AFTER THE FIRE: Euro ’85, Part 34 … The final chapter, in which lessons are learned and bridges burned.

AFTER THE FIRE: Euro ’85, Part 34 … The final chapter, in which lessons are learned and bridges burned.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Thirty-fourth and final in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

It was late in the evening on August 8, 1985.

In fact, it may have been past midnight, making it the 9th, not the 8th, but no matter.

I was back home again in Indiana, after three glorious months in Europe.

Now what?

Luxembourg City had disappeared far too quickly into the Icelandair jet’s rearview mirror. The European continent receded into cloud-blanketed expanses of ocean. After subsequent trips, I’d allow myself a moment’s melancholy at each westward departure, though not this first time.

There was too much to think about.

Many hours later, allowing for an obligatory Reykjavik shopping layover, I stumbled somewhat groggily from a customs checkpoint into the arrival hall at Chicago O’Hare. There John and Kevin were waiting to meet me. They were troopers and true friends, following through just as we’d agreed back in May.

As a bonus, the brothers were holding a cheesy cardboard sign, hand-lettered BAYLOR TAXI.

In this primitive rotary dial era, it had not occurred to any of us to prepare contingency plans in case of problems – a flight delay or cancellation on my part, or a flat tire on theirs. I hadn’t phoned home even once. European pay phones were old-school mystifying, as well as overly expensive. Only a handful of post cards were dropped into letter boxes.

That’s because the entire point of Europe was to get away from the United States, and this is exactly what I’d done. I went away, got away and broke away. Hurdles real and imagined were cleared, and the first pilgrimage was completed.

Now what?

At times, clichés are all we really have, so I can attest that even then, passing through customs, I definitely knew things weren’t going to be the same for me, ever again.

Once wasn’t enough. There’d have be another, and if so, how would I arrange my life for what might be two long years, until my funds enabled the next escape from our stifling Reaganite compound?

I didn’t know the details, only the imperative.

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We traveled five hours straight home from Chicago, stopping only to devour sliders at a White Castle along the way. This reversion to indigenous form was the first broad hint that in spite of my best efforts to be a new European man, bad American habits surely would worm their way back into my world.

So they did, and so it went.

Within days of returning home, I was filling shifts at the liquor store. Soon school was back in session; teachers immediately started taking off work, and substitute teaching began anew. Money trickled in, and the budget again could be written in black ink.

After a few weeks, there was sufficient revenue to develop those rolls of slide film still hidden in the lead-lined pouch, and at last I could see where I’d visited. Bills were paid, bar tabs settled, and a faint dribble of cash was stashed under the mattress.

Sadly, fiscal restraint suggested a return to inexpensive mass-market beer, except predictably, American swill no longer tasted very good. Eventually it would occur to me to drink less and drink better, but not just yet. Too many hormones required sedation.

Choking down the cheap beer, I grinned, rationalized, and accepted these cost-cutter hardships, keeping two eyes fixed very firmly on 1987, and the expected sequel. Anyway, I worked at a package store.

When all was said and done, Bass Ale and St. Pauli Girl tasted surprisingly good when the employee discount enabled an occasional splurge.

Thirty pounds had disappeared from my frame during three months across the pond. The medical experts probably will say it’s too much, too fast, and accordingly, unlikely to last. They’re absolutely right, and by the end of 1985, I’d found each and every of those lost pounds, and added a few more for good measure.

It all came down to exercise, or the lack of it. When the daily formula is to work two jobs, drink, sleep, rinse and repeat, physical self-care isn’t much of a consideration.

Rather, it was entirely psychological. It was get back to Europe, or bust.

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Far more than high school and college graduation dates, the year 1985 marks the first great dividing line in my life. There is what came before the European journey, and what happened after it.

Later there would be numerous other narrative junctures involving the usual suspects: Thru-ways, dead ends, lovers, careers, wins and losses; all the things that go to make up a life. There’d also be 34 more trips to Europe, perhaps bearing out the extent of the obsession that blossomed in 1985.

What did it all mean, way back then?

