The Pour Fool rules: "FUCK Budweiser: Your Basic Early Morning, Fed-Up Rant."

From the glorious article.

The Pour Fool induced a Vulcan mind meld, and now the contents of my own cranium have been reproduced in full, living color -- except, of course, the Pour Fool wrote these inspiring words himself.

He just might be my favorite living beer writer.

FUCK Budweiser: Your Basic Early Morning, Fed-Up Rant, by Steve Foolbody (The Pour Fool)

People don’t come out of the womb with a hankerin’ for Budweiser. Kids, in particular, love big flavors. They grow up eating nachos and Cheetos and burgers and pizza…NONE of which leads logically to drinking watery, flavorless adjunct Pilsner, that is so swamped by those food that you might as well be drinking water. People are programmed to drink BudMillerCoors. They find it in their family fridge and watch Mon and Dad and their uncles and aunts mindlessly slugging the stuff down and think, “That’s what beer is“. That knee-jerk repetition kept those wimpy-ass beers unchallenged for over a century…until beers with real flavor came along and craft brewing flourished and people found out, “Hey! I don’t have to settle for that insipid shit, anymore!” And AB/InBev is on the way out and they don’t even know it because we like these new, carefully crafted, great-tasting beers BETTER…and we are NEVER going back.

__

The PC: Swill in youthful times of penury and need.

The PC: Swill in youthful times of penury and need.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

The last time I drank a Little Kings Cream Ale, it tasted awful.

The exact year escapes me, but it was during the period when the ill-fated entity known as Snyder International owned and brewed Little Kings in Frederick, Maryland, having reduced it and other beer brands, both old and new, to lowly chattel, suitable only for manipulation by enriched computer geeks wearing mittens, posturing at chess with only half the pieces on their playing board.

Who did this temporary dot.com zillionaire think he was, Carlos Brito?

In the year 2000 or thereabouts, Little Kings tasted nothing like I remembered, back in high school, when those slim 7-oz bottles in eight-count containers were a highly valued weekend anesthetic, preferably ice-cold, a merciful two swallows and gone, with the empties destined for tossing at road signs and mailboxes.

Yes, of course our behavior was regrettable, and yet when you’re drinking and driving three or more years before legal age, often in a car not registered in your own name, environmental responsibility ranks fairly low in the pecking order. Green wasn’t a social imperative, at least yet. Rather, it was the color of the bottles being drained.

Accordingly, to me they were “greenies,” having merged this term from two separate sources: Jim Bouton’s baseball expose Ball Four, where it referred to rampant amphetamines, and also the way Jimmy Buffet described his doses of Caribbean-inspired Heineken, without once mentioning trash disposal by boat.

A few years later, drinking my way through coursework at IU Southeast, Little Kings made a strong comeback. We needed draft beer priced right for keggers, and Jeffersonville’s late and lamented Nachand Beverage was there, standing by, with the right answer from a wholesaler that genuinely cared. I miss them.

Little Kings on draft was effective, though it didn’t taste the same as in bottles. Perhaps the barrels weren’t cold enough.

It seems that Little Kings has now returned to Cincinnati as part of the revived Christian Moerlein/Hudepohl/Schoenling brewing effort. Maybe the beer has gotten better again, because I’d like to believe the web site’s claim that the same recipe has been used since the 1950s.

Snyder’s version left a bad taste in my mouth. For that matter, so did Snyder.

---

These repressed memories came bubbling effervescently to the surface recently when I came back from a meeting in Indianapolis lugging a four-pack of Sun King Sunlight Cream Ale in cans. I find it a fine example of craft brewing as yoked to the imperative of everyday drinking, clean with only a hint of corn, and boasting a comfy 5% abv.

But every time I drink one of them, I’m reminded how different it tastes from what I remember of Little Kings, which I actually liked at the time, as opposed to merely tolerated in route to the goal of inebriation, and as a wrecking ball to social barriers.

It may surprise you to learn that there were others. Indeed, wretched swill was wretched swill, but some swill came perilously close to being drinkable.

During my sophomore and junior years of high school, I actually thought Schlitz tasted good, and this was of inestimable importance, because at first, I didn’t like the taste of beer at all.

Until the decade of the 1960s, Schlitz was a bona fide American classic brand, and an immigrant’s success story. What happened next is a cautionary tale second to none.

Under pressure to keep pace with the emerging multinational behemoths, Schlitz took every available shortcut to cheapen ingredients, step up the corn sugar, industrialize the process – you name the adulteration, and it was enthusiastically embraced.

Welcome to global capitalism: You can eviscerate yourself, or let the friendly shark do it for you.

