Of yeast and men.

Photo credit.

Same general topic, first from a general interest perspective.

The story of yeast: Domesticated tipple (The Economist)

In a piece of genetic archaeology, researchers discover the origins of a good pint

CATTLE ranchers know that if they want to increase their yields it is best to breed their largest cows with their biggest bulls. The same idea works when trying to improve other livestock, crops and pets. Although less well known, microorganisms can also be bred selectively. Given that yeasts have a long history of being used to ferment food and drink, archaeologists have argued for years that early craftsmen may have selectively bred yeast strains without even realising it.

Now there is evidence to support this idea.

Then, a more detailed approach.

Ale Genomics: How Humans Tamed Beer Yeast, by Ewen Callaway (Nature)

Sequences of nearly 200 beer-making strains reveal yeast in action

Geneticists have traced the history of beer’s most important ingredient: yeast. By sequencing the genomes of nearly 200 modern strains of brewer’s yeast, the research reveals how, over hundreds of years, humans transformed the wild fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae into a variety of strains tuned for particular tipples.

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Louisville's First Link Supermarket, and its connection with Frank Fehr Brewery and Rathskeller.

Who knew that a supermarket closing would bring submerged Louisville brewing history back to the surface?

Downtown's only grocery store closes after more than 70 years in business, by Marty Finley (Louisville Business First)

Downtown Louisville's only grocery store has closed after more than 70 years in business, and the building will be auctioned next month.

The independently owned First Link Supermarket building, at 431 E. Liberty St., near Jackson Street, will be auctioned at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, May 18. The auction will be held at the property, according to Indianapolis-based Key Auctioneers, which is leading the auction.

This part grabbed me:

"The site was formerly the Frank Fehr Brewery and Rathskeller, and features a huge lower-level, temperature-controlled environment which would enable it to be repurposed (i.e. liquor storage and distribution), continue to function as a supermarket and USDA meat-processing operation, or to be completely redeveloped for a new use," the release stated.

Broken Sidewalk picked up the story:

Seventy year old grocery closure puts last remaining Frank Fehr structure in jeopardy, by Branden Klayko

The First Link property is older than it looks, dating to sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s. While the facade of First Link along Liberty Street has been bricked up and windowless for some time, the original facade ... featured large expanses of glass, including a layer of glass admitting light to the basement. A rounded aluminum overhang added to the structure’s Streamline Moderne Art Deco aesthetic.

The structure was built by the Frank Fehr Brewing Company and clearly was an effort to modernize its eclectic collection of historic buildings, long demolished for parking lots and the Dosker Manor homes. Another sleek, modern structure approximately three stories tall once stood across from the First Link site, standing in stark contrast with the older architecture.

Following are four random views of the Fehr demolition, circa 1966. They're at the University of Louisville's digital library.

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There actually was an IPA shipwreck, after all.

From Cornell's article. If click bait interested me, I'd have flashed a photo of a hard-to-find hoarder's IPA, but then you'd just be disappointed at having to read. 

Martyn Cornell surely has done more to de-mythologize Indian Pale Ale (IPA) than any other writer, although I concede to knowingly deploying selected bits of these myths periodically while storytelling at tastings.

However, I always try to return to the point, because at the risk of oversimplification, Cornell's longstanding mission is to illustrate the advent of more aggressively hopped ales in the UK as an evolutionary process over decades, rather than the result of one or the other light bulbs suddenly flaring.

Even he seems mildly surprised that the "IPA shipwreck" is true, strictly speaking, though the details remain highly contextualized. In short, it now can be proved that there was such an event, but it cannot be proved that certain trends started as a result. These already were developing, over a long period of time, and a lone shipwreck did not serve as flash point, although the stormy origins of casks salvaged from the ship probably made for wonderful, albeit temporary, marketing at a handful of pubs.

It's a great story. At the end, there are links to other pieces written by Cornell on the topic of IPA.

