I'm the subject of a feature-length profile in this month's issue of Louisville Magazine.

"Beer's not what he does, though, not any more."

I've been given the gist of a curriculum vitae, albeit several thousand words long, and yet it feels odd to tout an article about me. Instead, here is the writer Dylon Jones to introduce his feature article in Louisville Magazine.

I spent the last year getting to know Roger Baylor. After months of political humor, debates, cigars, Communist cats, and a good many beers, I give you this: The Independent, my profile of a small-town dissident with the whole world spread out before him.

It's flattering to be featured, but more importantly, my aim is to draw your attention to Dylon Jones as a writer. He spent countless hours taking notes and making recordings, distilled this unruly mass of information to its essentials, then formed an accurate, entertaining narrative.

As a journalist, he gets it right, and as a writer, he tells the story well. Writing is damned hard work, and Dylon does it well. Keep your eyes on him.

The Independent, by Dylon Jones (Louisville Magazine)

New Albany craft-beer pioneer Roger Baylor drained his glass and left his brewery to run for mayor last fall. The path ahead is littered with obstacles -- contentious former business partners, the two-party system, "garbage trees." Good thing he brought shears.

Also, kudos to Chris Witzke for his photography and informed chat. The link takes you to the interactive issue of Louisville Magazine (June 2016), which is easy to use.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part five, and a closing rumination about revolution, orthodoxy and contrarianism.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part five, and a closing rumination about revolution, orthodoxy and contrarianism.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

If you feel like having a beer, and better choices are limited or even non-existent, what do you do?

For quite a few years now, my thoughts on this matter have been simple: Go somewhere else, do something else, or drink something else, even if this means water, coffee, wine, or something even stronger.

Or nothing at all. The older I get, the fewer years remain … and life becomes even shorter for drinking wretched mass market swill.

Sorting through available options resembles a process of triage, and it requires principled thinking. There are considerations of flavor, and these exist alongside equally compelling explorations of origin.

It’s true that I have periodic issues with Samuel Adams, but in a pinch, I’ll drink Boston Lager in an airport. The same goes for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale … for now, but as Sierra Nevada inexorably morphs into Sierra Appalachia, my thoughts might well change.

Those ubiquitous house mockrobrewed atrocities trotted out by the big boys, from Blue Moon to Landshark and back, might as well not exist in my world. I’m far too loving of my greenbacks to sacrifice them on charades, and there is too much preying on the gullible already.

The same reasoning applies to the late Goose Island, as reduced perhaps forever to inert zombie bondage. Goose Island is little more than a Craft Shaped Hologram, and the money spent on it goes straight to Leuven, hence to Chardonnay-sipping shareholders the world over. Sorry, but I cannot support subsidizing leeches.

Leinenkugel? Spare me. Not since the decline of its Indian Head stubbies in the 1980s has this Wisconsin brewery been remotely independent. Neither do I know which offshore corporate bank accounts benefits from abominations like Summer Shandy, nor do I care. It’s all legal documents under a watery bridge at this juncture.

By the same token, every now and then I’ll drink a Pilsner Urquell or a Guinness, and my doing so strikes some as hypocritical. It isn’t, because the self-awareness of shift precludes it. First and foremost, thinking and drinking locally (regionally, nationally, in ever-widening circles of consciousness from “often” to “much more rarely”) involve shift. “Perfection” is a stupid and non-existent term meant for marring the verbiage on restaurant menus.

Yes, Pilsner Urquell, Guinness and a few other beers worth considering are entirely owned by multi-national conglomerates, from which I shift my interest and cash as often as possible, but the difference to me is that these brands are not incessantly framed to deceive in the fashion of AB-InBev’s Trojan Goose, which is a shelf-space-monopolizing chess piece in a game I don’t care to play.

---

Long ago in the 1990s, when I first composed the essay that has provided the inspiration for these past five updates, it was my observation that mass market swill continued to exercise a hold on me many years past the point where I knew far better, and that this grip did not strictly owe to considerations of cost.

Rather, it was something almost cultural, which required a process not unlike active daily therapy to properly expunge. A few passages are worth revisiting.