Three decades later, it’s a question I’m still trying to properly assess, and in many ways the available answers are uniformly embarrassing.

I can see more clearly now than before. In spite of the many qualifications and evasions available to me, the mere fact that I took a trip to Europe in 1985 speaks to privilege, not privation. It speaks to how lazy and formless I’d been up to that point.

In 1942, my 17-year-old father ran away from home to fight in a world war, and I was spared this tough choice. We didn’t always agree, but my parents worked hard and sent me to university – for a philosophy degree.

I didn’t go to work in a sweat shop at age 12, didn’t endure domestic violence, and didn’t have many hard decisions to make. In short, I was lucky. It was easy muddling through my youth, such that there was ample time for me in my early twenties to decide at long last to get my act together and set off on a quest, purely elective, to “find” myself.

Most humans on the planet don’t have this luxury. And yet, this life is the only one I’ve ever had, and all I can do is live it.

Europe in 1985 is where and when I grew up, insofar as I’ve ever grown up, which is debatable. Europe was the exact opposite of my undergraduate experience, and far more of an advanced educational seminar than a non-stop party. It’s where things began making sense to me.

Honestly, I was as surprised as anyone. Somewhere inside there were the genes I needed to plan ahead, work hard, save money, and challenge myself.

This is the ultimate point, because at first, I got it backward. I kept thinking that a tenure in Europe was required to gain the experience necessary for growth and self-knowledge, and of course being there proved to be a big part of it, and yet what changed me the most, more than three months in Europe, was the two-year period preceding the trip.

Yes, Europe changed my life. What I didn’t notice at the time was my life changing in order to get to Europe. Finally, I cared about something, and finally, out of nowhere, emerged a work ethic.

Who’d have guessed it?

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This 1985 travelogue began in 2005. It proceeded by fits and starts until completion in 2016. At this pace, you’ll be lucky if I make it into my 1990s travel history before dying at 101.

There seems to be no good way to end a story that has taken so long to write, so as an attempted coda, subject to future revision, here are three personal legacies of Euro ’85.

Food, cooking … and beer.

Moussaka, clam sauce, blood sausage, Wiener schnitzel, herring and beef tartare are just a few of the culinary high points of Euro ’85. I’d never enjoyed foods like these, and the fact that even a poor tourist might still be able to taste them was impressive.

Coming from a background of largely flavorless meat and potatoes, this exposure was revelatory, but since few of these meals were readily available back home, it was time to take cooking seriously. The only way I’d be able to get the dishes I wanted was to cook them myself, and while much has changed since then, cooking remains a rewarding pursuit.

Meanwhile, beer as a career wasn’t yet apparent to me, and my first European trip wasn’t about compiling or rating brands and styles. My beer understanding remained decidedly imperfect afterward. However, experiencing first-hand the prevailing beer culture in places like Germany, Austria and Ireland was absolutely invaluable, and it obviously informed the Public House.

Language.

In 1985, I’d been exposed to almost as many languages as countries, but the problem with constant movement was a reduced opportunity to make sense of any in detail. Upon return, I vowed to learn a European language, and began stockpiling books, instructional cassettes and videos.

Alas, it came to very little in the end, and three decades later, I still lack proficiency in a second language. However, I know a few words in two dozen languages, and prior to my second journey in 1987, managed to teach myself the Cyrillic alphabet, which made Moscow’s subways navigable.

The lure of urbanism.

I grew up in the Southern Indiana countryside, then went to Europe for the first time and spent nearly all of the trip exploring cities. I’ll grant that it took a while for these urban lessons to be absorbed, but the conversion was genuine.

These days, it seems to me that I inhabit a neighborhood (New Albany) of a larger city (Louisville), albeit it without all of the amenities in infrastructure that made European city life what it was, and remains.

Shouldn’t I be able to board a bus, switch to the subway, and be in downtown Louisville in minutes without once considering the use of my car? Why our endless sprawl? Can’t we fill in those tragic empty spaces where the downtown buildings used to be?

I must stop.

The older I get, the more normal my European interlude in 1985 appears to me. It’s the long trip since then that’s been so damned strange.

