by Iain Gately
While the EU struggled with overproduction, in the USSR the reverse was the case. In consequence, its leaders started to lurch toward capitalism, intending to embrace it. The process commenced under President Gorbachev in 1986, after the failure of a last-ditch effort to save the Soviet Union for Communism by making its comrade citizens sober. The Kremlin had decided that the West was winning the cold war because its workers did not mix vodka drinking with making computers. Taxes were raised on alcohol, new criminal offenses for drunkenness were introduced, and drunks were censored out of movies. Male life expectancy leapt by three years, from sixty-two to sixty-five. However, the antialcohol campaign had little impact on Russian productivity and provoked a public backlash against the system that had initiated it. Popular discontent, in combination with economic stagnation, forced Gorbachov to introduce Perestroika (economic restructuring) to Soviet territories.
Perestroika was painful. The temporary restrictions on the manufactureand supply of alcohol had driven its production underground. Samogon (moonshine) poured out of illicit stills, whose operators did not care if their raw materials were toxic so long as they were cheap. Together with crisis sources (there was no such thing as a Communist wine lake) of alcohol such as aftershave and brake fluid, samogon killed tens of thousands of Russians every year. Moreover, temperance reforms attached to perestroika, including the prohibition of alcohol at state functions and the promotion of tea-houses and ice-cream parlors, drove drunks into each other’s homes, or onto the streets, where they drank openly, for oblivion, and personified the atomization of Soviet society. Their poet was Venedict Erofeev, whose Moscow Stations depicts the failed rail journey of a Moscow drinker to meet his sweetheart in Petushki. The book is distinguished for its black humor and alarming cocktail recipes. Its narrator considers himself a scientific alcoholic who is inspired to drink deep by a chorus of loving angels in his head. Whether taking his morning pick-me-up in the corridor of the train or sneaking in a swift one in the lavatory, he celebrates their guidance in a dramatic fashion: “I drank straight from the bottle, tossing my head back like a concert pianist, aware of great things just beginning, and those still to come. . . .” The narrator is catholic in his tastes and will “drink anything that burns.” He believes most Russians share the same compulsion to get drunk and reflects on the effect that this has had on their culture: “It’s weird, nobody in Russia knows how Pushkin died, but everybody knows how to distil varnish.” The fruits of such knowledge were genuinely frightening potations, including the narrator’s favorite:
Dog’s giblets, the drink that puts all others in the shade! It’s not just a drink, it’s the music of the spheres! What’s the most beautiful thing in life? the struggle to free all mankind. But here’s something even more beautiful—write it down:
Let it marinade for a week with some cigar tobacco, then serve.
The process of dismantling the Soviet behemoth begun by Gorbachev was finished by his successor, Boris Yeltsin, in 1991. In addition to terminating the USSR, he also abolished the state monopoly on the manufacture of vodka. The result was a collapse in tax revenues and a new flood of samogon. Yeltsin followed up in 1993 with a privatization program intended to distribute state property among the people, most of whom received a voucher representing their share in the nation’s industry and infrastructure. These were bought up by entrepreneurs— the street price for each was a bottle of vodka—with the result that a few became fabulously wealthy, the owners of oil fields and gold mines, while the government went bankrupt. Its president, already known to be fond of a drink, pursued his hobby with increased vigor and a disdain for public sobriety. He raised eyebrows on state visits abroad when he stumbled and slurred his way through official appointments, or missed them altogether because he was drunk. His penchant for intoxication was tolerated by other heads of state: “At least Yeltsin’s not a mean drunk,” observed President Clinton, after being advised of his guest’s antics while on an official visit to the United States in 1994.
Yeltsin staggered on with his reforms until 1999, when power passed to Vladimir Putin. Within a year of his taking office, a state holding company for alcohol had been established—RosSpirtProm, which presently accounts for close to 50 percent of Russian alcohol production. This measure induced tax revenues to flow once more—in 2003, 2.2 billion liters of taxed vodka were sold in Russia, or about fifteen liters per head of population, including babies. However, and notwithstanding the ready availability of white-market vodka, tax-free samogon continued to flood the market. Gin-craze conditions appeared—the birthrate plummeted, and male life expectancy dropped back to sixty-one years. In the first four months of 2005 more than thirteen thousand people died of drinking poison hooch. In response President Putin, notably more sober than Yeltsin, proposed a new state vodka monopoly. Rigorous central quality controls, plus affordable pricing, would put an end to the use of perfume and varnish as beverages.
