If you want to drink excellent beer, we have it. If you want compromise your standards and drink yellow nonsense, then you’re probably not our customer anyway, so what do we care?”- Greg Koch, co-founder Stone Brewing

In nearly a decade of writing about small business, there is no single group I’ve enjoyed talking with more than craft brewers. It’s an industry that attracts passionate beer-lovers of all stripes, meaning it has more than its share of fun-loving oddballs. (Yes, a cult-like religious devotee to the products by your man with a can may hold sway.) Thus, I was looking forward to the 2009 documentary Beer Wars, a classic look at scrappy craft beer Davids taking on the big bland brew Goliaths.

Well, my reaction to the film was the equal of an Abita Beer’s raspberry Purple Haze (as opposed to the delicious Strawberry Harvest): Quaffable, with a major kick, but ultimately unsatisfying with a bit of a bitter aftertaste.

The problems with Beer Wars can be laid at the feet of the filmmaker, Anat Baron, or more precisely, her decision to take cover in the elephantine shadow of underdog muckraker nonpareil, Michael Moore. The angry fat man’s techniques overwhelm the trenchant stuff in the film without ever raising the pitchforks and torches the way good agitprop needs to do. Let’s look at where Moore’s influence renders Beer Wars flat.

1. Filmmaker Megalomania: Like Moore, Anat Baron decides to make herself the centerpiece, but unlike Moore, she doesn’t have the massive personality (or frame) to pull it off. Her connection to the beer industry is that she was a manager at Mike’s Hard Lemonade and knows how hard it is for the little guy to compete. Fair enough, but her former job doesn’t lend her any sort of expertise that Beer Wars uses to its benefit. Baron comes across as good-natured and friendly, but she isn’t a force like Moore, a guinea pig like Morgan Sperlock, or a fearless schemer like Nick Broomfield, so she ends up being a distraction in her own film. At times, you get the feeling Baron knows it, because she disappears during stretches in the middle. Michael Moore couldn’t disappear with the help of David Copperfield.

2. Boilerplate Gimmickry: Animation? Check. Black-and-white commercials? Check. Voiceover narration? Check. Disconnected shot of a visit to a Clydesdale farm? Check. OK, so the last one only pertains to Beer Wars, but you get the point. Early on, she animates the fact that wouldn’t you know it? She’s allergic to beer“¦ Wow. The irony. It’s so much more vivid in cartoon form. In places, it’s effective, like juxtaposing footage of the Big Three CEOs discussing the quality of their brands along with commercials featuring farting horses or jiggly boobies, but ultimately the documentary gimmicks are as routine as sepia tones and violin melodies in a Ken Burns production.

3. Irrelevant Man-on-the-Street Interviews: At one point in the film, Baron ask people at a Santa Monica bar about Budweiser Super Bowl ads, while they’re watching the Super Bowl. We learn that most of the selected-to-fit interviewees think Bud is the official Super Bowl sponsor, when actually it’s Coors. That sucks for the brand managers in Golden, Col., but what does that have to do with the price of hops in Hungary? All the craft brewers know they have to build loyalists beer-by-beer, not through some insipid ad with horny woodchucks they could never afford in the first place.

4. Faux Naivety: Late in the film, Baron goes to Washington D.C. to attend a big beer lobbying event. And she is shocked, shocked, to find big breweries influence the government with their deep pockets. The $4.6-billion Anheuser-Busch InBev has more pull with the lobbyists than Chicago’s Black Toad Brewing Co.? Wonders never cease.

5. Unearned Pathos: AB bought Rolling Rock a few years back solely for the name and local history, and then promptly shut down the famous “33” plant in Latrobe, Pa. Corporatism at its worst. However, Rolling Rock was not a craft brewery, which is why it’s a two-minute scene jammed into Beer Wars to show how terrible it is for a workingman to lose his job. Agreed. Budweiser is terrible. But the schmaltz fizzles.

6. Manipulating the Subjects: One of the featured subjects of Beer Wars is Sam Adams co-founder Rhonda Kallman, who is now peddling a caffeine-infused brew called Moonshot. Ignoring the fact that Moonshot is a marketing gimmick that clearly evolved from the crime that is Red Bull*, Kallman tries to sell her product to Coors and Anheuser-Busch. She gets rejected, but bully for her if she gets another shot and convinces them otherwise. I was perplexed by this counter to the film’s David vs. Goliath theme. Kallman is a savvy business owner looking for capital, not an experimental beermaker. A more cynical review might note that she’s a mother of three having a rough go of it. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s more cooked up pathos for Baron’s audience manipulation.

