BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Headlines from June 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 June (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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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: That time in 2003 when we rode bicycles to Schneider Weisse.

Anyway ... at Pints&union, we'll be carrying bottled Schneider Weisse and Aventinus, two world classic wheat ales. Back in 2003 at the Public House, we'd been carrying the Schneider brewery's line since it first became available via the B. United wholesale house, and naturally it was to B. United that I directed a pre-trip inquiry: might my friends and I get a tour of Schneider while cycling?

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Tom and Nick Moench collaborate on a sour beer -- and what I remember about a day with Tom in Orlando in 2006.

In 2006, when the annual family reunion took place in steamy summer Orlando, the estimable Tom Moench sacrificed an afternoon to save our lives, rescuing the Baylors from resort hotel ennui, and with it $6 half-pints of Guinness served in bizarre Belgian-style stemware at the hotel bar.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: These "new rules of pub etiquette" are a must-read.

In fact, these rules of etiquette should come across as common sense for anyone who has consumed drinks in public, anywhere at all. They're not really new, but then again, teachers teach the same topic over and over to incoming classes who are unaware of the importance. So it goes.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Cask ales are the indigenous, tasty, beery glories of the British Isles (article from 2009).

Pints & Union will be opening soon, and several readers have asked if we'll be pouring cask ale. The unfortunate answer is no, although there might be the occasional pin or firkin from somewhere hoisted atop the bar and dispensed by gravity.

In this column and the one following it on Saturday, it is my aim to provide some background about cask ale, which might help to explain why we won't be installing hand pumps at the start. In short, economies of scale are out of whack.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Three cheers for a British ale movement in the States.

Conditioning ale in the cask (real ale), then pouring it by use of a hand pump (beer engine), are quintessentially British ways of brewing, serving and enjoying ale, with the basic idea being to take a slightly unfinished and still living product and artfully prepare it to be served at the optimal time, with a gentle carbonation produced naturally.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: How a bicycle ride and Lenin's Tribune connects Bank Street Brewhouse with Our Lady of Perpetual Hops.

I'm hoping you can see how the OLPH sketch prompted these recollections. Just imagine the podium facing in the direction of New Albany's City County Building, not unlike a minaret. I'd have been the muezzin of sorts, and it would have been the finest bully pulpit ever.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Whether sheep stealer or highwayman, he was hanged just the same at Cannards Grave.

Bud Light drinkers used to feel this way when they wandered by mistake into the Public House. The illustration comes from a 1972 book called British Inn Signs.

Where five roads meet on the A37 near Shepton Mallet (Somerset) is a gruesome sign of a man hanging from a gibbet.

The back story takes on a number of versions, which are considered in this modern update.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Anchor Porter is delicious. Just don't expect a firm answer as to how it differs from Stout.

Anchor Porter is black and rich, firmly hopped (circa 40 IBUs) with plenty of malty underpinnings. I'm getting chocolate, espresso, toffee and a hint of licorice in my mouth, and I'm struck by a vestige of similarity with some Baltic-style Porters I've had in the past -- albeit at a gentler ABV.

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Headlines from January 2018 on THE BEER BEAT.

This blog has gone on hiatus, primarily because these days my thoughts about beer are being posted alongside my utterances about everything else, over yonder at NA Confidential. You'll find them there in reverse chronological order via the helpful all-purpose tag, The Beer Beat.

However, each month I'll collect the links right here. Following are January's (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 Drinking Bout in the Cathedral Porch," or why it's time to make the Feast of Fools great again on New Year's Day.

Make no mistake: "Lux Optata Claruit," from the section called "Mass Of The Asses, Drunkards And Gamblers," is drinking music equal to "Gimme a Pigfoot" or "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight."

One need only observe an expanded context.

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THE BEER BEAT: On inauthenticity, disinformation, RateBeer and those disembodied breweries of the Trojan Zombie Afterlife.

If Trump were to consider deporting counter-revolutionary swine like these, I might consider voting for him.

ZX Ventures is a global incubator, operator, and venture capital team backed by Anheuser-Busch InBev. We are a small army of futurists, dreamers, doers, designerers, engineers, scientists, marketers, brewers, builders, and data geeks.

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THE BEER BEAT: We always cook with beer. Sometimes, we even add it to the food.