The IPA shipwreck and the Night of the Big Wind, by Martyn Cornell (Zythophile)

The “IPA shipwreck” is one of many long-lasting myths in the history of India Pale Ale. The story says that IPA became popular in Britain after a ship on its way to India in the 1820s was wrecked in the Irish Sea, and some hogsheads of beer it was carrying out east were salvaged and sold to publicans in Liverpool, after which the city’s drinkers demanded lots more of the same. Colin Owen, author of a history of Bass’s brewery, called the tale “unsubstantiated” more than 20 years ago, and others, including me, being unable to find any reports of any such wreck, nor of any indication that IPA was a big seller in the UK until the 1840s, have dismissed it as completely untrue. Except that it turns out casks of IPA did go on sale in Liverpool after a wreck off the Lancashire coast involving a ship carrying hogsheads of beer to India that, literally, became a landmark – though not in the 1820s – and the true story is a cracker, involving one of the worst storms to hit the British Isles in centuries, which brought huge destruction and hundreds of deaths from one side of the UK to the other.

Arabs and distillation: Liquor “as hot between the ribs as a firebrand.”

This one's an ancient link, but it's a story worth repeating, with a fair warning: Reading the essay will make you thirsty AND hungry.

My first trip to Ireland was in 1985, and I distinctly recall the man in the pub in Sligo telling me "the Arabs invented distillation, but the Irish perfected it!"

As the following shows, the Arabs invented alcohol and knew good and well how to use it. The complicating factors are more recent themes in the interpretation of Islam, which The Economist explains in this piece: Tipsy taboo -- Alcohol is a reality in Muslim lands, but discussing it remains off limits.

Liquid fire: The Arabs discovered how to distil alcohol. They still do it best, say some (The Economist)

WHAT is Islam's greatest gift to the world? The faith of the Koran, Muslims will promptly say—along, some would add, with the Arabic language. Yet it may be that the single most pervasive legacy of Islamic civilisation is not holy scripture, but the rather unholy art of distilling alcohol. Not only were Arabs the first to make spirits. The great trading civilisation of Islam spread the skill across the globe, and in its lands some of the world's finest alcoholic concoctions are still made to this day.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 18 … Irish history with a musical chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 18 … Irish history with a musical chaser.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Eighteenth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

As I sit at my desk in the year 2015, writing this account of travel in far-off 1985, roughly 4,000 compact discs surround me, arranged in shelving units of varying sizes and shapes. I’m told they’re obsolete, but then again, so were the LPs packed into my tiny bedroom back when Ronnie Raygun was President, and I was planning my first trip to Europe.

Nowadays vinyl once again is sought-after, although not cassette tapes, which also took up storage space in the cramped living quarters of my youth. At least I never bought into the ethos of the 8-track tape, a fact of which I’m inordinately proud.

At the age of 55, I’ve yet to learn how to play a musical instrument, and if I so much as tried to carry a tune across the street, the likeliest result would be two broken legs – or the wailing enmity of every dog in the neighborhood. Still, my earliest childhood memories are about music, and it is impossible to overstate the role music continues to play in my everyday world.

During the years prior to the summer of 1985, my musical consciousness was filled with the usual markers of a male in his early twenties, with rock, pop and MTV the dominant influences. Perhaps unusually, my parents had raised me on swing and jazz, and these were viable complements. Just after college, formal composition began to please me, and I was a regular listener of WUOL, the University of Louisville’s classical FM station.

As genres go, “world music” wasn’t on heavy rotation in metropolitan Louisville at the time, and this is where Don Barry’s tutelage re-enters the narrative.

My cousin always brought albums of Irish music with him whenever he’d drive back from Florida to visit his mother (my aunt). I’d copy these albums onto cassettes: The Dubliners, Wolfe Tones, Tommy Makem, Clancy Brothers and other Irish folk bands, mostly from original pressings Don had purchased during his previous journeys to Ireland.

Of course, music wasn’t the only cultural touchstone in my informal education about all things Irish. As a pedagogue in the finest of constructive senses, Don provided ample homework, with reading assignments that extended far past our summer interludes: James Joyce ("Ulysses" is one thing; "Finnegan's Wake" quite another), Seamus Heaney, John Synge, W.B. Yeats, and "The Green Flag," Robert Kee's masterful history of Ireland.

Irish music helped tell Irish history, and it all became interwoven. Don and I listened to bawdy tunes, weepy ballads and riotous calls to action. We also drank gallons of beer while doing so, and these were the best seminars ever.