Private enterprise also came to the aid of Russians struggling with their drinking. A hangover cure developed in KGB laboratories, which had enabled its agents to outdrink their capitalist adversaries, was patented and marketed to bear-headed Russians and, after 2003, to people overseas under the brand name RU 21. RU 21 was said to work by neutralizing the body’s ability to metabolize alcohol. Its principal active ingredient, succinic acid, hindered the production of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme responsible for converting alcohol into acetaldehyde, the compound that turns drinkers into quivering catatonics the morning after.
37 FIAT LUX
For is not the life of man simply the soul’s sidelong glance? the soul’s eclipse? We’re all of us drunk, each in his own way, only some have imbibed more than others. And that’s how it affects people: Some laugh right in the world’s face, others cry on its shoulder.
—Venedict Erofeev
The principal export market for RU-21 was America, where the declining trend in alcohol consumption that had commenced in 1980 bottomed out in 1997. Thereafter, it rose slowly, reaching the equivalent of 2.22 gallons of pure ethanol per head per annum in 2003. There appears to have been a 9/11 effect—the incidence of heavy drinking increased by nearly 10 percent in 2002 over the preceding year. The recovery of American drinking, and consequent need for hangover cures, was achieved in the face of spirited resistance from opponents of alcohol. Indeed, the controversy over whether it is a friend or foe of mankind has been debated with especial vigor over the last decade. Enemies of the demon drink have sought to limit its availability and promotion and have emphasized its negative impact on health, while its manufacturers and advocates have fought to maintain their markets, and to spread the news of certain positive discoveries as to the worth of alcohol to society in general.
The increase in consumption was broad-based, and led by demand for hard liquor and wine. The spirit revival was largely the work of African Americans, a demographic class hitherto indifferent, statistically, to alcohol, but who tuned into lifestyle drinking in the last decade of the twentieth century. By 1995, black males aged eighteen to twenty-nine had overtaken their white counterparts in “Frequent heavy drinking.” The shift was inspired by popular music. Rap and hip-hop dominated the charts, and their artists were advocates of alcoholic beverages, the more expensive the better. Such talents as Snoop Dogg, P. Diddy, and Biggie Smalls were dandy disciples of premium Cognacs. They trumpeted their good taste in song. An analysis of a thousand of the most popular tunes from 1996 and 1997 revealed that 47 percent of rap songs (against 13 percent for country & western and only 4 percent for heavy metal) referred to alcohol, most to a specific brand such as Rémy Martin.
By happy coincidence, rappers and their disciples were the saviors of the French Cognac industry. In the late 1990s, Asian economies nosedived and, with them, demand for VSOP. Weddings were postponed to a more auspicious date, Chinese New Year celebrations were muted. Without the Hong Kong market, grape growers in the Cognac region of France were facing ruin. After rioting in the best of Fren
ch traditions, they demanded compensation and subsidies from the EU. In the event, crisis redistillation of brandy to make it suitable for automobile fuel proved unneeded. Tunes such as “Pass the Courvoisier” (2001), a duet featuring Busta Rhymes and P. Diddy, sang them out of trouble.
Rap put a flame under the tail of American demand, which rose nearly threefold between 1993 and 2003 to account for 36 percent of global Cognac consumption. African Americans were responsible for roughly three-quarters of the sales of the market leader Hennessy. When growers in the Cognac region were asked what they thought about their new customers, they replied that they viewed them with “equipoise and serenity.” Theirs was a quality product, which did not require a specific setting or a time of day for its perfect enjoyment. It was appropriate to the bucolic, urban, and even ghetto environments.