7. Ignoring the Actual Forest for the Premise of the Trees: The biggest problem with Beer Wars (and the best thing in the real world) is that craft brewers are gaining market share bottle-by-bottle. As noted in the film, craft beer is the only growing segment in the industry. There are some 1,500 American breweries, up from basically zero 30 years ago, and market leaders like Stone, New Belgium and Brooklyn are widely distributed and enormously popular. Baron scores solid points exposing the origins of organic beer from “Green Valley Brewing”: a Budweiser plant. The film also deserves credit for explaining the big breweries’ monopolistic practices in distribution and grocery store shelving, but the meaningful strides of microbreweries in recent years are overlooked. Whole Foods is a flag-bearer for the craft beer revolution. My local Brooklyn Associated Grocery has an entire walk-in beer bonanza featuring an amazing selection of microbrews, and my hometown of Billings Mont. is flush with handcrafted Tap Rooms.

For all its freshman shortcomings, Beer Wars is worthwhile for one reason: Sam Calagione, founder and President of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, Delaware. He’s the star of the show, a daffy, dedicated beer nut facing the biggest expansion of his company’s life. Calagione steals the film through the combination of his down-to-earth personality and mad scientist methods. Think Blood Orange Heffeweizen or Pangaea, which features an ingredient from all seven continents, including water from Antarctica.

It’s because of brewers like Calagione that you and I can walk into just about any bar in America and have ourselves an artisanal glass of beer. In honor of Calagione and all the brewers out there doing the Lord’s work, it’s worth cracking a pint and taking in the film. You might get lost in the sloppy mess that is Beer Wars, but the insurgents are winning.

Further information: check out Todd Alstrom of Beer Advocate.com in a post-film discussion on the DVD extras. I recommend the panel – it offers a more edifying discussion than the film itself.

Images: Beer Wars, ddb & kdw

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When historians look back on the fall of the American Empire, the Hummer may well serve as the symbol of cultural excess that brought down the once great nation. The Romans got gout and fell over from guzzling wine in lead pots; we bellied up to the gas pumps sucking down the sweet oily nectar that would flow forever.

If ever there was an apologue for the gilded anything-goes Clinton era, it is the Hummer. Hell, the car’s name itself calls to mind images of stripper-laden rap videos, $1,000 bottles of Cristal, cigars and teenage fantasies involving interns, corridors of power and sullied dresses.

Seemingly created for a real-time-action movie starring the Terminator himself, the Hummer was originally a military vehicle made famous in Desert Storm where some 20,000 of the vehicles helped display American might, showing the world once and for all, we make the rules when it comes to fighting wars in the Middle East.

Those days – and the Hummer marque – are long gone. GM announced that a deal to sell the brand to a Chinese manufacturer collapsed and it would begin to wind down the division unless another magical suitor has $150 million to burn. Ironically, the primary reason the Chinese government wouldn’t approve the deal was due to environmental concerns.

And the greenies rejoiced!

(Although, please keep in mind, 3,000 American jobs will be affected. As Bruce Springsteen said about his hometown, “Foreman says the jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back.”)

In some ways, the Hummer already feels like a relic from another era. A vehicular charade from a time when play-acting weekend solider was a rich man’s hobby, and 5,363 American troops hadn’t lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even Arnold Schwarzenegger himself bailed on the brand in 2006, and only 9,000 were sold in 2009. GM kept scaling them down, but the “efficient” H3 and its 15-mpg never captured the collective “love it or leave it” imagination like the original H1, and remaindered Hummers have been collecting cobwebs at dealerships ever since.

Does this mean Americans have become more responsible in their car-buying ways?

Well, Ford announced January SUV sales were up 8%. Alas.

The end of Hummer is a business decision, nothing else. But as far as symbolism goes, it’s a good day for common automotive sense.

There isn’t a lot to be said for the Hummer and one suspects it will die a quiet death, a lot quieter than the sounds of Earth being chewed-up by a pointless egotistical six-figure S.U.V. that should have been buried in the desert long ago, anyway.

In the end, there’s only one thing to be said about the Hummer.

Hasta la vista, baby.

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Marketing 101: When it comes to auto racing, telling jokes, and launching a new product, there is one truism: Timing is everything.

Ladies and gentlemen, Lexus presents the HS250h.

