BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Headlines from May 2018 on the beer beat.

This blog has gone on hiatus, probably permanently, and primarily because these days my thoughts about beer are being posted alongside my utterances about everything else, over yonder at NA Confidential.

You'll still find them there in reverse chronological order via the helpful all-purpose tag, The Beer Beat, although I'm in the process of changing the column title to Beer with a Socialist. For the foreseeable future, I'll retain both labels for ease of searching.

At the end of each month I'll still collect the links right here.

Following are May (2018) ruminations, with the oldest listed first. Some of these posts are more topical than others. On occasion, there'll be references to beer in posts using "The Beer Beat" as a label, though not a title. I hope this isn't overly confusing.

Thanks for reading, if belatedly.

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THE BEER BEAT: The path to 6,000, or one helluva big difference in 25 years.

Yesterday, amid 14 consecutive hours of joyous Kentucky Derby downpour, I started rummaging through my collection of posters, photos and bric-a-brac suitable for hanging.

This one, called "Brewpubs and Craft Breweries," is a poster that dates from 1992.

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THE BEER BEAT: Yuengling Golden Pilsner, or how I mourn the taste of corn in the morn (and afternoon).

Several of my friends beat me to tasting Pabst Pale Ale (I still haven't), but earlier today by sheer serendipity I walked into Keg Liquors (Clarksville) and became the first customer to buy a six-pack of Yuengling's ballyhooed Golden Pilsner.

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THE BEER BEAT: A brief Pints & Union beer list report (yay) and a Yuengling correction (shrug).

It's ironic, although not entirely unexpected, that the more beer I drink as part of a solemn imperative to research (alas, someone's got to do it), and the greater the amount of time translating this diligent research into a beer list for Pints & Union, the less opportunity to write idly about beer in general.

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THE BEER BEAT: U Fleků, home of "Bohemia’s definitive dark beer," really WAS founded in 1499.

I meant to attend U Fleků's 500th birthday party in 1999, but just couldn't pull it off. That's a big regret. Jeff Alworth is a great beer writer. In this brief essay, he takes us to Prague for one of those "Holy Grail" bucket list beers, originally described by the beer writer Michael Jackson, all of which packed off my butt to Europe so very long ago.

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THE BEER BEAT: R.I.P. Jerry "Turoni's" Turner. Also: New England IPA, Mile Wide, Goose's disgrace, George Washington, and weighing a keg of beer.

As I may have mentioned earlier, though probably forgot, the current issue of Food & Dining Magazine (it's out today) has two contributions from moi: a profile of bar Vetti (lower case "b" is intentional), and a beer column about New England IPA.

Research for the latter brought me to Mile Wide Beer Co. (636 Barret Avenue, Louisville KY) a few weeks back for their release of Nomah!, which I enjoyed very much. In some ways I'm surprised by this. Not long ago, I'd have dismissed NE IPA as a fad, but now it makes perfect sense to me. May the style live long and prosper.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Still on the "beer beat," but with a new identity and a renewed consultancy.

"Beer with a Socialist" is what happens when the Potable Curmudgeon momentarily mistakes the word "scientist" for "socialist," and after a good laugh, decides it's kismet.

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ON THE AVENUES: Long live Keg Liquors Fest of Ale, an indisputable annual beer institution.

The 13th edition of Keg Liquors Fest of Ale will take place at New Albany’s Riverfront Amphitheater on Saturday, June 2. Up to 2,500 area beer fans will be in attendance, which might sound like a crush of humanity, but it isn’t. The major regional stops on the beer festival tour host as many as 8,000 guests, with Port-A-Lets extending around the entire perimeter like Donald Trump’s walled-in America.

However, festival founder and package store owner Todd Antz has grown Fest of Ale slowly and organically, from the parking lot adjacent to his original Clarksville store to St. Anthony’s lawn, and now the banks of the Ohio. It’s an urban area, and yet still presents a pastoral scene of greenery, passing barges and the rising sun architectural imagery of the amphitheater itself.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Vandals strike Asheville brewery: “No more breweries” and “**** Beer City.”

