Headlines from September 2017 on THE BEER BEAT.

Previously, I've explained why this blog has gone on hiatus, adding that my thoughts about beer will be posted alongside my utterances about everything else, over yonder at NA Confidential.

You'll find them there via the helpful all-purpose tag, The Beer Beat.

However, whenever the urge strikes -- I seem to have settled on monthly -- I'll collect a few of these links right here. Following are September's ruminations, with the oldest listed first.

Some are more topical than others. In September, there were several travel-related postings using "The Beer Beat" as a label, but not as a title. I hope this isn't overly confusing.

Thanks for reading, if belatedly.

---

THE BEER BEAT: Remembering Michael Jackson and revising the beer tasting syllabus.

The Mesa gig was on August 23. I knew the 10th anniversary of Jackson's passing was coming soon, but wasn't sure exactly when; while eating lunch at Brugge Brasserie on Wednesday, I glanced at my e-mail and saw the notification of Tom Acitelli's letter perfect tribute in All About Beer, linked here.

---

ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: We are dispirited in the post-factual beer world.

Come to think of it, contemporary cocktail-driven bar programs seldom advertise on the basis of “cheap” whiskey, do they?

Verily, it’s forever top shelf and upscale with wine and spirits, but when it comes to beer, the dumbing-down always lies waiting, just around the corner.

---

ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Beef Steak and Porter always made good belly mortar, but did America’s “top” steakhouses get the memo?

Perhaps the simplest answer is best. There is no documentary evidence to suggest that the customer base of such a steakhouse desires beer choice. Moreover, the profit margin on wine and liquor surely dwarfs the return on beer, so only a few popular lagers are kept around for the die-hards, and that’s that.

I’ve long since learned to mournfully adapt. Precisely because my operating assumption is that steakhouses customarily downplay beer, I harbor absolutely no expectations once I’ve resolved to dine at one of them.

---

TRAVEL PRELUDES: Mechelen, with a side of Gouden Carolus.

Het Anker’s flagship Gouden Carolus Classic remains a great favorite of mine, and in 2008 I was at the peak of my powers, since largely ceded, to cajole favors from importers and wholesalers. In this case it was a guided brewery tour for the group.

---

TRAVEL PRELUDES: Poperinge and a date with Westvleteren.

Trust me - it's really Westvleteren 12, the beer that “disappeared” from circulation when it was selected as the best beer in the world by readers of RateBeer.com.

Not that it was easy to find, even in Belgium ... even where it is brewed.

---

TRAVEL PRELUDES: For a town so small, Watou packs a big gustatory punch.

I've been extremely fortunate to have enjoyed more than one meal at the 't Hommelhof restaurant in Watou, founded twenty or so years ago by Stefaan Couttenye and his wife, the late Sabine Dejonckheere. On one early springtime visit, hop shoots were on the menu.

When Chef Couttenye opened 't Hommelhof, the notion of beer cuisine in general, and local food sourcing in particular, remained a minority taste even in a place like Belgium.

---

TRAVEL PRELUDES: Haarlem's awesome Cafe Briljant is winding down (for now), but not before I have another drink there.

On September 30, Rob will preside over the Cafe Briljant's final evening in business at the current location. Happily, I'll be able to drink a few beers there before this closing event occurs.

---

TRAVEL PRELUDES: An eagle's nest, a tasting room; a study in brown.

The Dutch word "proeflokaal" (test classroom) appears to be one of those only vaguely translatable concepts, although at root it implies something on the order of testing/tasting room, and may have originated from the habit of jenever (Dutch gin) distilleries operating sampling venues nearby.

When Peter van der Arend opened his specialty Dutch beer bar, there were only a few dozen breweries in the Netherlands. The number now is in the hundreds. He definitely was on the front end of a savory trend.

---

ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Getting in tune with the straight and narrow.

It seems to me we’re all guilty at times of espousing a false dichotomy, in which there is mass-market corporate swill on one side and exuberant, innovative craft beer on the other, but the problem with hegemonic Cold Beer War dualism like this is that it utterly excludes a beer like Schlenkerla Märzen. Maybe it fits rather comfortably in the same metaphor with non-aligned nations of the 1970s.

---

TRAVEL PRELUDES: Finally, a chance to visit the Jopenkerk -- a Haarlem brewery in a church, and with gruit beer.