Schlitz’s missteps culminated with the infamous New Improved Formula marketing debacle, otherwise known as “saving a few bucks has made our beer taste so different that we’ll try to make a virtue out of its degradation,” followed shortly thereafter by another disaster, the recall of a few million bottles of Schlitz compromised because the artificial foam stabilizer had an allergic chemical reaction to another extraneous additive.

At any rate, Schlitz came to taste worse, and anyway, something better had come along: Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull. It numbed the teeth considerably faster.

However, the Bull was no match for Mickey’s Malt Liquor in the wide-mouthed bottles, and to this day, I have no plausible explanation for this fact.

Mickey’s came from whomever was contract brewing Sterling that particular week, and was stupidly inexpensive. Oddly, I never liked Sterling, but Mickey’s didn’t taste like Sterling, though even Sterling itself tasted better in wide-mouthed bottles – when very, very cold.

Notice a trend emerging?

Once in the late 1980s, I told a friend – an import snob like me – about a lovely new beer in town, and went to the kitchen to pour him a glass of it. It was love at first drink, and his guesses of origin ranged from Czechoslovakia to Alsace-Lorraine. The correct answer was Evansville.

He didn’t speak to me for a month afterward.

---

Then there was Schaefer, a beer dating back to before the war – the American Civil War.

Schaefer was a New York City brewer with a plan to roll-out nationally during the 1970s, building a new brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and quintupling its production to 5,000,000 barrels per year – and still Schaefer lost market share to the Buds and Millers, so in 1981, the towel at last landed, and it was purchased by Stroh’s.

This was the pretext for Stroh’s to make its own great national leap forward, which eventually failed just as spectacularly as Schaefer’s and Old Style’s similar efforts, though in the interim, during the mid-1980s, Schaefer was recalibrated as one of Stroh’s budget brands.

This coincided with my tenure at Scoreboard Liquors, where we sold Schaefer 30-packs for something like $9.00 – cheap, but the necessary bag of ice cost a buck extra.

Perhaps it made sense that Schaefer would appeal to me on price point, since by the mid- to late-1980s, Stroh’s was my “premium” beer of choice. By then the white can had become blue. I didn’t like Stroh’s very much until after returning from my first trip to Europe in 1985, when it seemed that something vague and indefinable about Stroh’s still connected with the continent.

Back home from the journey, and once again employed at the liquor store, one reasonably priced regional beer topped them all: Christian Moerlein, or Hudepohl-Schoenling’s answer to Michelob.

It, too, has returned – and that’s a story for another day.

When the Euro '85 series returns: Leningrad USSR. 

_

"Anatomy of an Oligopoly: the Beer Industry."

It's a commentary that sounds like I should have written it, and I'm slightly annoyed I didn't.

Anatomy of an Oligopoly: the Beer Industry, by Jeff Nielson (Sprott Money)

Why has the standard of living across most of the Western world fallen by more than half over the past 40+ years? Why is Western unemployment at an all-time high, with more than 100 million permanently unemployed people who are not allowed to work? Why does most brand-name beer taste like swill?

Most readers will see no connection between these questions. Some will see a connection between the first and second, and very few will see a common link between all three. In fact, we can answer all of these questions (at least in part) the same way, and the answer is spelled O-L-I-G-O-P-O-L-Y.

_

Vomitorium now in progress as AB-InBev hack dupes CNBC stenographer.

Reading this article reminds me of the time 35 years ago when I made it all the way through Mein Kampf, written (screamed?) by some fellow named Hitler.

Wait a minute -- no, it doesn't. There's a crucial difference.

Like AB-InBev's flunky Andy Goeler, Hitler was spouting pure gibberish. Unlike Goeler, Hitler believed in his own gibberish and set about to prove how catastrophic it really was.

Goeler doesn't believe his own corporate gibberish. Unfortunately, many "craft" beer aficionados will, and that's catastrophic, too, so let me remind you of something:

The very existence of AB and its engorged successor, AB-InBev, made it necessary for us to take beer back from the bean-counting Philistines by prying it from the monolith's cold, dead (but profitable) hands, by means of a revolution. There is no way, as in cannot happen, that anything AB-InBev ever does can facilitate better beer in any meaningful sense. It can only subtract from better beer. It can only bastardize. It can only destroy integrity. It cannot add it. Ever.

Death to AB-InBev -- then, now, tomorrow.

Inside Anheuser-Busch’s craft beer deals, by Tom Rotunno (CNBC)

 ... "If you look at craft right now, it's playing a very important role in the industry, and while around 80 percent of consumers still enjoy and drink domestic large lagers, the craft piece of the business is really growing," said Andy Goeler, CEO of craft for Anheuser-Busch InBev's Anheuser-Busch division. "It's adding a lot of excitement and so our strategy is really simple, it's to participate in the excitement that's going on in craft" ...

