AFTER THE FIRE: Hip Hops ... Bourbon-barrel aged Imperial Stouts.

AFTER THE FIRE: Hip Hops ... Bourbon-barrel aged Imperial Stouts.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I'm always an quarterly issue behind when it comes to reprinting my columns from Food & Dining Magazine. This one is from Fall 2016; Vol. 53 (August/September/October).

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Bourbon-barrel-aged Imperial Stouts

You’ll hear one sort of pitch at a sales meeting, and see another thrown during a baseball game, but brewer’s pitch is completely different.

Brewer’s pitch is a resinous substance used to line wooden barrels so liquid doesn’t come into contact with the wood.

That’s because exposure to a wooden barrel affects the flavor of its contents, and generally over the centuries, brewers have preferred their wooden vessels to be neutral. Brewer’s pitch remains a handy means to this end, and anyway, stainless steel long ago supplanted wood for beer’s storage and serving.

But what if beer’s modification is the stated aim of the exercise?

If submerged wood can positively complement the taste of beer, as with white ash chips or oak spirals, and if wooden cooperage harboring funky microorganisms can leverage its own intended outcome (for example, in some styles of sour beer), then barrels formerly harboring spirits offer a wide potential range of flavor and aroma characteristics for beers aged inside them.

Consider an emptied oak Bourbon barrel. It was charred in order to properly host Kentucky’s indigenous corn-based liquor, and after a period of years, the mellow finished whisky was removed for bottling to proof.

However, this once-used barrel retains considerable evidence of Bourbon. Why not repurpose these flavors and aromas by aging beer in it?

It seems a forehead-slapping moment, and yet the genuinely strange thing is how long it took for someone to grasp the possibilities.

Lost Abbey brewmaster Tomme Arthur, no stranger to the nuances of barrel aging, identifies Bourbon Barrel Zero in this 2013 excerpt from All About Beer magazine.

In 1992, Greg Hall from Goose Island Beer Co. in Chicago might very well have become the first American brewer to produce a bourbon-barrel-aged beer when he filled six oak barrels that previously contained Jim Beam. He poured this experiment at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in Denver that fall, inducing rumors, appreciative nods and whispers of something entirely new.

I can second Arthur’s emotion, for at a GABF vintage beer tasting in 1997, the late, great beer writer Fred Eckhardt was seated next to me. When I asked him the beer he considered the festival’s finest ever, he didn’t hesitate: Goose Island Bourbon County Stout.

In our contemporary craft beer era, all manner of spirit-soaked barrels are being merrily procured by enterprising craft brewers as creative mediums for aging and experimentation.

The number of beer styles deemed appropriate for barrel again also has expanded, although certain combinations strain credulity to such an extent that I’m almost afraid to joke about Organic Free Range Mezcal-Barrel-Aged Imperial Kolsch lest it somehow comes to tragi-comic fruition.

No timelessness for the impatient

Such embellishments are hip, and I’m square. 25 years are more than enough to concede the elegant pre-eminence Hall’s foundational Bourbon-barrel-aged Imperial Stout.

Hall sourced oak Bourbon barrels in Kentucky, and he filled them with Imperial Stout, the stout family’s brawniest hitter. This inspired pairing remains the bellwether. Bourbon and Imperial Stout are burnished and challenging, richly assertive and subtly intricate. They bring out the best in each other.

At strengths typically in excess of 10% abv, Imperial Stout’s dense, black, viscous intensity lends itself to a panoply of descriptors, including roastiness, coffee, caramel, smoke, vanilla, sultana, plums, figs, cherries, chocolate, brown sugar, licorice, fruit cake and bubblegum.

A wooden barrel saturated with Bourbon offers similar and complementary flavors and aromas, as well as a pinch of added alcoholic potency. The brewer’s objective is to choreograph these delightful factors by calibrating, aging and blending with ultimate “Bourbon Stout” balance in mind.

Consequently, Bourbon-barrel aging is a thoughtful, time-consuming process. Used barrels must be visually inspected for imperfections, and kept from drying out. While uncut whiskey is an effective disinfectant, it’s better to fill the barrels with beer relatively quickly, lest undesirable microorganisms find a safe haven.

Once filled with beer, the barrels need a place to rest, and you’ll sometimes see stacks of barrels in the brewhouse. Ambient temperatures matter, as well as ready access, because brewers will need to pull samples for taste testing. Often they’ll drill holes in the wood and use stainless steel nails as plugs after regularly scheduled nipping.

Just as most Bourbons are blended to achieve uniformity of character, typically beers from multiple Bourbon barrels are, too. Brewers often blend in a second batch of base beer. Aging and blending take time and money, explaining why Bourbon-barrel-aged Imperial Stouts tend to be limited cool-weather seasonal releases, both rare and expensive.

Save that cigar for the second bottle

Imperial Stout is ideal, but it isn’t the only style of beer suitable for Bourbon-barrel-aging. From the hoppy (Double India Pale Ale, Barley Wine) to the malty (Doppelbock, Belgian Quadrupel), characteristics of Bourbon can meld with those beer styles boasting the heft and complexity to compete.

Balance, smoothness and harmony are the watchwords when seeking worthy Bourbon-barrel-aged beers. Beer and barrel must co-exist as equals, with discernible contributions from each. If they don’t, a glorified boilermaker is the likeliest outcome.

Here’s how not to do it

Head Brewer: “We’re making our Bourbon-barrel-aged beer today.”

Assistant Brewer: “Great. How many fifths of Old Rotgut should I pick up at the package store?”

A small number of Bourbon-barrel-aged beers are available year-round (Goodwood Bourbon Barrel Stout, New Holland Dragon’s Milk). Others are the sporadic targets of fervent cult appeal, like Against the Grain’s Bo and Luke.

Plan now for the approach of winter. On-line ratings aggregators like ratebeer.com and beeradvocate.com are the best sources for building your shopping list. Brewery web sites list seasonal release dates, and it’s always a good idea to befriend the beer buyer at your neighborhood package outlet.

Goose Island Bourbon County Stout endures, more widely available than ever thanks to AB-InBev, the Chicago brewery’s parent. BCS remains an impeccable example of Bourbon-barrel aged Imperial Stout, these days the elder statesman in an extensive, ever-changing yearly barrel-aged program. Even I can remember the annual release date for BCS.

It’s Black Friday, on Thanksgiving weekend.

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November 21: AFTER THE FIRE: Hip Hops ... Goodwood Brewing Company: Touched by a Barrel.

October 17: AFTER THE FIRE: These old, old habits die hard.

October 10: AFTER THE FIRE: The Great Taste of the Midwest is the best beer fest of them all.

October 3: AFTER THE FIRE: New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming occupation isn't alleviating my "craft" beer Twitter depression.

September 26: AFTER THE FIRE: The seasonality of Oktoberfest in time, beer and year.

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AFTER THE FIRE: Hip Hops ... Goodwood Brewing Company: Touched by a Barrel.

AFTER THE FIRE: Hip Hops ... Goodwood Brewing Company: Touched by a Barrel.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I'm always an quarterly issue behind when it comes to reprinting my columns from Food & Dining Magazine. This one is from Summer 2016; Vol. 52 (May/June/July).

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Goodwood Brewing Company: Touched by a Barrel

It is a deceptively simple notion to modify the flavor of beer by aging it in Bourbon barrels.

Just as char and time transform simpler corn-based spirits into a sipper’s elixir, so a barrel’s second use with beer can create a characterful hybrid, balancing the chosen base beer with notes of vanilla and spices.

This principle holds true when using barrels previously filled with other liquors or wine, and to a more subtle extent, by exposing beer to various types of wood (most often oak) through chips or spirals.

Currently there are at least 4,200 breweries in America, and many of them have experimented with wood during the aging process. Often these are small batches for limited release, though Alltech’s Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale is a flagship, available year-round.

Then there is Goodwood Brewing Company, where all of its beers are touched by wood and brewed with limestone water.

Goodwood’s identity dates to 2015 and a rebranding of the entity once noted for brewing Bluegrass Brewing Company’s beers under license for packaging and distribution. The brewery’s new name is fully intentional, meant to inform beer lovers of the roles played by wood and water.

“We became Goodwood because we are known throughout the region and industry as experts in barrel aged products,” says Goodwood’s CEO, Ted Mitzlaff.

“Our barrel-aged program quality is second to none.”

Brewmaster Joel Halbleib adds, “Kentucky water is fantastic for many reasons; our yeast is happy about the extra calcium. Louisville KY has a global reputation not only for our water quality, but the unique and historic way in which we process it.”

Of course, oak barrels and limestone water are not exactly revolutionary concepts in Kentucky. They form the backbone of the state’s geographically determinate libation, and a tradition informing Goodwood’s tagline.

“What’s good for Bourbon is even better for beer.”