By 1996, the present Jopen company had been formed to brew beer in Haarlem on a regular basis, although at first it functioned strictly as a contract brewer. In 2005, after years of negotiation, Jopen purchased the Jacobskerk, and in 2010, the renovated church opened for business as the Jopenkerk brewpub.

---

THE BEER BEAT: Hull & High Water is only days away, and it has me all playful about beer lists.

I caught myself wondering what sorts of wine are to be sold at an inland seafood shack, then began trying to remember when (or even if) I've ever ordered wine at a seafood restaurant of any sort.

Everything about Weaver's piece screams "beer," and precisely because not a soul has asked me, here are a few ideas for a solid, nautically-and-aquatic-themed beer list.

---

THE BEER BEAT: "How Jared Williamson Found Love — and a Head Brewing Job — at Schlafly."

In an effort to keep this simple: I'm delighted at Jared's career path in brewing, honored to have played a small part in encouraging it, and thrilled that he was able to go to Germany for a taste of what has inspired me for so long.

---

On the BEER BEAT, and back in Poperinge for hop festival Saturday, 2017.

Poperinge's hop festival runs from Friday through Sunday every three years. I first attended in 1999, and have missed only 2011 in all the years since. Next up is 2020, and I intend to be there.

In my opinion, the festival steadily has improved from one to the next. It remains almost entirely organized and operated for the benefit of the city and immediate proximity; outsiders are welcome, and yet it's very local in nature.

__

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

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

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Twenty-fourth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

In 1985, the performer Michael Jackson’s savvy pop music was ubiquitous throughout Europe – also in America, unoccupied islands off the coast of Antarctica, and the remainder of the planet.

It’s no surprise. After all, Jackson’s “Thriller” album already was timelessly epochal a mere two years after its release, and today, six years after his death, it has sold 65 million copies worldwide.

This astounding quantity is considerably more than the total number of books sold by Michael Jackson, the beer writer (1942 – 2007), although three million units is no small achievement in itself.

Honestly, Michael Jackson the entertainer's music never did much for me, apart from his “Willard” theme. To this day I refuse to accept “King of Pop” as his honorific. Maybe it applies to Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra or Hound Dog Elvis, but not to the Moonwalker.

Conversely, a compelling case can be made that Michael Jackson the Yorkshireman fully deserves to be remembered as “King of Beer,” far more so than A-B InBev’s classically insipid American Lager.

Jackson’s book “The World Guide to Beer” (1977) almost singlehandedly elevated beer to the status of a topic important enough to discuss in mixed company, although ironically, it probably didn’t achieve critical mass in America until long after the initial publication, when it could be found remaindered on the discount tables of chain bookstores in malls across the country.

That’s where I found “The World Guide to Beer,” and I wasn’t the only one. A whole first generation of “beer geeks” took its cues from Jackson’s classic survey of world beer history.

It was a big, heavy, coffee-table book, and I didn’t haul it to Europe in my gym bag, but it was every bit as important to me in 1985 as budget travel guidebooks like “Let’s Go: Europe” and “Europe on 25 Dollars A Day.”

Why?

It’s all about the power of words.

While the canon of pop music has been enriched by the singer Michael Jackson’s output, its everyday vocabulary is not directly referential to his body of work. However, the language of beer indisputably passes directly through Michael Jackson, the writer.

He was among the first to systematically consider and explain beer styles, and to show how aspects of the brewing process, historical practice, geography, chemistry and myriad other human experiences pertained to them, demonstrating that our enjoyment of the genre is enhanced by greater overall knowledge.

All of these facets taken together form a shared language of “beer speak,” and Jackson shaped it in an enduringly readable way, neither dumbing down his material nor assuming the role of lofty pedant. He was an erudite prose stylist in addition to his journalistic skills as a nuts-and-bolts reporter.

The “Beer Hunter” always told wonderful stories, while never forgetting the newspaperman’s facts-first orientation, and I persist in believing that Jackson is best compared to figures like Samuel Johnson and other great essayists of the English tradition.

As such, I feel quite fortunate to have made Jackson’s acquaintance, chatting with him on more than one occasion. In fact, in 1994 he visited my pub and drank a pint, but first he showed me the way to Carlsberg in Copenhagen, where I experienced my first Old World brewery tour.