You can’t know what you’re missing if you haven’t been exposed to it, and when you have, familiar habits and conveniences don’t change easily. It takes an act of calculated volition to escape the subtle noose of conformity that American consumer culture imperceptibly tightens with every ubiquitous ploy in its considerable arsenal, with every billboard, television advertisement and sponsorship agreement that assaults our senses in a typical day. To begin escaping it, you have to be willing to question beliefs that seem all the more sacrosanct owing to the almost religious conviction with which they are advanced.

You must try to cease thinking in terms of packaging and presentation, and begin thinking in terms of essences and ultimates, to abandon the orthodoxy that more for less is always better, and to recognize that enlightenment is far preferable to ignorance even when broader understanding brings with it "unpatriotic" and "antisocial" perceptions and connotations on the part of your peers.

These many years later, the last part remains most difficult, except that now, while having no interest whatever in returning to the intellectually bankrupt ethos of mass market swill, I’m finding myself equally at odds with it and with the “craft” worldview succeeding it, the latter being a book I’ve helped write.

Alas, once a contrarian, always a contrarian. I wondered what would happen in my cranium when revolution mutated into orthodoxy, and now I have the privilege of finding out.

For my money, the sociology of human beings making alcoholic beverages and drinking them, both privately and publicly, is the most complex, intimate and fascinating of all such systems that seek to explain our behavior in the context of interaction with others. All the elements are there: Religiosity, education, science, individual and group psychology … on and on, with all aspects of the human experience, the bodies and the blood, capable of being poured into a glass and consumed. The power and intensity of the metaphor is enhanced by knowledge, and this alters your relationship with the people who are taking part, and with the elixir in the glass.

Not bad. In the original, I was riffing on St. Augustine of Hippo, hence the atypical (for me) religious ale-legory.

Of course, one tinkers with these fragile relationships at his own peril; once released, the genie might be reluctant to crawl meekly back into the bottle, and so it has been with me. It takes a certain hardness of heart to realize that your beliefs are beyond compromise, even if the result is a schism with the past. I’ve come a long way toward achieving my goal of being a better beer drinker than all the rest of them – not in terms of volume, but in terms of understanding. If celebrating this accomplishment means sharing with them the detestable liquid that started us all down this path, and partaking of the liquid they still venerate, as though nothing has changed in twenty years of incessant, clamorous change, then I’ll have to regrettably pass, and urge them to come to me on my terms … or not at all.

“Detestable” aptly covers swill, though not the far better beer I still choose to the exclusion of watery alcohol-delivery devices. It’s the wrong word to describe where I am now, given that “better” beer is precisely that. Where does it go from here? I can’t predict, but I’m fairly serene in the plan I’m devising for myself and my business.

I’m not going anywhere … at least physically, and this fifth segment is the last in the series.

Next week, it’s on to something else.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part four, with a boomerang.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part four, with a boomerang.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

My last three curmudgeonly columns have been devoted to a personal beer history of sorts. Their basic framework was borrowed from an essay I wrote roughly twenty years ago, in which my consciousness at the time was harnessed, perhaps inexpertly, to explain why I no longer cared to drink mundane, pedestrian, mass-market (read: the usual shitty) beer.

I disavow none of it, though not unexpectedly, the intervening two decades have taken me to a different place. It is a transition in progress. While my aversion to the ordinary remains as strong as ever, and there exists no urge to return to the days of bottle-baby, longneck coddling, minimum-alcohol-delivery devices, I find the current state of “craft” beer appreciation to be the cause of a profound disillusionment.

Insofar as I possess a soul, it is in a relative state of annoyance, if not outright torment.

---

Interestingly, on one occasion in 2008, I dipped into the cross-disciplinary stream in search of explanations for my long, gradual detachment from mass-market swill, not to mention the formative period of my “career in beer” spent assisting other beer drinkers to overcome their attachment to the BudMillerCoors hegemony.

At the time, it occurred to me that something similar to the "Five Stages of Grief" was appropriate. Take it away, Wiki:

The Kübler-Ross model describes, in five discrete stages, the process by which people deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness. The model was introduced by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book "On Death and Dying". The stages have become well-known as the "Five Stages of Grief".