My initial thought upon reading about "anti-brewery vandalism" in Asheville was something on the order of: "Just their luck the Woman's Christian Temperance Union is still alive and kicking."

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ON THE AVENUES: Sadly, the Kentucky Derby no longer is decadent and depraved. It’s just another vacuous capitalist bait ‘n’ switch.

Let’s talk about beer. In 2018, for the first time in six years, the “official” beer of this signature institution known as Churchill Downs no longer is Stella Artois, the chosen import of AB-InBev’s payola empire.

Now it’s Corona, perhaps the most vile mainstream corn-choked Mexican lager atrocity known to man, reminding us that while the Kentucky Derby has developed intrinsic traditions since its inaugural run in 1875, locally brewed beer hasn’t always been prominent among these predispositions. After all, bourbon gets you there way faster.

Hunter's Double D and Seattle Slew Kabobs, please.

In 1987, May Day fell on a Friday.

I was in Vienna (Austria, not Virginia) for the weekend, walking into the center to watch the annual parade held in honor of the world’s holiday for workers, and punctuating the experience with periodic doses of lager beer.

My exact thoughts cannot be known even now, when they’re occurring, much less 27 years later, but I’m confident that among them on this pleasant spring day in the cradle of the Habsburgs was this: “Hot damn – I’m missing Derby for this!”

In 1987, I’d barely taken note of the encroachment of ATMs on the now lost art of exchanging traveler’s checks, and so I couldn’t have foreseen the advent of Twitter, on which I recently made another installment in a seemingly endless series of disgruntlements, NCAA Meets Derby Festival Edition:

The problem with living here is when they finally stop babbling about college basketball, they begin babbling about the Kentucky Derby.

Armed and ready with an answer was Jerod Clapp of the News and Tribune.

Given my proximity to the Downs, this is my least favorite time of year. Let's brew an anti-commemorative beer. Something sour.

It was sounding more and more like a plan, and what better as bistro accompaniment to soured Derby ale than Secretariat Burgers, perhaps with some jockey-itch sauce on the side. How I detest Horse Pimp Days in these parts!

But Jerod’s final idea was the best of all:

Ya know, it's HST's year in Louisville - "Hunter's Double D." After his essay on the whole thing.

For the unenlightened, my correspondent refers to the founding document in the pantheon of gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” Much to my surprise upon joyfully rereading this fabled piece, it actually is possible to lift on sentence as summary.

So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.

It’s hard for me to fathom that in 1987, I was less than two decades removed from Thompson’s visit to Churchill Downs, when I was 10 years old. In three weeks, it will have been 44 years, and while the entire planet has changed its stripes numerous times since 1970, the Kentucky Derby remains just as decadent and depraved, and likely will stay that way.

That’s both timeless and thoroughly idiotic. At least we have better local beer now.

Annual Kentucky Derby poster ... or poseur?

How many furlongs to Leuven?

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

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

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

How many furlongs to Leuven?

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

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

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

If it's Stella, it means that Churchill Downs does not give a flying **** about local-anything.

So why give a **** about Churchill Downs?

With all due credit to Sara "Bar Belle" Havens (her complete LEO story is reprinted below), here's the other side of my writing assignment for Food and Dining Magazine's next quarterly issue, May/June/July, which is to be released just prior to the Kentucky Derby.

My job? Inform the magazine's readers, many of whom will be visitors from out of town, about the nature and whereabouts of Louisville's craft breweries. Included are bits of recent history, as in this brief preview.

The Kentucky Derby has taken place right here in Louisville every year since 1875. From 1979 through 1992, there was no locally brewed beer to celebrate the Run for the Roses, but when Sea Hero captured the race in 1993, a few hardy and pioneering microbrew fans could be found drinking Silo Red Rock Ale. Later that fall, Bluegrass Brewing Company was founded, and there Louisville’s present-day craft beer story really begins.