---

Much ground would be covered during my second (and final) day in the city, as facilitated by the wonders of the Eurailpass, which was valid on the efficient “S” trains of the city’s suburban rail network.

Early Monday morning, I left the skating rink bunkhouse and took the bus to the central train station, checking my bag at left luggage, and securing an overnight couchette reservation for Oslo, Norway. The train would be departing around 21.00 … or 9:00 p.m. The 24 hour clock was beginning to make sense, though thermometers remained mysterious.

Twelve whole hours lay ahead.

Unencumbered of increasingly dirty clothes, the “S” whisked me through urban Copenhagen, its outskirts and far-flung suburbs for a 45-minute ride to the city of Hillerød, and a pleasant, sunny morning spent traipsing the grounds of the Frederiksborg Castle.

I dimly recall finding a pølservogn in Hillerod. Assuredly, a budget traveler can live on hot dogs alone.

On the way back, there was a stop at Churchillparken, site of an old star-shaped earthen military redoubt and the Museum of Danish Resistance (to Nazi occupation), which I’m saddened to learn suffered a devastating fire from suspected arson in 2013, and currently is being both rebuilt and reconsidered.

Denmark’s experience in WWII falls outside the aim of my narrative, although its surreal nature is worth noting. The Nazis desired a measure of propagandist “ethnic” solidarity with Danes, and occupied Denmark without formal hostilities being declared. The country’s government and institutions functioned somewhat normally until 1943, when the tide of affairs elsewhere made matters more openly confrontational.

Interestingly, the aftermath of the museum’s burning appears to have opened more than a few old wounds. The exhibits were saved, but there is a difference of opinion as to whether they should be re-installed exactly as before, or accompanied with a more contemporary and nuanced examination of Denmark’s wartime status.

As with so many other aspects of my travel narrative, the resistance museum symbolizes differences in consciousness, then and now. Forty years after the war’s end, many people who lived through it were still alive. Now, most aren’t, and the uses of the past change with time, no matter how hard we try to cling to “eternal” and seemingly objective truths.

Just like beer.

---

By mid-afternoon, I’d finally gravitated back to the Vesterbro neighborhood stretching beyond the Vista restaurant’s front door, stepping off the “S” near Carlsberg’s 19th-century rail yard complex in Valby, the brewery’s gently undulating locale.

This observation alone provided a valuable lesson for future European beer hunting expeditions, because breweries of a certain pre-automotive age almost always are located near railroad tracks or navigable waterways – the interstates of their age.

(At the time of my visit, formerly independent Tuborg still brewed beer at its own historic plant on the other side of town, despite having merged with Carlsberg. Tuborg, which I toured in 1989 prior to its closure, had its very own shipping docks.)

Carlsberg remains an iconic international beer brand, recognizable the world over for the green label and unique script of its flagship, Carlsberg Hof, a mild Pilsner-style golden lager. Significantly, the beer wasn’t always golden. Nor was it always a lager. Carlsberg’s first batches in 1847 were dark-colored ales.

Founder J. C. Jacobsen was the son of a brewer, and his career began at a propitious time, because numerous factors were converging to make possible the seismic transformation of the beer business, from a typically localized and smaller-scale brewing of ales to the eventual global reach of mass-produced golden lagers as brewed at factories just like the one I visited.

Jacobsen had no specialized academic background, but he was industrious and astute. His European contemporaries Gabriel Sedlmayer and Anton Dreher were pioneers of lager brewing, and because they didn't think in proprietary terms, the Dane freely borrowed from their expertise, making frequent journeys south for continuing education.

It is said that Jacobsen transported fragile lager yeast from Munich to Copenhagen, keeping it cool in his stovepipe hat. More importantly, he funded a laboratory and commenced a rigorously scientific approach to brewing, correctly foreseeing the value of a consistent, replicable product in the context of a global economy.

However, neither Jacobsen nor his son and eventual successor Carl were robber baron capitalists. To them, brewing was more about technology than art, but the profits were a different story. Father, son and Carlsberg became models of 19th-century industrialized philanthropy, with the family’s brewing interests bequeathed to a foundation with numerous scientific, cultural and artistic non-profit imperatives.