I modified the five stages of grief to pertain to the tragedy of swill consumption.

Denial: "It just can’t be happening that my ice-cold Bud Light no longer lights my fire."

Anger: "Why me? It’s not fair that Roger made me drink that good, expensive beer … and now my Silver Bullet tastes awful!"

Bargaining: "Just let me enjoy one more evening at (insert name of preferred dive bar, meat market or sporting venue) so I can give my Miller Lite a proper, respectful goodbye."

Depression: "I’m so sad, why bother drinking beer at all, good or bad?"

Acceptance: "It’s going to be all right, and swill is no longer a part of my life. Thank you, Roger."

What prompted this 2008 rendering of the five stages of grief was an experience in a local eatery. I was seated at the bar, and looked to my right. There sat a man I knew. For a great many years, he’d been coming into the Public House, loudly praising the beers, and drinking as many as one per sitting.

However, on the evening in question, he was hoisting a bottle of Miller Lite, and doing so in much the same fashion as the actors in the brand’s television commercials of the same period, in which the manufacturer of this eternally insipid, vaguely beer-like liquid encouraged Lite’s many “fans” to adopt a Mussolini-era fascist salute to celebrate the many medals the brand recently won in an international beer competition, wherein the corporate entity’s longtime sponsorship of the contest in question had led to the creation of category guidelines precisely describing the negation of anything approximating beer flavor – this being the exact “style” best assuring Lite’s many medals.

And so there I was, at the bar of the local eatery, with my lapsed customer seated less than ten feet away, spiraling downward like a victim of Baron von Richthofen's triplane. It might have been an awkward moment, except that he steadfastly looked away every time I tried to make eye contact and say hello.

Knowing that the key to most successful conversions is to hate the sin and love the sinner, I wasn’t offended at all. Rather, it was flattering, but not without a pang of weird conscience that maybe, only now, is coming back to roost.

---

I’ll never stop feeling amusement when confronted with predictable spectacles initiated by the unbeerable lightness of American bearing, as when the Harley rider in full leather costume regalia entered the Public House, asked for an Alpha King, and refused to listen to my well-intentioned explanation that he might not like such assertiveness. The motorcyclist was back within moments, demanding a Spaten Lager.

Only at closing did I discover the nearly full pint of Alpha King, hidden in a corner behind a lamp.

At the same time, while loving better beer as much as ever, I can neither comprehend nor stomach today’s chest-thumping, trend-chasing, pretentiousness-sans-principle brand of beer enthusiasm. It is two miles wide and a centimeter deep, generally practiced in a narcissistic vacuum, and has quite effectively rendered the very term “craft” superfluous. What was formerly known as “craft” beer is in a non-intellectual, pack-think stage of development. It makes me crazed and sad.

But this isn’t the most depressing part of it.

That distinction is reserved for the knowledge that I must claim a measure of personal responsibility for the formless, disconnected beer snobbery that now has me running for an unoccupied commode.

Exactly how and why my beer narrative became sidetracked remains to be considered. Perhaps I mistakenly believed my own press clippings. It’s also true that beer fashions change, and so have I. All revolutions mutate and evolve. Pendulums swing back and forth. Sit out a few dances, and the band may eventually play a song more to my liking.

One thing’s for sure.

While recapturing youthful glory isn’t a very good bet, the cessation of food service at Bank Street Brewhouse leaves me with a clean slate of sorts. BSB is a lump of clay. It needs remolding, and so do I. BSB is now free to be a place to talk with people about beer, to educate, to learn, and to find a few of these errant threads. NABC’s second location may have not succeeded as an eatery, but it may yet find its niche.

Doing so just might require me finding mine.

Finally, the path forward is becoming clearer.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part three, in which a shaky maturity is attained.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part three, in which a shaky maturity is attained. 

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of “dark” beer during my formative years. After all, who are you going to believe, Gussie Busch or your own eyes? Wasn’t beer supposed to be yellow, and if it wasn’t yellow, what exactly did that mean?

Very, very interesting.

My first close encounter with Guinness was not of the draft kind, which didn’t reach Louisville until later in the 1980s. Rather, it was Extra Stout from the bottle. Fireworks went off, and bells could be heard chiming deep in my throat.