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Previously:

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Euro ’85, Part 33 … All good things must come to a beginning.

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Euro ’85, Part 32 … Leaving Leningrad.

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Euro ’85, Part 31 … Leningrad in three vignettes.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 30 … Or, as it was called at the time, Leningrad.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 29 … Helsinki beneath my feet, but Leningrad on my mind.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 28 … A Finnish detour to Tampere for beer and sausages.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 27 … Stockholm's blonde ambition, with or without mead-balls.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 26 … The Hansa brewery tour, and a farewell to Norway.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 25 … Frantic pickled Norway.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 24 … An aspiring “beer hunter” amid Carlsberg’s considerable charms.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 23 … A fleeting first glimpse of Copenhagen.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 22 … It's how the tulips were relegated.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 21 … A long day in Normandy, though not "The Longest Day."

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 20 … War stories, from neutral Ireland to Omaha Beach.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 19 … Sligo, Knocknarea, Guinness and Freddie.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 18 … Irish history with a musical chaser.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 17 ... A first glimpse of Ireland.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 16 … Lizard King in the City of Light.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 15 … The traveler at 55, and a strange interlude.

The PC: We pause Euro '85 to remember the Mathäser Bierstadt in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 14 … Beers and breakfast in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

_

Houndmouth, band and ale, all around this November.

In the summer of 1985, I was in Ireland.

I was in search of an Irish stereotype, preferring it to be a regular provincial town and not a larger city, once with scenery nearby for rambling through. There needed to be pubs (as though one could locate a square inch of Ireland without three or more of them) and cheap eats. It needed to be accessible by train, because that way, tickets already were paid with my Eurailpass.

A place just like Sligo, in fact.

It was to the northwest of Dublin, on Ireland’s opposite side, and a place utterly alien to me that sounded estimably Irish. There wasn’t enough time to explore Donegal, to the north, where the original language still could be heard. Sligo was my choice, and it proved to be a good one.

Exiting the train station on a sunny day, I saw an orderly settlement of perhaps 10,000 inhabitants (a quarter-century later, it has doubled in size). There were pubs and a lively main street, a small river surrounded by decaying gray mills, and green fields on the periphery, rolling out to meet Knocknarea and Ben Bulben, two limestone hills looming nearby. Near the bus station I passed a normal row house with a hand-lettered sign in the window offering a room to let for travelers just like me. The husband and wife both were teachers, supplementing their incomes during tourist season. It was ideal.

Back in France, a British rock and roll magazine parked atop the breakfast table had trumpeted Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief, scheduled for worldwide transmission by satellite on July 13, 1985. Early in the morning that exact day, Gerry was off to play golf at nearby Strandhill, and he dropped me off at the foot of Knocknarea. I hiked to the top for an examination of the ancient burial mound, then descended and hopped a weekend bus back to Sligo. Live Aid was underway at Wembley in London, and the pubs were more crowded than I'd imagined with people in the pre-big screen age, watching the concert.

At some point, I went back to my lodging, and found Gerry and Mary intently huddled around a tiny black and white television in the kitchen, upon which there were fuzzy images of U2 taking the stage. This was much to my delight. It was a band I knew well, just a few albums into its ascension, and as Irish as Irish could be. Sharing this viewpoint with my hosts, they nodded amiably and proceeded to inform me of their abysmal ignorance of pop music -- but U2, well, it was a different thing altogether, even if they didn't know a single song.

"They're Irish boys, one of us."

Fast forward too damned many years, and I feel the same sort of pride about Houndmouth. They're New Albanian lads, and a lass, although the difference between anecdote participants is that I know and like Houndmouth's music, which to the uninitiated is hard to describe. Accounts of the band often evoke comparisons to The Band, and I'll leave it at that. We all got together early in 2013 when Houndmouth suggested we brew a beer just for them, and while such pairings don't always work out, this one seemed worth trying, and so we did. It was a genuine collaboration. We sat around a table at Bank Street Brewhouse, tasted and chatted, and the final verdict was a hoppy American Wheat Ale. David Pierce and Ben Minton took it from there.

