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Inventory March 11th, 2018

Welcome folks! In this week’s short but sweet inventory, we have an Australian brewery that’s trying to copyright the color of beer, the European Union prepares an import duty on US bourbon, and the definitive list of books that every spirits nerd should own. Cheers!
We all know that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a way with words (or at least, with stealing ideas from his “hysteric” wife and then turning those ideas into good copy for his own books), but he was also a great drinker. In a letter the author wrote to Blanche Knopf, Fitzgerald proposed that “cocktail” has become a verb and as such, needs to be conjugated. He breaks it down as follows:
Present: I cocktail, thou cocktail, we cocktail, you cocktail, they cocktail.
Imperfect: I was cocktailing.
Perfect or past definite: I cocktailed.
Past perfect: I have cocktailed.
Conditional: I might have cocktailed.
Pluperfect: I had cocktailed.
Subjunctive: I would have cocktailed.
Voluntary subjunctive: I should have cocktailed.
Preterit: I did cocktail.
This might just be his greatest contribution to the global literary canon. Thanks Scott!

Australian Brewery Trademarks the Colour of Beer

The Sydney Morning Herald reports “Melbourne craft brewer East 9th Brewing has filed an application to trademark the colour of beer. The brewery is following in the footsteps of Cadbury, which attempted to trademark the colour purple and BP which attempted to trademark the shade of green it uses.” Co-founder Benjamin Cairns says that the brewery has trademarked the Pantone color which most resembles beer. It’s meant to be seen as an “ironic wink” at the stupidity of intellectual property ownership by corporations. To correctly identify the color of beer the brewery worked with a street art company. “The Colour of Beer can imitates Ironlak’s iconic spray can design and Ironlak has simultaneously released a spray paint with the same name and matched as closely as possible to the colour of East 9th Brewing’s beer.”

EU Prepares for a Bourbon Tariff

After the Trump administration declared the possibility of a 25% import duty on European steel and 10% duty on aluminium, the EU has responded by claiming the US is instead seeking to impose protectionist trade measures. President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker has confirmed that EU will “react firmly and commensurately to defend our interests” by proposing counter-restrictions. Juncker added: “The Commission will bring forward in the next few days a proposal for WTO-compatible counter-measures against the US to rebalance the situation.” The Distilled Spirits Council is obviously not a fan of this. “Any efforts to impose retaliatory tariffs on US spirits exports to the EU will harm consumers, producers and the US and EU spirits sectors.” We’ll see how this plays out as Trump continues to wreck global havoc.

Six Essential Books Every Spirits Professional Should Own

Last week, Scott Rosenbaum compiled a list of his top-tier selection from the past 70 years for SevenFifty Daily. A few notes regarding how he put the list together: “I tried to stay away from specialist texts that aren’t likely to be useful to everyone in the trade; this means you won’t find books on molecular mixology or 19th-century barmen, or cocktail books put out by world-renowned bars or restaurants. I also did my best to offset the effect of recency bias, scouring my brain and shelves for books that weren’t published in just the last five years.”
Books that made the list: Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology, Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist, Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Bar Book, David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, Lew Bryoson’s Tasting Whiskey, and William Grimes’ Straight Up or On the Rocks. A very solid list we think! No doubt Rosenbaum’s collection is sure to spark debate between bar industry professionals everywhere.

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