Headlines from April 2017 on THE BEER BEAT.

Previously, I explained several reasons why this blog has gone on hiatus, and explained 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 all-purpose tag, The Beer Beat.

However, whenever the urge strikes -- probably monthly -- I'll collect a few of these links right here. Following are April's ruminations, with the oldest listed first. Some are more topical than others, and I'm past the point of caring about it.

Having noted this, I found that writing about my favorite pubs made me feel good. There may be more of it.

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THE BEER BEAT: Indie, not craft, because "There is absolutely NOTHING 'independent' about AB/InBev."

I haven't gone cold turkey on the "craft" descriptor, and find myself using the word here and there (usually in quotation marks, as intended to emphasis the escalating irony), but zero tolerance is a worthy goal to which we might aspire.

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THE BEER BEAT: Retro and dive, tavern and free house. Stages of development. A rumination.

We’re approaching an important local anniversary in the saga of better beer, because at some point in the late summer of 1992, the first keg of Guinness was tapped at the Public House formerly known as Rich O’s.

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THE BEER BEAT: The Hibernian (Hi-B) Bar, one of my favorite pubs in the world.

It's been 30 years since I climbed the stairs to the first floor (in Europe, that's how they're numbered) and beheld the cramped majesty of the Hi-B. Somewhere up or down another set of stairs was the loo. The publican Brian O'Donnell was a legend even then, and as I write, it is my earnest hope that he's still alive and scowling.

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THE BEER BEAT: The Dolphin, one of my favorite pubs in the world.

Few such pubs can boast a semi-official house artist. The late Beryl Cook was a painter who moved to Plymouth after the retirement of her husband. They opened a guest house nearby, and gradually Cook gained fame as an artist. Because The Dolphin was her local, several of her paintings chronicle pub life.

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THE BEER BEAT: BrewDog's private equity $$$ bonanza: "Not bad for ten years of being rude about the rest of the UK brewing industry."

BrewDog's antics have entertained me for a long time. The company's success reminds us that while P.T. Barnum may have been an American, hucksterism never has been confined to just one country. I hope the founders of BrewDog make a mint, whether in dollars, Euros or pounds sterling. I'll be at a local establishment somewhere, drinking myself to sleep.

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THE BEER BEAT: Jim Koch ponders whether it's "Last Call for Craft Beer."

Just my two cents. It's hard feeling sorry for Jim Koch, though in some ways I do. Samuel Adams Boston Lager is one of the most important beers in American brewing history, whether "craft" or macro. It helped pioneer a whole segment, and it's still really good for what it is.

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THE BEER BEAT: St. Radegund Free House, one of my favorite pubs in the world.

Regrettably, my paean to St. Radegund Free House in Cambridge, England must begin with the sadly belated report that former landlord Terry "Bunter" Kavanagh died five years ago at the age of 75.

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THE BEER BEAT: A neighborhood dive bar for the post-craft beer world?

It's feeling like a lab rat, as though you're part of an ongoing experiment in anxiety escalation -- like an arms race, always hoppier, sourer, stronger and plain weirder; the wheel constantly is revolving, and there's nothing upon which to hang one's metaphorical chapeau for longer than one keg (a sixth barrel), lest another begin pouring the diametrical opposite.

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THE BEER BEAT: Sometimes compliance takes a labyrinth.

Attention, oppressed Indian(a) ATC permit holders.

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THE BEER BEAT: Valley Malt. Pioneer Valley. It all comes back to me now.

And, during two recent trips to Western Massachusetts, it never once occurred to me that Valley Malt might be located nearby, as in fact it is -- in Hadley, just a few miles from Diana's niece's family in South Hadley. We almost certainly were within minutes of the malting, and may well have passed it a half-dozen while driving back and forth.

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Wasted: Jim Koch, Sam Adams and Indifference.

The first point to make clear is this: First-rate beer writing here (it is Andy Crouch, after all). How very refreshing to read a piece about beer that isn't a list, a selfie or a professional rassling video masquerading as a beer review.