In fact, beer and Bourbon are grain-based cousins, beginning life similarly during the mashing stage, then diverging into fermented and distilled forms. Goodwood’s aim of reinserting beer into a Bourbon-based equation may strike some as audacious.

Others will find it a delightfully appropriate adaptive reuse, both for barrels and ideas.

Pretty used bourbon barrels, all in a row

Goodwood occupies an old industrial warehouse at 636 East Main Street in downtown Louisville KY. Beer has been brewed there since Pipkin Brewing Company opened in 1998, and in fact, Pipkin produced Louisville KY’s first Bourbon Barrel Stout in 2001.

In 2006, BBC’s began brewing its Jefferson’s Reserve Bourbon Stout here. It was a mainstay in markets outside Kentucky, and remains the basis of Goodwood Bourbon Barrel Stout.

Goodwood’s stretch of Main Street used to be lonely unless the Louisville KY Bats Triple-A baseball club was playing at Louisville KY Slugger Field, a few hundred yards to the west. These days the area is changing, and fast.

Angel’s Envy distillery will open soon opposite the ball yard, and the burgeoning NuLu district lies a block away to the southeast. A 200-unit upscale apartment complex is rising directly across from Goodwood, and adjacent industrial acreage is for sale, seemingly destined for residential construction.

Inside Goodwood, there is a tap room and production area packed with stainless steel brewing and fermenting vessels. Upstairs is a vast space that might someday host special events.

In the basement, dozens of barrels are lined in repose. The barrels are used only once by Goodwood, and before being filled, must be closely sniffed, inspected and tested for contamination. Beer remains in the barrel for 30 to 90 days, depending on the type.

Beer ages “in” these barrels, as opposed to “on” them. Mitzlaff explains the difference:

“All our beers are aged either ‘in’ or ‘on’ wood. Aging ‘in’ wood refers to barrel aging from 30 to 90 days, depending on the type of beer we are producing. Aged ‘on’ means we are adding wood to the process.”

Goodwood’s aged-in-the-barrel line includes Bourbon Barrel Stout and Bourbon Barrel Ale, as well as Red Wine Barrel Saison and Brandy Barrel Barbarian Honey Ale. Among those aged “on” wood are Louisville KY Lager (ash), Pale Ale (poplar) and Walnut Brown Ale (walnut). Intriguingly, a seasonal IPA is planned, with an uncommon twist of aging “on” native aromatic cedar.

Wood changes beer; breweries change neighborhoods

The Goodwood line of beers is available in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio and Virginia, and with other states queued and ready for their share, Mitzlaff has a plan to serve them.

It is called Paristown Pointe, a $28 million project to be located approximately a mile away from Goodwood’s current location on a patch of ground where Barrett Street meets East Broadway.

Paristown Pointe is a certifiably ambitious neighborhood redevelopment proposal involving multiple investors who are seeking to leverage state tourism tax credits to create an arts and culture district.

Plans call for an enlarged Louisville KY Stoneware factory, a multi-use theater for the Kentucky Center for the Arts, renovated housing, commercial space … and yes, a new Goodwood brewery.

“We’ll have a 70,000-barrel brewery and a significant taproom, beer garden and rooftop bar in Paristown Pointe,” says Mitzlaff. “We’ll continue to operate our existing brewery and taproom.”

Make no mistake: 70,000 barrels is a substantial amount of beer. It represents a potential brewing capacity four times larger than Goodwood has today. In 2014, a craft brewery producing this much beer would have placed 44th in production for the entire country.

Yet such a rate of growth has ample precedent in craft brewing, and Goodwood’s rebranded identity can only be enhanced by participation in what might be a nationally celebrated redevelopment project.

Goodwood’s brewery at Paristown Pointe will concentrate on aged-in-the-barrel beers, and will boast a fully automated brew house as well as both bottling and canning lines. If all goes according to plan, brewing will start in summer, 2017.

Halbleib is bullish about Goodwood’s overall prospects. “Craft beer as an industry has come too far with barrel aging to think of it as a fad,” he concludes. “The sheer variety of brews aged in barrels or on wood these days is mind boggling.”

It is, and it seems only natural that a Kentucky brewery should lead the way by specializing in this emerging art.

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October 17: AFTER THE FIRE: These old, old habits die hard.

October 10: AFTER THE FIRE: The Great Taste of the Midwest is the best beer fest of them all.

October 3: AFTER THE FIRE: New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming occupation isn't alleviating my "craft" beer Twitter depression.

September 26: AFTER THE FIRE: The seasonality of Oktoberfest in time, beer and year.


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AFTER THE FIRE: New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming occupation isn't alleviating my "craft" beer Twitter depression.

AFTER THE FIRE: New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming occupation isn't alleviating my "craft" beer Twitter depression. 

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Idly cruising Twitter one recent evening, I happened upon a jarring retweet dispensed from a regional “craft” brewery’s official account.

It was nasty and misogynistic attack on the plaintiff in a biracial rape case, and judging from the hashtags, it may originally have emanated from supporters of the once and future Klansman, David Duke. Sadly, both Indiana and Kentucky have been traditional bastions of hooded white supremacy.

This dubious retweet was deleted so rapidly that I wasn’t able to snap a screenshot, and for this I’m oddly thankful, although my comforting rationale for its hasty removal – hey, someone probably confused his or her personal account with the brewery handle – isn’t tremendously reassuring upon closer examination.

Since the dawn of the brewing revolution, it has been my operating assumption that most of us are leftists. In the 90s, I simply can’t recall meeting very many fascists in the business.

However, as someone told me back in kindergarten, never assume; you make an ass out of "u" and me. Probably my sampling was always too small, and in terms of demographics, it’s unlikely that "craft" beer would be any different in attitudinal composition than the nation as a whole.

And yet it strikes me that positing a split between Democrats and Republicans (or liberals versus conservatives) in "craft" brewing circles is one thing, and retweeting the likes of David Duke is something else entirely.

Aberrant? Abhorrent? As the shoe or mash paddle fits.

It’s hard imagining me as a cockeyed optimist, but I genuinely believed that what we were doing in elevating better beer was ultimately inclusive – in ideal terms, if not in socio-economic reality. After all, there’s a market for dollar beers utterly removed from our reach.

Sexism, racism, abject macho stupidity -- tell me, how is this strengthening the revolution’s gains?

Or is it that you’re ignorant of the revolution’s tenets … and by extension, certain key elements of the American historical record? Given the comic-opera presidential campaign, perhaps 2016 was destined to be the year when the last bits of innocence went swirling down gold-plated toilets.

There isn’t much one grizzled veteran of the beer wars can do to protest in a case like this, though one response is crystal clear to me: I buy far less beer than before, and giving me a reason not to buy yours makes my choice -- nay, my life -- much easier.

How very disappointing.

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Closer to home, New Albany’s peculiar institution of Harvest Homecoming approaches.

This year, the Curmudgeons are taking a rational route out of the ensuing discordancy – specifically, I-65, which gets us started on the northward journey to Madison, Wisconsin and four classic days removed from the civic daze.

Properly rendered, community festivals are just the sort of exercise to promote good times, unite the citizenry, help us bond through joy and alcohol (on second thought, that’s a redundancy), and maybe provide another yearly excuse to conduct a spate of deep street cleaning – preferably, both before and after the crowds come through.

Unfortunately, when it comes to celebrations, New Albany prefers ponderous bludgeoning over subtle stilettos. In rhetorical terms, so do I, and yet my feelings about Harvest Homecoming probably are more nuanced than they often appear to be.

I like it, except when I don’t.

Harvest Homecoming is New Albany’s annual 800-lb municipal gorilla, or stated more mildly, it is the granddaddy of all festivals in this slowly recovering, stubbornly hidebound city.

The annual arrival of the itinerant carney corps follows the opening Saturday parade, an increasingly dull “family-oriented” exercise, and then on the following Thursday the heart of the historic downtown business district is handed over lock, stock and sewer pipe to Harvest Homecoming’s mysterious, Kremlinesque governing committee.

Four solid days of throng-crowded booths ensue, increasingly manned not by local indies but roving huckster mercenaries, dispensing foodstuffs, arts, crafts, politics and anti-abortion counseling, and completely disrupting any semblance of downtown commerce as meant to function normally.

Increasingly, this yearly disruption constitutes the flash point. For decades, there was little objection to Harvest Homecoming’s yearly invasion and occupation of downtown, because downtown was a ghost town.

Now it isn’t, and dynamic revitalization has a predictable way of igniting a revolution of rising expectations among a new generation of downtown business owners, investors and clients.

These are plain facts.

However, as yet, there is no obvious solution to dynamism’s clash with conservatism, primarily because the low level of daily communication between various interested parties makes sparse dialogue between North and South Korea look like a beer hall sing-along in Munich.

