The one bottle that taught an entire generation how to drink, and how not to drink. Besha Rodell explores the 40's strange cultural impact and appeal.
In the summer of 1992, ...the complaint I made the loudest, to anyone who would listen—even my poor father who had brought me up to recognize a classical composer by a few bars of music and wine grape varietal by scent—was that Australia had no 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. What a bore, to have to drink beer after beer to achieve intoxication. How irksome to not have your own personal vehicle to that intoxication, in one convenient receptacle. “A 40 is, like, the perfect amount of drunk,” I’d blather, as if anyone cared.
As stupid 16-year-olds, we sat in parks and on train tracks drinking sweet malt liquor, and dreamed of the day we’d be old enough to go to bars. That’s when life would really start, we imagined. Now that we’re adults, we long for the days when we roamed our cities in the dead of night, or when the plan for a summer day stretching out ahead of us could be as simple as “wanna get 40s?”
That year, 1992, was just about the apex of the 40’s strange cultural impact and appeal. Malt liquor had been around since the 1930s, born of the Depression and the rationing during World War II, when brewers didn’t have enough malt to make beer (http://punchdrink.com/articles/40-ounces-to-freedom/).
Two brewers in the Midwest had an idea. At the Grand Valley Brewing Company in Ionia, Michigan, some time around 1937, Clarence “Click” Koerber first brewed Clix Malt Liquor. In 1942, at Gluek Brewing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Alvin Gluek had a similar idea. The grandson of the brewery’s founder, Alvin was happiest in the laboratory, tinkering. And one day, he found a way to brew a beer that would use less malt but have more of a kick. He named his malt liquor Sparkling Stite by Gluek, courting drinkers with champagne aspirations. Envisioned as an upscale product, Sparkling Stite was even promoted with score pads for bridge players (http://faithfulreaders.com/2012/04/29/malt-liquor-a-history/).
In 1963 at National Brewing in Baltimore, Maryland, a man named Dawson Farber was leading the marketing effort. He was very concerned about the growing competition from other “national” breweries — Anheuser-Busch and Joseph Schlitz — who were moving into his city with large budgets for promotion and advertising. Farber anticipated that his National Bohemian lager was not going to fare well against bullies like Budweiser and Schlitz. He had to find a niche where the brewery could compete.
At the time, the only malt liquor with anything close to a national presence was Country Club. Farber had a different vision, one that focused less on upper middle class aspirations and more on the reality of more kick in the can. He came up with the name Colt 45 and told a designer he wanted a label emblazoned with a kicking horse and a horseshoe. Farber was not going to hide the potent brew’s extra bang.
This was a master stroke. It was also a violation of federal law, if anyone had been paying attention. The Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27, Part 7, Prohibited Practices, Section 7.29 (g), states that a malt beverage’s label “shall not contain any statements, designs, or devices, whether in the form of numerals, letters, characters, figures, or otherwise, which are likely to be considered as statements of alcoholic content.”
The future of malt liquor hung in the balance, but National Brewing needn’t have worried. Apparently insensitive to metaphor, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) approved Colt 45, kicking horse, horseshoe and all (http://faithfulreaders.com/2012/04/29/malt-liquor-a-history/).
By the mid 1960s, malt liquor companies had begun to advertise specifically to an African-American clientele, and over the next two decades, that advertising grew more and more raunchy. In the mid 1980s Colt 45 brought on Billy Dee Williams as a spokesperson. His famous tag line was “The power of Colt 45, it works every time,” with ads showing Williams holding a can of Colt 45 with a randy-looking woman touching him suggestively. In 1986, the first poster for a new malt liquor called Midnight Dragon featured a black woman dressed in red, garters showing, straddling a chair and sipping a 40 through a straw. The caption read: “I could SUCK! on this all night.” (http://punchdrink.com/articles/40-ounces-to-freedom/)
According to Pete “Bruz” Brusyo, the proud New Jersey owner of the world’s largest collection of 40s, the first beer to be sold in that specific bottle was called A-1, and the oldest known bottle is from 1961. But it wasn’t until the ’80s that the 40 became common. It’s not clear why malt liquor started being sold in that particular quantity. A New York Times story from 1993 quoted a spokesman from the Miller Brewing Company as saying it was a matter of “retailer and consumer convenience,” and cited the fact that store owners loved 40s because they took up so much less space on the shelves. After the mass introduction of 40s, malt liquor consumption in America increased by tens of millions of cases over only a few years (http://punchdrink.com/articles/40-ounces-to-freedom/).
