Best drinks for ‘Beer Bowl’ 2016

It’s Super Bowl time again and this year Colorado will square off against the Carolinas in both footballing and brewing terms.

Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers take on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl I in 1967. They won the game and beat the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl II the following year.

Taking place at ‘The Big Bellbottom’, a.k.a. Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California on 7 February, Super Bowl 50 will see Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos and Cam Newton’s Carolina Panthers will battle it out to determine who will lift the Lombardi Trophy*.

As ever, the Super Bowl is a good excuse to hold your own ‘Beer Bowl’, making the most of craft brewed suds (or other drinks) from the home state of the competing NFC and AFC champions.

Last year’s Beer Bowl saw mighty Washington take on venerable Massachusetts with the home of Sam Adams and the craft beer movement eventually emerging triumphant.

The year before that was a truly mighty craft beer showdown between Colorado and Washington with the Broncos and Seahawks, albeit one that failed to live up to its reputation on the field as the Seahawks handed the Rocky Mountain men a painful 43-8 thrashing.

In fact, Super Bowl 50 bears many similarities to that Super Bowl XLVIII encounter and not least because it includes the Broncos.

Quarterback Peyton Manning, now the oldest man to play in a Super Bowl at the age of 39, is surely set to retire after this game and it represents probably his last chance to finish his playing career with more than one Super Bowl victory.

Meanwhile, like the Seahawks in 2014, the Carolina Panthers have been to the Super Bowl before (SBXXXVIII in 2004, it of the famous Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction”) but have never won, so this would be a franchise first.

Despite his reputation as one of the game’s great players, Manning and the Broncos are going into the game as marginal underdogs against a young and dynamic Panthers team with ‘SuperCam’ Newton under centre.

Whereas in Super Bowl XLVIII it was Peyton Manning’s record-setting Denver offense taking on Seattle’s equally impressive defense, Denver will need to lean heavily on its defensive squad this time around to contain the rip-roaring Carolina running game and Cam Newton’s own impressive athleticism and accurate passing.

Stats and percentages aside however, in craft beer terms (the most important measure of any sporting event), Colorado outperforms its east coast opponents by the proverbial country mile.

Figures from the Brewers Association show that Colorado has a grand total of 235 craft breweries (6.1 per capita) producing 1.6 million barrels of craft beer a year, a generous 13.6 gallons of craft suds per adult in the state. That’s not including the amount of beer produced by the rather large Coors Brewing operation in the state.

Both North and South Carolina together by contrast can only boast of 132 craft breweries producing 428,734 barrels per annum. The bulk of the Carolinas’ craft industry is based in North Carolina (as are the Panthers) where there are 101 craft breweries (1.4 per capita) producing 372,473 barrels a year – just 1.6 gallons per adult.

Despite signs that wine is an increasingly popular drink at Super Bowl parties, beer remains the beverage of choice. Nielsen figures show that spending on beer in the week leading up to the Super Bowl weekend rises by an extra US$40m.

Americans alone will drink something like 325 million gallons of beer during the game on Sunday, enough to fill 500 Olympic Swimming pools according to calculations by the Stevens Institute of Technology made back in 2014. They will also eat around 1.3 billion chicken wings, which when laid end to end is enough to stretch from the Broncos’ home ground at ‘Mile High’ to the Panthers’ stadium in Charlotte 53 times.

Of course the majority of suds sunk while enjoying Super Bowl 50 will be a brand from one of the brewing giants such as Molson Coors or, no surprise, AB InBev.

Anheuser Busch recently confirmed that it resigned a deal with the NFL to remain the official beer sponsor of the league and the Super Bowl through to 2022. It has also shelled out a good $30m for just three minutes of advertising during the Super Bowl broadcast at a new record of US$5m per 30-second advertising slot.

To celebrate the 50^th Super Bowl and the company’s 28 consecutive years of sponsorship, Anheuser Busch has rolled out limited edition packaging for its Bud Light cans featuring the teams and the Super Bowls they’ve won – though they may not prove as popular with those fans whose franchises are yet to win a Lombardi trophy.

Anyway, in the comfort of your homes you’re free to drink whatever you want and remember, if you can’t get hold of any of the drinks we’re about to recommend, the game’s being played in California, driving force of the US wine industry and the biggest craft beer producing state in the country. Anchor Steam and Lagunitas shouldn’t be too hard to track down – here’s a reminder of some top Californian brews from when the 49ers went to Super Bowl XLVII back in 2013.

So, whether you’re a Broncos or a Panthers fan or perhaps just plain curious about what this whole ‘football’ thing is, over the following pages you’ll find the best drinks with which to display your allegiance and a rudimentary ‘bluffer’s guide’ to the game.

Kick off is at 6.30pm Eastern Standard Time on Sunday 7 February on CBS. In the UK the game is being aired on the BBC and Sky Sports from 11.30pm and in Australia on ESPN and 7Mate at 10.30am Monday 8 February (AEDT).

