My new column at LouisvilleBeer.com: "How many furlongs to Leuven?"

It's a major rewrite of something I posted here previously, and I trust, a good deal more confrontational than the first time.

Let’s face it: Subway’s new Italian sandwich collection is more authentically local (in a vaguely tri-colored Neopolitan, fake Gucci, prosciutto gangsta sense of genuine) than Churchill Downs’ fiscal embrace of AB-InBev’s “classic Belgian lager."

How many furlongs to Leuven?

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

I freely admit to getting no kick out of juleps. Horse pimps don’t thrill me at all, and the fireworks during Flatulence Over Louisville are an excellent annual pretext to skip town for somewhere that’s both quiet and civilized by comparison, and which has craft beer readily available to wash away the bad taste of the air show’s martial glorification of pure garishness.

Nowadays the year-round availability of locally-brewed beer in Louisville is something we take for granted, but unfortunately, the Kentucky Derby isn’t really about anything other than thoroughbred horses, gamblers and maybe the Ohio River filled with bourbon – as long as you keep that accursed mint out of it, and take it neat, the way your personal deity intended.