But dark beers were not entirely new to me, although I hadn’t the first idea why they were dark, or how they were made, or how they differed from the massive blackness of Guinness, which cut an olfactory swath through my soul.

Early on, in 1978 or thereabouts, there had been a dark beer from a long-defunct Chicago brewery called Peter Hand (it also made an extra light beer of some sort), and it was followed onto Cut Rate Liquors’s shelves by Augsburger Dark. Occasionally we purchased the contract-brewed American version of Lowenbrau Dark, having accepted without question Miller Brewing’s television advertising strategy of "tonight, let it be Lowenbrau," and saving it for special times.

There had been other American Dark Lager sightings. Don Da Leon’s, a deli and imported foods store located in the shabby old Quadrangle in Jeffersonville, was far ahead of its time, and put Schlitz Dark on draft around 1981. Even before that, Mario’s Pizza on Charlestown Road in New Albany (Mandarin Café is located there now) had a dark beer on tap for a few months. It came from the Budweiser wholesaler, and must have been a short-lived Bud house brand experiment.

Just after having Guinness for the first time, I saw a six-pack of Stroh’s Bock and tried it. What was bock, anyway? According to an old man at Steinert’s, who spoke in stately and authoritative confidence, and probably hadn’t traveled any further afield than Cincinnati in his entire life, bock was brewed from the leftovers at the bottom of the vats after spring brewery cleaning each year.

As for himself, he wouldn’t touch the dark stuff for fear of its crippling 20% alcohol content and molasses-like consistency. It wasn’t long until I learned that those tales of spring scrubbing and heightened potency were utter nonsense. At first I suffered from embarrassment for having been so stupid, but later realized that listening to old men perched on bar stools telling stories was the important part, and truthfulness a subsidiary consideration.

---

At first, Guinness Extra Stout was a multicultural shock, and the impact was softened by mixing it with flavorless golden lager beers. To be perfectly honest, on more than one occasion we brought a six-pack into the K & H Cafe in Lanesville and amused the owners by making “black and tans” using draft Budweiser. I must have been living right, because the beer gods saw fit not to punish me for this transgression, and anyway, the percentage of the “cut” became more and more lopsided until we graduated permanently to unalloyed stout.

Whether “black and tan” or “half and half,” I’ve had little use for the idea of training wheels since discarding them. As my friend Mark once noted, the perfect “black and tan” isn’t halves of stout and pale ale or golden lager mixed in a glass. It’s a pint of each, mixed in your stomach.

---

Of course, merely being introduced to better beers like Guinness and Pilsner Urquell did not imply automatically enshrinement into a state of pure bliss and enlightenment. Many years of practice and refinement were yet to come, in part because youth is wasted on the young. When there is a surfeit of hormonal adrenalin and a paucity of discretionary cash, progress in any area can be painstaking and incremental. Old familiar temptations and new, unexplored domains vied for hegemony over mind, palate and wallet.

Gradually it became clear that if beer’s sole purpose was to serve as an odorless, flavorless alcohol delivery device, then it held little ultimate interest for me. A bottle of cheap vodka and a few drops of Rose’s Lime Juice provided a much speedier and efficient means of intoxication.

It was left to Michael Jackson’s original “World Guide to Beer,” as culled from the remainder table at a mall bookshop, to become the cosmic text that wove all the threads into a coherent whole.
Jackson offered the saga of beer as a long and fascinating one, ranging across all aspects of the human experience.

Beer is about science and art, farms and cities, social history, local culture and geography. It's about the places you've gone, and the ones you'd like to go. It's about different textures and flavors to match your mood, the time of day, the season, and the task at hand.

To this very day, my relationship with better beer continues to be defined by what the academicians would call a cross-disciplinary approach. In its absence, my interest flags, because when better beer is removed from its context as a unifier of human experience, to be isolated and objectified as a status-affirming Soma for beer porn narcissists, it’s just another fad.

I might as well be a wine geek – and that’s a fate worse than death.