My family background is almost entirely sharecropper German from the Pomeranian plains, with a smidgen of English tossed into the mix, but once I'd experienced Irish culture from these secondary sources, it always seemed there must have been at least one stray shot of Irish DNA somewhere -- a rogue, a wanderer, an outcast from the great Irish displacement, who’d contributed to the family tree and then disappeared into the mists.

Musically, Ireland felt very comfortable to me, even if discomfort was the source of so many of the more overtly political songs, given that in terms of history, Ireland hasn’t always been such a happy or peaceful place.

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By 600 AD, the island’s original Celtic inhabitants had been converted to Catholicism. During the Dark Ages, Viking and Norman incursions were disruptive, but the visitors generally assimilated. A far more portentous invasion began in the 16th century, as launched by the bigger island to the east.

In 1534, King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church, and established his own Church of England. In 1541, he added the Irish throne to his list of royal titles, and thus commenced more than 150 years of “plantation,” a policy wherein Protestants (primarily from England and Scotland) were settled in Ireland and afforded rights disproportionate to those of the indigenous Catholics, who steadily were disenfranchised.

The area of heaviest Protestant settlement was Ulster, a cluster of six counties to the north. Today, this is Northern Ireland, which remains joined to the United Kingdom. Ireland’s other 26 counties were subject to the same Protestant favoritism, but retained Catholic majorities. These make up the contemporary Republic of Ireland.

In the early 1800s, sectarian strife grew amid the institutionalized disparities, with seemingly endless patterns of revolt and subjugation, culminating with a wild card blithely tossed by Mother Nature: A potato blight in the late 1840s, which deprived huge numbers of impoverished Irish Catholics of their sole source of sustenance.

The tragic ensuing famine either killed or caused to emigrate more than 2,000,000 people, or one of four Irish men and women, and yet throughout the crisis, farms controlled by outsiders (most of them English) continued to export food, even though people nearby were starving.

Not for the last time, London’s inept performance during the famine reignited a slow, smoldering movement for greater Irish autonomy. Through the remainder of the 1800s, this movement for “Home Rule” grew stronger, but because of its Catholic orientation, Protestant-dominated Ulster threatened counter-measures of its own to remain under British sway, and little changed.

Just before the outbreak of WWI, it seemed as though Home Rule might at last come to pass, but the conflict intervened. It was broadly agreed that domestic considerations would be placed on hold for the duration. Spotting an opportunity to force the issue while the British were preoccupied with the war, radical Irish nationalists struck.

On April 24, 1916 (Easter Monday), rebels seized key buildings and installations of importance in Dublin, including the post office, and declared a free Ireland. It was called the Easter Rising; however, the Irish nation did not “rise up” as the rebels expected, and the revolt was mercilessly crushed by British troops.

Yet again, London completely misread the situation, responding with calculated harshness toward a populace that for the most part had not heeded the revolutionary call. All but a handful of the rebels were executed, and the brutality managed finally to turn Irish public opinion against British rule, at least among Catholics outside Ulster. The stage was set for ugliness, which dutifully followed.

From 1916 through 1923, the contemporary configuration of Ireland was determined through a series of parliamentary maneuvers accompanied first by a triumphant war of independence against the British, and then a divisive civil war among the Irish themselves. By the early 1920s, the exhausted island was divided, and a template of periodic violence established for the ensuing decades.

It has been almost a century since the Easter Rising, and just about everything else in Ireland has changed save for the division of the island into two entities. In theory only, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland ended with a brokered settlement in 1998. Meanwhile, the Irish Republic has weathered a burst real estate bubble following its “Celtic Tiger” period of modernization, and a new chapter is being written as you read these previous ones.

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My major point with respect to this upheaval-laden travel narrative is that when I first stepped onto Irish soil in 1985, quite a few of the elderly men and women seen reposing on park benches in Dublin had active memories of the tumultuous 20th century.

They had lived through the infancy of the Free Irish State, and at the time, as I prepared to board the train from Dublin to Sligo and a planned 5-day jaunt in the countryside, emigration remained the norm almost 150 years after the famine. Their country still was reckoned among the poorer relations of the European Union.

