Bourbon's racist history: "It’s simply a warning to be careful which myths we choose to swallow."

Library of Congress.

To view an antebellum image like this is to be reminded that discussions of racist and sexist advertising in "craft" beer are perfectly legitimate, and to be encouraged, lest the Wayback Machine deposits us in unsavory locales.

The recent election outcome isn't to my taste. Let's hope it doesn't take us all the way back to the 1850s, shall we?

Sugarcoating a painful history, by Christine Sismondo (The Globe and Mail)

Marketing-driven nostalgia is bringing people back to American whiskey, whose history, like the country itself, is steeped in anti-black racism

The past decade has been soaked in bourbon, and it’s easy to see why. It tastes like sweet, boozy, butterscotch-ripple ice cream and the price point is decent compared with Scotch.

But the biggest reason for a renewed enthusiasm for the corn-based spirit, however, has been its marketing, which trades on the idea of a hand-crafted product with a long-established heritage ...

 ... The golden age wasn’t particularly golden for those who experienced the lynchings and daily terrorism that was part and parcel of the era being idealized. African-Americans know this, which is why bourbon has never sold terribly well in their communities. Around the turn of the previous century, gin was what they preferred. And ever since African-American soldiers from Jim Crow-era southern states were deployed to fight in Europe in both wars, Cognac has been the most popular liquor among African-Americans who could afford it.

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The PC: "A True Local Approach ... Kentucky Beer and Food Take Center Stage at Crescent Hill Craft House."

The PC: "A True Local Approach ... Kentucky Beer and Food Take Center Stage at Crescent Hill Craft House."

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Please excuse me for tardiness. As regular readers know, I write a quarterly beer column for Food & Dining Magazine (Louisville Edition). The magazine is free of charge and can be read at issuu concurrent with the print release, and yet I like to wait a bit before adding the columns to the public record here.

Eight months is more than a bit, so here is something different from the Summer 2015 (Vol. 48; May/June/July) issue, in that my "Hip Hops" column about Crescent Hill Craft House was expanded to feature length. With a second Craft House under construction in Germantown, at least the topic remains somewhat timely.

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A True Local Approach ... Kentucky Beer and Food Take Center Stage at Crescent Hill Craft House.

It remains a golden age for craft beer in America, but while artisanal brewing continues to grow and prosper on Kentucky soil, another satisfying libation retains the bulk of bragging rights in the Commonwealth.

It’s bourbon, and bourbon is ascendant.

With considerable justification, Kentuckians view their native spirit not merely as intoxicating, but representative of a local art form belonging uniquely to them. Strictly speaking, bourbon is a process and not an appellation, and can be produced anywhere in America. However, don’t expect a Kentuckian to accept this fact without an argument – and splashes of branch water are purely optional.

Verily, a bourbon aficionado residing in Kentucky probably is the most rigorous practitioner of localism in all of these United States: A specific distillery’s venerable layout, its historic pot still, a particular limestone water source, gentle aging in oak (from which preferred cooper’s grove?) and the comprehensive guiding intelligence of a wily master distiller, all combining to create a topographic, geographic and mythic elixir like no other.

Yet it is rightly said that bourbon is a form of distilled beer without the hops, and surely craft beer’s explosive Kentucky growth with hops is intriguingly comparable with bourbon’s, but significantly, not always so much in terms of its acceptance as a manifestation of localism.

It is depressingly common for Louisville-area craft beer enthusiasts to openly eschew locally brewed beers, reserving their fevered approbation for new and different beers coming into Kentucky and Indiana from far, far away. As such, localist beer instincts compete with perceptions of “exotic” value, which are as old as humanity itself.

Unfortunately, these perceptions often have little to do with the actual liquid occupying one’s glass.

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When the shipping-borne international spice trade commenced in Europe several hundred years ago, a form of consumer demand was created. A “need” arose to obtain previously unknown spices from overseas, owing not to their supposed usefulness in masking otherwise rancid food, as is often erroneously imagined today, but because the spices themselves were quantifiable and visible measures of social status according to prevailing, evolving and subjective value systems.

In essence, anyone who was anyone just had to have these spices – or risk not being anyone, any longer. Possession was a palpable, tangible symbol of status, and the key to their value was distance: These spices were from somewhere else – exotic, expensive and hard to obtain, and as such, infinitely sexier than piddling local norms, with magical and totemic properties.