The HS250h rolled into showrooms in fall 2009 and car buyers who love the Earth and luxury accoutrements like heated/cooled seats in equal measure, finally had a dedicated hybrid to call their very own.

Marketing 102: If an auto company becomes a national punchline because its cars won’t slow DOOOOWWWWNNNN, then it’s probably not the right time for delivering a new vehicle aimed at the same drivers currently stuck in recall hell at their local Toyota dealership.

The last five months were a glorious time to be luxuriously green, but all good things must come to an end. (For example, a sedan with sketchy brakes headed toward a brick wall.) Yes, sales of the HS250h are on hold until the kinks can be worked out, but it’s no biggie. There’s nothing to see here, keep moving. As Toyota president Aiko Toyoda said of the recall, “Quality is our lifeline for Toyota.”

Marketing 103: Never use the word lifeline when speaking of cars with the troubling habit of not reducing speed on Dead Man’s Curve.

I kid Toyota because they demand consumers make hard choices: “I’d rather not perish in a fiery crash, but I would save a ton on gas expenses while reducing our dependency on foreign oil”¦” But the truth is, I kind of liked the HS250h, and think it could play an important role in the yet-to-be-determined world of everyday hybrid driving.

As a part-time car reviewer, I’ve been behind the wheels of a number of hybrids and have generally felt better about the reasons to drive them than the actual driving experience itself.

Take the Prius, for example. Setting aside the holy-shit-this-hybrid-has-become-the-bus-in-Speed issue, it has bigger problems. They’re hideous. And in these here United States, they’re movement cars, huge in Santa Monica and Marin County and not so much everywhere else. Behavioral marketing expert Dr. Clotaire Rapaille goes so far as to say it’s sex that sells the Prius, not loyalty to Mother Earth. In a 2004 interview he told me,  “Right now the Prius will get you laid, just like when VW Beetles invaded college campuses in the ’60s.”

Only 1.6 million Priuses have been sold worldwide since 1997. (To put that in perspective, Ford sold 414,000 F-Series trucks in the recessionary year of 2009 alone.) It will always be a tiny fraction of car buyers who purchase what’s healthy over what tastes good, which is why the HS250h has a (rapidly diminishing) chance of making an explosion in the marketplace. Poor word choice, my bad.

The exterior of the HS250h isn’t dazzling – it’s more Camry than Lexus – but it’s no crime to be bland, at least not in comparison to the Prius’s metallic slug shell. At 24/35 mpg, the HS250h gas mileage is good for its class and the solid 4-cylinder 187hp engine has four drive-modes: Normal, Power, Eco and EV that helps increase efficiency and lower emissions. In five days of driving, the HS250h never had any of the hiccups or acceleration problems I’ve experienced in other hybrids like the Ford Escape. It has a kick to it and had no problem holding steady at 75 mph on the New Jersey Turnpike.

For the record, the brakes were a bit stiff, but not ineffective and I never noticed a sticky go-go pedal. Then again, I’m far from petite, so the G-forces of my driving boots may have overwhelmed the software issues.

Marketing 104: There’s no such thing as bad publicity…unless it includes the phrase “individual lawsuits claiming deaths or injuries caused by unwanted acceleration of vehicles.”

Where the HS250h shines is in all the creature comforts that could attract drivers who want to brag about going green over backyard Chardonnay without sacrificing a tool that lets drivers know of the location and length of upcoming traffic jams.

Starting at $34,000, the HS250h features the sex toy-sounding “Remote Touch,” which is basically a combo mouse/joystick that operates all the technology. It takes a minute to adjust to manipulating the cursor around the navigation screen, but it’s so intuitive to our techy lives that I quickly found it a vast improvement over the old button-centric dashboard. There are other fun design notes, like the gauge that keeps tabs on green driving, adjustable leather seats, key fob settings that automatically adjust to a driver’s preferred A/C setting, and an ability to upload GPS destinations from a home computer.

Personal maps, bioplastic material in the interior upholstery and satellite radio? It would be an honor to have the brakes go out. Besides, the HS250h has a collision system that automatically dials 911. It’s Mother Earth’s Indy car!

It’s hard to imagine that the HS250h will overcome this and be a player in the eco-conscious auto world, which is too bad because its luxury features could entice more mainstream suburban drivers and help get hybrids out of the “good-for-you” garage. It’s a fun ride and could have crashed the hybrid party. Whoops. Sorry.

Marketing 105: On second thought, timing isn’t everything. Braking is.

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