.
Another interesting tidbit: seasonal beers are now the best-selling segment of beer, having eclipsed that of Pale Ale, which previously held the top spot.
Here are the geographic areas listed by their growth rate:
Some additional observations.
1. Notice that there are seven states where beer cannot be purchased at grocery stores and the like.
2. What happened to Hawaii and Alaska?
3. Three of the regions showed growth of more than 25%
4. Only one region, the West (excluding California) was below 10% which suggests that craft beer is growing virtually everywhere and is not limited to small pockets of the country.
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The Brewers Association in Boulder, Colorado today released the preliminary numbers for beer sales in 2007. Craft beer is again showing double digit growth for, I believe, the fourth consecutive year. Craft beer growth was 12% last year, as compared to 1.4% for imported beer and 1.4% for non-craft beer, primarily the major domestic beer companies. The craft beer industry eclipsed 8 million barrels of craft beer produced for the first time last year, as sales grew to 3.8% by volume and 5.9% by dollars. But perhaps the most impressive statistic is that the microbrewery segment (defined as a brewery that produces less than 15,000 barrels per year) grew a staggering 21% in 2007.
From the press release:
In what has become a true American success story, the craft beer market again grew by double digits in 2007, leading all other segments in the beer category. The Brewers Association reports estimated sales by independent craft brewers up 12 percent by volume and 16 percent in dollars for 2007. Craft brewers’ share of the beer category is 3.8 percent of production and 5.9 percent of retail sales.
The Brewers Association annually polls the country’s craft brewers to estimate the total volume of beer sold by brewpubs, microbreweries, and regional craft breweries in the United States, and uses scan data to estimate sales. Results show that the U.S. had 1,449 total breweries in operation in the U.S. during 2007, including 1,406 small, independent, and traditional craft brewers. Nearly 70 percent of craft breweries are brewpubs that sell most or all of their beer on-premises.
“Since 2004, dollar sales by craft brewers have increased 58 percent,” said Paul Gatza, Director of the Brewers Association. “The strength of this correlates with the American trend of buying local products and a preference for more flavorful foods and beers.”
The Brewers Association estimates the actual dollar sales figures from craft brewers at more than $5.74 billion, up from $4.95 billion in 2006. Sales in barrels equaled 8,011,141 (one barrel is 31 U.S. gallons) up from 7,147,050 barrels in 2006. The 2007 increase totals 864,091 barrels, which is the equivalent of 11.9 million cases or 285 million 12-ounce bottles of beer.
Using the recently redone definition of craft breweries, below is the breakdown of American breweries currently operating.
| Craft Beer Stats 2007 vs. 2006 | |
| U.S. Breweries Operating in 2007
54 Regional Craft Breweries 1,406 Total Craft Breweries 20 Large Breweries (Non-Craft) 1,449 Total U.S. Breweries |
U.S. Breweries Operating in 2006
52 Regional Craft Breweries 1,394 Total Craft Breweries 20 Large Breweries 1,437 Total U.S. Breweries |
| 2007 U.S. Openings
44 Brewpubs |
2006 U.S. Openings
59 Brewpubs |
| 2007 U.S. Closings
23 Brewpubs |
2006 U.S. Closings
40 Brewpubs |
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This is slightly off topic — it’s more about advertising — but since Anheuser-Busch’s Super Bowl ads are singled out, and also because it’s quite interesting, I thought I’d pass it along just the same. An article in yesterday’s Advertising Age by a Lisa Haverty, titled Don’t Flush Your Ad Down the Super Bowl: Unless Your Spot Has Fundamental Cognitive Elements, No One Will Recall Your Brand, begins with this ominous warning. “If you’re not Bud, don’t bother.” Ouch, if I were spending $2.7 million on an ad promoting the Bulletin during the Super Bowl I wouldn’t be very happy to read that. But apparently unless I’m careful to incorporate “some very fundamental cognitive elements” in my ad, people will end up remembering it as another Bud ad. The Cognitive Science Conference — doesn’t that have fun time written all over it? — held last August in Tennessee (and sponsored by the Cognitive Science Society) revealed in a study that “[a]ds with poor ‘cognitive scores’ were misattributed by consumers, and beer ads were attributed to the huge Super Bowl presence that is Budweiser.” There are ways to avoid this from happening. As Haverty suggests, you have to follow the basic principles of cognitive science to make people remember who you are, or in the jargon, reliable brand recall.