Yes, there have been painstakingly slow and incremental concessions, and as Harvest Homecoming generationally reloads, the festival slowly is going through a necessary process of reinvention.

May it proceed a bit faster, please.

But from the standpoint of newer downtown businesses, the root equation remains largely unaltered: Harvest Homecoming’s longtime business model is dependent on the existence of a clean, moribund downtown grid that no longer exists, and if anything, will grow even less adaptive to the festival’s needs in the years to come as downtown residency become the norm, not the exception.

My personal nuances are these: I don’t dislike the idea of Harvest Homecoming, only its current implementation. I believe it can be adapted to take full advantage of potential symmetry between it and an evolving downtown business district, without sacrificing its tradition, and to the benefit of all parties involved. I envision a downtown food and drink court on the current booth grid, one maximizing the uniqueness of our burgeoning dining scene, retaining space for booths while not blocking year-long purveyors. I foresee a celebration of what downtown New Albany is, and is becoming.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I’m just the only one stupid enough to dream aloud. For this, I'm sure to be punished.

Again.

(Go here to learn about a wonderful new initiative on Friday, October 7 called the Harvest Beer Hop)

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September 26: AFTER THE FIRE: The seasonality of Oktoberfest in time, beer and year.

September 19: AFTER THE FIRE: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism (2014).

September 12: AFTER THE FIRE: England, or one man's heightened cholesterol panic is another man's nostalgic repast (2013).

September 5: AFTER THE FIRE: Beer stories and bedtime for gonzo (2013).

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AFTER THE FIRE: The seasonality of Oktoberfest in time, beer and year.

AFTER THE FIRE: The seasonality of Oktoberfest in time, beer and year.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Let the record show that in 2016, our Kentuckiana (Indyucky?) weather became tolerable again by Monday, the 26th of September.

The air conditioning had run constantly from the beginning of June, and it was a pleasure to switch it off. There were no 100-degree days I can recall, although temps topped 90 for a record number of days. We also had frequent rain, contributing to a steaminess more commonly associated with Florida.

Taken together, these atmospheric variables wreaked havoc on our five tomato plants, which grew like weeds but only began yielding fruit in early September.

The point to all this is that having endured three and a half months of pain, autumn conditions arrived overnight, and with them the impulse to drink an Oktoberfest (or Märzen) beer.

Naturally, by this point they’d been on store shelves for weeks, as had a profusion of pumpkin-influenced marketing exercises. Well, to each his own. I’m no fan of pumpkin-anything, even when it isn’t used as pretext to flavor beers with baking spices best left in their jars, and yet if I were to crave one, 90-degree weather isn’t the time for it.

To be honest, I’ve nothing profound to add to the seasonal beer timing debate, by now a staple of poorly written click bait portals. Rather, my aim is to remark upon how wonderful it can be to enjoy seasonal beers in their appropriate season, especially when they’re well-crafted lagers.

Oktoberfest always was misleading to American ears, this being a “German” concept confined largely to Bavaria and its capital, Munich, and beginning in September, not October.

Back in the 1980s, when we first began receiving shipments of Oktoberfest beer from Bavarian breweries, these tended to be malty brown-shaded lagers. Subsequently they seemed to lighten in color, while remaining malt forward, impeccably balanced and of slightly higher alcoholic strength than the norm.

I couldn’t ever separate them from two primary influences.

The first was Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson’s descriptions of Oktoberfest as festival and seasonal beer, and the second was finally being there in Munich in 1989 to witness one and drink the other.

Kindly indulge a look back.

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In September of 1989, after an eventful summer spent chasing history in the East Bloc, the leaves were beginning to turn in Copenhagen when it was time for the rail journey to Munich. I’d never been to Oktoberfest, and meant to redress this oversight.

We stocked up on beer, salami, beer, cheese, beer, bread and more beer before boarding for the overnight journey to the Bavarian capital, where reservations had been made at an inexpensive “pension” (small family-run guesthouse) near the Hauptbahnhof, or central train station.

Upon arrival, it was still morning. We hurried down the platform to the famous Imbiss at the foot of Gleis (track) 16. The Imbiss is long gone, victim of extensive remodeling, modernization and gentrification, and it wasn’t all that much even in its heyday, but during the 1980’s this simple, functional train station concession stand was a genuine Munich destination for budget travelers the world over.

There were two long windows with outside counter space, plentiful tile and stainless steel, wonderful beer taps, kitchen equipment for preparing basic snacks and several customarily greasy, though by necessity efficient, employees in blue smocks.

In front of the Imbiss were a handful of tables that resembled smaller, elongated versions of the telephone wire spools that used to litter backyards in the Georgetown of my youth. Standing at the tables in morning, evening and night were locals, tourists, commuters, vagrants and assorted hangers-on, the majority of them savoring the Imbiss’s only true specialties: Cool Hacker-Pschorr golden lager at a reasonable price and a portion of Leberkäse, a high-quality form of all-meat bologna cut from a warm deli-sized square loaf, weighed and priced, and served with a crusty roll and plenty of mustard.

The Imbiss at Gleis 16 never disappointed, and with breakfast under our belts, it was time to claim the room and prepare for the main event: Oktoberfest, 1989. A few hours, unburdened of luggage, with Deutschmarks in hand and harboring a powerful thirst, a vast fairgrounds lay before me. It was crowded with carnival rides, arcades, food vendors of every stripe and giant prefabricated beer halls.

There was at least one Oktoberfest beer hall for each of Munich's six major breweries, all having every appearance of being permanent structures, and yet they would be completely dismantled and stored away at the end of the two-week festival.

Thousands of people of all colors, creeds and nationalities were spread out before me, reveling in Bavaria’s most notorious celebration of beer as a beverage, as a foodstuff and as a way of daily life. My favorites were the natives dressed in folkloric Dirndls and Lederhosen. Later I learned that Oktoberfest is far more localized during the afternoon, yielding to foreign visitors by night.

I'd come to the grounds by way of the U-Bahn (subway), where scores of policemen assisted in the packing and unpacking of underground trains at a station built overly large for peak usage during Oktoberfest’s annual run.

Emerging into the cool dampness, I plunged into the throng and was carried through the Midway by the crowd, past bumper car arenas and target-shooting booths that wouldn’t be out of place at an American state fair, and toward beer halls that assuredly would.

Soon the mass of people parted in near Biblical fashion to reveal the majesty of the Paulaner hall. Gaping at the vision before me, I went off-tackle and bulled ahead. From fifty yards away, the interior was visible through several sets of opened double doors; trancelike, my eyes focused on the octagonal bandstand in the center, where an oom-pah orchestra twice the size of any I'd seen before held forth to the undisguised delight of hundreds of glass-wielding drinkers.

The temporary structure seemed to shake and roll, and to no surprise: Half the people inside were dancing and singing atop the heavy wooden tables, tables that surely had been constructed with precisely that sort of punishment in mind. Obviously, considerations of decorum -- those restraints on behavior customarily observed by society -- had been forgotten, to the obvious edification of all those present.

I stopped at one of the outer doors. Just yards away, absurdly long rows of whole chickens were being roasted on spits. Signs decreed the price of the liter-sized Masses to be six Deutschmarks, 75 pfennigs - or was it 7.10? Either way, think of it as $8.50 for 33.8 ounces.

Just like in the photos, matronly waitresses toting anywhere from two to ten of the deliciously full Masses rushed past. Pretzels the size of large plates were being eaten.

Still standing at the door, I beheld this veritable city of beer, and as I started to enter, a greenish-hued man staggered past me and began vomiting violently next to a steel support beam.

Finally, it seemed that I'd found home.

Im Himmel gibt es kein bier! Darum trinken wir es hier!

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Consequently, and unsurprisingly, these sources and sensations have combined to produce an inner barometer.

To see an Oktoberfest beer on sale in mid-August is an optical illusion to me. If I buy one, it is destined to remain in my cupboard until the Ohio Valley adapts to Bavarian climatic norms. If this occurs in mid-September, that’s fine. If it doesn’t happen until October, even better.

And if I might be in Munich some sweet day to once again experience the real thing … but maybe not. Nothing can match the memory of the first time. Better to board a train for the countryside, find a weekend harvest celebration in a small town, and do it together one more time.

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September 19: AFTER THE FIRE: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism (2014).

September 12: AFTER THE FIRE: England, or one man's heightened cholesterol panic is another man's nostalgic repast (2013).

September 5: AFTER THE FIRE: Beer stories and bedtime for gonzo (2013).

August 29: AFTER THE FIRE: In the Red Room, we’re all left – right?

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AFTER THE FIRE: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism (2014).

AFTER THE FIRE: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism (2014).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Originally published in 2014, and with a strange sort of resonance as the most insufferable political campaign in American history limps to the finish line.

