Why does local matter? Let me count these three ways, courtesy of Tristan at BIG.

Authored by Tristan Schmid, communications director for the Brewers of Indiana Guild (BIG), it's a three-part refresher course on the theory and practice of localism in beer.

Taught him everything he knows ... well, not really.

First, follow the money.

Why does “local” matter when it comes to craft beer and beer fests? Part 1: Economics

“Money from the beer value chain is made up of producer-distributor-retailer (and taxes). Where that money goes varies by retail channel, product, etc., but on average, roughly one-third ends up with the producer. When that producer is local, that means the money goes to local workers, investments, businesses, taxes, and more. When that producer isn’t, you still get the value from the other portions, but you simply lose that 1/3 that would have gone to the producer.”

Next, think about the community.

Why does “local” matter when it comes to craft beer and beer fests? Part 2: Community

You may have heard of Ray Oldenburg’s concept of “third places,” those which “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Nearly 2/3 of Hoosier breweries are brewpubs–the epitome of Oldenburg’s “third place.”

These are places where, in addition to beer direct from the source, you can enjoy local food, artwork, music, events, and much more. Locally owned brewpubs are places to hang out with family, meet new friends, and talk with the brewers about the beer you’re drinking.

Finally, take a bow.

Why does “local” matter when it comes to craft beer and beer fests? Part 3: You

Consumer support of finely crafted local beer is key to the industry’s continued growth and strength. Thanks to demand for a good, local product, it’s been possible for Brewers of Indiana Guild to lobby for efforts like legalizing Sunday growler fills at Hoosier breweries.

People like you made it possible to raise barrelage limits last year from 30,000 that could be sold in state to 90,000–meaning that it’s easier to get Three Floyds and Sun King across Indiana because they can legally sell more of it in their home state.

If it weren’t for Hoosiers supporting their local brewers, we wouldn’t have been able to launch the Drink Indiana Beer campaign or the app or the forthcoming DrinkIN magazine (which–plug!–features a handy-dandy regional map of all the state’s breweries.)

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Craft Beer is dead. Long live Indie Beer. It's about "supporting local small business rather than a global entity."

To me, "craft" beer's conceptual basis always has been, and should remain, localism.

The inevitable rejoinder: "You're not using local ingredients, therefore you're not local." However, just as there are many styles of beer, there are differing ways of principled thinking.

The finished value of any product can be the result of individualized local creativity rather than widespread, industrialized production; accordingly, a substantial local component is present even if local hops are not. After all, beer doesn't often brew itself.

This isn't the most important point, because an independently-owned local brewery is an independently-owned local business, and the positive economic factors for independent local businesses in their communities are one and the same.

Sorry, but if you're buying Goose Island at Wal-Mart, you might be missing the point in multiple areas. Let's work to make shift happen -- indie breweries, indie middlemen.

Often I've pointed to organizations like AMIBA and BALLE, and asked skeptics to visit their web sites and consider the information therein. My impression is this seldom happens, probably because it takes less time to post a selfie with Bourbon County than read a few pages of economic facts.

Bizarrely, unfamiliarity with the economic realities of independent local business might be expected of consumers in general, but often it's something not understood by folks who own their own small businesses. Must we cut our own throats?

Meanwhile, I like this vibe coming out of San Diego. May it take root, and convince readers to go back to first principles.

Craft is dead. Now we drink Indie Beer: As Big Beer creeps into town, locals want to change the lingo, by Ian Anderson (San Diego Reader)

The term Craft Beer may be in need of a makeover. The Union-Tribune reported this week that Bend, Oregon's 10 Barrel Brewing Co. has proposed a 10,000-square-foot brewpub in East Village. In response, local beer industry podcasters have doubled down on a push to describe independently owned breweries as Indie Beer companies, rather than craft.

A couple of individuals have tried to coin the term Indie Beer before, but they had different reasons.

Not because 10 Barrel hails from Oregon but because in 2014 the company was purchased by AB InBev, the conglomerate responsible for one-third of the planet's beer supply, including core brands Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois. It owns 10 Barrel brewpubs in Oregon and Idaho and recently announced plans for one in Denver.