Here’s an interesting example:
Take, for example, the concept of “working memory.” Information has to go through working memory to get into long-term memory, where brand awareness and loyalty reside. One of the principles of cognitive science is that a person can hold and process only about seven items in working memory at any given moment. This actually varies from about five to nine in the general population. If your ad has so much information that it exceeds working-memory capacity, you’ll lose control over what consumers are able to remember. Cog-sci lesson: Respect working memory.
There are a few other examples, read them if you find this sort of thing as fascinating as I do. What I really take away from all this, apart from the simple fact that one must be careful in how to spend $2.7 million, is something I always suspected about any large company’s approach to blitzkrieg advertising. By year after year being the biggest advertiser during the Super Bowl, A-B has set themselves up in a very enviable position. Any other beer or related commercial runs the risk of having their own ad remembered by consumers as being for the competition. Talk about a gamble. They’ve effectively made it almost impossible for any other beer company to reach their audience during one of the most-watched television events of the year. In essence, they now own the event, ad-wise. The cynic in me thinks that if they paid for it, they should reap the rewards, but my idealistic side hates that any big company with vastly more resources than all of his competition can just use a bludgeon to maintain his market position. But that’s what’s happening in virtually any industry you can name. Once upon a time, hundreds and thousands of small local and regional businesses competed more or less on a level playing field, at least more fair than today’s environment. Go anywhere in America today, and the number of national chain stores and other businesses dominating and squashing local competitors is astonishingly near completion. And that’s not good on so many levels. As the science of advertising gets better and better, we’ve truly been manipulated into thinking what’s good for GM is good for America. If that idea is allowed to run its course there will be two or three brands, at most, for literally every type of good you can name, and even at that each will be remarkably similar to one another. Only the cognitive branding, advertising and marketing will be able to identify any difference, and they’ll do so by the most dishonest of methods possible. Geez, I need a beer.
As an aside, there’s a very funny critique of this AdAge article by AdHurl, which as far as I can tell is by a thirty-year veteran of the ad game, George Parker. He calls out Haverty for her overuse of the word “cognitive” throughout her piece. It’s snarky and hilarious. A kindred soul.
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This Chronicle article comes to me via a local political blog, The Left Coaster, which curiously is also the name of the regular column I write for the Ale Street News, which in turn is located on the other coast.
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Matier and Ross’ column today, The Bay Area could be the Clinton-Obama decider, contains this bit of wisdom from long-time state pollster Mark DiCamillo, dividing democratic voting patterns according to one’s preference for beer or wine.
I’m not exactly sure what to make of that. You’d have to search far and wide to find someone more liberal than myself, I’m reasonably well-educated, but I definitely would prefer to pair that cheese with beer. After all, the notion that wine and cheese work well together is really just a myth. And frankly, either candidate on those labels is pretty scary looking. |
Not surprisingly, most of my friends are like-minded, so either DiCamillo is way off the mark or more probably, I’m so far removed from the pulse of the people that I don’t even register. I’m most likely the guy in their 2% plus or minus margin for error, so rarely do I agree with any of the choices polls usually offer. For example I’m not particularly wild about either Clinton or Obama, and think our media is doing its usual disservice to society by so nakedly picking sides so early in the campaign process. All the candidates are supposed to get equal time, but because they cover only who they want to and who they decide are the front-runners, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that subverts the very idea of a democracy.
But enough proof that I’m on the fringe, is DiCamillo suggesting that the more liberal and/or educated one is, the more likely that person is to prefer wine over beer? With Sonoma and Napa Counties, along with several others, so close to the Bay Area, it’s no surprise that we’re awash in wine lovers. But perhaps DiCamillo is unaware that this same area, the San Francisco Bay Area, might also be the second most important region in the country for craft beer. And the demographic that most frequently goes for craft beer? You guessed it; liberal and educated. Of course, craft beer drinkers are only a fraction of the total beer picture (though in the Bay Area we’re well above the national average) but doesn’t cheap table and box wine sell pretty well, too? And lets not ignore the many people who enjoy both beer and wine.
My only point in all of this is to ponder whether or not the traditional stereotype of beer as blue-collar and wine as white-collar might not be as true as it once was (if indeed it really ever was true), and especially when applied to craft beer? Better beer seems to cut across class lines to a great extent, at least it seems to me that you see all stratas of people at beer festivals, beer dinners and the like.