Perhaps their experiences, and those of their kinfolk abroad, explain the powerful longing for home that surfaces in so many of the classic Irish folk songs, as in my favorite, “Carrickfergus,” as performed by my favorite group, the Dubliners, with vocals by Jim McCann. Printed lyrics can't convey the melancholy of this incredible traditional song, but nonetheless, here are excerpted stanzas.

I wish I was in Carrickfergus
Only for nights in Ballygran
I would swim over the deepest ocean
Only for nights in Ballygran
But the sea is wide and I can not swim over
And neither have I the wings to fly
I wish I had a handsome boatman
To ferry me over, my love and I

My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy times we spent so long ago
My boyhood friends and my own relations
Have all passed on like the melting snow
And I spent my days in ceaseless roving
Soft is the grass and my bed is free
Oh to be back now in Carrickfergus
On that long winding road down to the sea

Now in Kilkenny it is recorded
On marble stones there as black as ink
With gold and silver I would support her
But I'll sing no more now till I get a drink
'Cause I'm drunk today and I'm seldom sober
A handsome rover from town to town
Ah but I'm sick now, my days are numbered
Come all you young men and lay me down

Note that Carrickfergus is in Northern Ireland. In terms of the Irish diaspora, it isn’t at all clear whether this fact is ironic.

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Previously:

The PC: Euro '85, Part 17 ... A first glimpse of Ireland.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 16 … Lizard King in the City of Light.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 15 … The traveler at 55, and a strange interlude.

The PC: We pause Euro '85 to remember the Mathäser Bierstadt in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 14 … Beers and breakfast in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

Kevin Gibson in LEO Weekly: "Homebrew: Craft beer before craft beer was cool."

FOSSILS meeting in 1997.

Kudos to Kevin Gibson for this well-researched and entertaining "recent" history of homebrewing in Louisville and Southern Indiana.

Kevin surveys LAGERS and FOSSILS, the latter of which celebrates its 25th birthday in September. I'll have more information on this, but in the meantime, if you were a member back in the day, keep the weekend of September 11, 12 and 13 open.

Homebrew: Craft beer before craft beer was cool, by Kevin Gibson (LEO Weekly)

The mustachioed 20-something sips away at his IPA of the week as he peers around the bar. All around him, people drink beers of all styles, colors and creeds. “Craft beer” is the buzz term of the 2010s thanks to a beer-drinking public that has increasingly demanded more and more from its beer than a 12-ounce, ice-cold bottle of “Corporate Light” can muster.

But good beer has been around for centuries. And it’s been around Louisville since the city was settled in the late 1700s and even after the fall of commercial brewing here in 1978. Home brewers kept the boilers burning in small batches during Prohibition, and they kept them burning even when light beers became the American fancy and the boilers at Falls City were turned off. At that point, the only beer Louisvillians — and most Americans — had available to drink was what many beer enthusiasts now call “corporate swill.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The PC: The uses of the past.

The PC: The uses of the past.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

For those just tuning in, this column used to appear at LouisvilleBeer.com, but henceforth will be published here each Monday. Previous columns at LouisvilleBeer.com are archived there.

---

In the late 1980s, reports began filtering into Southern Indiana alleging the existence of an institution known as the brewpub.

It sounded crazy enough, and what’s more, the deliverers of this news tended to have a wild-eyed, messianic appearance; they’d seen the future, and it was a place that made beer of its own and served it to you right there, on site, as you sat and stared at a television screen just like at any other bar.

In other words, the way it had been done for thousands of years before being confined to factories.

At the time, my exposure to better beer while living stateside had come exclusively from the import aisle, although the time was fast approaching when I’d be called upon to give a helping hand to friendly local homebrewers by diligently drinking the remnants of their previous batch -- seated in a camp chair, cigar in jaw, watching as they labored to render the next one.

That’s what I call voyeurism, of a heightened, refined sort.

Thus it transpired that in 1992, just a few months before turning 32 years of age, I’d never had the pleasure of setting foot in an American brewpub. Not a single one.

To be sure, I’d visited European breweries both large (Carlsberg, Heineken) and small (U Fleku, Spezial), but upon returning home to metropolitan Louisville, our somewhat barren local beerscape remained, awash with dreadful low-calorie swill manufactured elsewhere in a factory.

