Taplines

In 1999, Vinny Warren was working at Chicago ad firm DDB and on the hunt for a hit idea for a Super Bowl spot for his client, Budweiser. The King of Beers was still selling better than Bud Light at that point, but just barely, and August Busch IV had been handed the reigns to rejuvenate the flagging flagship with a fresh new creative vision. As it turned out, Warren had just the thing. The short comedy sketch he stumbled across would eventually become the basis for "Whassup!", one of the most celebrated and successful beer ads of all time. It didn’t stanch Bud’s slide, because nothing could. But the ad and its follow-ups entered the phrase firmly into the American cultural vocabulary and was elected to the advertising industry’s Hall of Fame a few short years later. Here's how it all went down. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

Joining Taplines today is Ryan Burk, the former head cider maker of Angry Orchard Hard Cider. These days, he’s making cider under his own label in upstate New York, working as a co-founder of the beverage innovation firm Feel Goods Company, and serving the Cider Institute of North America as a founding board member. But midway through last decade, Ryan was working at Michigan’s Virtue Cider when Boston Beer Company tapped him to lead production on its in-house hard cider brand, which was then making one out of every two barrels of cider sold in the US. Angry Orchard's legacy in the category is contentious: is it a vital gateway that led to broader hard cider acceptance, or a millstone holding back what cider could be in the American drinking imagination? Both? Neither? Listen on, listener. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

Nothing exists in a vacuum, Taplines listener, and beer certainly doesn’t. When Stuart Bewley and his cofounder dreamed up the idea for California Cooler, single-serve fermented-fruit-based ready-to-drink in the mid-70s, they couldn't have known that it would inspire knockoffs from heavyweights in the wine industry (e.g., E. & J. Gallo’s Bartles and Jaymes) and the beer industry, too (Miller’s Matilda Bay, for example.) And get this: Bewley says the long-running boycott of a certain big-on-the-west-coast brewer was instrumental in getting California Cooler onto the trucks of distributors who otherwise might’ve not had anything to do with it. Nothing exists in a vacuum, after all. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

Joining Taplines today is Seth Gross, a former Goose Island Brewing Co. brewer who was at the meeting where Goose Island then-brewmaster Greg Hall and the late, legendary master distiller Booker Noe, of the Beam bourbon dynasty, first came up with the idea to barrel age a beer, how they did it… and what happened once rank-and-file drinkers got their hands on the final product. Some three decades later, Gross is still barrel-aging his own beers at Durham, North Carolina’s Bull City Burger and Brewery — just one of the hundreds, or more likely thousands of brewers who have taken up the BA gospel since. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

Today on Taplines, we’re joined by none other than Wolfgang Puck for a candid, clear-eyed look at how his Eureka brewpub — “one of the loudest salvos in elevating the role of craft beer in dining,” as Tom Acitelli put it in his 2013 book, the Audacity of Hops — met such a quick and unceremonious demise in early '90s Los Angeles… and what Chef learned from its collapse. Here’s a hint: when the kitchen is clicking but the brewery business ain’t, a brewpub is headed for trouble. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

In the mid-’70s, as the Light Beer Wars were starting to heat up, a family-run brewery in central New York called F.X. Matt — one of the nation’s oldest, and still running to this very day — came up with a wild new packaging format for its beers. It was bold. It was bizarre. It was… balls? That's right. Big, translucent plastic spheres full of 5.16 gallons of Matt’s Premium Lager. Part keg party, part party trick, F.X. Matt’s beer balls were all the rage in the Eighties, and soon drew competition from local rivals and national heavyweights alike. Joining Taplines today to talk about beer balls and so much more is fourth-generation Matt and president of the brewery that bears his family name Fred Matt. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

Joining Taplines today is Jacinta Howard, a veteran culture and music writer and editor in Atlanta, to talk about a very specific, very special, and very star-studded "sponsored content" series that hit the airwaves back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, long before "sponsored content" was even a thing. St. Ides malt liquor first arrived on store shelves in 1987, but it wasn’t until the brand’s parent company hired the iconic DJ Pooh to enlist a who’s-who of blue-chip rappers — from Ice Cube to the Wu-Tang Clan — in the production of original mixtapes and music videos about the “Crooked I” that it began to take off. And when it did, sales followed — but so did the controversy that would eventually bring St. Ides’ breakout #sponcon project to an end. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!

When Left Hand Brewing opened for business outside of Denver in the early '90s, the plan wasn’t to become known nationwide as “the milk stout brewery” or “the nitro brewery,” and certainly not “the nitro milk stout brewery.” But when it introduced its chocolatey, none-too-heavy milk stout in the Aughts, people loved it, and especially the silky smooth nitro draft pour. Co-founder / CEO Eric Wallace and the Left Hand team started wondering: "Hey, if Guinness is able to package nitro beers, couldn’t we?" Nobody else in America had figured out to do widget-free nitro in the bottle, but that didn't stop them milk stout boys. They succeeded, and forevermore Left Hand would be synonymous with the hard-poured, inky-black, velvety stout. The rest was history—history we discuss with Wallace himself on this week's episode. Don't forget to like, review, and subscribe!