According to Ross and Matier, “[t]he big showdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could come down to California’s ‘beer-drinking Democrats’ versus its ‘wine and cheese’ liberals — with the Bay Area playing a pivotal role in the outcome.” I’m not sure about those labels, they just seem a bit outdated and too simple-minded for my tastes.
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The Marin Institute, one of the more blunt and churlish of the anti-alcohol organizations, is mounting an offensive to raise alcohol taxes an incredible “25 cents per drink” in California. Their vision — my nightmare — is to bring about “communities free of the alcohol industry’s negative influence and an alcohol industry that does not harm the public’s health.” But as they naturally see any influence as negative and everything that the alcohol industry does as harmful, what they really want is nothing short of an another Prohibition.
Throughout their rhetoric (and even the sources they’re relying upon) is a call for “fairness” and for alcohol to pay its “fair share,” whatever that really means. But the carrot they’re holding out is that by doing so it would help to alleviate California’s budget deficit that’s been plaguing us for several years now. But I fail to see how raising the taxes of people who drink is in any way fair. Effectively what they’re suggesting is that because our state managed to get itself in a fix, budget-wise, people who drink should be called upon to foot the bill. They just want to punish those of us who choose to drink, and yet they call it fair? The first definition (of 26) for the word “fair” is “free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice.” There’s clearly bias, it’s dishonest in my opinion to claim it’s because of our state’s tax problems, and it hardly seems just to have drinkers pay a disproportionate share to get us out of our budget hole. So it’s really the very opposite of fair.
This is the same nonsense that’s going on with Indian gaming right now, with several state proposals on November’s ballot. We committed genocide against Native Americans and broke every single treaty we ever made. So when Indian gaming successfully exploited one of the few advantages left to them, we still can’t seem to let them be. This is the second time California politicians have tried to get (or more accurately extort) a bigger piece of their gambling revenues, and the exponents of these propositions try to sell them in the same way as the Marin Institute is doing with beer taxes, by twisting the idea of “fairness.”
Of course, the real reason they can say with a straight face that it’s fair to ask drinkers to pay more taxes than teetotalers is this odd notion that, in the words of David Leonhardt, “taxes serve a purpose beyond merely raising general government revenue. Taxes on a given activity are also supposed to pay the costs that activity imposes on society.” I’m not necessarily against this idea entirely, but I don’t understand when it became an unquestionable fait accompli and why people are so quick to believe it. Why is this only ever said of things that some people don’t like? The costs on society for our general obesity and unhealthiness has not brought about taxes on fast food, sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Hummers, SUVs and other similar gas-guzzling vehicles not only are not taxed at a higher rate but actually receive federal and state tax breaks and incentives and have lower standards of fuel efficiency than regular cars. With their poor MPG they do great harm to our society yet are actively subsidized and encouraged by our government over cars that get more miles per gallon and are kinder to the planet. Check out this Slate article for more on this. I’m not saying that’s as it should be, simply that this idea that all products must contain within their profit structure some tax scheme that balances the price with their damage to society caused by them is wholly fallacious.
But even if it wasn’t such a weak argument, we don’t charge a higher percentage of a person’s tax burden for the fire department if they live in a tinderbox house vs. an inflammable brick home. Instead we average the cost to society out and charge everyone the same amount since everyone gets the same potential benefit. That’s a fair arrangement in every sense of the word. It’s good for the whole town, not just for you, if your house does not burn down. So there’s really no reason why we can’t apply that same logic to the whole of society. I realize that will be unpopular with folks who don’t think it’s fair that while they choose to abstain, they may have to pay for problems supposedly caused my decision to drink. But if it’s legal for everyone who pays taxes (except, those 18-20 years old — hey, another reason they should be allowed) to drink then I don’t see why it’s so troubling that we all share the costs of society equally. You may think it’s unfair because you feel you’re not causing the (hypothetical) problem. Well I think you’re being selfish by only wanting to pay for services that that either benefit you or were caused by you. In a sense, it’s like after building your inflammable brick house you refuse to pay to support the fire department any longer under the theory that your house is in order.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is so selfish that they don’t want to help other people. Look at this another way. The vast majority of drinkers do so in moderation and never are any burden to society whatsoever. But a tiny percentage of drinkers do cause problems for themselves and others. There are at least two ways we can shape policy to deal with problem drinkers. We can treat the causes of the problems and make tougher laws to deal with them, and only them. Or we can make it harder on everybody’s ability to drink, thus punishing everybody for the sins of the few. It’s not too difficult to figure out which approach the neo-prohibitionists have chosen. Even if only one in every ten-thousand persons who drink may exact a cost on society they would prefer to punish the other 9,999, too.