As for Jim Koch's place in the sun circa 2015, surely he must be credited for occupying such a polarizing position. You can't do that without being known, and arousing feelings one way or another.

Personally, it's a struggle for me to decide how to feel about Koch. He performed valuable services by elevating the standard of airport beer, introducing seasonal styles to a wide audience and "perfecting" the art of contract brewing ... and now overall beer standards are better when you fly; seasonals proliferate like weeds, and punk gypsy brewers using someone else's brewery get the ink formerly reserved for Koch.

He didn't stay "cool" ... but was he ever "cool" from the outset?

You see, as a reluctant capitalist, it's hard for me to feel bad about a guy with millions in the bank. I suspect it is Koch's unalloyed profit motive that always has kept me aloof -- it's my issue, and not necessarily yours, but it helps explain my indifference, because that's what it is. I simply don't care.

Mick Jagger is a very rich human, and yet even at the age of 70, he can bound across a stage and convince many of us that he means it. I'm not sure Koch ever possessed this ability, and unfortunately for him, Samuel Adams Boston Lager has not aged as well as "Satisfaction."

Wasted: How the craft-beer movement abandoned Jim Koch (and his beloved Sam Adams), by Andy Crouch (Boston Magazine)

Jim Koch was pissed off.

The most recognizable man in American beer, who sold us all on the idea of craft brew three decades ago on his way to a billion-dollar fortune, was having dinner last October with a group of brewers inside Row 34, one of Boston’s top-rated beer bars. The drink list was filled with esoteric options from hot new breweries throughout the country, as well as palate-pleasing offerings from abroad. But Koch had a problem: Though this mecca for beer nerds carries two dozen beers on draft and another 38 in bottles and cans, it doesn’t serve his beloved Sam Adams.

Staring at the beer menu, Koch began to criticize the selection. More than half of it, he said, wasn’t worthy of being served—inadvertently insulting the establishment’s owner, who unbeknownst to Koch was sitting next to him. Then Koch interrogated the beer manager about the offerings. Unsatisfied with the answers, Koch complained about the beers so intensely that an employee at the bar teared up. Koch rose from his seat and walked into the keg room, where he started checking freshness dates on his competitors’ kegs.

Wednesday Weekly: To the “craft” of the matter.

The idea is to stay disciplined by continuing to write Wednesday columns here, but to try posting one each week instead of every other week (as was the case for Mug Shots in LEO). The following had been submitted as the next LEO column. So much for that! I'll come up with something better for a column name as we go along. Thanks for your support during the past few days, and the many notes and kind thoughts.

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To the “craft” of the matter.

It was in a moment of sodden, resigned and benumbed weakness, to be repeated only once in all the manic, hazy years since, that I agreed to attend either the second or third Thunder Over Louisville.

Don’t ask me to specify the date. In those heady, early 1990’s days of blessed, expanded, real beer choice, I was pioneering a veritable self-Stakhanovite movement dedicated to exceeding quotas of alcoholic consumption wherever and whenever possible. As a result, the rear view mirror now is blurred on occasion. So be it.

Otherwise embarrassed, I mention this “thunderous” error in event attendance judgment for one reason alone: We’d booked rooms at the Seelbach, and when the fireworks ended and our flasks were damnably emptied of spirits, it was decided to close the evening at the hotel bar. There, amid the classicist’s interior opulence, we were surprised and delighted to find Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

It was in a bottle. Or: On tap. I don’t remember which.

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The Sam Adams flagship was, and remains, dependable default lager beer, and the line has expanded to include numerous other styles. It’s impossible to criticize these many well-made products, and it’s just as unlikely to find well-versed beer enthusiasts who’ll express undying love for them.

From well-documented, humble origins, and with zeal, diligence and a considerable measure of sheer blarney, Boston Beer Company has consolidated strengths with few missteps. It has registered steady growth, while at the same time striving to maintain its small-scale renegade micro sheen, except that nowadays, Boston Beer is equipped with a productive capacity to play the game at a near-macro level.