No one thought it necessary to bother with explanations as to why the rare spices proffered at the wedding feast mattered. It was understood. Peers compared the quantity of their spice stocks to establish social pecking orders, and any stray servant or cowed peasant in proximity of the scene knew immediately that strength and power were conferred on those who possessed the requisite spicy symbolism … while by contrast, he or she remained a degraded underling.*

Happily, we’re here to consider local beer and not saffron; after all, that stuff’s almost as expensive as trendy finishing hops from New Zealand.

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Present-day metro Louisville boasts numerous bars and restaurants where the distilled variant of localism is stirringly endorsed by means of encyclopedic Kentucky bourbon lists: Haymarket Whiskey Bar, Down One Bourbon Bar, Bourbons Bistro, the Silver Dollar – surely there are barber shops in a Shively strip mall boasting “century” bourbon lineups – but not one metro multi-tap or specialty beer bar of appreciable size has followed suit with similarly exhaustive local craft beer selections.

Until now. At the Crescent Hill Craft House, 40 taps pour locally brewed beers to the exclusion of all others, and as much kitchen fare as possible is sourced from regional farms and suppliers. For good measure, there is a list of 40-plus bourbons.

Co-owner Pat Hagan explains: “We’re going with all Kentucky beers, including Southern Indiana. That’s the way economies should be going, and are. Customers want to support the local area and they want local products, so offering them beer and food from the area makes sense.”

Hagan’s name might be familiar. In terms of Louisville craft brewing, he is an undisputed elder statesman, and his family’s Bluegrass Brewing Company (founded in 1993) now includes three on-premise Louisville locations. There also is a BBC production brewing facility, owned separately but working in concert with the BBC brewpubs.

In 2014, after two decades of building and nurturing his own locally popular breweries, Hagan began thinking about what has come of craft brewing’s proliferation in BBC’s wake. A new concept began to take root, and with business partners Brad Culver and Beau Kerley, he bought and remodeled a longstanding bar space located at 2634 Frankfort Avenue – a locale where independent small businesses tend to thrive.

At the Crescent Hill Craft House, amid exposed brick and stripped beams, beers from Against the Grain, Alltech (Kentucky Ale), Apocalypse, Bluegrass Brewing, Country Boy, Cumberland, Eight Ball, Falls City, Flat12, Great Flood, New Albanian and West Sixth are featured, and according to Hagan, their massed presence initially caused confusion.

“The biggest resistance we had, pre-opening, was convincing bar managers, distributors and salesmen that you don’t need Bells and Southern Tier,” he said, nicely name-dropping two out-of-state brewers.

“But breweries in Kentucky make great and diverse beer, so serving just those beers is no downgrade. I think both locals and visitors like to be able to come to one place and see everything that the area has to offer.”

Chef Tim Smith enthusiastically agrees, and has designered the Craft House’s food program to reflect localism from the ground up. Hagan approached Smith in the early stages of the project.

“Pat asked if I could put together a locally sourced menu, and I said sure. He liked it, then wanted to know who could pull it off in the kitchen. I said, well, might as well be me.”

And why not? Smith has been cooking professionally in the Louisville area for as long as Hagan has been brewing beer, putting in stints with the Grisanti family, Napa River Grill and 60 West Martini Bar.

Smith’s first priority at Craft House is local and regional sourcing, whenever possible: Beef from Marksbury Farms and aquaponic greens raised at Groganica Farms; spent grain from the BBC brewhouse in St. Matthews to top his delicious cobblers, and crusty Blue Dog bread baked a few blocks away to produce a beer-friendly bruschetta oozing bacon jam.



Even when a local source isn’t available, menu items are “finished” on site (smoking salmon, curing pork belly) and strategically paired, as with the Sheltowee Farms mushroom risotto accompanying Smith’s pan seared scallops.

Smith gently rejects the notion of any specific style or cuisine as ideally suited to a venue like Craft House. “The idea is good food you can pair with beer in an unpretentious atmosphere,” he said, adding a crucial point: “It always takes a team, and it’s up to the servers to know.”

That’s huge. At Craft House, both the beers and the food constantly change with the season, and so servers are the ultimate frontline aggregators of information. What’s in the “seasonal vegetable medley”? Is that ale hop- or malt-forward? What makes this dish and that beer work together?

In Louisville, the Crescent Hill Craft House is answering these questions. Why not local beer and local food? Why not harness subjective value systems to objective local quality, and celebrate the beers that make us special, as brewed right here, in and near our own neighborhoods?

