Andy Couch at I'll Have a Beer is our host for this month's Sessions and the topic he has chosen for us is Framing Beers.

Framing beers?
That's what you drink when you're putting up the walls of a house Right?
No??
Well then it must be the number of beers your drunken buddy tells the police you just had when you have been abstaining all evening to be the D.D. Right?
No??
Oh, it's salesman talk. I'm a production guy, salesmen are mortal enemies. I'll do my best.

Around here we write beer reviews, every time we do we are essentially "Framing a Beer" in that we are telling our readers what to expect from a given beer. I often worry about this since my taste is exclusive to me and most others will not feel the same way about a beer.

Every time I write a blog about beer I am again "Framing a Beer" even if I don't mention any specific beer. A blog tells people about beer in general, perhaps some history or some aspect of the beer "community" and this also either encourages or discourages people when they think about beer.

If someone tells me they don't like beer I will usually just say "that's too bad", If they are persistent or obnoxious about it I will probably tell them that they just haven't tried the right one yet.

I rarely try to encourage them to try something specific but if I know someone likes a certain style of beer I will do my best to suggest similar beer for them.

A young lady I know was not a huge fan of beer despite being a bartender. She tried a Kriek Lambic one time and now goes out of her way to try more. If I run across a new one I will occasionally pick up an extra to give to her.

She still doesn't like lagers or most mild ales but she loves fruit flavoured lambics now.

A young nephew of mine recently "Came of age" and wanted to try some different beer, he is an amateur chef and is willing to try different tastes so I offered him an "Adnams Broadside" with it's huge berry and bread tastes. He was amazed. Didn't think beer could taste like that. All he'd tried was mainstream lagers. He is a convert now, even started going to a few beer fests. Wish I had learned when I was that young.

The thing is that both these people did it for themselves, I had almost nothing to do with it. After they decided they wanted to try something I could encourage them and maybe make some suggestions but they decided on their own that they wanted to try something and all the pretty packaging, outrageous names or overblown ad campaigns in the world wouldn't have convinced them if they didn't want to already.

This "Framing" stuff does work to some extent though, it can even catch even the more experienced if the marketers do it right. Mind you if they go too far overboard, a la Molson, Labatts, Bud etc. it can come back to haunt them and even destroy their market.

Amsterdam Brewing got me not too long ago.

They have a fairly new brew out called "Pomegranate Wheat Beer". It comes in a bottle completely covered with a shrink wrap plastic label all in shades of deep purple. I admit that as soon as I saw it on the shelf I had visions of a powerful fruit taste as I would find in a flavoured Lambic. I bought two largely because of the packaging and partly because I know Amsterdam and that many of their products are interesting. It was not at all as I expected it to be. I was waiting for this overwhelming hit of pomegranate. It wasn't there. Instead was a subtle fruit flavour in a well made wheat beer. Just what it should be. The packaging threw me badly and I didn't get what I expected. I like wheat beers for what they are and I like fruit wheat beers to still taste like beer, and this one did. I would not have bought it if I hadn't known about and liked Lambics, however, simply because of the labelling. I'd have missed out on a good wheat beer. I could also imagine the reverse happening. If I had given one of these to the Young Lady mentioned above she would have hated it. It would not have been close to what she wanted or expected.

There we go, got through the whole blog without ever once mentioning
"Priming the Pump" or anything about the "Post". I prefer "Fox News" for
comedy, It's almost as good as the C.B.C.'s "Mercer Report".