---

By 1983, I was working part-time at the old Scoreboard Liquors in New Albany and seeking to stock one door of the walk-in cooler with imports (remember, American-made “craft” beers were as yet several years away). On and off, I continued at this job right up until 1992, when I went into the business at the pub formerly known as Rich O’s.

Starting in 1984 or thereabouts, I no longer drank light, low-calorie beer under any circumstance. In 1985, I traveled to Europe for the first time, a voyage of exuberant discovery that has been repeated dozens of times since. In those early days, after each trip, it became harder and harder to return to old haunts and to stomach cans of Stroh’s or High Life, although until 1992, it continued to happen.

Now it is the year 2014. My last taste of Budweiser came in 2004, and before that, 1992.

Bud Light? Early 1980s.

I managed to swallow a Miller High Life in 2009, and perhaps consumed a new generation (read: impossibly vapid) Pabst at some point during the last five years. So it is that exceptions prove the rule, and the mass-produced liquid still preferred by my countrymen (and women) at a ratio of 9 to 1 is utterly alien to me. I can more easily imagine being beamed up to the Enterprise for afternoon tea than drinking a Coors Light.

And this is the source of enduring, abiding happiness for me.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part two ... and the clouds begin to part.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, part two ... and the clouds begin to part. 

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(last week's first part)

Falls City, Fehr’s and Oertel’s 92 were Louisville beer brands that survived Prohibition, and remained shakily operational when I was born in 1960. They were about to be decimated by a combination of internal cluelessness, changing market tastes and incessant dirty tricks practiced by better-funded, expansionist mass-market breweries.

Fehr’s went out of business in 1964, so for obvious chronological reasons I have no clear memories of it. Oertel’s was next to expire in 1967. I can distinctly recall my father and his pals drinking Oertel’s from long neck bottles, offering occasional nips to the kids, and being scolded by their womenfolk.

Like the wasting victim of a terminal disease, the original incarnation of Falls City managed to last until 1978, the year I graduated from high school. Then an opportunistic carpetbagger from Wisconsin called G. Heileman bought the rights to Falls City’s identity, and the brand commenced a ghoulish low-budget afterlife, inexorably cheapened as its former regional target demographic inexorably shrank.

Through it all, in my unformed and youthful opinion, these post-Prohibition golden lager beers generally tasted foul. So did the bulk of the national brands following in their wake. Having already conceded that as a youngster, I didn’t much like the taste of beer, it is theoretically possible that these beers were not wretched at all. The eternal question is this:

Did I dislike the normal taste of beer as a universally quantifiable flavor, or was the liquid being handed down to us as beer as objectionable as I judged it to be?

Being otherwise aimless and college bound, it seemed appropriate to devote a few years of diligent “study” to this vexing problem.

---

I may have been getting older, but I wasn’t looking any older. This was an issue, given that many of my friends already had the appearance of lumberjacks, and a miracle was needed. It came in for form of a fake ID, which bought me two years of early entry just when I needed it most.

After all, how can one turn pro if he can’t get served?

According to self-annotated legend, it was the autumn of 1979 when I renounced my amateur drinking status and joined the professional beer drinking ranks. The impetus was stereotypically familiar: The messy dissolution of a romance, and rampant ensuing depression. One morning during the worst of it, my car suddenly veered away from the university’s parking lot in the direction of a nearby package store. Breakfast was two quart bottles of Colt ’45; the next day, a six-pack of Wiedemann did the trick.

Worry not: I had a Styrofoam cooler to keep these beers cold, because as before, the major impediment to becoming a professional beer drinker was how disappointing beer inevitably tasted. The flavor of beer as we knew it somehow had to be evaded. The less of it, the better, and ice deadened one’s tongue.

But what if beer could be flavorless and odorless by design, as with the advent of light, low-calorie American lager?

When my fake ID first began easing passage into bars, most of the older male regulars were drinking traditional macho “real man” beers like Pabst, Sterling, Stroh’s and Miller High Life. By the early 1980s, it seemed that they’d all switched to Lite, Budweiser Light (as it was called in the beginning) and even Old Milwaukee Light.

Price wasn’t the issue. If anything, they’d traded up from “popular price” and were paying 25% more to cover the cost of Big Beer’s ubiquitous television ads … not to mention the fact that “less filling” actually was veiled code for “drink more of it.”