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Way back in 2010, when 10 Barrel Brewing was but a gleam in Carlos Brito’s numbers-crunching testes, President Barack Obama returned to a theme often broached during his historic campaign for the White House. It happened during the 2010 State of the Union address.

“The best anti-poverty program around is a world class education.”

No, not the Indiana wholesaler.

Naturally, the precise components of a “world class education” are open to interpretation, discussion and debate between open-minded citizens, assuming you can find any of them in these idiotically polarized times, but the overall sentiment that education is a corrective to impoverishment has been proven to be truthful again and again.

I submit that the word “impoverishment” has more than one meaning as used in this context. We’d be correct in the assumption that there are clear and compelling correlations between education and the eradication of material impoverishment.

However, we might also consider impoverishment in creative, artistic and cultural contexts, and how one’s attitude toward the general topic of knowledge, pertaining to its veracity as an end onto itself as well as the tangible benefits gained from expansive education as opposed to a confining illiteracy, shapes what we know and the uses to which we put our knowledge.

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who drank wine: “With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it."

What I think he meant is that possessing something of supposed value for the sole purpose of the object’s ability to reflect its “value” back on the holder somewhat misses the point. The true value is derived from the object being used wisely, and a well-rounded education supplies the means to make this determination.

Given the perpetual linkages between education and personal advancement, why is it that people choose to devalue the notion of education, eschewing the why, how and wherefore, and substituting in their place a solipsistic, narcissism-driven, knee-jerk, me-first hedonism?

Perhaps it’s the logical outcome of our American strains of materialism and consumerism. When it comes to pulse-quickening snobbery, exclusionary avarice and frenzied hoarding, the very last thought surfacing in one’s fevered, acquisitive brain is the possibility that all is not what it seems.

Do you still desire the object once it is revealed that the profit chain leads straight into the Texas-sized mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, or to the owners of factory-farmed chickens wallowing in their own feces, or to that bastard Obama’s pocket … or, into the very coffers of ISIS (read: AB-InBev).

Except you really want it, don’t you? You want it right now – and by “it” I refer not to a mass-produced Trojan Goose barrel-aged ale, but to a blissfully unexamined version of capitalist doltishness, wherein there are no reasons whatever for diagnosing the nature of the itch, only interminable scratching.

The writer Aldous Huxley called this phenomenon soma. If you don’t know the source of this reference, perhaps it’s time to read a book.

But I’m nothing if not stubborn. Ideas matter, and yet at present, both the country at large and my own beer and brewing milieu are dismally stupid and mercilessly tacky places. These daily tsunamis of crass materialism and consumerist greed have come to define the American experience, and even when the topic is “craft” beer – perhaps modern America’s signature accomplishment – we have digressed just as quickly into 24-7, must-have shopping zombies, pausing occasionally to thank Jesus for the blessed privilege of possessing our baubles, and ignoring what’s happening in our own back yards because there’s not enough status in mere localism.

It’s the old Chinese proverb – yes, you guessed it, the one printed on plasticized card stock suitable for framing, and available not from the heirs to Billy Mays, but from Wal-Mart via Guangdong Province:

"It’s all about me."

Yes, it is.

And that’s also why YOU don’t interest ME any longer.

---

What would happen if you combined classic sacred choral music with a thesaurus? You’d have a synonym for a seminal hymnal!

Hi, Roger Baylor here for the Sing ‘o’ Saurus. It’s no ordinary reference book.

Watch this!

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September 12: AFTER THE FIRE: England, or one man's heightened cholesterol panic is another man's nostalgic repast (2013).

September 5: AFTER THE FIRE: Beer stories and bedtime for gonzo (2013).

August 29: AFTER THE FIRE: In the Red Room, we’re all left – right?

August 22: AFTER THE FIRE: Drink, smoke and enjoy.

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AFTER THE FIRE: England, or one man's heightened cholesterol panic is another man's nostalgic repast (2013).

AFTER THE FIRE: England, or one man's heightened cholesterol panic is another man's nostalgic repast (2013).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

As originally published at Louisville KYBeer.com in December, 2013, and while previously reprinted here at the blog, I've been daydreaming about Real Ale again. Will Brexit have an affect on traditional ale in the UK (or what comes of it)? I've no idea, but let's hope not.

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“The secret of a happy life is to know when to stop – and then go that bit further.”
–Inspector Morse, classic British television police crime solver

The very least I could do during two weeks spent in England’s lovely West Country was to ingest my gout medicine each and every morning without fail – preferably washed down with a pint of cask-conditioned Bitter from one of those pubs nearby already dispensing it, but in a pinch, grudgingly conceding the utility of mere water.

Yes, I know: Fish do IT in THAT. The solution? Eat more fish, especially with chips.

Somewhere a health fanatic reads and brays with dismay, but have no fear. It’s only despairing, defeatist clatter of the sort Winston Churchill wouldn’t have countenanced, even after his morning bottle of champagne, and these naysayers are inaudible to me — fully muffled by the cacophonous sizzle of a traditional English breakfast frying atop the stove, even the waxy tomato from Tesco’s, because it is destined for maximum exposure to hot oil just like all the rest.

Queue the Elgar, and consider this partial list of foodstuffs joyfully consumed during my holiday, including both local “English” fare and widely available culinary options borrowed from elsewhere.

Anchovies fillets (fresh)
Bacon
Baked beans
Bangers and mash
Black pudding (i.e., blood sausage)
Cornish pasties
Crab sandwiches
Egg rolls
Falafel
Fish pie (not Stargazy pie, alas)
Gajrati (regional vegetarian Indian)
Haddock and chips
Pie, mash, eel and liquor (the latter is gravy)
Pizza (loaded)
Smoked salmon
Spanish tapas
Steak & kidney pie
Thai red curry
Yorkshire pudding

Alas, I digress. It generally is my custom to entertain and inform in purely fermentable measures of prose, and yet on this most recent English holiday in July, 2013, I found it quite unthinkable to separate the culinary from the ale-mentary.

Overall, ways of the new were not my objective, and I did not search for top chefs flashing their own branded apron and sauce wear. Rather, my task was to focus on the glories of the much maligned traditional English table, and to accompany them with the native products of classic ale-making.

Mission accomplished. First, let’s review the liquidity to be found in a reference volume.

Just after purchasing plane tickets, and before any other arrangements had been made, I purchased the essential book for ale hunting in the United Kingdom: “Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) Good Beer Guide,” edited by Roger Protz, and fully revised for publication each year.

CAMRA is the beer world’s oldest and most doggedly pervasive consumer protection society, founded in 1973 for the express purposes of espousing and protecting cask-conditioned “real” ale from the intrusions of modern times. What exactly is cask-conditioned “real” ale? CAMRA explains:

Real ale is a natural product brewed using traditional ingredients and left to mature in the cask (container) from which it is served in the pub through a process called secondary fermentation. It is this process which makes real ale unique amongst beers and develops the wonderful tastes and aromas which processed beers can never provide.

Just know that traditional cask-conditioned ale is a living entity. It is pre-industrial, “slow” beer at its finest, predating every advance in ease of packaging, and preceding all processing shortcuts undertaken for the sake of modernity.

Consequently, as a product requiring training, thought and effort to maintain and dispense properly, real ale and the pub where it is consumed are inextricably linked. In America, the “coldest beer in town” merely signposts the triumph of refrigeration. In England, the best pint of real ale within walking distance of a bus stop is stirring testament to the publican’s commitment to craft.

That’s why CAMRA’S beer guide is vital. The organization’s local chapter members serve as diligent boots on the ground, studiously analyzing ales and pubs on a daily basis. Their intelligence gathering is the heart of the book, making it the top source of information for the visitor who cares less about his bed and breakfast than finding pints of fresh ale. Which pubs are tops at tending their firkins? What do they usually pour? Do they serve snacks or meals? Are they hosts for discourse in their community? The book provides these answers, and many more.

My first visit to Devon and Cornwall was in 2009, and four years later, there have been changes in the pub scene. Owing to regulatory, political and societal factors too numerous to recount, pubs in the UK are diminishing in number, and that’s a bad sign. At the same time, there are more breweries now at work than at any point in a half-century.

Dozens of newcomers are brewing classic ale styles — Mild, Bitter, IPA, Stout and Porter – alongside newer variations, and they’re supplying local pubs. There may be fewer venues, but the range of choice probably is greater. Session strengths (below 4.5% abv) remain the norm, and while I might drop names (St. Austell, Skinner’s, Summerskill and Bridgetown), it wouldn’t matter, because none of the beers brewed by these excellent breweries are available anywhere close to Louisville KY. This is as it should be. They await your arrival, over there.

On a sunny Sunday in July, my wife’s cousin drove us from the city of Plymouth to the Dartmoor National Park. There, surrounded by rolling, sparse uplands and freely roaming sheep, we dined at a venerable establishment called the Dartmoor Inn in Merrivale. I enjoyed roast beef with gravy, cabbage, vegetables and Yorkshire pudding. Two pints of well-tuned local Jail Ale from the Dartmoor Brewery in nearby Princetown completed this time-honored Sunday Roast.

