Beer News: Newsed the hard way

Budweiser attempts to call everyone “not manly enough,” Commercial Taphouse intends to wreck your palate, and now you can run around with other beer lovers at night—but like, in a sanctioned way!

February 6, 2015; 6:00 AM • by Ross Catrow

Brewery employees, your lives might get even better! The General Assembly will consider a bill (SB1237) that would allow “tour guides employed by a licensed brewery that manufactures no more than 10,000 barrels of beer during the license year may consume samples of the beer…while conducting tours of the premises.” You life isn’t going to get that much better, though, because the bill sets the limit of beer consumed at four ounces and no more than three products. The Senate Committee on Rehabilitation and Social Services (?) passed the bill 33-5.

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Excercise immediately followed by drinking a beer is something that people do even after they graduate from college, turns out. On April 26th, you can pair these two activities and join a couple thousand dedicated beer runners (brunners) in the Hardywood Twilight 4 Miler. April 26th seems like a million years away, but the first block of 500 tickets already sold out, so you may want to go ahead and register to brun today.

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Today, February 6th, from 4:00 – 10:00 PM, you can stop by Ardent Craft Ales and participate in their first Pilot Night, where they’ll encourage you to drink and comment (politely, of course) on their latest brews and beer experiments. This first edition features the Robust Porter and Bièr de Garde.

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Introducing our 2015 winter pint glass! Yeah, yeah, it’s almost not winter anymore, and yes we realize that we only had three seasonal pints in 2014. WE REALIZE ALL OF THESE THINGS. Anyway, I love this year’s design and you will too. Just $6 until we run out of them, then you’ll have to turn to the seasonal pint glass black market, where prices are much less predictable.

National news…

Since time immemorial, mass-market beer advertising has been a critical and sizable part of the Super Bowl. Remember when we watched a smaller bowl pitting a team of shitty anthropomorphic beers against another team of shitty anthropomorphic light beers? Remember “Tastes Great / Less Filling”? This year was no different, but saw Budweiser going on the offensive against the craft beer movement–which makes no sense to me. Life is mostly about both/and not either/or. There’s plenty of people, myself included, who drink a ton of beer, macro, micro, nano, whatever. So when Budweiser tells me “the people who drink our beer are people who like to drink beer brewed the hard way,”1 I will continue to buy Miller High Life on the regular.

Here’s a roundup of responses to the commercial from around the Internet.

Takeovers & Releases

Photo by: GenBug

  1. To be fair, Budweiser’s brew process is pretty interesting, and involves beechwood chips in the lagering. To claim it’s “beechwood aged”, as the commercial does, seems a little disingenuous. Plus, doesn’t aging a beer on wood seem a little…fussy? ↩
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Ross Catrow

Founder and publisher of RVANews.

February 6, 2015 6:00 AM · in , , and more 2

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