My conclusion, then as now: Their lifetimes spent suckling Sterling finally had gotten to them, and when they grasped that the new wave of flavorless light beer had become socially acceptable to their peers, they fled traditional brands as fast as their terminally impaired taste buds would carry them. Better the nothingness of wet air than what passed for “full flavor.” You could hear palpable sighs of relief at air-conditioned taverns, softball fields and church picnics all across the nation.

Light beer may have been the castrato of the beer world of beer, but its flavorlessness had a similar effect on me, at least initially. In the absence of any standard for comparison, light beer became a sort of step-ladder for me. I was able to drink enough of it, and sufficiently often, to finally develop a taste for the generic “beer flavor” that defined American mass market beer of the time, which light beers possess, albeit it in substantially diluted form.

It didn’t suit me for long. Like my fake ID, light beer simply bought necessary time. Light beer wasn’t drinking; it was swallowing. Not unlike masturbation, light beer promised temporary release. Light beer was affordable, and a purely utilitarian means to an end, but to me it never once became the end itself.

---

For one thing, regular examinations of the wares at Cut Rate Liquors in Jeffersonville revealed the existence of exotic, unexplored modes of thinking and drinking. Cut Rate stocked imported beers – mostly international golden lagers, but also dark lagers, British ales and even a few Belgians. What we now categorize as craft barely existed, even in California.

Money was tight, and sampling meant splurging. There was no source of information, apart from bottle labels and six-pack cartons. Still, every now and then I took the risk and tried a new beer. The flavors were different, and hinted at broader horizons.

In 1982, two good friends intervened with essential personal testimony. Both of them had gone away to college, to reside in places less parochial than Floyd County. One of them returned to the fold singing the praises of Guinness Extra Stout, and the other introduced me to Pilsner Urquell, then sold in four-pack cartons for a lofty $3.99 plus sales tax.

I was intrigued. I’d had Molson, Labatts and Beck’s, but what was the spicy flavor in the Pilsner Urquell, that piquant bitterness cutting through creamy grain flavor? It was something I hadn’t experienced in Blatz. My friend wasn’t sure, but he thought it had something to do with hops. Guinness was black like coffee. It was dry, roasty and daunting in a way that defied categorization, and completely unlike any "dark" beer I’d had before.

You mean there were different sorts of dark beers, too? These always had intrigued me, along with pumpernickel, rye and other departures from the Wonder Bread norm. Finally, liberated from the longnecks of our fathers, the notion of beer was starting to make better sense.

All I needed was a lot more money and a plane ticket.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, with the party of the first part.

The PC: Well, ya gotta start somewhere, with the party of the first part.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Beer is my life, and yet amazingly, this hasn’t always been the case.

Then again, even LeBron James prepped in high school before being allowed to turn pro.

I’ve come a long way from humble origins, and it has been an arduous path to self-knowledge, a steady upward trudge from the degrading depths of Schaefer "Weekender" 30-packs, purchased with blackened spare change scraped out from the ash tray by my dashboard light, to the sublime stylistic cornucopia of the present day.

It all started a bit after I was born.

As a child, I was treated to wee nips taken straight from my father’s returnable bottles of Oertel’s 92. I wasn’t impressed because it didn’t taste like Coca-Cola. Now, at the age of 53, I haven’t touched a Coke for a decade or more, and I’d cut out my tongue rather than taste a Diet Coke.

My first solo "cold one" was consumed at a junior high school party. Actually, I wasn’t alone. Four of us split a single can of Budweiser while hiding in the woods, safe from the prying eyes of lurking parental units, ostensibly attaining instant credibility and cult status by boasting of beer on our breaths and mimicking the outward appearance of drunkenness.

Later, my gang climbed another rung when our first driver’s licenses were issued. Wheels meant easy access to the bountiful paradise of Louisville’s west end liquor stores, just down Vincennes Street and across the claustrophobic steel lanes of the K & I toll bridge. It was only then that the frustrating struggle to find a brand of beer that didn’t completely disgust me began in earnest.