The philosopher’s advice rings true: “Think globally, drink locally.”

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* For more see “Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants,” by Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

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Let bourbon be bourbon. We'll just brew beer.

Here's the pitch:

Will a barrel shortage hurt small distilleries and breweries? For some, it already has, by Kevin Gibson (Insider Louisville)

As for the longer term consideration of white oak barrels used in distillation, the real question might be this: Production of bourbon is predicated on the single use of a new white oak barrel, after which the used oak barrel enters the secondary marketplace ... but is this cycle environmentally sustainable?

“It’s really tough to see an end in the short term. Everything seems to indicate that bourbon, Scotch and Irish whisky are very bullish. It’s a question of whether logging capacity and cooperage can catch up with demand from the other side.”

Assuming there is enough white oak to go around, and the value of bourbon production dictates supply of the necessary wood according to the purportedly "free" market, then brewers in need of used barrels to inflate the value of their specialty products, as determined by the geek-driven niche market on Rate Advocate, should be able to procure plenty of them. It's probably a non-issue.

Is the future of better beer as a whole dependent on a niche market like this? One certainly hopes not. Sam Cruz provides the correct answer when asked how a barrel shortage might affect Against the Grain.

Asked how (AtG's) brewery expansion would be affected if the barrel shortage worsens, he says, “If something does happen, we would adjust our production plans. We’d make more of something else and make it well.”

Precisely.

What brewers of beer beer must do is brew better beer, perhaps even the sort -- generally, those styles that are non-barrel aged -- capable of being consumed during a baseball game.

The PC: Bourbon, bone marrow, Greg Fischer … and Stella Artois?

(Published at LouisvilleBeer.com on December 8, 2013)

Bourbon, bone marrow, Greg Fischer … and Stella Artois?

My New Year’s resolution was going to be writing this column weekly, rather than twice monthly, in 2014. Might as well get started.  

Whether working as brewers, taco slingers, distillers, baristas, vintners or sous chefs, we customarily inhabit an insular space within the hospitality industry zone.

Of course, the trick is to make insularity more expansive, and to link and project our individual artisanal skills in a big-picture way so that the ripples carry beyond the inner sanctum of true believers, far out into the broader world where the casually interested people live. Get them to look your way, and you’ve got something.

Kentucky’s bourbon makers grasped this point long ago. As a spirit, bourbon is strictly defined, and even if the geographical element is somewhat more porous than before, the fact remains that bourbon makers consciously group themselves as Kentucky Bourbon, and are unified in anchoring a sizeable element of their product’s allure to a particular place – what’s more, to a specific state of mind, and to a story told often and persuasively.

It wouldn’t take a befuddled alien from outer space very long to absorb contemporary bourbon’s savvy place-making expertise. All bourbons come from quaint little towns in the atmospheric backwoods, where the 6th or 7th generation of a family relies on its oldest living member – generally a weather-beaten, impossibly wise male fueled entirely on pork belly and grits – to magically render hand-crafted rarities that city folks will sell their first-born children to possess. It matters less whether any of it is true, and more that the branding is irresistible and awe-inspiring.

The city? It usually gets a cut, one way or another.

When I was growing up, my father’s view of Louisville was a city governed by a coalition of bourbon, tobacco and horse breeders, with politicians finishing a distant fourth in the power hierarchy. Tobacco’s nicotine addiction may have jarred it from the governing elite, although its failure to self-reinvent as a hand-rolled, designer cigar purveyor didn’t help, either. The horse pimps are still very much with us, even if bankrolled from Arab sheikdoms. Right now, the Kentucky Bourbon Kingdom is second only to Big Coal, and the trail of native intoxicants originating in the mountainous hinterlands has become urbanized.

As well it should.

The only odd part about Louisville taking full advantage of its own time-honored position in the Commonwealth’s chain of bourbon legacies is that it took so long to cement. Combining the bourbon renaissance with the city’s astounding culinary reputation is as close to a no-brainer as can be experienced, drunk or dead sober – even when viewed by a New Albany city councilman.

And so it was that last week, Mayor Greg Fischer of Louisville breathlessly announced the summoning of a task force filled with corn-whisky conjurers and superstar chefs, with a PR- and tourism-driven mission of assisting an eager planet in viewing Louisville as the end-all when it comes both to bourbon and dining.