The podcasters' believe consumers who patronize 10 Barrel brewpubs mistakenly believe they are supporting small business rather than a global entity ...

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Support your independent local brewer, and tell AB-InBev to go Busch itself.

As far as I'm concerned, AB-InBev is a terrorist organization.

Like most terrorist organizations, the key to defeating them is withholding money from them. In terms of my personal spending habits, I regard this as the most important shift of all. There is nothing the zombie (former) craft brewers can brew -- no Goose, Breckenridge or Elysian -- that's good enough for me to give the corporate overlord blood money to use against us.

As AB-InBev carpet-bombs craft with money derived from swillmongering, it's time for clarity of vision and purpose.

Consequently, the three most important breweries in the world are those located closest to me, in my city of residence: Donum Dei, Floyd County Brewing and NABC.

Next: All the other breweries in the Louisville metropolitan area.

Next: The breweries in Indiana and Kentucky. It goes from there, according to who is independent and best exemplifies the founding ideals of better beer. Dozens of breweries, hundreds of beers. It's enough for me.

The craft beer revolution was, and remains, local and regional in orientation. It spreads outward only after insuring the health and well being of genuine local options.

At this precise moment, as I try to negotiate an exit from brewery ownership, it remains imperative for me to continue helping in any way I can to keep grassroots brewing vibrant and to improve its quality, where it is being done closest to me and with greatest impact on my daily existence.

I cherish the idea of the money I send on beer going into the pockets of grassroots entrepreneurs, and not the slimeball likes of Carlos Brito. Dollars spent locally circulate locally, and remain in the local economy longer. I'll continue to shift my spending in this manner even when I'm not an "owner," and revert to a mere baseline consumer.

Because principle is important, and ideas count.

Because fighting for what matters, does matter. Less narcissism, more commitment to fundamentals.

Fluff the corporate shareholders if you wish. I prefer spitting in their eyes.

What, you couldn't find an actual beer writer to fetishize multinational beer companies?

Esquire helpfully informs us ...

Aaron Goldfarb is the author of How to Fail: The Self-Hurt Guide, The Guide for a Single Man, and The Guide for a Single Woman.​

How very compelling, considering the article he wrote is about beer, not sex. Qualifications, anyone? In "It Doesn't Matter Who Owns Your Favorite Brewery," Goldfarb celebrates the fact that beer is entering a golden age of multi-national stewardship.

In fact, I predict the beer industry will begin to resemble the liquor industry. You know, the industry where an Italian amaro-maker like Campari can also own an American, family-run bourbon distillery like Wild Turkey, as well as SKYY Vodka and about 20 other international brands. Where Diageo seems poised to own just about everything you can possibly pour down your face. Or where a Japanese company like Suntory somehow manages to own Jim Beam and Maker's Mark bourbon-wise, Laphroaig and Bowmore in the scotch realm, and even a brand that makes cupcake vodka. Have any of these brands grown worse? I doubt it.

Have you ever heard about the straw man fallacy?

It never, ever was about the fear that AB-InBev (with Goose Island and others Trojan crafts) or Heineken (Lagunitas) would destroy the quality of the "craft" brands they buy.

Rather, it's always been about following the money: About them using such brands to leverage shelf space, or conduct price wars, or use in many varied ways gleefully developed throughout their multinational corporate histories toward the objective of "winning," which in multinational terms, is about eliminating, weakening and neutralizing competition.

You see, Aaron -- you wouldn't know this, so let me help you -- this thing got started back in the day so as to save beer's soul, which had gotten sucked clean out of it by ... yes, by the same multinational companies you fetishize.

It's time we admit craft beer is a business, no better and no worse than any other multi-billion dollar business. Sure, its products can get you drunk and make you hug people more than normal, but in the end, it's still a business that needs to make a lot of people a lot of money. There's nothing wrong with that.

Go back to writing dating books. Please.

As noted yesterday: Now more than ever, what matters to me is supporting brewers who function as independent local business persons. I know from a quarter-century of experience that these are the folks keeping the ethos real, and the money local, where it recirculates and helps other local businesses. It's just a matter of personal taste. Multinationals like Heineken have enough money. I'd rather have more control over where mine is spent.

It's time to put the genuinely local and "micro" back into this thing we all love.

