Blog

(Update December 31, 2019: While I greatly support the Beer Culture Summit and the Chicago Brewseum’s mission, I have since left the organization and will be pursuing my own projects.)

On a sunny August day last year, I was driving north on the Dan Ryan expressway with Chicago Brewseum founder and director Liz Garibay, bound for lunch at Forbidden Root. We’d just left a meeting about the Chicago Brewseum’s exhibit, “Brewing Up Chicago,” then still in production. It’d been a long morning—I’d driven up from Purdue University for the meeting and was hungry. But with someone like Liz the wheels never stop turning, even in Chicago traffic.

Continue reading “The New Beer Culture Summit is a Mixed Fermentation” →

(Update 5/26/2019: A Wisconsin federal judge has ordered Anheuser-Busch to halt some advertisements suggesting MillerCoors uses corn syrup without “giving more context.”)

Anheuser-Busch has revived an age-old marketing tactic in American brewing, even though it might be a bad idea. The nation’s largest brewer repeatedly uses high-profile Super Bowl ads to premiere bold narratives about its brands—such as differentiating Budweiser from craft beer or touting their support for disaster relief—and this year didn’t disappoint. During the 2019 Super Bowl, two Bud Light ads criticized its biggest rivals for using corn syrup in their brewing process, and it was classic misdirection.

Continue reading “Containing a Kernel: Bud Light’s New Ad is Really Old” →