Sam Adams can be enjoyed in stadiums, airports and country clubs, those “special” places where the notion of free markets capitalism is less popular than in Pyongyang, and where genuinely local “craft” breweries struggle to penetrate the archaic vestiges of monopolist distribution ... and usually fail, such that we sigh, shrug, and mutter to ourselves: Well, at least Sam Adams is better than Heineken, right?

Wait. What was that? That’s right. 200 words into this essay, and I could no longer avoid the use of the “C” word. Perhaps now, you’ll see where I’m headed.

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As any parent can attest, growing pains can be awkward, and semantic dominoes began falling earlier this month when it was reported that the Boston Beer Company could lose its status as a “craft” brewer by climbing past the two million barrel yearly production limit.

In this instance, “craft” is more than shorthand for marketing purposes. In part, it’s about prestige. Without Boston Beer’s oversized two million barrel output, craft/micro/artisanal brewing’s overall beer market share would decrease overnight, even if all the other 1,500+ smaller breweries reported gains of their own.

And yet, the “craft” segment sales leader is undersized compared with the heaviest hitters – with implications in the realm of taxation, where the real story lies. Sammy’s 2,000,001st barrel will place Boston Beer in the same excise taxation class as Anheuser-Busch, even though A-B annually brews at least 50 times more beer than Jim Koch’s famous car trunk start-up gone big time.

The immediate and prosaic solution touted by Boston Beer and the Brewers Association is a piece of national legislation that would increase the yearly production limit on "craft" breweries from two million to six million barrels, and then cut the excise tax on the first 60,000 barrels brewed by half, with a more modest discount up to the limit.

On a more philosophical plane, a freshly minted discussion of the word “craft” is underway. I tend to use it freely, almost as slang: We’re experiencing a “craft” beer revolution, our peers comprise “Craft” Beer Nation, and it’s all about fresh, local “craft” alternatives. It’s hard to define, but we persist in thinking that we know it when we taste it.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that the word “craft” was co-opted long ago by those larger and less scrupulous brewing industry denizens like the AB InBev monolith, which always have depended on subterfuge and deceptive advertising to take the place of artistic creativity.

Fact is, they’ve already soiled the “craft” nest, even though bloated multinational megabreweries can no more produce a “craft” beer than an elephant can sire a butterfly, although they employ squadrons of soulless PR flaks to fashion micro-exterior Potemkin packaging to willfully blind the drinker to the insipid reality of robotic mockro-liquid in the glass.

Repeat after me: Michelob Brewing Company is marketing-speak. It is not a “craft” brewery. Wishing and advertising dollars will not make it so.

Those of us who are willing to search for the genuine article might as well accept the loss of “craft” and move on to a different way of describing what we drink, think and do. I favor simplicity: “Good beer,” as opposed to bad beer, works just fine on my word processor.

Meanwhile, as you follow this saga, pay attention to the path of the legislation, and adjustments in the excise tax. Smoke and mirrors might produce the appearance of a craft purse from sow’s swill, but 100 pennies still add up to a dollar … each and every time.

I didn't to to Bavaria for salad, you know.

Before and after views of a Nurnberg mixed grill of local signature sausages, ham, pork knuckle and duck, accompanied by a tureen of gravy, with potato dumpling, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut and sweet red cabbage to be pushed the other way toward my vegetarian spouse, are provided courtesy of my recent weight gain. This morning's YMCA visit set the gear in reverse.

I'm back from Europe. How did I know this? Yesterday afternoon it was revealed that the gate in the Cincy/Northern Kentucky airport being made ready for the final leg to Louisville was located adjacent to a Samuel Adams-themed establishment.

I had a Samuel Adams Boston Ale and a Winter Lager, both on draft, observing that both tasted pretty good.

The first three people to follow us to the bar heard the waitress explain the Sam Adams beers on tap, and opted instead for Bud Light. The fourth tried to order Blue Moon, which was unavailable, and then opted grudgingly for a Winter Lager.

Yep. Back home again, in brain-dead beer land.