African American patronage was also an influence in the champagne market. The rappers’ favorite brand was Cristal by Louis Roederer, which had been invented for Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1876 and made exclusively for the czars until the revolution in 1917, whereupon production ceased. The brand was reintroduced and offered for sale to the public for the first time in 1945. It remained a rare, expensive, and relatively unknown tipple until the later 1990s, when rap artists adopted it as a token of success. It appeared as Cris or Crissy in their lyrics, notably in Jay-Z’s number-one hit “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” (1998): “Let’s sip on the Cris and get pissy-pissy.” By 2003, Cristal had become the seventh most-mentioned brand in Billboard’s Top 20 chart, one place behind Prada but ahead of Hennessy, Lamborghini, and Chevrolet. Unfortunately for Cristal, when the French managing director of Louis Roederer was asked what he thought of its new clientele, he implied he would rather not have their business and regretted that “we can’t forbid people from buying it.” The racist insult incensed his best customers: Jay-Z called for a boycott, and both he and P. Diddy included the phrase “Fuck Cris” in the lyrics of subsequent songs.
While the decision to boycott Cristal was one that only a few Americans were rich enough to make, most were in a position to afford beer, and the brewers solicited their custom with considerably more energy and tact than French champagne producers. In contrast to rising demand for spirits, the beer market was flat. Competition for drinkers was intense, and advertising expenditure reached new highs. In 2004, the top ten brewers spent $1.14 billion in reaching out to beer lovers across the nation. Anheuser-Busch, which occupied the number-one slot, got through $412 million on its own. Such colossal sums, and the apparent ubiquity of beer advertising, provoked the ire of opponents of drinking. It was impossible, they argued, to protect the nation’s youth, i.e., those under the minimum drinking age of twenty-one, against such a barrage. They pointed to statistics showing that 76 percent of American children had had their first drink, usually beer, before they left high school, and they demanded an increase in regulation.
The style and content of brewers’ promotional material were largely determined by self-regulation, in accordance with the Beer Institute Advertising and Marketing Code of 1997. This voluntary code, whose preamble noted the “ancient origins” of beer, and that it had “held a respected position in nearly every culture and society since the dawn of recorded history,” was a reasonably stringent document, whose overriding aim was to “portray beer in a responsible manner.” It forbade the depiction of underage drinking, drunk driving, or intoxication in any form, and provided a myriad of other limitations on what ads might show, and when they could be shown. There were to be no kisses, no cartoon characters, no Santa Claus, and no promises of success in business or in love. Last but not least, “Beer advertising and marketing materials should not depict the act of drinking.”
Most of the code was dedicated to ensuring that beer ads were kept out of sight of underage drinkers. This was to be achieved by limiting their appearance to shows, events, and publications where the brewers could be certain that at least 50 percent of the audience was over twenty-one. The compliance of the industry with this so-called placement standard was questioned by the Center for Alcohol Marketing and Youth, which published a series of studies with alarming titles suggesting that the brewers, and indeed the liquor industry in general, were in breach of their own codes. Papers such as “Television: Alcohol’s Vast Adland” (2002) and “Radio Daze: Alcohol Ads Tune in Underage Youth” (2003) sought to demonstrate that self-regulation was at best ineffective and, at worst, a license to corrupt.
The matter was considered by the Federal Trade Commission in 1999 and again in 2003. Its conclusions made disappointing reading to the opponents of alcohol advertising. It found that, on the evidence, the brewers had achieved 99 percent compliance with their own codes and that such codes made them models of corporate responsibility. Moreover, in response to the investigation, they had voluntarily raised the placement standard from a 50 percent adult audience to 70 percent, beyond which, in the opinion of the commission, it would be hard to venture without impeding their lawful ability to promote a legal product.
Although this round went to the brewers, the victory was technical rather than moral. By coincidence, perhaps, many of their ads appealed strongly to juvenile minds. While they did not feature adults kissing or making money, they abounded in animals. Budweiser, for instance, had expanded its menagerie. Spuds MacKenzie and the singing frogs had been succeeded by twin Dalmatians, a trained mouse, a ferret, and a pair of lizards. A 2005 study into how children responded to beer ads found that they had an overwhelming preference for those that featured their four-legged friends. The ads that interested juniors least, in contrast, were those that focused on the brewing process and the quality of the resulting product.