Houndmouth was on tap for Houndmouth's season-opening outdoor show at the Iroquois Amphitheater back in April, and it will be pouring again on November 29 and 30, when the group plays indoors at Headliners. NABC's web site has the details, along with news of the St. Matthews Mellow Mushroom's month long Houndmouth beer promo.

Mellow Mushroom in St. Matthews is putting on the Houndmouth all November long

The PC: Tears of joy at the Augustiner, 1985.

(Published at LouisvilleBeer.com on September 15, 2013)

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Coming of age in the Ohio Valley in the 1960’s and ‘70’s meant witnessing on a depressing, first-hand basis the very nadir of beer culture in America.

In Colonial times, our beer making and drinking customs reflected English origins. Later, when Germans began coming to the United States in large numbers, their traditions traveled with them and remained intact. All big American cities and most of the smaller ones had breweries that took procedural, technical and atmospheric cues from the time-tested Central European playbook. It was a lovely thing, while it lasted.

Xenophobic sentiments in World War I did not help matters, and the idiocy of Prohibition sealed the deal, obliterating American beer culture for decades after. Following WWII, the imperial-era American preference for bland, manufactured uniformity wrenched beer from its fresh, local foundation, rendering it into watery oblivion, and subjecting beer to the multitudinous regulatory irrationalities of Bible Belt superstition.

Nonetheless, during my youth, there remained a dusty patina of vaguely recognizable German character to local legacies and customs of beer and beer drinking. After all, Oertel’s, Fehr’s and Wiedemann were not names traceable to Guatemala or Japan. Family trees connected them to Bavaria, the southern region of Germany where lager brewing and its social vocabulary were first developed.

In 1985, these faint Bavarian murmurs were as good as it got in Louisville. I knew nothing of the English ale-making tradition, which survived in shrinking pockets in New England, and was being surreptitiously revived by a nascent “micro” movement out West. Belgium was a place for waffles, not Trappists, which were virtually unknown outside their monasteries of origin.

Fortunately, I worked in a package store, stocked a few imports, and read the early words of the late Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson. These and other educational nuances were supplemented by frequent samplings, accumulating steadily over the years until beer became my life’s work. However, in 1985, all this was yet to come. Rather, there was a train from Vienna to Salzburg, in Austria’s mountainous Alpine region, located just over the frontier from Mecca (Munich).

Salzburg has fully earned its reputation as a clean, efficient and scenic center of art and culture, especially music. Mozart was born there, and the composer’s image is synonymous with marzipan sold all over town. The “Sound of Music” was filmed in the region. There’s a thousand-year-old castle overlooking the fairy tale facades of the Old Town, and ancient salt mines nearby (“salz” is salt in German).

I was oblivious to most of it, having set my sights on the history of just one attraction, the Augustiner Bräustübel, a venerable tavern and beer garden where beer now called Müllner Bräu has been brewed and served for four centuries – or, well before the United States was founded.

Safely ensconced in a friendly Salzburg youth hotel, I embarked by foot upon the search for my chosen beer garden. My course was plotted on an English-language map, because I was still learning to make sense of street signs and other navigational clues in German, even if it was as comprehensible as any language I’d yet experienced. Eventually the Augustiner acreage came into view. The religious complex inched up onto gently sloping terrain at the foot of a ridge, with the brewery and beer garden … where?

In a state of excitement and youthful muddle, my first choice of entry doors was utterly mistaken. I stepped across a threshold, and through a partly ajar door, a choir could be seen and heard practicing. Finally one of them saw me, and gestured: Out, to the left.

The adjacent entrance took me inside, down a wide flight of stairs to a long corridor that contained various kiosks vending foodstuffs. Indoor drinking rooms were located off to the side, sumptuously appointed in wood, with tile stoves and stained glass windows.

But it was out in the leafy beer garden that I fell in love with a way of life, one experienced for the very first time. At midday, hundreds of beer lovers were seated at tables, shaded by towering chestnut trees, surrounded by stone walls and stucco, virtually all of them drinking malty Marzen-style lager brewed and aged only yards away.