Unknown to me, change was about to come. Serendipity always reigns supreme in our lives, and as the leaves reappeared during that spring of 1992, there was a turning point.

In May, I went to Chicago to take the State Department’s Foreign Service exam. Failing that (literally), there was time to navigate the CTA transport grid and visit the original, independent Goose Island brewpub, which deeply impressed me. Perhaps enjoying my first ever American brewpub experience at Goose Island is directly linked to my supreme and abiding disdain of what Trojan Goose has become since selling out to the beer assassins at AB-InBev.

By July of 1992, I’d made the decision to get into the food and drink business at the Public House formerly known as Rich O’s. Later that autumn the Silo, Louisville’s first brewery of the modern era, opened with David Pierce in the brewhouse. The Silo brewed its own beer and served it to us along with food.

Finally, we had brewpub, and had come full circle.

---

A new era abruptly exploded, and with it came many more opportunities to visit brewpubs and microbreweries. I didn’t always travel in America, but when I did, I’d look for the places making beer on site.

Here is a list of 15 American breweries I visited during the 1990s

Baltimore Brewing in Baltimore, Maryland
Tucker Brewing in Salem, Indiana
Silo Brewery in Louisville
Pipkin Brewing in Louisville
Oldenberg Grill in Louisville
Oldenberg Brewing in Ft Mitchell, Kentucky
Silver Creek Brewing Corporation in Sellersburg, Indiana
Main Street Brewing in Cincinnati, Ohio
Barrel House Brewing in Cincinnati, Ohio
BrewWorks at the Party Source in Covington, Kentucky
Circle V Brewing in Indianapolis, Indiana
Crooked River Brewing in Cleveland, Ohio
Diamondback Brewing in Cleveland, Ohio
Champion Brewing in Denver, Colorado
Dixon’s Downtown Grill in Denver, Colorado

As you may have gleaned, what these 15 businesses have in common is that they are deceased, and if there is any one integral component of a sustainability doctrine, it is the necessity of the individual, business or ecosystem being animate, as opposed to dead. No pulse, no sustainability.

There were quite a few good beers brewed at these establishments, and also some stinkers. Some of them brewed for production and distribution, while others were oriented for on-site consumption. In my mind, each contributed something memorable to the narrative, and deserves to be remembered.

Ultimately, the reasons for them ceasing to exist lie outside the scope of today’s rumination, although we can reasonably surmise that these factors mirror those of other, non-brewing businesses: Variable leases, poor locations, business plans that went sour when the coin landed tails and not heads, or maybe plain bad luck. The slimmer the margin, the less margin for error.

And so on.

---

It doesn’t require Sigmund Freud’s couch to deduce that given recent developments in my own business, where we’ve suspended the food program at Bank Street Brewhouse to concentrate on our beer, thoughts like these would come to mind.

Except that it goes beyond this, I think.

Having witnessed one boom ‘n’ bust cycle, perhaps I’ve developed a sensitivity to the possibility of a second one amid the current, applauded expansion of brewing. I desperately want it to work out like Great Flood’s opening, not Mobreki’s closing; the latter was a brewing operation in Madison, Indiana that never really got off the ground, suffered from quality issues, and folded this past winter (Mobreki’s equipment has landed in Jeffersonville at Red Yeti, which opens today with guest beers; best of luck to them).

I’d like to think that we, as the brewing community, might avoid the mistakes of a previous generation. However, as a longtime student of history, ignorance of past lessons isn’t a good place to begin when seeking to avoid repeat performances.

It has been 10 to 15 years since most of the breweries listed above closed, and we can learn a lot from their experience. Unfortunately, institutional memory is slim in the current milieu of self-absorption, masquerading as beer appreciation. As a result, certain virtues often are viewed as clichés, but they shouldn’t be.

Quality is chief among them, because a reputation for quality is something one earns, over time. When quality is involved, you don’t mind history repeating itself. It isn’t always flashy. Rather, quality is about hard work – over and over again.

To me, the sought-after ideal of quality in “craft,” a word most of us use without ever contemplating its meaning, is an ethos manifested locally and independently. At RiverRoots this past weekend, I thought about it often while examining pottery and other handmade items, and listening to a fellow play the dulcimer.