Which brings me back to your meal and beers tonight.

What you’ll be experiencing tonight is something exceedingly rare in the current time, so oddly offbeat as to be a counter-revolutionary act. Your meal tonight and those drinks accompanying it are not being crowd-sourced. Ratings have not been consulted, polls have not been taken, and not a single selfie was harmed in the preparation of this feast.

Rather, the bill of fare was selected because in the experience and intuition of Chef Fill-in-the-Blank and Anonymous Brewing, it was felt these dishes and beers belong alongside each other.

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THE BEER BEAT: How "Ambitious Brew" prefaced "I Know What Boyz Like" -- and "The Misogynist Within."

The (pre-Prohibition) brewers didn't know what hit them, primarily because they refused to pay attention until it was too late.

Ever since Leg Spreader first oozed to the surface three years ago (really -- it was January, 2015), much has been accomplished with respect to sexism in "craft" beer.

Quite a bit is left to be done, judging by another excellent piece by Bryan Roth, who is one of the most thoughtful beer writers around -- perhaps the Dave Zirin of good beer?

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THE BEER BEAT meets "comfort beer." It's undervalued, but real -- for instance, like Fuller's London Pride. Did I mention undervalued?

1. What one word, or phrase, do you think should be used to describe beer that you’d like to drink?

Comfort.

As I was laying out this post, another paean to comfort beer popped up in my Twitter feed, leading to immediate pangs of hunger for an authentically rendered Cornish pasty (pastie, British pasty, oggie, oggy, teddy oggie, tiddy oggin or oggy oggin) washed down with one or more adeptly pulled PINTS OF BITTER, damn it.

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THE BEER BEAT: V-Grits, False Idol Independent Brewers, their bricks 'n' mortar vegan brewery in development -- and the BSB Hangover Hoedown in 2015.

As has been widely reported recently, V-Grits is partnering with a brewery start-up to be known as False Idol Independent Brewers in a bricks 'n' mortar shared vegan brewery space at the former (and revered) Monkey Wrench at 1025 Barret Avenue ...

... I strongly suspect V-Grits and False Idol will do quite well with this concept, and perhaps a yearly commemorative Monkey Wrench Ale would be appropriate.

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THE BEER BEAT: Chili cook-off at Donum Dei Brewery on the 28th, to benefit APRON.

Just when you thought "Bowl Season" was finished, we present the first chili cook-off to benefit Apron, Inc.

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THE BEER BEAT: This smoked beer story is fine, thank you. Also: Eiderdown and Sunday sales.

Today's linked posting at Atlas Obscura strikes me as a perfectly reasonable introduction to the genre of smoky flavored beers, so naturally, I saw the article subsequently mentioned somewhere on Facebook, and found a heated debate among purists as to whether Garrett Oliver's description of a firebox was technically accurate, how such glaring errors as this fatally compromised his stewardship as editor of the Oxford Companion to Beer, and whether every "t" was crossed and "i" dotted -- and I was muttering obscenities to myself.

Give me a freaking break.

I thought: Have any of you ever stood behind a bar and tried to help a real person understand what smoked beer was all about, with the goal of encouraging the customer to try one, and maybe even enjoy it?

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THE BEER BEAT: Have a look at this Pints&Union pub buildout progress report.

Later the building housed two bars, first Love's Cafe and then more recently, Good Times. It is in the process of being almost completely rebuilt from the ground up, with much of the original wood slated to be repurposed in the interior. When the work is finished, it will become Pints & Union, the forthcoming pub being sketched by Joe Phillips and yours truly.

Our shared vision takes the traditional Anglo-Irish pub as a starting point. It might be described as "progressively old school," although this phrase lamentably is being used by someone else.

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THE BEER BEAT: "Dives and hives" in Nawbany, a new brewery coming to Floyds Knobs, and other tales of the drinking life.

Sara's pub crawl also took her to Jack's, Brooklyn and The Butcher and Hugh E. Bir Cafe. Taken as a whole, her wanderings testify to a rich diversity of drinking options in New Albany, and in spite of my own personal trials and travails, I have to admit I'm proud to have played my role in it -- and look forward to doing so again.

Speaking of start-ups, I too was surprised to see a brewery coming soon to Floyds Knobs (Our Lady of Perpetual Hops).

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