Girlie Beer Labels

All the hullabaloo at Beervana over the label for Upright's bottles of Four Play reminded me of a beer label I spotted a few months ago at Belmont Station, this "Before-After Triple Bock", which turns out to be from a Lithuanian brewery called Rinkuškiai. It didn't cost much, and I didn't have much hope for an allegedly 12% ABV Baltic bock that I'd never heard of, but it I figured the somewhat humorous nature of the label made it worth a couple bucks.

See how pretty the girl is after you drink this beer?  You should have seen her beforehand (see the side-by-side picture at the bottom of this post).  Talk about beer goggles.  The beer was pretty bad, by the way:  syrupy and one-dimensional.  Dave described it as: "Like syrup from canned fruit cocktail with fluorescent cherries".  It gets a generous "C" on Beer Advocate.

Back to Ezra's label for this year's Four Play.  Commenters at Beervana and the New School have complained that the painting of a partially undressed woman on a couch objectifies women.  Good lord.  It's a stylized piece of art, and while I think the artist has portrayed an attractive, fit young woman, it's not necessarily a seductive pose.  She might be waking up with a hangover, for all the picture conveys. To the complaint that the label panders to "stereotypical hyper-masculine, heterosexual males", Ezra replies that there is no indication of masculinity or heterosexuality in the picture at all: "the lack of presence of a male could mean the opposite".

To my mind, the Before-After label is more offensive than the Four Play label.  It's a clever drawing, and good for a titter or two, but it sends an even bleaker message about women than Ezra's pin-up art.  First, it says that a woman is only interesting if she has a particular kind of youthful beauty.  A second implication is that if you can just get drunk enough, you'll be ready to hook up with any woman.  But look, even though I said the label was more offensive than Four Play's, it's not worth throwing a snit about either one.  Lighten up, people.  Next you'll be complaining about the St. Pauli Girl (this year's is a trained architect and kick-boxer who speaks five languages and is developing her own make-up line!).

Judging from the website, Rinkuškiai markets a much more staid image in Lithuania.  But trolling the internet I found a couple more labels where they strive for prurience in strange and ineffective ways: Lobster Lovers Lager and Werewolf Dark Ale.

One more thing.  Why is it that, in a town full of beer lovers, any little glitch is greeted with a chorus of "Boycott!"?

Latvian Beer Labels, 1993

When Ezra threw his Baltic Porter party a few weeks ago, it reminded me of my trip to Latvia in 1993, when I visited my friend Kristen who was in one of the first batches of Peace Corps volunteers there. There was a fair amount of beer involved, some of which was fresh and delicious, some of which was bland or worse. Sadly, that's the extent of my memory of the beer situation.

Luckily, I did save a few cool-looking beer labels. The top one commemorates the summer solstice, Ligo, which is celebrated in Latvia by staying up all night burning bonfires to scare away the witches. It's where the phrase "You can sleep in the grave" entered my repertoire -- it was considered bad luck not to stay up and see the sun rise. Cool iconography on that label: the maroon and white Latvian flag draped down the left and back up the right; forest ferns on top; oak leaves at the bottom.

I dug out these labels because I remembered drinking some porters at the time, so I hoped I had a cool porter label to commemorate the porter party. The only one I could find was the Aldaris Porter label here, which wasn't as interesting as I hoped. I seem to remember having a lot of porters, but since this is the only label I can find, I might be remembering it wrong.

Most of my time was spent in Bauska, a small town south of Riga. There was a local brewery there, whose unpasteurized bottles of beer -- a dark ale and a lighter one -- were tasty and cheap. The bottles didn't have a big label around the middle, only a small one on the neck, commemorating the castle ruins the town is known for. I don't know the meaning of the "16%" on the label -- it's not the ABV or ABW: the beer was not even half that strong.

This "Labrit" label is one of my favorites, mainly because of the story behind it. I had taken a side trip to Lithuania, and took a night train back to Riga, arriving the morning of July 1. As I stumbled around in front of the train station, the usual small-time vendors were out, including the beer sellers. When I saw this bottle sitting on top of one vendor's icebox, I couldn't resist, because "labrit" means "good morning" in Latvian. What can I say? it spoke to me.