Another one of the contentions is that the last time California raised taxes on alcohol was 1992. That increase was apparently one cent on a glass of wine and two pennies for a bottle or can of beer and one shot of hard liquor. So clearly a 25-cent increase seems reasonable?!? Maybe sixteen years is too long without an increase, I’m not going to argue that point. But even if the tax had been raised another penny every year, the tax would still only be 16 cents higher today, so please tell me how 25 cents is a fair suggestion? Or are they just shooting for the moon in the hopes of a negotiation that ends up compromising higher as a result?
And if it’s tax fairness they’re after, taxes of corporations have fallen much more dramatically over the past several decades. They haven’t just stagnated and gone down merely by adjusting for inflation, but have actively been lowered. At the same time, personal taxes on the poor and middle-class have gone up while tax cuts for the rich keep increasing. So if the Marin Institute really cares about California’s budget crisis, I think a more prudent approach might be trying to raise corporate taxes across the board and removing unfair tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthiest among us. It wasn’t alcohol that got us into this mess, so why make it foot the bill.
One of the main sources that the Marin Institute cites for their proposal is Let’s Raise a Glass to Fairness, a polemic about why the author, David Leonhardt, believes federal alcohol taxes should be raised. Some of the supposed alcohol-related costs to society he cites are the following:
So let’s look at those claims.
1. Child Abuse: This one’s a head-scratcher for me. Sure it sounds bad, but what does it really mean? I was terrorized as a child by an alcoholic, psychotic step-father but even as a kid I knew it wasn’t the alcohol that caused him to be that way. There were myriad things in his life that made my step-father such a mess, and alcohol was the least of them. At its worst it was merely a convenient catalyst. If alcohol had been removed from the situation, something else would have filled the void. I can’t see how alcohol causes child abuse any more than cake is directly responsible for obesity.
2. Drunken-Driving Checkpoints: If these are such a burden to our nation’s purse strings, then by all means stop them. They’re already an invasion of civil liberties because they randomly presume guilt of everyone behind the wheel of a vehicle. But saying these are a cost of alcohol seems weird to me. The fact is that police forces choose to do them, they aren’t mandatory, and they’re more often done because of politics or pressure from local neo-prohibitionist groups. So they aren’t caused by alcohol, they’re caused by people against alcohol. There are plenty of legitimate ways for the police to do their job in keeping potentially dangerous drivers off the road that don’t involve these checkpoints.
3. Economic Loss Caused by Death and Injury: Now I certainly don’t want to downplay or make light of anyone’s loss or injury, but the alcohol didn’t cause either. The idiot person who drank too much or otherwise couldn’t control himself is responsible for a death or injury that resulted from his actions. And he should be punished to the full extent of the law. But don’t punish me or my right to drink moderately because some yahoo couldn’t act responsibly.
4. Hospital Bills for Alcohol-related Accidents: This is the same as the last one, it’s economic harm inflicted by a person and we should be blaming the individual person. People scoff at the Twinkie defense, saying it’s ridiculous that too much sugar might cause a person to commit a crime, but here Leonhardt is saying effectively the same thing.
He also throws around a lot of statistics about how many people die each year in “alcohol-related car accidents” along with “other accidents, assaults or illnesses in which alcohol plays a major role.” But as we learn time and time again, the way “alcohol-related” is defined is usually pretty deceptive. Many such studies have considered an accident “alcohol-related” if one of the passengers had earlier been drinking so it’s pretty hard to take such stats very seriously. Do people die from causes related to alcohol? I’m sure they do. But the number one cause of death: living. What I mean by that is every single thing we do every single moment has some risk associated with it. It’s a fool’s errand to dissect every thing we humans do and determine which ones to tax more heavily.
Leonhardt likens his strategy to the same argument for higher tobacco taxes, saying for alcohol the impetus “is even stronger” with this gem. “Tobacco kills many more people than alcohol, but it mainly kills those who use the product.” Did I miss a meeting? Isn’t one of the strongest reasons for all the recent tobacco bans that second-hand smoke is far more dangerous to people around smokers than previously believed?