It occurred to me that condemning the dulcimer’s construction because one doesn’t like the music it creates is misplaced, especially coming from someone styling himself a music enthusiast. In like fashion, last week an on-line commentator maligned the quality of my product line because all 30 beers we brew in a year aren’t IPAs.

I’m forced to conclude that he’s tone deaf.

What can we do about that, anyway?

Of a few taverns past, and some new ones on the way.

Here in New Albany, the shortest way to drive from the vicinity of my Midtown home to the Charlestown Road corridor north of I-265 is to proceed first to Vincennes Street, than hang a right onto Charlestown Road and follow it all the way out.

Doing so, you'll pass a vacant spot by Silver Street where Steinert's Tavern  used to stand before it burned down a few years back. It eventually restarted downtown, but folded. All told, it was one of New Albany's oldest drinking establishments.

A bit further up Charlestown Road, on the right side at Slate Run Road, there stands a modern strip mall on the site of what was called the Lone Star (I believe in olden times it was a lumberyard), then became a Tumbleweed some time around 1983, when the Tex-Mex chain still was local. It burned about a decade back, and was demolished.

Another mile down Charlestown Road at the Blackiston Mill Road intersection are the foundations of Sam's Food & Spirits, which occupied the spot from about 1985 through 2013; it burned just before Christmas, and was recently torn down. Before it was Sam's, it was Ye Olde Mill Inn, the Gasthaus, and for decades prior, the Fourth Dam Tavern.

I turned 21 in 1981, and from that point through 1987, when I first began hanging out at Sportstime Pizza five years before actually joining the business, probably 95% of my drinking occurred at Steinert's (until I was kicked out in a dispute over a salt shaker), Tumbleweed, Sam's and the K & H Cafe in Lanesville. Only the latter never burned, and although the bar business there never ceased being operational (it's Big Momma's nowadays), I haven't been inside since the Schneiders retired in the early 1990s.

My dwelling on these memories may have something to do with aging, or with the revelation that an old, dilapidated tavern building near my house is slated for the wrecking ball:

Some of the taverns at 922 Culbertson, from 1937-1996.

What happens to the ghosts of drinkers past when the buildings go away? Must they find a new spot to haunt?

Of more a optimistic orientation are these stories of impending debuts. Great Flood has started brewing, with NABC's David Pierce providing some helpful hints.

VIDEO: Louisville’s Newest Brewery – Great Flood Brewing

... and three other food and drink businesses on the way have caught my eye. Big Four Burgers is owned by Matt McMahan, who also owns Irish Exit in New Albany:

Big Four Burgers eyeing more in downtown New Albany

In Louisville, there's another branch of the BBC empire coming:

BBC-run Brewhouse to replace Dark Star on Frankfort

Finally, where the epochal Maido used to be, comes a new Japanese eatery:

Old Maido location to re-open as Bar Code 1758, featuring Japanese fare

Will the beer selection at Bar Code 1758 come close to what Jim used to stock at Maido? We boys (and girls) can dream -- of old and new watering holes, and of wasabi and Hop Slam speedballs.

Idle 1980s thoughts about bad beers and old men.

I was thinking back to when my love affair began ... with bars, taverns and watering holes. It was before I began traveling, so these were the local spots -- some of them dives, others with slightly more dignified pretensions.

Seeing as I was just south of 21 when it started, pretty much all the patrons were older than me, and it seems that when it came to the old men, who in retrospect probably meant anyone older than 40, most of them were drinking traditional manly, old-man beers like Pabst, Sterling and Miller High Life.

At some point shortly thereafter, when I was in my mid-twenties, I became aware that almost all of them had switched to Lite, Bud Light and even Old Milwaukee Light. Price seemingly wasn’t the issue; if anything, they’d traded up and were paying more to cover the cost of Miller’s and Bud's television ads.

After long consideration, I concluded that a lifetime of Sterling and City finally had gotten to them, and when they realized that light beer was socially acceptable to their peers, under the rationalization that it was less filling, thus enabling them to drink even more beer than ever before, they fled their traditional brands as fast as their terminally damaged taste buds would carry them. Better the nothingness of wet air than something terminally foul ... and you could hear the sighs of relief in air-conditioned lounges and softball fields all across the nation.