It was entirely self-service, or so I remember. You went back inside for sausages, salads and loaves of crusty bread, and then joined the line for beer. A cashier took Austrian schillings, as plastic was not negotiable and Euros didn’t exist, and handed back a receipt. Upon choosing a liter (33.8 ounces) ceramic mug from the freshly washed public stack, you ritualistically rinsed it in a fountain of cold water, handed it and the receipt over to aproned men who were pouring the deep golden beer from a tap embedded in a wooden barrel, and prepared for nirvana.

Teens drank alongside elderly men. There were playing cards, songs for singing, chicken bones and carts filled with emptied mugs. Strangers shared tables and bought rounds. Worldwide languages were spoken. I ate, drank, used the WC, drank some more, and returned the following two nights to do it again, each time walking 25 minutes back to my lodging, feeling perfectly safe and wishing we could do the same back home.

In the decades since, I’ve visited dozens of similar beer gardens in Central Europe. Some proved superior to the Augustiner, but it’s the first time you always remember, isn’t it?

Scandinavian beer on my mind.

On Monday, February 8, I’m inaugurating Office Hours with the Publican, a weekly Monday evening tasting at NABC’s Pizzeria & Public House (in Prost). It is slated to begin at 6:30 p.m., and run for an hour or so. I intend this and future tastings as self-contained, one-night skull sessions. There will be a nominal fee of $5, and you may order food and drink throughout.

NABC Beer Manager Mike Bauman has set aside bottles from Scandinavian craft brewers Mikkeller, Nøgne Ø and Olfabrikken, and we’ll taste and discuss them. I’m not sure which ones I’ll choose, so you’ll just have to attend and find out. Until then, here is a dab of conceptual back story.

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There was a time, not long ago, when the countries that comprise the geographical entity we call Scandinavia were hardly among one’s first choices when planning a European beer hunting itinerary. To suggest that this situation has been reversed is a massive understatement. Let's see why.

There always were specific local brewing traditions in Scandinavia, and many have survived, like the time-honored practice of homebrewed Sahti in Finland. It can be made from a variety of grains, spiced with juniper berries, and filtered through twigs. Mead, a fermented honey beverage, was a Norse staple, and big wooden “mead halls” were built to facilitate its consumption. Indigenous wheat ale is another example of old-fashioned brewing. It was kept alive in recent times, albeit tenuously, by larger brewers in search of a light specialty brew.

The Industrial Revolution launched the age of large-scale commercial brewing, and Scandinavia’s brewing companies have predictably entertaining and instructive backgrounds. Carlsberg’s founder is said to have personally transported fragile lager yeast to Copenhagen, keeping it cool in his stovepipe hat – or something like that. Tuborg’s “Thirst” advertising poster always will be a classic. Even with larger breweries, there is a strange charm attached to the decades of loyalty they inspired, and the cultural identities that came to be associated with them. Otherwise, we'd have no breweriana collectors.

As in other places, the inexorable logic of industrial brewing displaced smaller competitors and resulted in the standardization of product lines. Yes, when in Helsinki, you knew the "local" beer was Koff, and you surely remembered the Koff you drank in Helsinki, but not because it was a special beer. You remembered it because you were visiting Helsinki.

By the 1980’s, commercially brewed beer in Scandinavia reflected very little stylistic diversity apart from an adaptive necessity to conform to taxation regimes by producing golden lagers of varying strengths (and prices), and occasional Porter or Stout, and stronger seasonally brewed beers, almost all of them lagers.

It is at this point that I entered the scene. I did nothing to change Scandinavia, but Scandinavia contributed toward changing me.

When my European travels began in 1985, I really wasn’t savvy enough to explore the esoteric roots of local brewing in Scandinavia, although I probably was more aware of them than my fellow tourists, because I knew the beer history that the beer writer Michael Jackson had taught me in his books. In Sweden that summer, I knew to look for mead, and found it in Uppsala.