He then goes on to say. “Many alcohol victims are simply driving on the wrong road at the wrong time.” And that may be true, and it is certainly tragic, but why then is it fair that I should pay more for my beer because of other drunk drivers, especially if I and millions of other responsible drinkers don’t place anyone else at risk. If the argument for fairness is that all alcohol drinkers should pay more for their beer because of the costs that alcohol exacts on society, how then does that same logic explain why this burden is so unfairly placed on all drinkers and not just the problem drinkers? Isn’t that just a teensy-weensy bit hypocritical?
Leonhardt later admits, or at least accepts, that there are plenty of responsible drinkers around and even quotes Jeff Becker, President of the Beer Institute. “Most people — the vast majority of consumers — don’t impose any additional costs on anyone.” But in the end he concludes that since he can’t figure out a way to “tax only those people who were going to drive drunk in the future” then it’s somehow fairer to just tax everybody who drinks. Yeah, that makes sense. No wonder the Marin Institute loves this guy.
But another flaw in this theory is that raising taxes on alcohol will raise an additional $3 billion in tax revenue to help with California’s $14 billion current deficit. One of the major prongs of the Marin Institutes’s plan is that by raising the price of beer, drinking will be curtailed once again. If people are drinking less, then how will that result in more tax revenues? If this proposal was really about solving California’s budget crisis, wouldn’t it make more sense to raise alcohol taxes and then actively encourage drinking to help raise more money to apply to the deficit? But this never really was about taxes or California’s budget crisis. It was always about keeping people from drinking or at least making it harder for them to do so. But not enough people were apparently getting their message and were — gasp — still enjoying a drink now and again. So instead they dressed this proposal up as a panacea for our state’s budget crisis hoping that people might respond more favorably to that gambit. Don’t you believe it.
Look, we have the highest federal budget deficit in history and many states, including my own, have similarly terrible fiscal situations that they’re facing. But no matter how much junk science you throw at this problem, alcohol did not cause our current situation. As a result, trying to raise more taxes by arguing that it would be fairer for the nation’s alcohol drinkers to help pick up the tab is just ludicrous. Perhaps taxes should be higher across the board to get us out of this deficit and that might include alcohol taxes, too. But politicians don’t like to raise taxes generally because people tend to vote out of office any politician who tries to do so, no matter how vital they might be in paying for our infrastructure and making our society work for everyone. So we keep electing fiscal conservatives who slash and burn social programs. And then we wonder why there’s no unemployment available when we get laid off so that the factory we used to work for can relocate overseas and chain ten-year old girls to a sewing machine to slave away for twelve-hour days, seven days-a-week for peanuts just so we can be spared the injustice of paying a few cents more for some crap we don’t really need at Wal-Mart. Let’s not change that situation, let’s blame alcohol instead. Raise a glass to fairness, indeed. I’ll buy the first round.
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This came to me via Rick Sellers at his Pacific Brew News concerning another poll by ChristiaNet concerning Christian’s attitudes towards beer drinking. I meant to write about this earlier, but it got away from me. The story is about a poll ChristiaNet conducted with their readership, which they state involves twelve million monthly page loads, and they further claim to be the “world’s largest Christian portal.” The question they asked was “[i]s it wrong for a Christian to consume beer?” Now why they singled out beer is still a mystery to me. To justify the question, Bill Cooper, the president of ChristiaNet, says “Christ warns of the results of drunkenness.” But, of course, the question wasn’t “is it wrong for a Christian to consume beer to the point of drunkenness” or to be drunk, it was simply whether it was acceptable to consume any amount of beer. That’s a vastly different question and one which does nothing to examine the “results of drunkenness.” They did a similar poll last year, too, which I wrote about on Christmas Eve, but more about that later.
According to their press release, 5,200 completed the online poll and beer drinking got the thumbs up by a very slim margin, about 51%. A little over a third (38%) did, however, respond that they believed that having a beer was “wrong.” Here is some of their rationale.
They felt that one beer almost always leads to more and then can also lead to alcoholism, “I don’t know anyone that only drinks one beer, they usually drink more to get a buzz and that is wrong. Sometimes they even turn into alcoholics.” Others in this group quoted Proverbs 20:1 which states, “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” Most felt that all alcohol consumption was wrong, “There just isn’t any good reason to drink alcohol, and it is not like it tastes good.”