*So named after the famous coach of the Green Bay Packers. He led the Packers to victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in the first ever Super Bowl in 1967 and the following Super Bowl over the Oakland Raiders in 1968 (each Super Bowl is counted as part of the previous year’s season, so the Super Bowl I was part of the 1966 season, Super Bowl II that of 1967 etc.)

The teams:

Denver Broncos
Coach: Gary Kubiak
Quarterback: Peyton Manning (pictured)
Key players: Von Miller, DeMarcus Ware, CJ Anderson, Emmanuel Sanders

As was abundantly clear in the intro, Colorado is a state that likes its beer. As well as its proud craft brewing scene it’s also the home of Coors Brewing, which was founded in the state in 1873 and today is part of multinational brewing conglomerate, Molson Coors. As Lloyd declares in ‘Dumb and Dumber’, Colorado is the land where “beer flows like wine”.

For the discerning Broncos fan, therefore, there really is no other choice than beer and what a choice there is.

Coors and Coors Lite are of course viable options but that would be to ignore the produce of those 235 craft breweries already mentioned.

Photo credit: Oleander+Palm

Good names to look out for are Left Hand Brewing, West Flanders (makers of the ‘Brett on the Broncos’/’Omaha! Omaha! Brett!’ for Super Bowl XLVIII), Great Divide, Denver Brewing Co, Oskar Blues, Odell and Wit’s End.

For those of you who are more cocktail-inclined, Natalie’s Orchid Island Juice Company in New York has come up with two simple mixes for each team’s quarterback (see Cam Newton’s below).

For Denver’s Peyton Manning there’s ‘The Sheriff’ – a nod to Manning’s nickname – which is a mix of Bourbon, orange curaçao and ginger beer.

The Sheriff:
Ice cubes
1 oz. bourbon
2 oz. orange curacao
4 oz. Natalie’s Orchid Honey Tangerine Juice ginger beer
Orange peel and blueberries to garnish

Fill a glass with ice cubes.  Pour bourbon, orange curacao, and tangerine juice in the glass and stir. Top up the glass with a splash of ginger beer. Garnish with a generous piece of orange peel and a couple blue berries.

Click here for more breweries.

Carolina Panthers
Coach: ‘Riverboat’ Ron Rivera
Quarterback: Cam Newton (pictured)
Key players: Luke Kuechly, Greg Olsen, Josh Norman, Jonathan Stewart

If Colorado is a craft beer geek’s paradise then the Carolinas, sadly, are not. There are still plenty of good breweries to choose from though. The ‘Beer Advocate’s’ top-rated brews from North Carolina include offerings from Olde Hickory Brewing, Foothills brewing, Wicked Weed, Green Man Brewery, Pisgah Brewing and NoDa Brewing.

If Carolina still has a way to go to catch up with Colorado in the brewing stakes, it’s got history in other booze-related areas.

North Carolina is home to the Blue Ridge Mountains and with it the whole ‘Moonshine’ legend which stretches across the Appalachians.

‘Moonshiners’ of times past might have spent their time running their hooch about in secret but you can buy perfectly legal whiskey from Carolinian distilleries today.

Nor should it be forgotten that the Carolinas are also home to the world’s oldest and most extensive collections of Madeira.

As one of the few wines capable of surviving the Atlantic crossing and the near-tropical summer conditions (on account of its fortification and highly oxidised production), Madeira became extremely popular with southern – and in particular Carolinian -businessmen and plantation owners.

Photo credit: Oleander+Palm

Not to forget the quarterback-themed cocktails from Natalie’s Juice Company, Panthers fans might want to tuck into ‘The Cam Do’ – a rather electrifying blue cocktail involving the company’s blue basil lemonade, curaçao and basil maple syrup.

One might also riff on the American South’s love of iced tea and create a Carolina-inspired ‘Long Island Iced Tea’.

The Cam Do:
ice cubes
2 oz. blue curacao
1 oz. vodka
1 oz. basil simple syrup (see below)
Natalie’s Orchid Lemonade
Basil leaves and blueberries for garnish

Fill a tall glass with ice cubes. Pour the blue curacao, vodka and basil simple syrup into the glass and stir to combine. Add lemonade to fill the glass. Stir and garnish with basil leaves and a pick of fresh blueberries.

Basil Simple Syrup
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
2 tbsp. fresh basil chopped

Bring water, sugar and basil to a boil. Boil one minute or until the syrup dissolves. Strain basil leaves from the syrup.  Allow the syrup to cool completely, store in an airtight container in the fridge.

Click here for breweries in N. Carolina and here for breweries in S. Carolina.

American Football – a bluffer’s guide

At heart, American football is a simple game. Like rugby or football (‘soccer’) or hockey or any other team sport one cares to mention the aim to take the ball from one end of the pitch and score in the opposition’s goal area.

American Football (or simply football or gridiron etc) is a game of tactics and explosive, highly athletic set-piece passages of play.

The game is played on a pitch 100-yards long, with broad ‘yard lines’ every five and 10 yards and one yard markers in-between. In addition there is a 10-yard sized ‘end zone’ at each end of the pitch where the ball must be taken to score and goalposts.