Much about Carlsberg has changed since my first glimpse of Copenhagen. There have been mergers and acquisitions, and a structural reformatting of the company after the fall of Communism. Large scale brewing has moved to a different location in Jutland, and the “old” brewery in Copenhagen survives as a company headquarters, tourist destination, and historic site, producing specialty “craft” brews. The former acreage of the industrial plant nearby is being redeveloped as a whole new city quarter.

However, Carlsberg still fulfills its philanthropic mandates as a foundation, and I’ll always feel better drinking a multinational Carlsberg than a beer brewed by the likes of AB-InBev. Unlike the Jacobsens, the Busch family legacy is unsightly, indeed.

---

Carlsberg’s most enduring architectural feature is the imposing stone Elephant Gate lying just outside the historic brew house. Generation of multi-lingual brewery tour guides have been drilled to immediately disavow the presence of swastikas carved into the elephants’ pedestals.

Paraphrasing:

“These are ancient symbols of auspiciousness, luck and well-being. The word ‘swastika’ itself is Sanskrit, not German, and these have nothing to do with that other fellow during the war.”

Point taken.

As I came to understand with notches subsequently added to my belt, brewery tours at the Carlsberg level of operation seldom rise above the introductory. I’ve heard and repeated the gospel several thousand times since. Grain is malted and mashed, sugar water created, hops added during the boil, and yeast eating sugar to create alcohol and carbonation. The inevitable conclusion comes while looking over the throbbing, cacophonous bottling line.

Thirsty yet? Well, come right this way.

Of course, a brewery like Carlsberg is able to place these tours in a compelling architectural and historic context. If 19th-century industrial buildings like these did not continue to fascinate modern man, we wouldn’t rush to convert them into condos, and if advertising graphics from the same era didn’t cease to exert feelings of loyalty and cultural identification, we'd have no breweriana collectors.

Unfortunately, the litigiousness of our modern world has gone far toward spoiling the ultimate objective of brewery tours, because who would endure the factory stroll without a prospect of tasting the bounty?

At the end of my first Carlsberg tour, the participants were seated at tables in a room festooned with brewery ads and graphic art. Sample beers in lightly chilled bottles already were lined up and ready on each table, with a few salty snacks and gratis souvenirs – stickers and decals, maybe some paper labels. There was joy and delight all around.

It seemed odd to me at the time that families with young children would be taking the brewery tour, but they were. It was free-wheeling Europe, not puritanical America. There were soft drinks for the kids, and only later did I do the requisite math and learn the solo traveler’s best strategy at such times: Stick close to the families and be smilingly gracious, because when they occupy a table set for six with a single spare seat and invite you to join them, only the adults will be drinking.

And this, of course, means more beer for me.

(to be continued)

---

Previously:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Sept. 15, 2012: "Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red."

I'm in reruns for a few days, posting past columns of note.

It's a story that ties together the Red Room, geography, colors, politics and beer.

Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red

Michael Jackson unexpectedly visited the former Rich O’s Public House in November, 1994, a tad more than two years after we opened. If I hadn’t been drinking for much of the same day, tagging along as the Beer Hunter made pre-arranged appearances at Bluegrass Brewing Company and the now defunct Silo, I’d have been far too nervous to properly function as host.

Now at LouisvilleBeer.com: "Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red."

Louisville Craft Beer Week is coming, and among the many things about LCBW that you should know is this: "Text LCBW to 72727 to receive texts throughout Craft Beer Week reminding you of daily events, specials, and giveaways."

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about what brought us here.

Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

It’s an old story, but one I delight in retelling, and Louisville Craft Beer Week strikes me as the perfect time to do so.

Michael Jackson unexpectedly visited the former Rich O’s Public House in November, 1994, a tad more than two years after we opened. If I hadn’t been drinking for much of the same day, tagging along as the Beer Hunter made pre-arranged appearances at Bluegrass Brewing Company and the now defunct Silo, I’d have been far too nervous to properly function as host.

I’ll be forever grateful that Jackson consented to accompany our ragged band of awed and inebriated fledgling beer enthusiasts on yet another beer hunt, this one at 9:00 p.m., from downtown Louisville across the Ohio River to an embarrassingly unfinished strip mall space that at the time could offer only three beers on tap.