The PC: Getting our SHIFT together … again.

The PC: Getting our shift together … again.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It may surprise some readers to learn that I have determined to stand in this year’s New Albany municipal elections as a candidate for mayor.

It should surprise no one that my aim is to do so as an independent candidate, freed from the encumbrances of America’s two-party duopoly – whether Democratic and Republican ... or AB InBev and MillerCoors.

Are the thought processes prefacing the advancement of better beer all that different from those encouraging improved local governance? Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, founder of Denver’s Wynkoop brewery, surely has thoughts on the matter.

It’s hardly a secret that many of us frequently borrow ideas from the world outside beer, primarily because beer hardly exists in a vacuum, although try telling this to (a) burrowed survivalists, or (b) chasers of the current Great White Whales of rare beer.

Whether it’s better beer or the little shop on the corner, concepts of shift and economic localization are cross-disciplinary. The following essay was originally published at LouisvilleBeer.com on January 15, 2013, and has been edited to reflect a handful of altered details.

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Political stump speeches differ very little from religious sermons, and that’s probably why we call it a bully pulpit, not a milk crate.

However, a soapbox might be useful, or better yet, a couple cases of Bud Light in tall cans, because if the pet shampoo is too disgusting to drink, at least you can stand atop it and preach.

(By the way, President Theodore Roosevelt was the originator of the “bully pulpit” usage. Roosevelt was one of the last and best examples of a species now extinct, the progressive Republican)

During these past few years at the bully pulpit, I’ve endeavored to echo two important, recurring themes – economic localization and shift – because both notions should be of interest to the well-informed contemporary beer drinker, even if their foundations are rooted elsewhere.

Beer loving Louisvillians are familiar with LIBA, the independent business association that coordinates the annual Louisville Brewfest. LIBA works to “Keep Louisville Weird,” primarily through advocacy and education about the fundamental merits of economic localization. My city’s version of the same is called New Albany First, and my company, New Albanian Brewing Company, belongs to both organizations.

A chart provided by LIBA illustrates in simple, introductory fashion one aspect of the stakes involved with localism. The chart has to do with circulation and reinvestment.

These and other topics pertaining to economic localization can be explored at one’s leisure, and at numerous web sites. Here are two of them: AMIBA and BALLE.

At LIBA’s web site, I’m struck by this single, brief paragraph. There is much to consider in just these few words.

Each time we spend a dollar, LIBA encourages you to weigh the full value of your choices, not solely to yourselves immediately, but for the future you want for Louisville.

Granted, it may not seem immediately evident that one’s spending choices have value, although we’ve long seen that a principled refusal to spend can make a difference when such a calculated abstention aims at facilitating a desired end, as in the practice known as the boycott – so named after Charles C. Boycott, a 19th-century English property manager in Ireland, who was targeted by an organized, non-violent, systematized campaign of disinvestment that eventually came to be named in his dishonor.

A more recent example of sustained economic sanctions came during the 1980s, when numerous investors, from institutions to corporations, and from individuals to governments, expressed their protest against apartheid in South Africa by an international campaign of disinvestment. The objective of this boycott was to compel South Africa to commence the dismantlement of institutionalized discrimination, which in time did indeed occur.

However, for those readers despairing of history lessons buried within a beer column, LIBA’s wording suggests outcomes ranging beyond those pertaining merely to the withholding of expenditures. In fact, one’s spending choices absolutely can reflect positive, active shadings of value beyond the short term and ephemeral … so long as they are weighed, a notion that implies thought and at least some measure of deliberation.

I believe that most self-identified beer lovers/enthusiasts/aficionados grasp instinctively this crucial point in a broad sense. They realize that in a modern consumer society driven by mass marketing, saturation advertising and various insider tricks (legal or otherwise), those dedicated to pursuing better beer must learn to disregard norms previously judged as acceptable, and instead to think their way past the easiest and most commonly available beer, not to mention the cheapest.

Grasp is one thing and reach quite another, and for this reason, I view the second significant pillar of economic localization to be the ongoing process of shift, which by its very nature is gradual.

In an economic system largely predicated on non-local spending, where there may not be an independent grocery or filling station (whether it dispenses gasoline, beer or both) to patronize, going cold turkey isn’t always a viable option.