Many things have been blamed for the rise of the 40 in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but the usual culprit cited is rap music. By the late ’80s, 40s were showing up in many rap songs—Eazy-E had an entire song dedicated to Olde English, called “8 Ball,” on N.W.A.’s first album. Then came Minott Wessinger. Wessinger was a descendant of an established brewing family in Portland, OR. In 1987, he began brewing a new malt liquor—St. Ides. After hearing rappers praise 40s and malt liquor brands without prompting, Wessinger correctly assumed that some of them might be open to a commercial relationship. The resulting advertisements are practically a hip-hop genre unto themselves, with everyone from Eric B. and Rakim to Snoop Dogg to Notorious B.I.G. to WuTang Clan appearing in St. Ides commercials. And who can forget the classic words of Ice Cube: “Get your girl in the mood quicker, get your jimmy thicker with St. Ides malt liquor”? (http://punchdrink.com/articles/40-ounces-to-freedom/)
What happened to the days of drinking 40s, they seem to have lost their luster as a disgusting, yet effective way to get proper-angry drunk. This nostalgic picture, just shows you how cool Snoop is. For one, he’s got a cane, that resembles a hockey stick, and for a time there he was basically the spokesman for consuming 40oz of malt liquor. Making drinking 40s of St. Ides, and Old English cool, would be like eating White Castle burgers seem couture (www.hotnewhiphop.com/140-bars-or-less-may-30-to-june-5-news.2177.html).
Malt liquor... a major destroyer in the black community... I don't notice them advertising anything worth having to blacks in those days or now even (www.pinterest.com/pin/381257924674112358/).
That same New York Times article from 1993 also talks about the dangers of the 40 craze, particularly for underage minorities. There was a huge public backlash, particularly from within the black community. Many African-American scholars saw malt liquor as specifically targeting black youth, or as being used to control and keep down people of color.
In 1992 I lived in a depressed American city, and there’s no doubt we escaped our shitty school and home lives (many of them fraught with issues of poverty) by saying, “fuck it, let’s go drink 40s in the park.”
When, in 1993, I moved to a far wealthier community in New York, the kids drank 40s there as well. It’s undeniable that the long term cost and impact of malt liquor was far greater for poor, urban America than it was for the suburban baby hipsters who drank 40s on the weekends outside of punk shows. But still, for a few years, it was as if the 40 was a universal language amongst disaffected American teenagers from all walks of life (http://punchdrink.com/articles/40-ounces-to-freedom/).
It’s not lost on me that some people’s lives are still like that, and that those lives aren’t enviable. Or that many of the friends I had who spent the afternoons skipping school with me to drink malt liquor went on to serious drug abuse, beyond our teenage dalliances. That’s what makes the idea of drinking 40s on train tracks so sweet, because that kind of drinking happened before everything went to hell. That period between childhood and adulthood, when you taste debauchery but it hasn’t yet ruined anyone’s life, is so fleeting.
For me, that sweet debauchery tasted of malt liquor. The 40 taught a generation how to drink, and how not to drink. I drink esoteric wines now, and mix cocktails at home, and enjoy the fruits of the craft beer revolution. These things bring me great pleasure, but none of them hold nearly the same allure as that disgusting, sweet, half-warm bottle of Olde English on a summer day in 1992 (http://punchdrink.com/articles/40-ounces-to-freedom/).
(zie hier het filmpje)
Zie HIER wat filmpjes over malt liquor....
