T HE WAKKER WEEKLY
Issue #1547 – Posted on: 21-September-2020
BREWERY “HOP”PENINGS! Bushwakker Head brewer, Michael Gaetz, reports our seasonally available Upendi Pineapple Passion Fruit Ale, Fleck’s Czech Dark Lager (aged for an incredible seven months), Premium Pale Ale and Two Sons Milk Stout are currently on tap. There are also batches of Chinook ESB and Blackberry Mead working their way through the brewery.
It’s not often our brewers pose with a pint but our new batch of PREMIUM PALE ALE is something else! This English Pale Ale boasts top quality Maris Otter malt and English Kent Golding hops. Hopheads rejoice!
This weekend’s SPECIAL DINING FEATURE on September 18th and 19th is a gourmet CALGARY BURGER & A PINT for $19.95. Our Saturday CLASSIC STEAK & A PINT SPECIAL for $21.95 will also be available.
Our SEPTEMBER PREMIUM WINE FEATURES are Giesen Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand and Perrin Reserve Cotes du Rhone Rouge from France. Both are $7.95 for a glass and $21.95 for a half litre.
In addition to taking our beer home in glass bottles, 2 litre jugs and growler fills direct from our pub, you can find a varying selection of 650 ml bottles of Bushwakker beer in ALL SIX REGINA SLGA stores, as well as METRO LIQUOR REGINA.
BUSHWAKKER GIFT CARDS are available in $25, $50 and $100 denominations. Give us a call at 306-359-7276 or stop by to get yours. They work very well with all dine-in or takeout food and craft beer desires!
One of our enhanced safety measures spawned by the “new normal” was the introduction of one-time use menus which are then recycled. We have now launched The Bushwakker QR CODE which allows customers to quickly access our full menu (complete with images of the various dishes), our gluten-free menu, beer menu, cocktail menu, import beer & cider menu, scotch menu and Saskatchewan spirits menu. You can also quickly view our social media pages, subscribe to our Wakker Weekly Newsletter, place a takeout food order or make a table reservation. All you need to do in order to quickly access all this information is to download a free QR Code Reader app on your smartphone and then use the app to scan our code. Easy peasy!
Congratulation to Megan McKenny who won our draw on both Facebook and Instagram to win a gift certificate redeemable for a Bushwakker Complete Beer Sample Tray!
BUSHWAKKER “NEW NORMAL” NOTES
Please remember that reservations are accepted and are encouraged for any time and on any day so give us a call at 306-359-7276 to secure your table. Please note under current guidelines the maximum number of people who can be seated at the same table is limited to six. Larger reservations must occupy more than one table and maintain physical distancing between each table.
Our current hours of operation are Monday to Saturday from 11:30 AM until 9:00 PM. Our kitchen closes at 8:00 PM. We are closed on Sundays. Our takeout food and beer services will continue to be made available.
Please continue to practice safe health and social distancing practices. Remain connected to one another and to us! In addition to this weekly newsletter, we are very active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Check-in with us often as we navigate these continually evolving times together. Try to support local businesses whenever possible. Be vigilant in your resolve to protect yourselves which in turn will protect others. Please don’t let your guard DOWN so the province can continue to open UP! Bring on Phase 5!
September 8th marked the third month we have be allowed to re-open under the new health guidelines. We are currently operating at 35% of our previous seating capacity and are very grateful and happy to have the opportunity to see our many loyal customers in our spacious and very clean pub. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Beverage Alcohol Consumption Tracks Demographic and Economic Changes
By Bart Watson
Media reports on beverage alcohol often use data in inconsistent or misleading ways to tell a narrative. I’ve already written about this in relation to sales during the pandemic. Yes, grocery stores sales of beverage alcohol are way up, but the picture for total beverage alcohol is less clear. To quote from Nielsen in their newsletter this week:
“While off premise growth rates for alcohol continue to outpace growth rates of total consumer goods, we reiterate that the off-premise growth is not enough to make up for the total losses in on-premise channels. There has been a significant shift in volume from on-premise channels, which has exaggerated growth rates for off-premise alcohol.”
Americans are buying more alcohol at the store, but that’s at least partially (if not wholly) because they are buying less at bars and restaurants. We can see this in other industries. For example, they are also buying more vegetables. I have yet to read a headline declaring that “Americans Are Turning to More Leafy Greens to Cope with Pandemic” like those I’ve seen about beverage alcohol.
I open with this idea, because I wonder if it is a contributing background factor to another statement that I see cropping up more in the media: the assertion that Americans have been drinking more over a period of decades. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted a “20-year rise in Americans’ drinking.” Ironically, many of the same publications that have included this idea in their pages in recent weeks were writing about Americans drinking less alcohol in the last few years.
At an absolute level, the statement that Americans drank more in 2019 than in 1999 is correct, but then again, there are a lot more Americans to do the drinking versus 20 years ago. The U.S. 21+ population was 190.9 million in 1999 growing to 242.0 million in 2019. Given this rise, we can also look at beverage alcohol servings on a per capita level (21+), and there we find that Americans are drinking a bit more, with a per capita rise of around 6% between the 20-year gap (0.3% annualized). For context, about two thirds of Americans drink, and this works out to around one additional drink per week for every American who drinks.
But when we take a step back and look at the data more comprehensively, this case weakens. First, what year you pick matters. 20 years seems ideally picked to prove a case you want to make. If you said 30 years, per capita consumption is down 5%. If you picked ten years, it’s up, but only 1%.
Using data on historical beverage alcohol servings from bw166 and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I plotted beverage alcohol servings per capita for every year from 1970-2019 (you can also find an analysis by bw166 here). In the 49 years between 1970 and 2018, Americans drank more per capita than they did in 2019 in 24 of those years and less in 25. To be fair, if we limit ourselves to just the last 20 years, Americans only drank more in only three of those years and less in 17, but in 10 of the 20 years per capita consumption was within 1% of what it was in 2019. In other words, even if per capita consumption was a bit higher in 2019, per capita levels have been remarkably steady.
In addition, digging in, we can explain a huge amount of the changes in recent decades based on pretty simple factors. Imagine you are sitting in an introduction to research methods class and the professor tells you that per capita beverage alcohol consumption went up 6% over 20 years. How would you scrutinize that statement? What is different between Americans and America in 1999 and 2019 that might cause that change? In addition to investigating why they picked those two particular years instead of looking at the full data, you might immediately think of the changes in the demographics and economics of the U.S. over a few decades. In 1999 there were baby boomers who were younger than the oldest millennials are today while Pets.com was in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and planning their Super Bowl commercial.
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TIME OUT – A Lexophile’s Dream – Part 1
• Venison for dinner again? Oh deer!
• How does Moses make tea? Hebrews it.
• England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
• I tried to catch some fog, but I mist.
• They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a Typo.
• I changed my iPod’s name to Titanic. It’s syncing now.
• Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.
