My review of Kevin Gibson's Louisville Beer book, in the Winter edition of Food & Dining magazine.

My Hip Hops beer column still runs quarterly in Food & Dining magazine, the current issue of which is available throughout Louisville and Southern Indiana.

Via issuu Clip, you can read the full column here: Winter 2014 (Volume 46). It's a book review of Louisville Beer: Derby City History on Draft, by Kevin Gibson.

Here's a tease.

Louisville Beer Now and Then

... Louisville Beer is especially useful in providing descriptive attention to the two decades elapsing since brewing’s return. What’s more, this section of Gibson’s narrative offers context, and the inescapable conclusion is that the present-day craft constitutes a revolution all its own, rather than a restoration of past glories.

The late Tony Judt had this to say about the historian’s purpose: “You cannot invent or exploit the past for present purposes.” In this sense, although previous epochs of Louisville beer share similarities, they were very different from what craft beer has become.

Craft beer's creativity: "To sustain and destabilize?"

I always read the book review section in the Sunday New York Times, and spotted this one yesterday:

Book Review - Warning Shadows - Home Alone With Classic Cinema, by Gary Giddins, reviewed by Dave Kehr.

In this consideration of a collection of columns by jazz and film writer Gary Giddins, reviewer Kehr offers an insight that looms large in considerations of craft beer in America, circa 2010.

A sensitive critic of jazz needs both a familiarity with basic forms and genres and a special responsiveness to the often minute changes worked on that primary material by the individual artist. Similar skills are needed to decode the genre-based films of high Hollywood …

Kehr focuses on Westerns in this context of genre-based film and contrasts the approach of directors John Ford and Anthony Mann before arriving at the point that strikes me:

“The 1950s were arguably the greatest years of the western,” Giddins writes in his Mann essay, “the period in which generic formulas were at once sustained and destabilized through psychology, revisionism, high style and the kind of grandeur that follows when the most durable clichés are reframed against classical paradigms.”

To sustain and destabilize — that’s as good a definition of the Hollywood filmmaker’s function as it is of the jazz musician’s …

And, I’d add, of today’s craft brewers, who pick apart conventional viewpoints even as they perpetuate the art and science of brewing.