Amid the usual fanfare surrounding Derby "tradition", let's put it this way. Subway's new Italian Collection is more authentically local in a Naples sense of genuine than anything Churchill Downs manages with its exaltation of AB-Inbev's "classic" Belgian lager (lager just isn't a classic Belgian style, is it?) as the beneficiary of soulless sponsorship dollars, all of which happily reinforces my usual bilious point: It should have been AB-Inbev's Goose Island, not AB-Inbev's Stella. At least Goose Island was once legit craft before its big-buck absorption, and Chicago's considerably far closer as a source than Leuven.

Stella named Derby’s official beer

Stella Artois has been named the “official beer sponsor” of Churchill Downs, Oaks and Derby. According to the press release, “Churchill Downs Racetrack today announced a multi-year partnership, naming the world’s best-selling Belgian beer Stella Artois as ‘The Official Beer Sponsor of Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Oaks and the Kentucky Derby.’ While attending this year’s Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks, fans will be able to experience classic Belgian lager Stella Artois and its iconic Chalice, which will feature the Kentucky Derby 138 logo. Continuing its affiliation with Churchill Downs, Stella Artois also will serve as the presenting sponsor of “Opening Night” and four “Downs After Dark” nighttime events in 2012.”

I’m not a big fan of Stella, but I suppose it’s better than PBR or something. I will stick to the Mint Juleps.

BSB and Chef Josh Lehman's five-course, fixed price menu for Oaks and Derby.

“One of the grand appeals of the Kentucky Derby is the tradition it carries with it. We pretty much repeat the recipes each year for the sake of carrying on a tradition.”
-- Caroline Harmon

At NABC’s Bank Street Brewhouse, 2010 marks the start of our Derby tradition, and speaking personally, I hope Chef Josh Lehman does not repeat the recipes each year from here out, because that would be boring.

We’ll see. This year, Chef Josh is offering a five-course, fixed-price menu for the Oaks (Friday, April 30) and the Kentucky Derby (Saturday, May 1). Each course will be paired with an NABC beer.

Here are the rules:

The five-course fixed price menu will be available by reservation only on both nights. Reserve in person at BSB, or call 812-725-9585.

The Bank Street Brewhouse will observe normal dining and drinking hours, and we will accommodate walk-ins as space permits, but the special five-course menu will be available from 5:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. only.

The price for this feast is $60 per person, service not included. Naturally, you must be 21 years of age to drink beer. The state frowns on exceptions.

Don’t forget BSB’s acclaimed Build-Your-Own Bloody Mary Bar from Noon to 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 2.

Kentucky Bibb Salad
Maytag Blue Cheese, Toasted Pistachios, Granny Smith Apples, Champagne Vinaigrette (Tafel Bier)

Diver Scallops
Carrot Mousse, Spring Peas, Chantrell Mushrooms, Lemon Brown Butter (Abzug)

Lamb Loin
Ratatouille, Saffron Risotto, Mint Pesto (Dubbel OR Elector, whichever is available)

Filet of Beef
Crispy Potato, Asparagus, Bourbon Cream Sauce (Bob's Old 15-B Porter)

Bourbon Chocolate Mousse
Mint, Candied Walnuts (Thunderfoot)

NABC & Derby 2009.

Know this: You needn't have dinner reservations to visit Bank Street on Derby Day, May 2. The bar will be available, and also the tables not reserved.

Also, only the pizzeria at the original Grant Line location will be open on Derby Day, May 2. There just isn't enough business to staff both areas.

Reservations for Oaks and Derby evenings at the Bank Street Brewhouse.

The New Albanian Bank Street Brewhouse is now accepting dinner reservations for parties of four or more for the evenings of Oaks and Derby (Friday, May 1 and Saturday, May 2). Serving hours are 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. both nights.

The bar and non-reserved tables will also be available for seating.

The normal evening menu will be served, with Chef Joshua Lehman promising a special dish or two for the occasion.

The Bank Street phone is: 812-725-9585. If we don't answer, please leave a message and number, and we'll get back with you to confirm.