Frankly, I gloried in the ambience: Dark walls, wooden beams, a low-hanging ceiling and a fireplace, with humps, stoops and irregular measurements, and overall, minimal space for a heavyweight like me to navigate. The roasted meal was deliciously overcooked, and the ale’s ideally balanced malt and hops kept my palate sharp amid the meat and butter. It was the embodiment of a lifetime’s fascination with BBC News, “The Last of the Summer Wine” and maritime gin rations.

But what of the calories and cholesterol?

Whenever healthfulness began encroaching, I merely reached for another custard tart, found the closest CAMRA-listed pub, and waited for the feeling to pass.

Brew, Britannia.

---

September 5: AFTER THE FIRE: Beer stories and bedtime for gonzo (2013).

August 29: AFTER THE FIRE: In the Red Room, we’re all left – right?

August 22: AFTER THE FIRE: Drink, smoke and enjoy.

August 15: AFTER THE FIRE: Listening to "Dixieland" jazz, and thinking about drinking a beer.

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AFTER THE FIRE: Beer stories and bedtime for gonzo (2013).

AFTER THE FIRE: Beer stories and bedtime for gonzo (2013).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

As originally published at LouisvilleBeer.com on December 30, 2013, and previously not offered in its entirety here at the blog. It's been three years, though it seems like only yesterday.

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“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”
–Leo Tolstoy

It’s been a long, strange trip, hasn’t it?

The first brewing insurgency of the modern American era began at New Albion Brewing Company, which commenced operations in Sonoma, California, in 1976. Auspiciously, a revolution in beer was spawned in the very same year as America’s Bicentennial celebrated the culmination of a previous uprising.

As a casual student of history, I’m aware that almost inevitably, revolutions consolidate into their own systematized pecking orders, even as they mature and gravitate toward future appointments with reinvention (arguably the best case scenario) or, more often, messy counter-revolutions.

Maybe we’re witnessing one or both of these outcomes just now in the world of beer.

These days, what used to be known as microbrewing bears the designeration of craft beer, and in terms of consumer recognition, the siren’s call of mainstream acceptance beckons. If this weren’t the case, there’d be no Blue Moon or Shock Top, those sleek mockrobrews designered and distributed by mass-market brewers for the express purpose of pilfering craft brewing’s vibrant foundational imagery for the benefit of shelf space and engorged multinational shareholders.

Yet in fairness, there’d also not be a Sierra Nevada factory perched incongruously amid the Appalachians, or Lagunitas situated on both the Pacific and Gold Coasts. When it comes to robber baron capitalism, pecking orders frequently can be brutal, and maybe we’re not doing so well with our own institutional imagery if the misty mythology no longer seems worth protecting.

Not everyone sees it this way, and the fact that I persist in doing so clearly marks me as an aging craft beer militant, one whose radical worldview was shaped by an active desire for better beer, close to home, amid a denuded landscape of ridiculously limited choice. There were fewer than 100 breweries in the United States when I attained legal drinking age in 1981; more than 30 years later, the number is 2,500. The beer scene has mutated beyond recognition and comprehension, and the revolutionary cadres have splintered into multiple spheres of specialized interests.

A homebrewing culture analyzes beer by ingredients and methodology, espousing a “brew it yourself” ethos, while traders and swappers revel in the mechanics of the chase, the art of the deal, and the joy of collecting.

There is a priestly ratings caste trumpeting the presumed exactitude and objectivity of language in quantifying beer, and a localist persuasion embracing the personal, grassroots experience of craft beer in the context of places and people.

On widely scattered occasions, albeit rare, these spheres even manage to overlap. Me? I’m an ardent localist, with an asterisk.

For those of us who grew to beer-turity prior to the Internet’s incursions, when social media was a figment of Dick Tracy’s wrist radio – the downtrodden tightly clutching dog-eared books written by the late beer writer Michael Jackson and anointing him as a reliable guide for pursuit of the perfect pint — one of the most important aspects of craft beer is the ability to tell a good story.

Jackson excelled at it. He was a journalist by trade, and relentlessly factual in his approach, yet a sheer delight in storytelling is his primary legacy, especially through a knack for linking good beer with interesting people in specific places. At the end of the day, what else is there?

I found myself reacting to these stories first by repeating them, and later, augmenting them with embellishment from personal experiences, the latter gained initially by traveling, and later by operating my own pub. They became personal gateway beer tales, tied inextricably together, addressing the past and advocating the future.

In 1992, the pub itself represented the logical conclusion to my quest. What we needed in my hometown was a beer culture of its own, one embodying the litany of who, what, where and why. Elements of other beer cultures could be adapted and deployed toward this end, but the objective never was to “be” Bamberg (to cite one example).

Rather, it was to create a milieu that would provide a local experience similar to Bamberg, primarily for those of us living here, and also for those who’d like to come visit. Eventually, we’d have our own brewery, which would be the apogee; locally brewed beer as restorative and springboard.

Central to all of this was, and is, storytelling. Nowadays, quality craft beer storytelling is hardly dead, although I fear it’s gone into some manner of cryogenic hibernation. In the present time, craft beer enthusiasm is expressed with a throwaway brevity, defying any true depth of feeling; miles-wide, inches-deep. Social media affords an abundance of minimal exposure, trivializing and often eliminating context. Beer lovers check in, tweet, post and rate – and yet they hardly ever tell stories.

I find it profoundly sad.

Consider the typically triumphant craft beer photo on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Usually it’s a hard-to-find beer from a highly rated brewery, the further from home and harder to source, the better. The beer’s “proper” signature glass is strategically situated, half-filled and seductive.

Unfortunately, what’s missing are human beings and an explanation for why any of it matters, and the end result is craft beer objectified, little more than accumulated beer porn to the practicing fetishist, without any need for an accompanying story because fellow beer narcissists are expected to already feel the tumescence of the titillation, and automatically shift into fully salivating Pavlovian mutt at the first glimpse of the visual prompt.

We all do it, even me.

As Billie Holiday sang long ago, “Them that’s got shall have, them that’s not shall lose.” I don’t root for the haves. Underdogs are way more appealing.
I’m tired of losing, not in the superficial sense of final game scores or reds and blacks on a bank balance sheet, but from acquiescing for far too long in a process whereby the collective I’ve spent a quarter-century assembling somehow tosses away the thread of its own narrative.

Rather than gaze longingly upon someone else’s masturbatory beer glass, I’d rather be able to tell the story of why the liquid in the glass is important, assuming it still is – and to be perfectly honest, there are times when I have serious doubts as to whether any meaning remains to be examined, although as a contrarian of long and sincere standing, I’m honor-bound and forever obliged to doubt and re-examine even those precepts nearest and dearest to my heart.

However, what I know beyond a shadow of doubt is that in the year 201417, it is time to tell more stories, not fewer, and to remove craft beer from its selfie-induced vacuum by relating it to the real world outside. Stories build community by reinforcing beer’s local origins, and stories just might be the best way to reach the next 10%, absent the pomp, circumstance and end-zone chest-thumping that has come so infuriatingly to define and bastardize the genre.

In order to complete the journey, perhaps we must come back to town, back to the origins, and back to the notion of there being no such thing as strangers, only those who haven’t yet become friends. Maybe the best way to become friends is to have a chat, not compare soiled raincoats.

Just think about it. Quite possibly, there’s something left to learn.

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August 29: AFTER THE FIRE: In the Red Room, we’re all left – right?

August 22: AFTER THE FIRE: Drink, smoke and enjoy.

August 15: AFTER THE FIRE: Listening to "Dixieland" jazz, and thinking about drinking a beer.

August 8: AFTER THE FIRE: A pre-digital Bohemian vignette, 1989.

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AFTER THE FIRE: In the Red Room, we’re all left – right?

AFTER THE FIRE: In the Red Room, we’re all left – right?

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Have you ever had the feeling you’re being watched?

The sensation isn’t irrational, and it’s not paranoia. Rather, it’s the sneaking suspicion that you’re being toyed with, prompted, or set up.

Suddenly you’re confronted with a situation so weirdly surreal that surely a hidden camera is aimed your way, primed to capture your dumbfounded, flailing reaction for speedy editing into a YouTube video, to be greeted virally by the guffaws of the uneducated, addled masses.

My former manager at Scoreboard Liquors must have felt this way on the infamous day thirty-odd years ago when a complete stranger strolled in, pointed at the door to the rear office, and asked, “Do you mind if I go back there and change my pants?”

YouTube obviously didn’t exist back then, but Candid Camera did. The late Lloyd “Duck” Cunningham’s unprintable reply to the man’s request would have played well in syndication, with Allen Funt joyfully suffering the brunt of bleeped-out epithets.