Moreover, knowing that most of the regulars would be following Jackson through Louisville, we’d closed the pub for the day. Minutes ahead of the approaching motorcade, there was barely enough time to dash inside, flick light switches, sweep up and make the barroom somewhat presentable. Following hours of one-ounce samples, Jackson proceeded to order and consume a full 20-oz Imperial pint of Sierra Nevada Porter, and upon departure an hour and a half later, made this wry observation:

“I’ve been to many pubs in America, and I’ve never seen one quite like this.”

Wednesday Weekly: The Jackson I miss the most.

The idea is to stay disciplined by continuing to write Wednesday columns here at the blog, but to try posting one each week instead of every other week (as was the case for the late Mug Shots in LEO).

---

Last week (June 25) marked the passage of a year since the American entertainer Michael Jackson died.

In two months, it will have been three years since the death of Michael Jackson, the British beer writer.

Although ever willing to concede that it’s a chronologically relative kind of thing, I never once bought into the “King of Pop” tag for Jackson the singer. Maybe Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra, or Hound Dog Elvis Presley fits the bill, but not the Moonwalker.

Conversely, a highly convincing case can be made that Michael Jackson the Yorkshireman fully deserves the title “King of Beer,” and in a far more plausible way than A-B InBev’s classically insipid American Lager ever will be able to claim.

From their respective vantage points in music and writing, both Jacksons brilliantly synthesized artistic and stylistic themes that preceded them, but of the two, only the beer writer can be said to have annotated, denoted and connoted his source material into what amounts to a living language of beer, one that aficionados speak every single day of their beer drinking lives.

Pop music certainly is enriched by the canon handed down by Michael Jackson, and yet its everyday vocabulary is not referential to his body of work. The language of beer surely does pass directly through Michael Jackson. Even the swill merchants speak in his voice with their “triple hopped” this and “bock” that.

Yes, it is true that Jackson the beer writer did not create this vocational tongue from the ether, in the sense that a musician like the other Michael conjured melodies and choreographed dance steps, and yet our beer man clearly was the first to systematically consider beer styles, to explain them, and to show how aspects of the brewing process, historical practice, geography, chemistry and myriad other human experiences pertained to them, demonstrating in the process that our enjoyment of the genre is enhanced immeasurably by greater knowledge and linguistic “beer speak” aptitude.

What’s more, our Jackson performed this feat in an entertainingly and enduringly readable way, neither dumbing down nor assuming the role of lofty pedant. He far exceeded the journalist’s basic mandate to clarify and explain, because he was an erudite prose stylist in addition to his skills as reporter. He told wonderful stories while never forgetting the newspaperman’s facts-first orientation. I persist in believing that Jackson is best compared to figures like Samuel Johnson and other great essayists in the English past.

Some beer writers working today have equaled Jackson. None have surpassed him. Meanwhile, time marches forward, and matters like these fill my mind during those times when I toy with melancholia. I’d caution you that a changing of the guard is under way, except that it is likely to have already occurred.

I note merely that many of the same socio-economic, technological and cultural reasons why there’ll never again be recorded music “album” sales in the multi-million range of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” also preclude the emergence of another beer writer of Michael Jackson’s caliber and far-reaching influence.

There remains much wonderful music to enjoy, and there exists prolific writing about beer, with reams of both available on-line. Just as musical choice has proliferated far beyond what a relative handful of corporations formerly permitted us to hear, so has beer writing expanded in all directions, documenting the expanding choices, and encapsulating the Internet-driven democratic ethos that we’re all experts, even if some (most?) are slightly less expert than others.

My personal annoyance is that so very little of what is written nowadays about beer so much as touches the writer Michael Jackson’s elegant classicism. What annoys me even further is that this absence seems not to bother others in quite the same way that it disturbs me. Changing times, indeed.

Plainly, beer appreciation in its modern interpretation has been with us for long enough to pass across one and maybe two generational lines, and differing ways of conceptualizing and processing information on the part of succeeding generations are not confined to popular tastes in art or music. Shift happens in beer, too.

It already has, and even as we celebrate the growth of beer consciousness, there is acute awareness that the social shifts prefacing the decline of the compact disc and the newspaper inevitably must have an impact on what we do, too.

In short, with all the facts at our fingertips, are missing the crucial back story, essential history? More folks than ever know their beer styles – do they grasp the intrinsic stylishness of those styles? Had Jackson himself come to maturity during our present age, would there would be a medium to serve his talents?