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Naturally, it should come as no surprise when a politician expresses enthused, selfless willingness to tether himself to an explosively marketable phenomenon … and this is not to be taken as a criticism of Fischer. The idea is fundamentally sound, and at some point, he’ll need to be re-elected. In the mayor’s circles, it’s pronounced “win-win.”

Of course, there was a small catch.

Fischer’s advisors neglected to remind him that other elements of the city’s food and drink culture might feel slighted if not mentioned during the photo op, and indeed, nothing whatsoever was said about wine, coffee, food trucks … or craft beer. This is unfortunate, as a mere paragraph surely would have sufficed as appeasement, but someone ineptly dropped the ball … and thinking back to that insular space within the hospitality industry zone, it was inevitable that disaffection would come to be expressed.

As well it should have been.

I’ve mostly refrained from the ensuing ruckus. While NABC’s location in a neighboring state is subject to ever-changing conceptual definitions, some inclusive and others not, our connection to politics is inexorably Hoosier, That’s the way it works, and so I’ve been largely content to be a bystander and read as Sam Cruz of Against the Grain voiced annoyance on Twitter, Elizabeth Myers upped the ante at Louisville.com, and a thoughtful piece by Steve Coomes at Insider Louisville (where free-lancer Kevin Gibson originally broke the task force story) providedworthwhile counterpoint.

No one asked me (ahem), but I see all this as a valuable team building exercise. If there is to be a cogent rebuttal from the craft brewing community in Louisville and the state of Kentucky, it needs to stem from a position of principled unity among the breweries, and preferably, be expressed by the Kentucky Guild of Brewers (KGB). The message should be educational, about the craft beer segment as a whole, and addressing KGB’s existence and ultimate aims.

Politicians simply do not regard scattered on-line complaints with the same alacrity as those bearing even the slightest hint of massed, monolithic intent. For all I know, a statement of principle is already on the way to the mayor, better to snap his neck forward and suggest heightened diligence on the part of staff and himself in the future. Information? It makes him a better mayor.

Building blocks of cooperation and unity require time for organization, and this is a great and enduring challenge for craft brewers in the general sense. We’re independent-minded, under-financed, short-staffed and very busy – and what I’m learning more and more with each passing day is that we cannot afford to use these nagging circumstances as excuses.

As a director on the board of the Brewers of Indiana Guild, I can say that BIG has made considerable progress trudging uphill to a point where in Indianapolis, political personages like Louisville’s mayor (and his staffers) are becoming accustomed to consulting the craft brewing bloc, if only to gauge its point of view as an entity representing enhanced numbers and escalating economic clout.

The message might still elude county seats, and that’s why an active alliance between craft brewers and localists is so absolutely essential. For one thing, local brewing and localism are contextually synonymous. More importantly, local brewers telling their stories in local vernacular constitutes the only language any politician absolutely can be relied upon to understand –voting, remember? The story must be told over and over, to the point where you’re feeling like quaffing a nice, cold Miller Lite rather than repeating those same words yet again to a clueless council member or bumbling chamber of commerce propagandist.

That’s the way it works, and we just have to do it. Let’s hope Mayor Fischer gets the craft beer message, because there’s likely to be another seat at the table for those in a position to claim it … if they will.

A few articles and links of possible interest.

Partying at home? My fellow Food & Dining columnist Tim Laird has the complete plan, illustrated with photos by the inimitable Dan Dry, in this book: That's Entertainment!

But perhaps you're craving a change of scenery? The Curmudgeon always does, but isn't sure that an establishment accessible only by boat is the answer: Britain's most remote pub.

Also in the UK, mid-sized brewer Adnams seeks an end to small brewery tax break even though the company itself ranks the importance of its beer making operation behind both wine and kitchenware (?) in importance. Wankers.

For those planning to attend the Brewers of Indiana Guild's Indiana Microbrewers Festival in Broad Ripple on July 17, here is the story behind the next Indiana ReplicAle. Note that there will be no Friday evening brewers dinner function this year, but that the festival will expand in territorial terms on Saturday; more space, more beer.

Pizzaria owners are advised to short the public when it comes to draft beer pours, and I don't doubt the chicanery. At the same time, anyone taking advice about beer from Pizza Marketing Quarterly isn't the sharpest knife in the kitchen. Ask the Curmudgeon, people.

In Kentucky, a bourbon tasting bill is caught in a legislative fight, and the part that catches my attention is Rep. Clark noting that he doesn't want to see bourbon tastings in "every corner liquor store," although making exceptions for the Equestrian Games makes sense. Isn't the principle the same, either way?