—

It brings to mind the time when my inbox disgorged a Yelp review notification. An customer identified only as Manny was deeply troubled.

A little while ago I noticed there was a room that had pictures of several mass murdering, genocidal, tyrannical dictators on the walls. As a customer what meaning should I take from that? In my opinion it seems to show support from the owner of New Albania of these tyrants?

I enjoy the pizza at NABC but I don’t enjoy the thought of supporting someone that idolized people like the pictures and posters you seem to proudly display. Maybe I misunderstand their meaning.

My initial reaction was confusion. Manny filed his one-star review under NABC Bank Street Brewhouse, although the alleged "shrine" prompting his consternation has existed for two decades not downtown, but at NABC’s Pizzeria & Public House.

Next came annoyance. Murderers, tyrants and dictators on the wall, in the Red Room?

If so, who had possessed the nerve to pull down my Commie regalia and replace it with fascist iconography – Franco, Mussolini, Idi Amin and Dick Cheney?

Of course, I soon realized he was referring to the usual Red Room stalwarts like Lenin, Che and Gus Hall. Fair enough, I thought. The political spectrum for crimes against humanity has a tendency to mutate, depending on where one is standing at the time.

Here was my reply.

It isn’t necessarily a misunderstanding on your part, but what I can tell you with certainty is there’s no idolatry on mine.

I remain a leftist, broadly speaking, having traveled in the East Bloc and USSR as a young man in the 1980s, but while I found these countries fascinating from a number of standpoints, they were not places I ever wished to live.

Your question is asked every now and then, and my answer always has been the same: The Red Room means whatever the observer wishes for it to mean: Kitschy poster art emporium, spoils of Cold War victory or a shrine of reverence.

However, the primary intent for me is for it to serve as a talking point to help keep a piece of still-recent history living, in the sense that with each passing year, fewer (mostly younger) customers have any clue what the era was about.

The verdict of history is fairly clear when it comes to the legacy of Stalin and Mao, and I have confidence that most interested parties will reach that conclusion, as you and I already have. But first they must be interested in history and motivated to investigate it. In my view, the Red Room periodically serves that purpose.

As for what I was thinking more than 20 years ago with regard to this tiny bejeweled dining space, my prime consideration at the time was to have a place to display the many propaganda pieces I’d hauled home from travels abroad.

One thing led to another, and there it was. The Red Room came together non-metaphorically. I’m the first to admit there is as little to idolize on Stalin’s part as Hitler’s, but to repeat, the point lies elsewhere.

Decades have passed and the older generations have departed. Precious little discussion takes place about the “-isms” dominating the entirety of the 20th century … and sorry, yonder Teahadists, but petulant ranting about Communism and Obamacare amid voluminous ricocheting spittle does not suffice as earnestness.

It remains that to forget history is to risk repeating it, as either Santayana or Carlos Santana once remarked. I’m in favor of reminders. If you ask me, local school children should visit the Red Room on their field trips.

The Red Room’s “meaning”?

It prompted a question from Manny about the Red Room’s meaning, simple as that, even if the real estate in question now lies outside my immediate bailiwick. May these historical inquiry instigators survive the business buy-out – if the blessed cha-ching ever occurs in my lifetime.

—

Ironically, my single favorite example of work- and history-related consumer behavior occurred not in the comfortable confines of the Red Room, but at Bank Street Brewhouse, not long after it opened in 2009.

One of our servers was asked by a well-dressed while male customer to explain Roger’s political beliefs. The visitor had noticed the red stars and leftist imagery on the shiny new brewing tanks visible just past the dining room window.

Our man on the floor, who’d studied some history and political science in college, made a game effort to interpret these complex threads of geopolitics, economics and the art of brewing, and to phrase them in snappy sentences reproducible on bumper stickers suitable for a Lexus, and yet the customer remained unimpressed, writing this on his charge card receipt:

“Tell your Commie boss to share the wealth.”

In order to accentuate his displeasure with my cheeky political proclivities, this rather boorish scion of an identifiably Falangist regional family left the gratuity column empty, thus idiotically stiffing the server while doing me no harm whatever.

Classy, eh?

Not only that, but he was mistaken; in fact, I still share the wealth every day – in terms of knowledge, as teachers are wont to do, because I’ve always been more a teacher than a businessman.

In 2009, my advice to our server was this:

“If it ever happens again, tell him you don’t care what sort of ‘-ist’ Roger is, just as long as he keeps signing my paycheck.”

Seven years later, permit me to consciously refrain from associating the Republican Party’s nominee for president with any of these memories.

After all, The Donald would be just as clueless as Manny and the Stiffer when it comes to the history in the Red Room.

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August 22: AFTER THE FIRE: Drink, smoke and enjoy.

August 15: AFTER THE FIRE: Listening to "Dixieland" jazz, and thinking about drinking a beer.

August 8: AFTER THE FIRE: A pre-digital Bohemian vignette, 1989.

August 1: AFTER THE FIRE: The devil made me drink it.

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AFTER THE FIRE: Drink, smoke and enjoy.

AFTER THE FIRE: Drink, smoke and enjoy.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

This column dates to October, 2012. It was originally published at LouisvilleBeer.com, and has not appeared in its entirety here at the blog.

I must note with sadness that Billow is no longer with us. However, The Office Cigar Shop and Lounge in Floyds Knobs and Riverside Cigar Shop/Match Cigar Bar in Jeffersonville have expanded local options exponentially.

It also should be said that a return to temperate weather would be much appreciated.

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Tolerable front porch weather resumed in September this year, and temperate temps lasted well into October. Suddenly, as though gripped by an obscure internalized auto-pilot, I found myself queuing at various local cigar purveyors, and layering my humidor.

New Albany is fortunate in this regard. There’s Kaiser Tobacco, which has operated on Pearl Street for more than 175 years, and also Billow, celebrating a year in business on Market Street.

Billow’s strategic location is especially pleasing to the senses when those days when the planets are aligned. Just next to it is the Quills coffee shop, and across the street Habana Blues, a Cuban restaurant. Aromas of cigars, coffees, teas and spicy roasted meats can be pervasive in that area, reminding us of how very important our retained impressions of smell can be, combining with sights and sounds to conjure wonderful memories.

And then there’s beer.

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In 1995, on a sunny fall afternoon in Antwerp, Belgium, we’d started drinking early at the Elfde Gebod (Eleventh Commandment) café, where religious statuary both sacred and profane lines the walls. The eccentric tableau is just creepy enough to be inspirational, so for those seeking a view of “Jesus with the head of a dog” while sipping Westmalle Tripel, the Elfde Gebod is just your kind of place.

Later that afternoon, my pot of North Sea mussels steamed in dry white wine was superb. Endless, graceful “bollekes” of locally brewed De Koninck amber ale were equally fabulous, and there remains a sneaking suspicion that we found Rodenbach on tap somewhere at a bar upstairs on the other side of the cathedral.

Belgium’s diamond capital is a city filled with food, drink and nightlife, and the specific reason why the memory of this particular day returned to me recently was a cigar, cradled in my hand, burning ever so slowly, emitting puffy smoke rings – the fruition of a long, patient process of growth, cultivation, harvesting, curing, hand rolling, packing and distribution.

It took me back to the conclusion of our Antwerp session so very long ago, because we ended the long day’s session at the famous beer bar called the Kulminator, where Dirk was featuring ten-year-old vintage dark ale called Breughel, brewed by a long defunct brewery (since then, it has been revived), as salvaged from a forgotten stash hidden in a friend’s garage.

Miraculously, the process of aging had been quite friendly to the Breughel. Oxidization offered a velvety patina of sherry-like nuttiness to concentrated fruitiness, on the order of plums, pecans and toffee. I drank one, ordered another, and lit an authentic Havana: The Romeo y Julieta Churchill, purchased a few days earlier at a tobacconist’s in Brussels.

At the time, I was quite sure it was the best cigar I’d ever smoked. Finely conditioned, properly humidified and boasting a clean draw and steady, stately, dead-even ash, it was full-bodied and unapologetic in flavor, and the sensory qualities of the tobacco were simply overwhelming. Not only that, I had a complex, nuanced beer to go along with the cigar. The match of power vs. power seemed ideal.

At the same time, as one who regularly enjoys good beer with good cigars, I must confess that at some level, doing so is counter-intuitive. Puffing on a cigar changes the way a beer tastes. Conversely, drinking a beer also changes the way a cigar tastes. Can partaking of beer and cigars together change the way both taste, but in a positive way, one modifying pleasurable aspects of each and yielding a harmonious, hedonistic whole?

I think so.

When given the chance to nip at a beer I haven’t previously tasted, my general inclination is to avoid cigar smoke; after all, the first Breughel in Antwerp went down before the cigar came out. This is a personal preference, and simple enough to keep straight. The point to me is that because quality beer and cigars both appeal to me, I’m likely to continue making simultaneous use of them, and with a wee bit of forethought, the experience can be enhanced.

