Do you still drink beer?

I don't drink beer. My wife doesn't drink beer. My buddies drink craft beers. Very rare to see any of them with any of the nine beers mentioned in the USA Today story.

We do, however, have enough hard liquor (vodka, rum, you name it) to last us approximately 30 years.

So maybe there's something to this.

 

In my 20s and 30s, SOP was to hit our downtown bar after work, order up 3-4 pitchers for last call (for 3-4 people) and have them finished in 45 minutes.

I did get smarter. And today when I go out for dinner, the first beer tastes great, but I can never finish the second one.

I have gotten into wine more. We went on a couple of wine trails this past year, want to do that some more. And two years ago, we spent three days up in the Finger Lakes, hitting about 40 wineries and talking like Lawrence Welk.

 

Awful. Never want to be that sick ever again

 

I would suggest that there's a corollary with the general decline in network TV ratings. 500 channels means that you don't have to watch whatever crap NBC or CBS throws out there, and the rise of microbrews* means that you don't have to drink whatever crap you can get from the grocery store.

The only times I've drunk Budweiser or anything akin to it in the past however many years have been when I've won it in a raffle. I will drink Sol or Corona or some other such crap at a softball tournament, where the idea is to have ... several, and where an ale isn't really what you want.

* Including mass-produced "microbrews" -- Sam Adams is no more a microbrew than Budweiser any more, and I will openly mock anyone who says they don't drink mass-produced beer because they prefer Blue Moon.

 

When you inspect where "microbrews" are actually brewed and by whom, they don't seem so micro anymore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Tire

 

Thinks this is a dumb thread.

 

Interesting info here. Whiskey in America is BOOMING and yet ... it's barely half of what it was in the 1960s and 70s.

http://www.esquire.com/_mobile/blogs/food-for-men/whiskey-boom?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=29238

 

Yeah, Fat Tire is in no way a microbrew. By definition of how widely it's distributed, it can't be.

That doesn't stop it being a damn sight better than Budweiser, of course. But all things considered, I'd as soon have something else.

 

The structure of question is odd-- Do you "still" drink beer? Either assumes that everyone at SJ at one point drank beer or it's suggesting that drinking beer is
no longer socially acceptable or immature.

 

Fortune's cover story is on the Bourbon boom:



On a recent trip to Australia, Fred Noe, the master distiller at Jim Beam, stopped by a liquor store in a small town outside Sydney. In the city, Noe had seen hundreds of people line up to get his signature on a bottle of bourbon. "My guys said, 'Fred, you're a rock star!' And I said, 'Yeah? Where are my groupies?' " But even here, in the Australian countryside, dozens of bourbon fans had shown up to greet him -- groupies included. "A lady asked me if I would come outside and sign the hood of her car," he says. "I took a Sharpie and wrote 'Stay on the Beam' on the hood of her Ford Falcon. Another lady wanted me to come home with her and sign her pool table, but the sales manager said, 'No way.' "

Noe chuckled, but he's used to it. American whiskey has never been hotter, and that has made the man behind Beam an international celebrity. Noe is the great-grandson of Jim Beam and the seventh member of his family to serve as the company's master distiller. But while his forebears spent most of their time laboring over stills in Kentucky, he's as likely as not to be judging a cocktail competition in Moscow or meeting with executives in Beijing. "That is something I never dreamed in my entire life, going to Russia or China," he says. "Those might as well have been the moon."

A decade ago, the American whiskey industry was flat on its back, having suffered decades of weak sales and underinvestment. Today, though, bourbon -- the corn-based, barrel-aged spirit that accounts for the vast majority of the whiskey made in America -- is everywhere, from Mad Men to the wet bars of C-level office suites, feeding a global ecosystem of tourism, whiskey bars, cocktail competitions, and craft distilleries. The most coveted drink on Wall Street is no longer a Screaming Eagle Cab or a 40-year-old Glenfiddich, but the 23-year-old bourbon from Pappy Van Winkle, which is so rare that it can retail for up to $3,500.

"I like that it's a bit sweeter, whereas I don't really like the smokiness of Scotch," says Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group and just one of the many young, globetrotting executives turning to bourbon. "It's like the difference between American reds and French reds. The French are smoky and oaky, while Americans do fruit bombs -- which, done well, are really nice."

In absolute numbers, the bourbon industry's $8 billion in global sales is relatively modest. (The Coca-Cola company alone has 16 drink brands with annual sales above $1 billion.) What's extraordinary is the growth -- and the fact that bourbon's popularity appears to have come out of nowhere. According to Euromonitor, domestic whiskey sales have soared by 40% in the past five years -- NASCAR-fast numbers in a sector where good growth often means 2% or 3% a year, and a revolution for a spirit whose sales declined almost without a break for 30 years. Things are even better abroad. In 2002, American distillers exported just $376 million in whiskey; by 2013 that number had almost tripled, to $1 billion, according to numbers released this month by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/06/news/companies/bourbon-boom.pr.fortune/

 

Oh, no, not suggesting that at all. The thread title is a reference to beer's declining sales.

 

Doesn't a lot of it have to do with "Mad Men" and "Boardwalk Empire"?