It pleases me that local brands like City and Sterling are back, in altered form; in short, drinkable. The Pabst renaissance over the past two decades as yet puzzles me. It tastes nothing like the Pabst I remember. In fact, it tastes like nothing at all.

Wait, I forget; that's the point, isn't it?

The PC: Strawberry’s Bar Forever.

(Published at LouisvilleBeer.com on December 1, 2013)

---

Strawberry’s Bar Forever

Once I’d actually gotten to know the brothers Harold and Kenny Schneider, who at the time owned the K & H Café in Lanesville, Indiana, elements of my wayward past life began nagging at me. Early on, I resolved never to tell them my secret. The embarrassment would be too great, because they’d become more than ordinary bartenders. They were friends and mentors.

Harold, whom everyone knew as Strawberry (or Straw), died in June of 2013 at the age of 78, prompting memories and reflection. Is it too late now to confess? I don’t think so. It’s never too late to start all over again, and to put this trauma behind me forever by confiding aloud to his brother, other surviving family members and the planet as a whole: Yes, it’s all true. When first patronizing the K & H Café and partaking of its short list of adjunct beers, kept highly chilled therein, I wasn’t yet 21 years of age.

In fact, I was barely 19. There: I’ve said it.

What more can I say?

—

Kenny and Straw owned the K & H for 35 years, from 1960 (the year I was born) through 1995, when quite a few of the regulars from various eras gathered together to say goodbye and to wish them a happy retirement. A deeper consideration of this chronology reveals Straw to have been 25 when the “K” first opened, and 60 when the new owners took over.

(Immediately, I don the dainty shoes of Miss Trixie, elderly and iconic secretary inhabiting the pages of America’s funniest novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, to plaintively ask: “Am I retired yet?” Is there a slim possibility of my own escape from small business ownership servitude in only seven short years? Alas, it’s highly unlikely. I started later than Straw, at the advanced age of 32, and three and a half decades for me projects to a conceivable departure at 67. Ah, but a boy can dream)

Of course, mere words never will suffice to summarize a long and well-lived life. Some probably look down on the occupation of small town tavern keeper, but Straw raised kids and sent them through college (as did his brother), went to church, and was an active community pillar by any local standard. Displaying a bushy red raised eyebrow, he was understated to the point of a sage’s gentle sandbagging, invariably providing the barflies with wise, thoughtful counsel.

My chronological transgressions as patron were artfully obscured when Straw and Kenny hired me as an occasional bartender in 1983; there was no job application, and an ID wasn’t necessary considering I already possessed the requisite state servers permit from my other job at the package store. It was my first glimpse of the view from the other side of the bar.

The routine was simple. The two owners alternated weekly, working days or nights. An ancient lady who’d been there form the start cooked burgers and tenderloins at lunch, then prepped the evening’s food for greater efficiency, because on slower weeknights, the sole bartender both served and manned the griddle. On weekends, there’d be some kitchen help and an extra bartender to accommodate larger crowds.

Budweiser and Miller Lite were on tap, served in chilled Mason jars. Cocktails mostly resembled various combinations of whiskey, vodka, coke and orange juice. There might have been tomato juice, and tequila shots were not unknown. Pabst, Old Milwaukee and a handful of other mass market brands were available in cans, and a couple weekly cases of Stroh’s were on hand for Doc, a colorful Lanesville resident who duly pillaged them each weekend.

The wood-paneled bar room was divided from the all-ages area by a wall, later removed during renovations near the end of the brothers’ long run. Upstairs was a dusty, unused former apartment filled with supplies, point-of-sale detritus and a quarter-century of lost-and-found.

I desperately wanted to live up there.

The fat screen above the bar showed college sports, selected network dramas and (for a while) the Dukes of Hazard. The electronic darts game in back provided a useful distraction for idle hands, when visible; there was no discernible non-smoking area, and no obligation to provide one. Country music and classic rock played on a genuine vinyl-filled juke box, and to this very day, certain Conway Twitty and Alabama songs compel my inner Pavlov’s dog to yelp at the mere suggestion of their chords. Quite early during my tenure, customers pitched in to help restore a vintage shuffleboard table. It was a retro showpiece.