Wow, I don’t want to hang out with the person who doesn’t know even one person who can stop at a single beer. Being someone who visits the ChristiaNet website, I would think most — or at least some — of his friends were likely Christians like him. And not one of them could resist the temptation to have a second drink of beer? This guy needs to start hanging out with a new crowd. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve enjoyed one beer at a bar or with my dinner without being unable to stop there and even without turning into an alcoholic. I can’t help but picture that process as a bit like the gentlemanly Dr. Jekyll turning into the unsavory Mr. Hyde. Without trying to make light of alcoholism, is that really how it happens? And why on occasion is getting a buzz so wrong? Or is drinking “beer” to get that buzz what’s wrong here? Having the sacred wine makes it acceptable, does it? I guess I just don’t understand how these people think.
Just over ten percent wondered “about whether or not beer, in particular, was wrong” and at least one respondent was confused “because the Bible only talks about drunkenness with wine and strong drink, not about having only one beer.” What I assume many do not realize is that when the Bible was translated into Greek that there was no exact match for the Hebrew word and “wine” was simply substituted as being the closest word available. There are a number of serious scholars who believe that it is possible that it was actually beer (apparently the Greeks at that time had no word for beer) that Jesus turned the water into and that it may even have been beer that was served at the last supper. How different our world might be today if beer had early on achieved the exalted place in religion that wine did, possibly as the result of a mis-translation.
Last year about this same time, ChristiaNet asked this same question but got very different results. Only 339 people filled out the previous survey, of which 192 — or 57% — thought drinking beer was wrong. Armed with those staggeringly small and unscientific statistics, ChristiaNet proceeded to tell the world that Christians think drinking beer is wrong. I wrote about it a few days after their press release in a post I called Beer & Christianity. I thought it was nonsense then, and I’m not convinced it’s any less so this year, despite the fact that 5,200 people took the poll this year. When you look at how random sampling for polling data is usually done, this type of online poll has none of the features that make it a statistically accurate sample of the general population. Instead, as Rick also points out, the people responding are all people who regularly visit ChristiaNet’s website, most likely evangelical Christians — fanatics, possibly. That already greatly skews any data they collect on this or any subject they might ask their visitors’ opinions about. Of course, you may say, isn’t that obvious? Well, maybe it is, but then why bother with a press release unless you’re trying to convince somebody of something as a result of this poll? I scratched my head over this before and I’m afraid it’s still itchy.
Anyway, in his post, Rick called me a fanatic — which is true, of course — with regard to the agenda of neo-prohibitionists though he has tended to feel that “there’s no way we, as Americans, have anything to worry about with our beer related rights. Now, if there are this many ‘Christians’ in our country who think my beer consumption is flat wrong, it would seem appropriate to assume they wouldn’t mind seeing some form of control on my consumption.” I think that’s correct, and I think it’s also why there is a lot that we should be worried about. That’s precisely why I’m fanatical, because I believe apathy and complacency will ultimately spell doom. And while there are millions of self-avowed Christians who think drinking beer is no mortal sin, those that do seem to be more vocal and shrill about imposing that belief on everybody else.
Many neo-prohibitionist groups are religiously based, and often claim that Christian morals are at odds with alcohol, which suggests to me that fundamentalist Christians have more in common with fundamentalist Muslims than either group might be willing to admit. Both seem to argue that their belief leads them to prohibiting alcohol and both likewise believe that whatever their religion teaches should apply to non-believers and believers alike. Muslims have been more successful in building sovereign nations that use religious law as the law of the land, regardless of an individual’s religion, and under such rule religious freedom is not tolerated. But Christian evangelicals want exactly the same thing: to replace our secular nation — founded on the principle of church and state being separate — with a Christian United States, whose laws are all based on their literal interpretation of the Bible. And whether or not beer would be permitted under such an intolerant society would depend largely on whose interpretation holds sway.
So I see these polls as dangerous, because even though they are based on poor science, most people probably won’t examine that too closely and will accept them at face value. That seems to happen a lot with polling data. You see inaccurate statistics quoted over and over again, oftentimes even after they’ve been discredited. For reasons I can’t explain (perhaps because people trust the media or because in school we’re not taught how to think, only what to think) polls tend to be believed more often than not. In my experience, human nature causes people to want to side with the majority or the winner so polls which report that a majority feel one way or another often have the effect of bringing about that result, especially if it’s close. This is why I hate political election polling and exit polls on election day, because I think they have the effect of swaying voter’s opinions to vote for the leader. And therein lies the danger. Tell people that enough other folks just like them think drinking beer is wrong and they’ll start to believe it, too. One thing you can safely say about all religions is that they don’t encourage independent thought: the whole point of faith is to believe without questioning so it seems to me religiously-based agendas are particularly susceptible to manipulation.