I have no answers, no solutions, and I cannot rule out that I’m completely wrong in all of this. The simple fact is that I miss Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson -- alive, working and drinking in our world. As should be obvious, he was an enormous formative influence on my career in beer, which always was as much about storytelling and writing as understanding enzymes and identifying precise hop types.

But that’s for another day. Get a good beer, and one of Jackson’s books, and see what I mean.

A toast to the late Michael Jackson nationwide, tomorrow.

Trouble is, we're closed on Sunday.
On the 30th, we're having a company meeting, so we'll offer our toast during the server beer tasting/training segment, and make a donation to the National Parkinson Foundation.

Grieving the Beer Hunter's passing: Michael Jackson, the Red Room and Louisville.

Michael Jackson unexpectedly visited Rich O’s Public House in November, 1994, a tad more than two years after it first opened, and if I hadn’t been drinking much of the same day as an obviously weary Beer Hunter made pre-arranged appearances at Bluegrass Brewing Company and the now defunct Silo, I surely would have been too nervous to properly function in the role of host.

I’ll never know why he consented to accompany twenty-plus awed, fledgling and inebriated beer enthusiasts on yet another beer journey, this one at 9:00 p.m. after a long day’s work, from Louisville, Kentucky, across the Ohio River, to an embarrassingly unfinished space in a strip mall that, at the time, could offer only three beers on tap.

Moreover, knowing that most of our regular pub customers would be with us that day following Jackson around Louisville, we’d closed the pub tight, and with the motorcade from the Silo approaching, came dashing inside to turn on the lights, sweep up and make the barroom look somewhat presentable. Once seated, and following hours of one-ounce samples and a furious scribbling of notes, Jackson ordered a full 20-oz Imperial pint of Sierra Nevada Porter, and when he left an hour and a half later, wryly observed, “"I've been to many pubs in America, and I've never seen one quite like this."

It took a while, but eventually I understood what he meant.

----

It is impossible to overstate the influence that Michael Jackson had on thousands upon thousands of beer drinkers, who found in his elegant and precise prose a purposeful rationale for their pursuit of the perfect pint.

I'm prime among them.

Analogies with other cultural pursuits are difficult and fleeting, but they're most apt when made in literature, with the temptation being to describe Jackson as comparable to William Shakespeare in terms of reach and pervasiveness.

To me, far more flattering is the positing of Jackson as the beer world’s successor to the 18th-century English essayist Samuel Johnson. After all, Johnson established an expository norm for non-fiction and wrote a dictionary of the English language, and a century and a half later, Jackson synthesized Johnson’s style and words to write the language and vocabulary of beer.

We’ll be speaking and writing the fruits of Johnson’s and Jackson’s life work for quite some time to come.

As Lew Bryson perceptively notes in an appreciation elsewhere, it is Jackson's association of beer with place that survives as the finest representation of the beer writer's particular genius. 20th-century industrial complexes may have stolen beer from its traditional point of localized orientation, but Jackson stole it back, first a little, and then a lot.

He generally refrained from writing about technical brewing details, possessing instead a superhuman ability to filter hyperbole of the sort favored by marketers, and viscerally connect beer to its own "terroir" in terms of physical geography, human culture and social conditions. Jackson did so factually, wittily, often majestically, and always with supreme lyricism.

He was a damned fine writer, and the father of us all.

----

Five years after the nocturnal November visit, I found myself at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, a few samples under my belt, standing somewhere on the mezzanine, leaning against a vacant table and chatting with the beer writer and editor Stan Hieronymus. After a few minutes, Stan asked me if I had brought a book to be signed. With my face registering obvious cluelessness, Stan motioned behind me – and there was Michael Jackson, settling in for another afternoon with his reading public.

Surprisingly, I was at the head of a gradually lengthening line of people forming behind me, and entirely without a Michael Jackson book for autographing, but I had a GABF program tucked under my arm, and it was duly presented to Jackson as I reintroduced myself and asked if he remembered the late evening at Rich O’s.

Jackson smiled and said yes, and then added that the FOSSILS newsletters we had since been mailing to him in London were entertaining. “You’re quite the polemicist,” said Jackson.