Expand your horizons and ditch the cookie-cutter.

As a prelude to the Kentucky Derby, I wrote the following as my "Mug Shot" entry in the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO):

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Mug Shots: Expand your horizons (April 16, 2008)

According to one of our regular bar customers, he was chatting with a fellow who’d just returned from vacation in Key West, and asked the returnee what he thought of the cuisine in southernmost Florida.

“You mean the food? Look, you don’t have to give up anything down there. They have McDonald’s and Taco Bell just like here in Louisville – probably KFC, too.”

Presumably, you don’t have to “give up” Bud, Miller or Coors, either – neither in Key West, nor in Nome, Alaska – although the anecdote prompts a doleful reflection on the state of cultural appreciation in the world, to wit: Has there ever been a country where so many people proclaim their unique individuality by means of a slavish and overt devotion to numbing conformity in the form of the mass market?

I fully understand that an appreciation for irony has never been an indigenous skill for most Americans, but isn’t it just plainly sad at a very basic human level that people blessed with the means to travel arrive at their ultimate destination and ignore the local flavor in favor of the safety of the cookie-cutter?

Anywhere I go, here or abroad, I look first for the local beer and the local brewpubs, because more often than not, the people at the local brewpubs who drink local beer can make the best suggestions as to what else in their locality differs from the Louisville norm. That’s precisely what travel should do. Travel should open eyes to other ways, cultures and flavors. Food and drink should be different in Mexico and Maine. The joy lies in the differences.

People come to Louisville each year for the Derby and the festivities that precede it. I hope that while here, visitors check out our brewpubs, bourbons and culinary offerings. There’s great stuff waiting to be discovered, and remembered.

NABC, Buckhead, craft beer and Thunder Over Louisville, April 12.

NABC will be doing a split squad for Saturday, April 12, with Jesse, Jared, John and Roger (the token "non-J") in St. Louis for Schlafly's annual repeal-of-prohibition party, and Tony running the brewery crew at Buckhead Mountain Grill on the waterfront in Jeffersonville for its 2008 Thunder Craft Beer Extravaganza.

I refer, of course, to the Louisville area phenomenon known as Thunder over Louisville, a fireworks blow-out that heralds the arrival of Derby Festival, which owing to the weirdness of the calendar provides three weeks of partying this year before the horse race is actually run.

Here’s the pitch, and given what things cost during Thunder, it isn't a bad one at all.

Buckhead Mountain Grill's 2008 Thunder Craft Beer Extravaganza is a VIP Microbrew Tent featuring breweries such as NABC, Brugge Brasserie, Wabash Valley, Oaken Barrel, Barley Island, Three Floyds, Cumberland Brews, BBC, Browning’s and Upland.

Tickets are $75 and you'll receive $10 worth of tickets toward beer (cash after that for full pours, though I think samples are possible), the chance to meet people from the breweries, an all-day food buffet, plus prime real estate and river access for viewing the air show and fireworks. Must be 21 years of age, reservations and identification required. Families are welcome, and non-alcoholic drinks are included.

Go straight to the source for information and reservations: Kelly Leonardo of Buckhead Mountain Grill at 502-899-3030 Ext. 222.

Derby and election day operating hours at the Public House.

Two advance notes for local readers:

(1) Rich O's Public House won't open until 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, which is the first Saturday in May, which in turn is a Louisville area holy day known as Kentucky Derby. So many employees have called out festive that we have no one to work the afternoon shift. Sportstime Pizza will be open from 11:00 a.m. as usual

(2) Next Tuesday, May 8, steel yourself for the annual nastiness of election day (municipal elections in New Albany), which means that the taps don't open until the polls close at 6:00 p.m. As is our long custom in recognition of the futility of being a fine beer bar that can't serve during the daytime hours on election day, Rich O's will open at 6:00 p.m. Sportstime will be open from 11:00 a.m. for a long, uninvitingly dry lunch.

Could people vote worse drunk?