Rick is quite right to question that statistic claiming 38% of Christians “feel that drinking beer [is] wrong.” As he correctly concludes, “it is likely only those with strong enough opinions took the survey. But that too scares me, because it isn’t just the church goers in our country who are more than slightly apathetic — its seems to be the American way these days.” But if ChristiaNet and others with a neo-prohibitionist agenda keep sowing these anti-alcohol seeds with their questionable statistics they may win over enough of the “more than slightly apathetic” to make their proclamation a self-fulfilling prophecy. And trying to play my small part in making sure that doesn’t happen, keeping the neo-prohibitionist wolves at the door so to speak, is what makes me a fanatic. Because allowing an extreme minority to dictate morality and tell you and me we can’t enjoy a beer is not the way a free society should operate. Those with the loudest voices are not supposed to be who wins. So in the hopes of keeping that from happening, I’ll keep shouting in the wilderness until they pry the glass of beer from my cold, dead hand. But let’s try not to let it come to that, shall we? Let’s take this threat seriously. I really don’t want the Pyrrhic victory that forces me to say “I told you so.”
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Last year, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development surveyed per capita consumption of alcohol across the world and ranked the top fifteen. They ranked them a bit differently than most of these surveys do. They looked at the raw amount of alcohol consumed each year per person rather than the number of servings. This apparently had the effect of equalizing the results across beer, wine and spirits since they all have very different amounts of alcohol.
Below is a table of the results:
| Nation | Liters Per Capita Annual Pure Alcohol Consumption | Liters Per Capita Beer Consumption | Legal Drinking Age |
1. Luxembourg |
15.5 | 84.4 | 16 (beer) 18 (spirits) |
2. France |
14.2 | 35.5 | 16 (beer) 18 (spirits) |
3. Ireland |
14.2 | 131.1 | 18 |
4. Hungary |
12 | 75.3 | 18 (to purchase—none for consumption) |
5. Czech Republic |
11.8 | 156.9 | 18 |
6. Spain |
11.5 | 83.8 | 16 (drinking) 18 (purchasing) |
| 7. Denmark |
11.5 | 89.9 | 18 (bars only; otherwise no limit) |
8. Portugal |
12.9 | 59.6 | 16 |
9. Switzerland |
11.2 | 57.3 | 16 (beer) 18 (spirits) |
10. Austria |
11.1 | 108.3 | 16 (beer) 18 (spirits) |
11. Germany |
10.5 | 116.8 | 14 (beer) 16 (wine) 18 (spirits) |
12. United Kingdom |
10.4 | 99 | 18 (for purchase) |
13. Belgium |
10.3 | 93 | 16 |
14. Netherlands |
10.1 | 79 | 16 (beer) 18 (spirits) |
15. Australia |
9.8 | 109.9 | 18 |
As a result of the methodology, the top fourteen are all European countries and only the last nation lies outside of the EU. Previous studies, along with this new one, seem to point to social, political and cultural factors — along with tax structures — to account for this seeming anomaly. The new data, which includes 2006, is available from the OECD for a pretty hefty amount — much more than my budget will allow — but there is data from previous years available if you dig around. And while the numbers have changed over the decades, from year to year they change only slightly so we can see where other countries below the top fifteen probably fall in the rankings. Looking at 2003, the last year I could find with complete statistics, the top 15 are almost exactly the same (only numbers 14 and 15 are reversed). So below those, here are some of the likely remaining rankings (based on 2003 data).
The U.S. barely cracks the top twenty and Canada comes in at Number 22. You can also see how beer consumption is very different from overall alcohol. The top ten for beer are:
There is a note, however, in the raw data excel spreadsheet indicating that Luxembourg’s data does not “accurately reflect consumption by residents, due to significant levels of consumption by tourists and cross border traffic of alcoholic beverages.” That seems to suggest that data for Luxembourg is overstated and that it may not be as high as expressed in this study. So if we throw them out of the beer consumption list, the Netherlands slide into the number ten spot with liters per capita of 79.
So, while there’s nothing terribly surprising here, I thought it was an interesting peek at who’s drinking what and how much around the world.
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