You’d better believe I was blushing, but before there was much time to consider a coherent response, Jackson pushed away the program and said, “Have I told you why your Red Room made such an impression on me?”

No, he had not, and this remark seemed odd at the time it was offered. In 1994, the Red Room had only just come into being. Then, as now, it is a small seating area at the pub, with one wall painted red and a massive three-part Soviet-era poster of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the wall, since augmented with other examples of Communist paraphernalia.

It surprised me that Jackson even noticed the Red Room during his brief visit, and of course there had been no other times when he might have explained what it meant to him, so I answered as directly as I could.

“No.”

Jackson promptly put down his pen and began telling the story.

It began in 1945 with his earliest childhood memory at the age of three: The long delayed, post-war British election campaign that ended in sweeping victory for Labor and the fall of Winston Churchill. Jackson’s father, whom he referred to as the family’s political agitator, was working one important day, so his mother – normally apolitical – took young Michael to a gala rally for their constituency’s Labor candidate, who in fact was red-letter Socialist (unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the politician’s his name).

Jackson said that he never forgot the rally’s numerous red buntings and campaign banners, and a week later, the Socialist/Labor candidate handily won the seat and began a long and distinguished career in Parliament, so long in fact that after the adult Jackson graduated from university and embarked upon his own career in journalism in the mid-1960s, the very same politician was still holding the seat won in 1945. Jackson was assigned by his newspaper to interview the aging MP.

During the interview, Jackson learned that the politician had actually lived in American prior to the second war, and had worked for …

“The leftist Louisville newspaper,” Jackson said, “what is the name of your leftist Louisville newspaper?”

By now I was kneeling, and starting to become uncomfortably cognizant of perhaps 75 people queued behind me, and what’s more, I was unable to think of any newspaper in Louisville that would fit the description offered by Jackson, who tried his best to joggle my memory.

“The newspaper’s owners were wealthy liberals,” he said, “and they’ve since sold the paper to a media company.”

I blurted, “The Binghams? The Courier-Journal?” and Jackson almost came up out of his chair.

“Yes! The Courier-Journal, and the Binghams – that’s it. That’s where he worked.”

As it transpired, the member of parliament – the man whose campaign rally had been burned into Jackson’s memory by virtue of the color red, who had worked for the Louisville Courier-Journal, and who had spoken of Louisville when interviewed by Jackson so many years before – was the cognitive impetus for Jackson’s reaction when he walked into our pub in 1994.

Finally, it all made sense: Red Room, geography, colors, politics and beer, all combining to make more than a few other beer lovers impatiently wait their turn while the dots were meticulously connected for me by the world’s greatest beer writer. It is something that I’ll remember until the day that I join Jackson at the celestial tap room's bar, when I’ll ask him the one question that most needs answering:

What was the journalist/politician’s name?

I briefly spoke with Jackson a third time at another GABF, and then a fourth at a British ale tasting in Indianapolis in 2001, and that was all. Now he’s dead, and the return visit to Rich O’s that I always thought would be made some day isn’t to be.

To remember Michael Jackson, I can do no better than appropriate Edwin Stanton’s words at the passing of Abraham Lincoln: Now he belongs to the ages.

He was, indeed, the father of us all.

Beer hunter Michael Jackson has died; worldwide good beer community mourns today.

It always was my hope that there'd be a second visit to the Public House by beer writer Michael Jackson. Sadly, it isn't to be.

Joyfully, his role in teaching us about beer will be celebrated for as long as there is a craft brewing business.

As always, ironies abound. I'd just finished posting about essential beer books, smiled inwardly at my memories of meeting Jackson at Rich O's and later in Denver, and then I checked my e-mail, only to learn that Jackson died last evening.

There'll be eulogies by the thousands, written and spoken by people in good beer circles who recognize the almost unfathomable extent of Jackson's contribution to the success we enjoy today. The hyperbole is deserved, because he made us all.

I'll have more to write when there's time; the show truly must go on, and we have a Bamberg-centric draft beer event kicking off on Friday. If not for Jackson, would I have visited Bamberg when I did? Would I have chosen to make good beer my life's work?

The weekend's beers are going to have his imprint, and I'm having the first one now.

All About Beer is the first place to turn for an appreciation. There'll be others, and I'll collect them at another time.