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On the cigar side, the logical place to assess the range of pairing choices is the wrapper, which contributes much to the flavor profile and offers visual clues. Wrappers range from lighter to darker shades, with subtle, spicy notes common in the light wrappers and cocoa or chocolate hints noticeable as the color nears black.

Albeit imperfectly, these wrapper shades correspond to beer colors as a preliminary basis for pairing.

The base malt of beer is golden, with hues added through the use of specialty malts, which also provide flavors ranging from roast to espresso to wood smoke. Color alone doesn’t always indicate the strength and character of a beer, and it should be obvious that the lightest styles of beer won’t always pair well with tobacco even if the cigar is innately mild.

For instance, a golden-colored beer might be light and delicately hopped (Kolsch), medium-bodied, estery and phenolic (German Hefeweizen) or strong and malty sweet (Maibock). With a yellowish-brown Claro wrapper, Kolsch’s subtlety would be missed, and the assertive Maibock might overwhelm it. Among these three beer styles, a reasonable starting point might be Hefeweizen; a touch of clove and fruit for complementing the Claro’s spiciness.

Aggressively hoppy beers, including American Pale Ales and English ESBs, excel in the middle of the wrapper color range, especially Colorado (brown). Hops also can complement a cedar-like flavor component in cigars (sometimes gleaned from their modes of storage), but hoppy beers lacking a firm malt component, like an everyday Pilsner, often lack the heft to compete.

The greater the coffee, cocoa and chocolate content of the wrapper (Maduro and Oscuro), the less utility of either hops or spices, and far better the match with beers offering similarly dark character: Stouts, Porters, Belgian Dubbels, and any number of unclassifiable stronger, dark and blacker specialty brews.

As suggested long ago by my old friend Paul Mick, the residual sugar found in many bigger, darker beers serves as a leveling agent in the struggle for balance with fuller-bodied cigars. In a primal and purely axiomatic sense, the pinnacle of full-on-full pairings could well be oily, black Maduro cigars alongside bourbon-barrel-aged Imperial Stouts.

Of course, these musings will be familiar to cigar smokers with a taste for Port, and those already enamored of the wider world of whiskies. Kentucky’s legendary bourbon whisky pairs well with cigars because both possess woody flavors. The alcohol in the bourbon cleanses the palate; and the corn mash sweetness of the whisky balances the absence of sweetness in the tobacco. Or so it seems to me.

Indeed, the utility of experimentation never diminishes. So, what is your own strategy for beer and cigars?

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August 15: AFTER THE FIRE: Listening to "Dixieland" jazz, and thinking about drinking a beer.

August 8: AFTER THE FIRE: A pre-digital Bohemian vignette, 1989.

August 1: AFTER THE FIRE: The devil made me drink it.

July 28 (at NA Confidential): ON THE AVENUES: An imaginary exercise tentatively called The Curmudgeon Free House.


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AFTER THE FIRE: A pre-digital Bohemian vignette, 1989.

AFTER THE FIRE: A pre-digital Bohemian vignette, 1989.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

For the last five or six years, I’ve had an iPhone. Before this, from around 2002, a simple Nokia cell phone sufficed. During the entirety of this period, never once have I taken my phone with me when traveling abroad.

Rather, as much as possible, we try to stay off the grid when vacationing overseas. Yes, there’s an extremely modern world out there, especially in places like Estonia, which has pole-vaulted from Soviet-era poverty to the front of the hyper-connectivity queue. In a place like Tallinn, it’s very nearly a hardship not to have one’s phone in hand.

However, it makes me all the more determined to pack a tactile guidebook and paper map, and enjoy a merry reversion to prehistory – though not without a digital camera. My skills as a photographer are so greatly stunted that “do overs” are extremely valuable.

When I think back to the decades of the 1980s and my earlier jaunts, images of a lost world predictably crowd into my brain, but what I miss the most was the ability to get lost for months at a time – even in Europe, and without resorting to wilderness travel, for which I’m ill suited.

Camping?

You can't be serious.

Freedom?

It’s the ability to walk past a pay phone and feel no inclination whatever to connect with anyone. If you were lucky in those days, you’d get a postcard – if I could be bothered to hunt down stamps.

In 1987, Communist Hungary was my home for almost a month. I was to meet my friend Barrie in Moscow for a guided tour, and we’d pre-scheduled a window for me to call him and reconfirm our respective plans. It wasn't clear to me how I'd go about doing it.

The good news: I was in Budapest, the capital.

The bad news: There was no easy way to make an international phone call in Budapest or any other place in Hungary – unless one was staying in a top-dollar hotel, which I emphatically was not.

Even then … well, I heard stories.

Off to the city’s telecommunications center I trudged, because it wasn’t possible for most Hungarians to pick up their home phone and rotary dial the States. The building was big and dingy, and it was like going to a hospital waiting room where no one spoke English, but eventually I was able to reach an understanding, with one critical caveat.

I’d give them Barrie’s phone number and pay ahead for five minutes’ time. When the call actually was being dialed, which might occur 45 minutes or more later, I’d be summoned to a specific numbered booth … with the announcement of the number made in Hungarian over a crackling, muffled loudspeaker.

Szám tizenkilenc készen van.


Luckily, one of the workers made eye contact when the time came, and I had perhaps a minute’s worth of chat with Barrie before the connection fizzled out. It was enough, and I didn’t bother asking for a refund.

Obviously, there were hundreds of lovely and utterly unconnected vignettes amid my European wanderings, when there was time to indulge a genuine feeling of timelessness. One of them came in June of 1989.

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Our precise whereabouts in the bucolic Bohemian countryside southeast of Prague were blissfully unknown, but it was a lazy, sunny, aimless lunchtime.

My genial hosts were the aunt and uncle of a dear émigré friend from back home. They both had started the day puttering around their “weekend” house (the Russians would call it a dacha), tending to the garden.

Later, green peppers and onions would be chopped and cooked in a heavy iron skillet with big, fat pork sausages, alongside a salad of shredded cabbage, onions and homemade pickles. There was a football-sized crusty loaf, and plenty of butter.

Uncle Vlasta was the quintessential example of a Czech country boy made good. At the time, he was a proud, unrepentant Communist middle-tier administrator who had adroitly played the hand he was dealt, rising through the ranks to enjoy a solid, respectable and unpretentious life.

In that seemingly placid summer of ’89, there was little reason to believe the domestic scene would ever change. It was entirely unimaginable that a non-violent “Velvet Revolution” freeing Czechoslovakia from its Warsaw Pact orbit – and abruptly rendering Uncle Vlasta prematurely unemployed – would occur at all, much less six months hence.

But it did, although that’s another story.

Uncle Vlasta and his family spent their everyday working weeks residing in an unadorned apartment, albeit one located in a comparatively upscale, 1960’s-era suburb in Prague.

However, their obvious pride and joy was the A-frame weekend house. It had cold running water and a toilet. There was no phone or television. Any excuse to exit the capital city for a few days of peace in the groves and meadows was seized with excitement and vigor, and I was delighted to function as their present-use excuse.

The previous day, we’d taken a day-long, whirlwind tour of Southern Bohemia, Uncle Vlasta’s beloved red Skoda loaded down with supplies. We visited historic towns, sprawling castles and even a hydroelectric dam that he’d helped to construct in the late 1950s as a youthful Community party hopeful.

There were mugs of locally brewed beer, platters of roasted pork, sauerkraut and steamed dumplings, and a steadily encroaching exhaustion. We finally arrived at the family’s weekend house long after dark, and after a few minutes of housekeeping and light snacks, everyone fell fast asleep.

Next morning after breakfast I embarked on my orientation stroll in the nearby woods, returning to find a dirt-smudged and grinning Uncle Vlasta waiting for me. He held up two oversized brown earthenware pitchers and motioned for me to follow him.

We exited the front gate and walked along the rutted road, our ultimate purpose lost to me owing to our language differences.

After a quarter-mile or so, we came to a battered, 1930s-era building clad in chipped stucco, residing in the shade of old, leafy hardwoods. It stood next to the terminus of a single rail line, one that seemed to exist solely for use by the many holiday weekenders in the vicinity.

It became clear that the structure tripled as railway ticket office, grocery store … and pub.

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Although diabetic and generally teetotaling, Uncle Vlasta had been dutifully forewarned by his nephew back in New Albany that Roger was an ardent beer lover, and accordingly, throughout my three-week stay, he enthusiastically volunteered to introduce me to various classic pubs for sampling the many brands of golden, hoppy pilsner for which the Czechs remain justly famous.