Rather, one begins to support economic localization by shifting spending where and when such a shift is practical.

Perhaps the single greatest misconception greeting soapbox speakers like me who tout economic localization is that the listener is being expected to boycott non-local entities in their entirety, and either buy local or starve. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the forward march of better beer is a fine example.

That’s because better beer itself did not explode full-blown into the phenomenon it is in this day and age. Better beer evolved and grew slowly and continuously over three decades, incorporating constant shift as breweries were established and communities served. Now most of the country is within range of a local brewery, and with proximity comes a wider array of choice.

When it comes to craft beer, the implications of economic localization and shift are increasingly obvious. You needn’t digest them all at once. Little sips work just fine.

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In 2014, the NABC shipped limited quantities of 22-oz bomber bottles to Indiana, Ohio and Florida (via Cavalier); Kentucky (River City Distributing); and Massachusetts and Rhode Island (Humboldt Imports). In 2015, we’ll pick up most of Kentucky through Clark.

Appropriately, a friend and NABC supporter proffers this excellent question:

How does shipping beer to Ohio, Rhode Island, et al, fit in with a "buy local" message?

Economic localization involves the incremental shifting of spending choices. Shift is ongoing, and shift happens. It’s real. As the shift evolves and market for better beer further progresses, brewery owners must nonetheless continue to view our marketplace the way it actually functions, not the way we wish it to function some day in the future. We live and work in the present as we strive for the ideal. We make decisions accordingly, and hope they bear fruit.

During his Indiana U.S. Senate campaign in 2012, eventual winner Joe Donnelly was asked by a reporter whether he would renounce PAC money from outside the state’s boundaries – a particularly plentiful source of campaign financing for his opponent, the GOP’s Richard Mourdock. Donnelly said no. He would continue to accept out-of-state contributions, and explained why he didn’t view this act as hypocritical.

To paraphrase Donnelly:

Until campaign finance reform is bilateral and the playing field becomes level for all, a candidate cannot pursue campaign finance reform unilaterally; after all, the object in politics is to win, because without winning, how can the candidate pursue his platform?

The same goes for my business.

Shift may be happening, but pieces of brewing equipment still are machines that make beer; using them makes money, and unfilled excess capacity costs money. Losses impede the business cycle, and the business cycle remains in large measure dependent on larger-scale market precepts. The regulatory regime largely precludes genuine marketing innovation.

If one can do what must be done while retaining the bulk of his principles, there can be periodically restful sleep … and the bills get paid. My fundamental objective remains as before: Shifting toward economic localization on as many fronts, whenever and wherever possible.

As I pursue this objective, selling more beer to the folks nearest to our brewery is a priority, and that's precisely where most of our beer is sold: Close to home. Concurrently, pragmatism ordains a clear view of other business prospects in other places.

Given the innate complexities of life and living, it's impossible for human beings to entirely escape shadings of hypocrisy. The trick is to shift inexorably away from self-contradiction, and to keep moving progressively forward. This I intend to continue doing.


Last week's PC column: Ripped straight from the pages of an Onion satire: “13 white males not really so eager to discuss issues like racism and sexism.”

Ten vital commandments for localism in beer.

On Thursday and Friday this week, I richly enjoyed a one-sided debate (we were Netherlands to their ineffectual Spain) about the merits economic localism, which flared up after I published my weekly column at NA Confidential.

ON THE AVENUES: As a journalist and entrepreneur, I’m not tired of the “Buy Local” argument. Not at all.

Yesterday, I revisited a column from 2012.

REWIND: My column at Food and Dining: "Localism + Beer."

Following is an excerpt from the ON THE AVENUES piece. These ten commandments are not unique to the burgeoning world of better "craft" beer ... they just explain that world's origins and vitality, as well as providing a common sense warning of what stands to occur as we allow our world to become exactly like the one we fought a revolution to depose.

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... Why does (localism) matter? The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (www.ilsr.org) offers these ten vital commandments. The sooner New Albany grasps them, the better, but slowly, the shift indeed is happening.

1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
New Albany is unlike any other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain New Albany’s diversity and distinctive flavor.

2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.

3. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.