---

Raging acne and social ineptitude generally precluded my being chosen as the one to go inside Liken’s or the Corner Store and try to get served, at least until we all had fake IDs. Consequently, I was at the mercy of my peers, and this proved problematic, because they preferred Sterling and Pabst. By any standard (wretched, in my estimation) these beers were full-flavored, and at my earliest stages of palate development, the "flavor" of beer was the single biggest impediment to ingesting its desired alcohol.

Since my buddies were doing the heavy lifting at the counter, I was in no position to argue, and so I learned to adapt by chilling – not my whiny attitude, but the beer itself.

That’s because it became clear that the colder the beer, the less “flavor” of any sort it had, and the more I could drink of it. Accordingly, my mission in life became Styrofoam cooler maintenance – to nurture it, to protect it from harm, and most importantly, to keep it filled with ice. If I could prevent the bottom from falling out and find a safe place to stash it, we could save a buck or two the following weekend – and of course, that meant more beer.

Still, in the dog days of summer the opened cans could get warm very quickly. Crammed into the back seat of a late model piece of junk, and pulling the tab on an ice-cold can, I’d manage to down the first frozen gulps before being overwhelmed by the dismaying recognition that in spite of all reasonable precautions, my Sterling or Pabst was warming faster than I could drink it.

Frankly, swallowing was hard enough, and chugging made me gag. What to do?

Often I’d fake it. A sufficient interval would pass, enough to encourage a carload’s presumption that the warm and thoroughly vile can in my hand had been emptied of beer, and then the magical time would arrive for throwing it out the window, to be caught in mid-air by roving bands of Boy Scouts recycling for merit badges.

This called for consummate skill. In the humid stillness of a hot summer’s evening, to misjudge the distance from the open window of our moving car to the muffled cushion of a grassy rural roadside was to invite disgrace if a loud "thump" echoed through the valley as the half-full can struck steamy pavement.

The verbal abuse to follow was not at all good-natured. After all, hadn’t we driven all the way to Louisville to spend every last dime we could scrape together on beer? How could I waste it?

It came to pass that in this manner, slumped shamefully in the back seat trying to choke down a warm Sterling, I resolved to become a better beer drinker than all of them.

Mission accomplished.

---

Granted, the precise meaning of “better” remained unclear back then, and it still does today. However, as the others began to plan their careers in physics, cosmetology, and insurance sales, I worked at developing a feel for the generic concept of mainstream American beer, which I came to understand as light-bodied and bastardized when compared to the golden continental lager that inspired it.

But we couldn’t afford Lowenbrau, so the only choice was to develop a taste for American mass-market beer’s so-called flavor, or at least those discernable qualities differentiating it from coffee and orange juice. Gradually, as my high school years wore on, things began to fall into place.

First, I found a beer that I really liked: Schlitz in the 16-oz "tall boy" cans, before the infamous and ill-advised recipe change. Next, there was a craze for Little Millers and Little Kings; at only 7 ounces each, these could be consumed before they got warm, and in multiple doses that gave good story: "Yeah, we each had 12 beers on the way over here."

Then I learned that malt liquor packed a wallop, especially when clad in those bright silvery blue cans born of the Bull.

Finally, America’s beer barons came through with the ultimate solution for the problem of teenage drinkers in the year 1977 who wanted to drink beer, but couldn’t cope with the cheapened pungency of the post-WWII era’s full-flavored beers: Light, low-calorie lagers, of which Miller Lite was the first widely distributed example, although there were others, from Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light to the long-forgotten Peter Hand Extra Light.

The advent of light beer was a revolution, albeit a regressive one, and it’s almost impossible to remember the time before it became as much a part of the fabric of American life as that white sandwich bread baked from the paste that your elementary teacher used to warn you against eating.

What she didn’t tell you is that if you add water and ferment the paste, it becomes light beer, with all the character you would expect from such a concoction, which is none, and this was the point then, and remains the point now. It’s easy to see why light beer became such a phenomenon; it is a neutral, flavorless, alcohol-delivery device that requires not one iota of thought, and as such, it is quintessentially American.

For a little while, light beer even worked for me. You can think about that, and maybe I’ll tell the rest of the story another time.