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| Church Keys Don’t Really Open Churches! Normally, when speaking of beer “adjuncts”, we are referring to corn, rice, herbs or other ingredients added to beer in defiance of Reinheitsgebot, the German purity law which defines water, hops, malt and yeast as the only four things allowed in the brewing of beer. However, the brewing industry extends far beyond the serious business of just making and drinking the stuff, and here , too, adjunct uses for the other factors in the industry come to the forefront of consideration. Before revealing some of those adjunct uses, however, as an addendum to last month’s article detailing alternative uses for beer itself, I’d like to present yet another valuable reason why beer is so widely loved and appreciated!. Somehow I forgot to mention that beer can be an effective unit for the measurement of time and distance. Although this use is not recommended (in fact definitely DISCOURAGED) in today’s politically correct and temperate society, not too long ago a group of fishermen, planning a weekend trip “to the lake” and asked by a newcomer how long of a drive it was, might answer “about five beers”. “Swooping” home on a liberty weekend from Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Va. to Jersey required about three and a half hours, ten gallons of gas @ 29 cents/gallon and five Ballantine’s @10 cents/bottle. Ballantine was a more economical fuel than Gulf No- Nox! But I digress. Back to the alternative uses of beer marketing’s adjuncts: A whole industry has been born around the non-ingestive aspects of beer. Memorabilia concerning the beverage, better known as “breweriana”, has spawned many national and international clubs whose members meet regularly to buy, sell trade and covet millions of dollars worth of brewery advertising, that for the most part, was given away gratis by beer salesmen to induce retailers into bigger orders. Members of these organizations have been known to go into cardiac arrest when unearthing an “Amana” beer can at a garage sale, resort to violence over who saw a pristine Ebling’s beer tray first at a flea market, and trade away their wives for a patch ripped from the sleeve of a pre-prohibition Esslinger’s beer truck driver. In addition to the collectability of these items, all had other uses than that for which they were originally produced. Canned beer , first introduced by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, enabled retailers to cram more beer into less space, imbibers to drink colder beer with less chance for spoilage, and brewers to eliminate the need for washing and refilling deposit bottles. In the seventy years since, in addition to being drained for liquid refreshment, billions of cans have been collected, shot at, and pyramided in dormitory windows, the obvious adjunct uses of this wonderful marketing innovation. But there are more: In the good old days of steel cans I remember some parties ending with “grown ups” stamping around the cement backyard in Newark with empty cans of Hensler or Knickerbocker securely attached to their shoes, emulating James Cagney dancing to “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. In the same spirit of The Glorious Fourth, it was possible to blow one’s fingers off in a more American way than by using fireworks imported from Macau. Five steel beer cans, with the tops and bottoms removed, except for the bottom can, taped together with duct tape and primed with a squirt of lighter fluid, would produce a sound like a Howitzer when a Zippo was ignited near the end. I am told that these pieces of breweriana artillery will even shoot a potato for quite some distance, although I have never seen this done nor do I know why anyone would wish to do so. Every so often, one reads in the Feature section of the paper about someone named Lester G. Suggins in Pschittwhole, Nebraska, who has sided his barn using ten thousand flattened Budweiser cans. In addition to the barn, the accompanying photo usually shows Lester, grinning happily and holding what will soon become part of the casing for the hatch to the upper hayloft. Obviously drinking more beer will help to protect the infrastructure of one’s estate. Thanks to the internet, many an urban legend about the value of pop tops has been widely circulated. Over the years, thousands, even millions of school children, cub scouts and lushes have been induced to save these small pieces of packaging in order to provide heart/lung machines, dialysis, wheelchairs, artificial hearts and kidney transplants for long suffering patients. Funny, but when my doctor’s bills are received, I’m always instructed to pay in US legal tender and not in pop tops. Beer cans created an immediate need for their own adjunct, hence the invention of the “church key” to enable thirsty consumers to more efficiently open their chilled cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. PBR cans originally had printed instructions on the side to inform users how to apply the church key to the can in order to release the beer. It is unknown if anyone actually ever read the instructions, since the skill required to open a can using a church key is about as technical as how to turn an electric light off and on by means of a switch. As usual the church key, which is fast disappearing because of the pop top revolution, had other uses such as picking old grout out of ceramic tiles and arming 1950’s street gangs. Before the advent of the Crips, Bloods, and AK47s, the church key was an important part of the arsenal of many a Jet or Shark! Thanks to the influence of the British beer engine and it’s long handled hand pump, most American draught beers are also dispensed by means of long , elaborate, theme oriented tap handles.But it wasn’t too long ago that the gears of a ’49 Olds or ’52 Nash were shifted by a small round Schlitz or Schaefer tap knob, screwed onto the shift lever in place of the boring, stock plastic. The closest thing to drinking and driving that’s legal! A trip to the Philadelphia Zoo will reveal the polar bears happily playing with bobbing beer kegs. I guess the kegs are empty, due to their buoyancy, but I really don’t know if the kegs of Ortlieb’s are provided that way, or the bears’ playful state is attributable to the kegs being delivered while full! Several years ago I had a tremendous pain in my left foot, which was eventually diagnosed as Plantar’s Fascitis. A sinking feeling arose in the pit of my stomach when the examining physician questioned if I drank beer. Surely, I despaired, he’s going to tell me to stop drinking beer and I began to weigh which was the greater pain, the foot or the prospect of a beerless life. Imagine my joy and relief when he advised me to roll an empty beer bottle under my foot while watching TV in order to relieve the condition!. What a great doctor. And what a great adjunct use of beer packaging! Also along medical lines, foam scrapers, no longer used for sanitary reasons and because the oceans of Coor’s Light that are served today don’t require them, played an important part in saving many lives. The cry of “Is there a doctor in the house?” summoned many a medical man to the emergency. The doctor, oblivious to possible malpractice claims and finding he had left his medical bag at home, often requested a foam scraper to be used in place of a tongue depressor. Was the life saved because the patient didn’t swallow his own tongue or because the droplets of Guiness left on the scraper stimulated his recovery? According to leading beer writer, Vince Capano, a hundred beer caps, nailed one by one onto a board make an excellent tool for scraping dog poop from one’s shoes. This device is certainly more efficient than a stick or a curbstone, but since it can really be used only once, it’s somewhat labor intensive. There is available on the internet a little booklet entitled “101 Uses for Beer Coasters” so I’ll not duplicate them here. Suffice to say I’m writing at a desk which is nicely balanced by four Rheingold coasters under the left rear leg. These have been a few of the more popular uses of marketing adjuncts. If anyone has any more we’d all like to hear about them Cheers! Cheers! Dan |
| Another two glasses up article from Dan Hodge! |
| Someone has to say these things and it could only be Dan! |
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Beernexus.com proudly presents....DAN HODGE, beer reviewer, historian and raconteur
anything and everything about beer
by Dan Hodge