Soon after my arrival, he taught me a critical phrase in his native language: “Czech beer is better than American beer.” He would drill me on pronunciation just before entering a tavern, and then introduce the visiting foreigner to tavern staff and nearby regulars. I’d smile and utter the words aloud as best I could remember -- and the free beers would begin materializing in front of me.

Uncle Vlasta would shrug, beam with evident satisfaction and drink his apple juice, and while I wasn’t sure whether it was the capitalist novelty of my presence or his “fix-is-in” ruling party credentials that caused such a reaction, I opted to make like the elegant Vltava River and happily drink with the flow.

Consequently, spying the tap inside the rural railway station pub, it made perfect sense to me to have a creamy draft lager and quench my thirst after the morning walk, but as an inexperienced American accustomed to cans and bottles, I still couldn’t quite fathom why we’d lugged the pitchers along.

But Uncle Vlasta chatted with the friendly barman, who began filling them with cool beer for the journey back.

Growlers the old-fashioned way. Some of the liquid didn’t make the trip home. Imagine that.

If only there’d been a selfie.

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August 1: AFTER THE FIRE: The devil made me drink it.

July 28 (at NA Confidential): ON THE AVENUES: An imaginary exercise tentatively called The Curmudgeon Free House.

July 25: AFTER THE FIRE: Before the deluge, or knowing how this whole beer business started.

July 18: AFTER THE FIRE: Moss the Boss, his dazzling beer café, and what they taught me about “craft.”

July 11: AFTER THE FIRE: We are dispirited in the post-factual world.

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AFTER THE FIRE: The devil made me drink it.

AFTER THE FIRE: The devil made me drink it.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

One of my wife’s favorite Mexican dishes is Camarones a la Diabla, or Deviled Shrimp. Seeing as this delicious specialty tends to be among the higher priced entrees at local Mexican restaurants, we resolved last weekend to try cooking it at home.

The results were excellent, and it will get better as we dial in the recipe, which was chosen because it does not include ketchup.

Laugh at your own peril. This familiar condiment also is a key ingredient in the appetizer spare ribs served by your favorite Chinese carry-out shop.

Happily, having recently bought a few assorted six packs in anticipation of entertaining friends, there was a beer already in our fridge that was fully appropriate for pairing with our inaugural batch of Camarones a la Diabla.

And no, it wasn’t ice-cold, carbonated urine like Corona or Modelo Especiale. Can we retire the laziest of all foodie saws, the one holding that Mexican beer and food go together perfectly? So does ice water. We should be saving the corn for our tortillas, and drinking beers that bring character to the table.

Like German-style wheat ale (Hefeweizen), which during our meal was Hacker-Pschorr Weiss. Indeed, it's multinational-owned, and I’d have preferred Schneider Weiss or even Aventinus, but the important thing is shift, and nitpicking German-style wheat ales isn’t the point to this digression.

Rather, it is to make the case (yet again – I’ve made a career out of this) that Hefeweizen is a wonderful accompaniment to many Mexican and other Latin American cuisines, something you’d never know judging from restaurants alone, since most of them venture no further than the usual pale, limp, beer-flavored suspects.

It’s so enduringly tedious, but verily, this pairing problem disappears when you cook dinner at home.

To which I say: “Viva la revolución!”

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There was a time when I eschewed Hefeweizen, primarily because whenever I was unable to persuade timid pub customers to move beyond starter wheat ales to a wider range of options, it grated deeply within the cavernous void of my tortured, curmudgeonly soul.

This ideology began eroding when Diana decided that Hefeweizen was one of the few beer styles she genuinely liked. I grudgingly indulged her at first, then one fine day at the German Café in French Lick, she offered me a sip of her Weihenstephaner.

My chagrin was immediate and boundless. I’d simply forgotten how much I liked Hefeweizen, and now it is a beer we can enjoy together.

You’re here to learn from my mistakes, and there’s no denying that German-style wheat ale is a singular classic. Hefeweizen is half (or a bit more) wheat and half (or slightly less) barley, and is fermented with a special ale yeast that imparts fruity flavors and aromas more commonly associated with bananas, apples and cloves.

Significantly, neither fruit nor spice is used in brewing Hefeweizen. It’s all about the behavior of the yeast amid a warm fermentation temperature, and the tasty markers graciously left behind.

In fact, “Hefe” is the German word for yeast, and “Weizen” means wheat. “Weisse,” or white, is often used somewhat interchangeably, as the cloudy appearance of wheat ale once prompted snap descriptions of it as “white.”

This same blurry phenomenon is to be found in Belgium, where “Wit” also denotes whiteness. While brewed with wheat, it bears no further resemblance to the German variety. The Belgians use orange peel and coriander to spice their wheat ale, and these ingredients traditionally have been forbidden by the beer purity laws in Germany, though these bastions may finally be crumbling.

Occasionally, German-style wheat ale can be found in its filtered incarnation (“Kristall”), but this is comparatively rare, and makes little sense in the first place.

Decades into the “craft” beer era, most American-style wheat ales remain resolutely flavorless unless they’re heavily spiced or intentionally hopped-up, as with Three Floyds Gumballhead. These usually are brewed as seasonal summertime thirst quenchers using house ale yeast strains, resulting in clean, competent and thoroughly uninteresting temporary lodgers.

Meanwhile, most authentic Hefeweizens come in shades of gold, although “Dunkel” indicates a variety brewed with darker malts. Schneider Weisse is as dark as Franziskaner’s Dunkel, but the brewery sees no need to tout this on the label, reminding us that beer style categories aren’t always exact.

Traditionally, Hefeweizen was a warm weather libation and generally unavailable year-round, even on its home turf in Bavaria. The style staged a remarkable comeback in the 1970s and 1980s after very nearly becoming extinct. Nowadays, German-style wheat ale can be consumed every day if so desired, throughout Germany and the world.

This brings us back to Mexico.

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Mexican restaurants invariably adorn watery lagers with slices of lime, and just as predictably, I toss them in the ashtray, so let’s be clear about the proper use of citrus fruit garnish in beer.

There is no proper use for citrus fruit garnish in beer.

Period.

If lemons were intended for use in Hefeweizen, then lemons would grow in Germany. They don’t. Do oranges grow in Belgium? No, and they don’t grow in Colorado, either, so they have no place in a glass of Coors’s mock Belgian Wit ale, Blue Moon.

(Blue Moon is a multinational shelf-space colonist, not indie “craft,” so get over yourself and move on to something better.)

When you place a slice of citrus fruit in a beer, whether it is a competently conceived and brewed German or Belgian wheat ale or the soapy lagers brewed in Mexico, you are mindlessly following the marketing dictates of someone at Great Satan Inc. who’ll you’ll never know, and who makes more money deceiving you than you will earn in your entire life.

This said, I’ve forged a shaky provisional peace with Dos Equis and Negra Modelo in the absence of better choices at most Mexican restaurants, but the fact remains that ethnic eateries in general, from taquerias to sushi bars, and from dim sum emporiums to Indian curry houses, would benefit from stocking just a handful of beer styles invariably capable of transforming the dining experience in a meaningful way that lager simply cannot achieve.

At the very least, bottles of American Pale Ale, German-style Hefeweizen and indigenous Robust Porter would transform ethnic dining in the metro Louisville area. Toss in an IPA, a Belgian Saison or Tripel and a German Gose, and we’re getting somewhere.

At the high end, that’s $300 wholesale for six cases of beer. Margins are solid. It isn’t nuclear physics.

Thinking back to Camarones a la Diabla, the “deviled” sauce had a mild acidic bite from the tomatoes, and plenty of pepper flavor. Overall, the dish was restrained in the Scoville context, which makes sense, because you wouldn’t want to overwhelm the shrimp.

My Hefeweizen’s medium-bodied fruit and esters coated the mouth and complimented the peppers. The effervescence acted as the curtain being raised on the flavor of the shrimp. It was hard to tell whether the clove was coming from the beer or the food, and it didn’t matter. It fit like a glove.

The earliest verified written instance of my disgruntlement with the beer status quo at local international restaurants appeared around 2003. Nothing ever seems to change, though I have a bit more time these days, and have found myself guided back into the home kitchen.

Perhaps at long last I can follow up on the imaginary pairings that haven’t always been possible to test. Most recently, it was Greek Moussaka with a Belgian Abbey Dubbel.

If I get around to doing it, I’ll let you know how this meal turns out.

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July 28 (at NA Confidential): ON THE AVENUES: An imaginary exercise tentatively called The Curmudgeon Free House.

July 25: AFTER THE FIRE: Before the deluge, or knowing how this whole beer business started.

July 18: AFTER THE FIRE: Moss the Boss, his dazzling beer café, and what they taught me about “craft.”

July 11: AFTER THE FIRE: We are dispirited in the post-factual world.

July 4: AFTER THE FIRE: Euro ’85, Part 34 … The final chapter, in which lessons are learned and bridges burned.

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