They did not have to sit through many of them. Quality, in the sense of a superior pint, and variety, too, had by and large been filtered out of American brewing in the fifty years following repeal. By 1984, the four largest brewers controlled 94 percent of the market. Over the following decade, when the fashion for lite beers emerged, their products, while consistent, carefully engineered fluids, had little appeal to a connoisseur. In consequence, discriminating adult beer drinkers took matters into their own hands and set up their own breweries—in their backyards, in bars, and in commercial lots. These craft brewers were inspired by the example of Fritz Maytag, a Stanford graduate who had bought 51 percent of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco for a few thousand dollars in 1965. Anchor had been brewing continuously since 1896 but had hit rock bottom just before Maytag invested. He became its sole proprietor in 1969 and thereafter flourished. His flagship product was bottled Anchor Steam Beer, modeled on the staple brew of the gold rush era, which won itself space in California restaurants and bars both on account of its quality and its difference from the lite brews promoted with animals on television.
After quality came diversity. Anchor introduced new styles of brews, including Liberty Ale, which was released on April 18, 1975, to commemorate the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s rum-stoked gallop, and Ninkasi, made to the recipe implicit in the hymn to the ancient Sumerian goddess of brewing. Such superior products, and commercial success, prompted a host of other Americans to try their hand at making beer. Craft brewers sprung up all over the land in the early 1990s. Anchor Steam was joined by Chelsea Sunset Red, Sierra Nevada Pale, Pete’s Wicked Blonde, BridgePort India Pale Ale, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, and dozens of other novel labels.
The craft beer movement, however, ran low on steam toward the turn of the millennium. Its growth decelerated from a 50 percent year-on-year rate to only 5 percent in 1997. Several factors contributed to the loss of momentum. Ironically, quality was one of them. Some of the new breweries made bad, strange, or temperamental beer, and whatever its critics said about Bud Lite, it was a wonderfully consistent and stable product. A sour pint of “Alligator’s Breath” or suchlike might put a prospective convert off craft beer for life. A second factor was intrasector competition. The new brewers weren’t fighting only the majors but also t
heir peers for market share. Competition was encouraged through beer shows and prizes. Beer critics such as Roger Protz and Michael Jackson issued tasting notes and ratings, and brewers with better scores won customers from their lesser-ranked brethren.
The beer gourmandisme awakened by the craft sector also turned Americans on to foreign suds. Many of the new styles had been inspired by German lagers and British ales, and converts to quality beers were tempted to taste the original models of their locally made favorites. In consequence, imported brews led the charge against the bland majors in the second half of the 1990s, doubling their market share between 1995-96 and 2001. By 2005, imports accounted for 12 percent of the American market, against a 3.5 percent share for the 1,371 breweries of the craft sector. The remaining 84.5 percent was supplied by a mere thirty-eight major breweries. The market itself was a behemoth. In 2005, just under three hundred million Americans drank 6.35 billion gallons of beer worth $82 billion between them, equating to more than thirty gallons per head for those of either sex of drinking age.
The rebirth of American craft brewing inspired a revival in that most puritan of beverages, hard cider. The staple of colonial farmers had been killed off as a commercial drink by Prohibition. Orchards were felled, and by the 1950s people had forgotten even the taste of President John Adams’s breakfast tipple. The hard cider market slept for another forty years until awoken in the early 1990s through the introduction of brands such as Woodchuck Cider from Middlebury, Vermont, and George Hornsby Draft Cider, made by the Californian vintners E. & J. Gallo. The Boston Beer Company, a small brewer responsible for Samuel Adams Ale, also entered the market with Hardcore Crisp, which, as its name suggests, was targeted at a different market than its beer. Neo-cider drinkers were perceived of as being in their early twenties, dynamic in character, futuristic in outlook, and metropolitan in culture. The branding and marketing of new products were therefore aimed at white collar urban males. However, it was women who loved them, and by the law of unintended consequences that seems to apply to alcohol advertising, they became the principal consumers of hard cider. From a very low base of a quarter of a million gallons in 1990, the American market grew to 3.6 million in 1995 and 10.35 million gallons in 2001.