Each team is split, essentially, into two 11-man squads, one ‘offensive’ the other ‘defensive’. The offensive squad of one team will face off against the opposing defensive squad in the manner below (although they can vary their positions) and vice versa.

There are also ‘special teams’ whose role we will cover momentarily.

The game is divided into four quarters of 15 minutes each. There are short breaks between the changeover of each play, each quarter and a slightly longer one at half time.

If the ball goes dead or out of bounds then the clock is stopped, so while the game in theory lasts an hour it does in fact last much longer, three at least.

If the teams are tied at the final whistle then another 15 minutes are added on, a coin is flipped to decide who has the ball and the very next team to score wins.

Penalties: There are quite a few penalties in gridiron and they result in loss of yards and occasionally downs as well.

The most common are ‘holding’ and ‘pass interference’. Although players are allowed to tackle other players off the ball and otherwise impede their progress they can only do so at certain times.

‘Holding’ refers to physically holding onto someone to prevent them getting to the ball carrier – usually the quarterback.

‘Pass interference’ is a classic case of playing the man not the ball and is when the ball is in the air heading for a wide receiver and the player covering him appears more interested in deliberately making sure he won’t get it rather than trying to compete for it himself and force either an interception or incomplete pass.

Other penalties include ‘unsportsmanlike conduct’, ‘unnecessary roughness’ as well as ‘hands to the face’ or ‘facemask’ (tackling a member of the opposition by grabbing the helmet’s facemask) and ‘roughing the passer’ (a late hit on the quarterback when he’s already let go of the ball).

A penalty will result in the loss of five, 10 or 15 yards and occasionally loss of a down depending on the severity of the foul.

Gameplay: The team that wins the initial coin toss can decide to kick or receive the football. The kicking team will then kick the ball down the field to the receiving side.

The receiving team then run the ball up the field until tackled. The spot they are tackled is where the first line of scrimmage will take place – or occasionally they score but not often.

If the ball bounces out of the back of the field or if a player catches the ball and takes a knee then play will continue from the 20-yard line, the equivalent of a 22-metre drop-out in rugby. A player can also call for a fair catch if he thinks his position advantageous enough – again, similar to calling ‘mark’ in rugby.

The receiving team’s offensive side then come out and face-off against the other side’s defense and they line up at what is known as the line of scrimmage which is relatively well known even to casual observers of the sport (see picture, right).

Pinging the ball back from the centre player to the quarterback is known as a ‘snap’.

Football is based on plays, set-piece actions that are constantly rehearsed. When the quarterback is heard yelling he is telling his side the play they are about to go through with or making amendments to it if the defense have lined up in a manner he thinks will hamper the original play. Alternatively his calls may be meaningless and designed to fool the opposition.

When the ball is snapped, the quarterback can do several things. The most well-known play is to throw (pass) the ball up field to a wide receiver (a pass play).

Alternatively he may decide to hand the ball to one of his running backs (a run play) and if there is no other option he may run the ball himself and try and make yards.

The aim of each play is to advance up the field, making at least 10 yards in four attempts before it must hand the ball over to the other team’s offense.

The defensive team is obviously trying to stop them and do so by tackling the ball carrier or breaking through to reach the quarterback and either tackling him (known as a “sack”), forcing him to throw a rushed pass which his receiver cannot catch or making him throw the ball out of play in order to avoid the sack.

The ball can be turned over if the quarterback throws an interception, that is to say his pass is caught by a member of the opposition.

The catcher will then run the ball until tackled and his offensive team will come out for a new down at that spot.

If a player drops the ball (called a fumble) it can be picked up by the opposition with similar consequences and likewise players can attempt to ‘rip’ the ball from the carrier before his knees touch the ground.

If and when the offense makes 10 yards or more they get another four downs to repeat the process and so advance up the pitch to the end-zone.

At the fourth down, if the offensive line is struggling to make 10 yards they will usually bring on a placekicker to punt the ball downfield and ensure that the opposition’s offense have further to advance.

If they are within range of the goalposts but think it unlikely they will break through the defense then they can try for a field goal.

The first down is referred to as the “first and 10”. If the team only goes four yards then the next down will be the “second and six”, and so on until 10 yards are made or not.

The offense and defense are cycled through as often as necessary throughout the game.

Scoring: A touchdown (the equivalent of a try in rugby) is accomplished when a ball carrier crosses into the end zone or catches a pass from the quarterback in the end zone.

The ball has only to break the line of the end-zone to be ruled a touchdown so a play can seemingly be stopped on the line yet still be a legitimate score.

A touchdown is worth six points and a conversion a further one point. A field goal is worth three points just like a penalty or drop goal in rugby though drop goals do not happen in the NFL.

A team can opt for a two point conversion where, in place of a kicker, the quarterback will attempt to rush or pass the ball into the end-zone as they did to score the touchdown and makes the team eight points in total but it is very difficult and not often attempted.

Similarly if a ball carrier is tackled in his own end-zone that is known as a “safety” and is worth two points to the opposition.

As in all sports, the team with the most points at the final whistle has won and, in this case, is crowned Super Bowl champion.

Tom Brady; Photo credit: Michael Conroy