That summer, Mikhail Gorbachev had been Soviet leader for just a few months, Michael Jordan was preparing for his second year in the NBA, and I considered it a major victory to scrape together a few Kroner for a few bottles of different Ringnes formulas from a state-owned retail shop in Oslo.

Yet, in spite of being a novice whose only connection to the beer business was part-time work at a liquor store, I knew about the free tours at Carlsberg and Tuborg and took full advantage of them, eventually learning that when the tours came to an end and the participants were seated at tables where sample beers already were lined up and ready, the best strategy was to find a family with children and sit with them. They tended to drink less, leaving more for me.

I also had enough presence of mind to write the Hansa brewery in Bergen, Norway, requesting a personal tour. Through a long-forgotten importing arrangement, Hansa had become available in New Albany, and I’d been stocking it at Scoreboard Liquors. It was a golden lager beer that struck me as above average in quality. I enclosed a business card, and pretended to be someone important. To my surprise, a man wrote back and asked me to call upon arrival in Bergen.

Unfortunately, I misplaced the confirmation letter and phone number. Battling timidity, and with time expiring, I walked across town and found the brewery, managed to get past the guard shack, then was chagrined to discover that my export department contact had gone on holiday. Without credentials or much else in the way of a clue, I did the only rational thing, which was to look pathetic, and consequently was given a brief tour of the plant conducted by an amused company bigwig who could see quite clearly that I was nobody at all.

He had a sense of humor, though, and I’ve always appreciated that.

The golden lagers he gave me afterwards were crisp, clean and gratis, and about the only other thing I remember was a rural cabin relocated to Hansa’s backyard, and used to make the point to visitors that Norway’s brewing origins were in the kitchens of the countryside, where national law at one time required farm owners to provide beer to their laborers. This impressed me at the time. It may even be true.

While Viking blood does not run through my veins, it remains that two of my fondest memories of Norway – a place I have not been since – have to do with fish.

In the capital, I splurged for a breakfast buffet at the station diner after coming in on the overnight train from Copenhagen, readying my plastic bag to fill with meats and breads for lunch later in the day, and only then seeing a row of ceramic pots. They were filled with pickled herring, which I still adore.

A few days later, acting on the advice of a budget travel guidebook, there was a palpable grimace on my face at the prospect of blowing the equivalent of $15 on a seafood buffet at a famous restaurant in Bergen, and yet I did it, and haven’t forgotten the bounty.

To make this long story somewhat shorter, I’ll skip forward, ignore the many intervening, Carlsberg-laden visits to Copenhagen, and offer that beer appreciation has exploded throughout Europe’s north, especially between visits to Denmark’s capital in 1999 and 2009. After all those years of technologically perfect, otherwise uninspiring lagers, the beer landscape is completely altered. Breweries, beer cafés and consciousness have appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and last May, I found myself seated outside, enjoying a sunny Danish spring day, while drinking an American-style IPA on draft. It would have been unimaginable just a few years before.

Later, my sandbagging friend Kim Andersen took me to a bottle shop with a remarkable selection from Denmark, Belgium and the US, not bothering to tell me until later that the proprietor with whom I was chatting was Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, founder, brewer and guiding intelligence of Mikkeller, arguably one of the top-ranking craft brewing innovators in the world.

My point in all this is that for all the well-deserved plaudits given by beer aficionados to breweries like Mikkeller, Nøgne Ø and Olfabrikken, perhaps the extent of the craft brewing revolution in Scandinavia eludes those who never saw what it was like before, and how it likely remains today the further one travels from the larger metropolitan areas. I'm fortunate to have experienced it, and equally lucky to witness the wonderful changes.

Those mild pilsners in days of yore still tickle taste buds in my memory, most notably when I think of smoked herring, and yet in 2010, it’s a whole new ballgame, and a profoundly welcomed shift of priorities. Is it the remarkably high level of education and economic achievement in Scandinavia? Did the creative energies unlashed by the fall of Communism in 1989 have something to do with it?

And: How amazing is it to walk into a bottle shop in Copenhagen and see bottles of Three Floyds on the shelf?

Pretty damned amazing, if you ask me.