Once, in a condition of sheer blotto, my visiting cousin noticed a wooden carving on the shelf behind the bar, and announced to all and sundry that Jesus now was on tap. Saviors aside, no imports were stocked, and craft beer as such didn’t yet exist during the Reagan years, although the brothers tolerated a short period when Larry and I got uppity and insisted on bringing bottles of Guinness Export Stout inside the K & H for mixing into half-and-halves, in Mason jars, using … yes, using Budweiser in place of pale ale.

Once the novelty wore off, I accepted my station in regional life and meekly went back to drinking Doc’s leftover Stroh’s.

—

It wasn’t until I moved to Floyds Knobs from Georgetown and began hanging out at a pizza place in New Albany called Sportstime did my Lanesville ties begin to fade. An evolution was underway, or a revolution, or maybe (finally, and regrettably) I was growing up. But times changed quickly, and it wasn’t long before decades had passed and a rose-hued glow began shining in the rear-view mirror. I’ve learned to respect it – and keep driving.

When I think back, not once during my period of work and patronage at the K & H did the prospect of small business ownership cross my mind. Yet here I am, immersed.

Perhaps inadvertently, I learned far more about running a business than was evident to me at the time. Straw in particular offered numerous and memorable life lessons about patience and a good attitude when dealing with the unpredictability of the consuming public. I may not have always practiced these examples, but they haven’t been forgotten.

Most importantly, the K & H was all about community, and Straw welcomed me as part of the Lanesville family, as well as his own. It’s the biggest insight of all, and one that never goes out of fashion. Rest in peace, kind sir. Your work lives on … even the Mason jars, which I’m told are back in fashion.

If this archival film clip of Schlenkerla doesn't make you thirsty, you may be dead.

Tim "Starlight Distribution" Eads mailed this link, as posted at Schlenkerla's Facebook site some time back. I'm sorry I missed it. 

The black and white film clip was shot in 1963, and is entirely in German, but this doesn't matter at all. It's entirely comprehensible. More recent visitors to Bamberg can attest to how little has changed in the physical sense of the historic pub's interiors and conventional tourist views in a finely preserved old town, and yet, 50 years is a very long time. How many of Bamberg's breweries shown in montage have survived? 

In 1963, it was less than 20 years since war's end, and Matthias, today's standard bearer for the Trum family, hadn't been born.

Elegiac times two. I want to go back. When?

Bet you didn't know about the "chemist's war of Prohibition."

Very seldom does one encounter a story like this; indeed, it has been little-told, and it deserves your full attention. These excerpts should be enough to make you angry, but after reading the entire essay, there'll be major outrage. Thanks to RC for bringing this to our attention.

The Chemist's War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences, by Deborah Blum (Slate)

... Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

The big enforcement issue during Prohibition was stolen industrial alcohol. The denaturing formula is hard reading, indeed.

To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

"A quarter century of beer and pizza," by Matt Nash.

Matt commences with an ominous sentence, considering the record of the early years, but it's a nice segue into his personal account of pizzas, beers and so much else.

NASH: A quarter century of beer and pizza, by Matt Nash (News and Tribune)

JEFFERSONVILLE — My personal relationship with the New Albanian Brewing Company goes back to a few years before I was even able to drink beer, legally.

Bob Ostrander's new book is called, "Hoosier Beer."

Our old friend Bob Ostrander's new book is called Hoosier Beer: Tapping into Indiana Brewing History (the co-author is Derrick Morris), and here's the introduction.

Indiana became a state in 1816 and in that year our first two commercial breweries opened. Since then over 350 licensed breweries have offered cool, refreshing beer to Hoosiers, made by Hoosiers. 200 years of history.

Hoosier Beer chronicles, city by city, the rise from small family backyard breweries, breweries at religious orders, large factory breweries, two prohibition periods, massive mega-conglomerates, brewpubs, and back to small family-owned breweries that offer a wide variety of beers directly to customers fresh at the brewery.

Bob will be appearing at the Public House soon to plug the book and conduct a fun and educational pub quiz. Stay tuned for the date and time; our people are talking to his people as I write ... well, maybe.