Beer summit, 'beer wars' and peace

by Mark Silva

In the era of Cold Beer diplomacy and the Internet, it's important to have a Web strategy for covering a Beer Summit.

We thought of improving upon that oft-employed strategy of "live-blogging:"

Live-chugging the meeting of the president, the professor and the police officer at the White House today -- you know, we start drinking beer at about noon and file hourly updates on the runup to the 6 pm EDT (six o'clock somewhere in the world) parley that President Barack Obama plans at a picnic table outside the Oval Office with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the Cambridge Police Department's Sgt. James Crowley.

The brew ha-ha (with a nod here to a good-humored colleague) over the president's public crticiism for the Cambridge P.D.'s arrest of African-American scholar Gates after forcing his way into his own home because the door was jammed -- police "acted stupidly,'' Obama said when asked about the incident at a recent prime-time televised news conference, suggesting it was emblematic of a persisting problem of racial profiling in America -- is no laughing matter, however.

So we'll probably be left with a more traditional strategy for covering an "event" which is not really open to anyone but the three beer-drinkers who will find a custom-tailored menu at the White House: Bud Light for Obama, Red Stripe for Gates, Blue Moon for Crowley.

Thiis is no Rose Garden ceremony. The president never promised them a Beer Garden, but the White House plans to take this avoided fight outside, to a picnc table behind the Oval Office.

They will have a "pool spray,'' which does not entail shaking bottles, placing thumbs at the top and aiming them at one another -- picture that for a moment -- but rather involves photographers stepping in to record the historic acknowledgement of frosty relations between the president and the P.D. If anyone is to have anything to say about it all afterward, this will likely happen at the traditional press "stake-out'' for visitors in the West Wing driveway, on the other side of the building where the picnic is staged. This isn't the sort of stake-out to which the sergeant is accustomed, however.

Seeing as how Obama already has all but apologized to Crowley for his "bad choice'' of words in the saga, there may be more talk about choices of beer this evening. Imagine the damper that racial profiling can put on a conversation over a few cold ones.

Which leads us to the observation -- part of the still-developing Web strategy -- of Anat Baron, maker of the documentary fillm, BEER WARS, an "expose'' of "the political power of Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors'' who would have liked to have seen more independent American brewers in the mix of today's summit menu.

"President Obama is always saying to support the American made companies, but he should have chosen a local brewery,'' she suggests. "Mammoth consolidated beer companies are pushing out and squashing the American dream of the small business brewers, while they continue to compromise the taste and quality of the beer they currently mass produce.''

As big as Sam Adams may be, she notes, the more than 1,400 small breweries in America accunt for just 5 percent of the overall market share. She knows something about competing with the big boys -- as former general manager of mike's hard lemonade, which became a $200 million enterprise. She has been drawing on her experience to "expose the inner working of the male-dominated beer industry.''

Men and their beers, and racial profiling.

Which suggests that perhaps we should reconsider that idea of starting some live-chugging at noon. Film at six.

(Photo illustration by Paul J. Richards / AP)_