6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

7. Public Benefits and Costs
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.

9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

10. Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

Diary: I'd rather see their asses starve than let them have Trojan Goose money.

Two fat cat AB InBev shareholders are at the teller's window cashing their dividend checks, and one says to the other: "You know what's funny?"

The other says, "No, what?"

The first one says: "All the beer snobs used to call us crap, and now they say we're craft, and all we did was buy one of their breweries."

As I wrote last year, and seeing as nothing has changed in what increasingly appear to me as diametrically opposed "craft" camps of localism and narcissism:

You’re free to deny reality until the end of time, but Goose Island is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the beer world’s largest extortionate conglomerate, and it contradicts virtually every tenet of my daily business existence.

Of course, if one is not engaged in owning an independent business and seeing what economic localism means on the ground, in this place and time ... well, you know.

In which I offer friendly advice to the good people at Headliners Music Hall.

If the question is, "How does the locally owned and operated Headliners Music Hall compete against Live Nation-owned and -operated Mercury Ballroom?", then the answer is this:

Headliners needs to be MORE local than Mercury.

Not that Headliners isn't locally oriented already. In many ways, it is. The point, and my not necessarily unbiased advice: Be even more so. As much as possible. And rub the corporate entity's nose in it.

Restricting the focus to beer: Every multinational starter beer being served at Headliners negates the venue's argument v.v. Mercury's corporate advantages. Yes, of course the Headliners bar must make the customers happy and reap the mark-up whirlwind. But karma can be quite the bitch, and we've seen from our temporary experience with Houndmouth beer at Houndmouth's show that local products can compete. Craft beer, craft music. Forecastle can't or won't do it; Headliners should.

Some Headliners loyalists apprehensive over opening of the new Mercury Ballroom music venue, by Michael Tierney (Insider Louisville)

Developer Bill Weyland‘s CITY Properties Group and Live Nation have teamed up in Louisville to open the Mercury Ballroom. Though the new music venue isn’t set to open until April, its concert calendar has already sparked concern over how the locally owned Headliners Music Hall will be affected.

Jeffery Smith runs Crash Avenue, a locally owned media and management company with offices in Louisville and New York City. Last week Smith posed this question on Facebook, stirring the pot in the Louisville music scene:

Do you boycott Mercury Ballroom because they’re going to be in direct competition with our locally owned / local fave Headliners Music Hall? Understand, they’re going to be competing for the same talent coming through Louisville… but Live Nation has the money to essentially throw at the talent until they drown out the competition. If you’re going to be diligent about eating locally, should you not be diligent about extending where you choose to take in your smaller national acts?

Insider Louisville interviewed Smith, who claims Live Nation — the publicly traded (NYSE, LYV), Los Angeles-based entertainment company — may snatch a market that Billy Hardison built.

Hardison owns Headliners and is a partner in the local talent-buying agency Production Simple, alongside Joe Agabrite III, John Grantz, and Lizi Hagan ...

Diary: On caring how it got there (2).

Part one here

  ... Quite a few of America’s 2,500 brewing companies quite likely are soon to face a scenario in which the self-centeredness of the non-brand-loyal narcissist isn’t enough to service their debt; a time when store shelves will be filled with too many brands of beer produced by the likes of Blue Moon, larger contract brewers AND folks we all still like (Sierra, New Belgium), and the 10% annual growth we’ve been celebrating will not be producing enough asses in seats to please bankers.

In short, it will be a market that bizarrely reflects conditions of consolidation and attrition that once presaged America’s decades-long beer depression. There could be a great deal of pain.

If simply making excellent beer isn’t enough, and such beers neither can compete in the high-end market of the priestly caste, nor survive at price points on a par with the upper echelon of production brewers, what’s left to the vast expanse of middle ground in brewing?

I’d have to say that the best shot is intensified economic localism (AMIBA or BALLE are national organizational examples), as well as getting back to the craft of the matter, in the sense that we all use the word “craft” while seldom seeking to relate it to other crafts, or even offering a fundamental definition of what craft means. I’m not entirely sure I understand it. It doesn’t mean giving up “export” markets and shipping packaged beer, but making a deeper commitment to doubling down on economic localization and the foundational, grassroots tasks of educating and informing.

