Have you ever seen the show "Brew Masters" on the Discovery Channel? It's a very entertaining and informative five show series (six, if you count the filmed but not released episode) that follows Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewing Company on his journey to create some of the greatest beer in this country. From the first 10 minutes of the opening episode, I was hooked. Since I had no previous knowledge of this show until after all of the episodes were aired, I had the opportunity to watch them all, commercial free and at my convenience over the course of two days. Maybe I'm biased by being a beer enthusiast, but this is one of the best shows I've seen in a long time.
And like most shows I get hooked on, it has been canceled...
"No Reservations" host Anthony Bourdain, of whom I'm a big fan, tweeted "Big story there. Brew Masters goes--or our Ads do" and "See what happened to Dogfish/Discovery deal. Big Beer threatened to pull ads." I've read that Bourdain's show shares a production and/or film crew with the Brew Masters show, and you could draw a conclusion that he is someone who would know these details.
Although I'm not a fan of MillerCoorsBudweiser and often drink nothing if those are my only choices, I'm not so eager to hang them on this based on only two tweets. Discovery claims they are pulling the show due to poor interest. However anecdotal, everyone I've talked to about this show that has seen it really enjoys it, but many others haven't even heard of it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if "Big Beer" threatened to pull ads in the face of Brew Masters success. Craft beer sales rose over 10% last year, seemingly impervious to the economical dip, which must have companies like InBev worried. In the end, I doubt we'll ever hear the full story on this.
Go to the Beer & Whiskey Brothers website to read more, they have a great article on this situation.
Meanwhile, if you haven't seen this show, I highly recommend you click on over to iTunes and download all five. You can thank me later.
Nice article. I was wondering why I couldn't find that show on TV anymore. I just figured it was on hiatus, or my Comcast box's Search function was just stupid.
ReplyDelete