My brewery makes outstanding beer. If this isn’t enough for the priestly caste, cool beans, because the priestly caste isn’t enough for me. It’s about the liquid in the glass to the extent that I won’t drink crap, but it’s about far more than the liquid in the glass, because the liquid in the glass got there by means of a number of considerations, which are being ignored far too often as we chase the ephemera of the newest, biggest thing.

Those guys in New York with the signs speaking of contract brewing as “death of craft beer” are doing the right thing by asking the question and getting the discussion started. Whether intentional or otherwise, those objecting to the question merely provide tacit support to what entrenched interests always seek: Protection of the status quo. But when the status quo stands in the way of progress, it needs to be questioned.

Why do you think we had an American brewing revolution in the first place?

Diary: On caring how it got there (1).

Being an American used to imply that desired ends don't always justify undesirable means. Maybe it never actually did in reality, or doesn’t any longer, and rather than espouse collective ideals, we’re all entirely left alone, destined to grapple with life all by ourselves just so long as we get what we want, when we want it.

I’m not comfortable with that, and never really have been.

To me, the end doesn’t justify the means. Recognition of such is the basis for almost every meaningful progressive reform in the history of the United States of America, and specifically, as it pertains to the American workplace. You can have the highest quality product to take to market, and make bucketloads of money in the process, but it matters to society as a whole what you had to do to achieve it.

Were workers abused or exploited? Was the environment despoiled? Was the idea stolen from the rightful owner?

This is why, at various times, Americans have thought long and hard about what it means (or doesn’t) to do business with oppressive regimes. A good example in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s recent passing is South Africa during the period of racial Apartheid. More recently, legitimate questions have been asked about Third World sweat shops where workers are paid a pittance to produce $200 pairs of sneakers.

How these questions are answered will vary, and the answers are important, but our possessing a depth of conscience sufficient to grasp that such questions must be asked is even more important. This is especially true when South African diamond miners or Chinese sweat shop employees are unable to ask, or to protest their working conditions.

The preceding are examples of considerations that run beyond the quality, either good or bad, of finished products. In addition, I’d suggest the very real existence of other planes in life apart from the primacy of simple consumer demand.

I think about these matters each time I encounter a discussion about craft beer, at the point when someone says: “It's all about quality beer, and who cares how it got here as long as it enters my stomach whenever I wish?”

Well, among other reasons, it’s because caring about how it got here is part and parcel of why we had an American brewing revolution to begin with. Mass-market mockrobrews, contract brewing and zombie craft beers may or may not be the death of better beer, but what surely will harm it is when the code of the narcissist prevails. In the coming years, defining craft beer and expanding consciousness as to its ultimate meaning are going to require asking those irksome questions. If we don’t ask them, there’s a good chance we’ll forget our foundational story … and that can only assist the Trojan Geese.

Part two here

A barside conversation.

Someone said to me: Help me get it straight.

I said sure.

He asked, so who makes Stella?

AB InBev, I replied.

What about Bud Light?

That’d be AB InBev, too.

And Goose Island?

I looked at him with compassion.

Give it to me straight, he said.

AB InBev.

Thanks, that’s what I thought.

It was as though a great burden had been lifted. He took a drink.

Now, can you tell me about economic localization?

Sure. It’s the antidote to narcissism …

The PC at LouisvilleBeer.com: "Getting Our Shift Together."

When it comes to craft beer, the implications of economic localization and shift are increasingly obvious. You needn’t digest them all at once. Little sips work just fine.

Getting Our Shift Together

Political stump speeches differ very little from religious sermons, and that’s probably why we call it a bully pulpit, not a milk crate.

However, a soapbox might be useful, or better yet, a couple cases of Bud Light in tall cans, because if the pet shampoo is too disgusting to drink, at least you can stand atop it and preach.

(By the way, President Theodore Roosevelt was the originator of the “bully pulpit” usage. Roosevelt was one of the last and best examples of a species now extinct, the progressive Republican)

During these past few years at the bully pulpit, I’ve endeavored to echo two important, recurring themes – economic localization and shift – because both notions should be of interest to the well-informed craft beer drinker, even if their foundations are rooted elsewhere.