 ... To that extent the Anheuser-Busch has developed a two-pronged approach: Create its own in-house national brands like Shock Top, while at the same time expanding its portfolio by acquiring established regional craft brewers with room to grow.

"We look for owners that share a passion, have an amazing beer culture and have partners that take a long-term view and who want to keep expanding and do more things in the world of beer," he said.

"Bud Light’s U.S. sales alone would lodge it firmly within the Fortune 500."

I usually ignore click bait, but perspective is a very good practice.

These Are The 20 Most Popular Beers In America Right Now (Food Beast)

Big Beer is a big business in America. Total annual sales stand around $100 billion. Craft Beers, as defined by the Brewer’s Association, are booming, yet still only account for around 15% of the beer sold in America. On a volume basis, craft beer’s share of the market is about half of that, due to its premium pricing. So what’s America drinking? A whole lot of light beer, most of which is made by a handful of monstrous macro brewers. America’s most popular beer is Bud Light – by a couple billion dollars. Yes, Bud Light’s U.S. sales alone would lodge it firmly within the Fortune 500.

Pop open a Trojan Goose and enjoy this explanation of why you shouldn't.

Get ready for an uncommonly good explanation of the American brewing marketplace, a link forwarded me by my friend Jerry Ramsey. Here are a few passages and my thoughts.

For America's craft beer revolution, brewing battle has come to a head: The independent beer movement has exploded, threatening Big Beer and posing new dilemmas for craft brewers, by Michael Pizzi (Al Jazeera America)

... “It’s not just a matter of craft brewers banding together with our fists in the air against Big Beer anymore,” said (Chris) Gallant, Bronx Brewery’s general manager. “The biggest challenge is that there are just so many of us.”

What does this have to do with our monolithic "friends" at the Big Two?

The “Big Two” conglomerates — Anheuser-Busch Inbev and SABMiller — recognize the small beer movement is growing into a legitimate threat ... (and) pitched battles are brewing between Big Beer and small beer lobbies over distribution and franchising laws that determine access to markets. In Congress, dueling bills have been proposed to reduce the steep excise tax on beer in the United States, one of which offers a graduated tax schedule that would benefit small breweries. With their deep pockets and army of lobbying firms, Big Beer might just have its way.

With friends like them, who needs Islamic terrorism, except that "traditional low-cost American beers like Budweiser, Coors and Miller are simply going out of style." If you're a multinational monopolist, what's the response to an aesthetic precluded you by virtue of DNA?

“At Anheuser-Busch, you see a future where if you don’t act now to restructure the marketplace, your present product selection is going to confine you to a much smaller business down the road,” said Barry Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who has done extensive research on the beer market.

So restructuring the marketplace is what Big Beer has begun to do, experts say. Contrary to its recent anti-craft messaging, Anheuser-Busch has actually begun to buy out independent breweries, starting with the 2011 purchase of Goose Island in Chicago. It has since bought out Blue Point, 10 Barrel, and, last year, Elysian in Washington (which, ironically, produces the Pumpkin Peach Ale that Budweiser mocked in its Super Bowl ad). The company has not commented whether the buying spree will continue, including in an email to Al Jazeera, but its strategy so far seems to involve subsidizing and selling its craft offerings cheaper than its competitors, proliferating them across its massive, coordinated distribution networks.

Lynn said he didn't think the plan was to profit off these beers directly. “What they want to be able to do is offer wholesalers or retailers a full array of products, to say ‘you don’t need to go anywhere else, we’ve got your craft covered.’”

Yes, that's right: Colonize taps and shelf space, lock them down by whatever means is workable, and keep small brewers from coming through the door. It's what AB-InBev does with zombie crafts like Trojan Goose Island -- and yet many of you still feed money to the monolith.

Why?

Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association, which represents the craft beer industry, said the Big Two can, by way of co-opted distributors, offer preferential treatment — prices and promotional displays, for example — to bars and stores who choose not to carry independent brews. Now that craft is in their repertoire, Gatza said, “you’ll see it more and more at bars, where Anheuser-Busch is dominating the facility and all the beers on tap are produced or owned by them."

And where have we heard this before? Right across the river, in fact, where the money you feed the monolith via Trojan Goose is used against the interests of your local brewer.

In some states, Big Beer has taken the even more aggressive strategy of buying out wholesale distributors. In doing so, Big Beer is challenging the formalized 3-tier system that has regulated the alcohol market in the U.S since the 1930s — whereby the brewer or distiller, wholesale distributor and retailer are all supposed to be separate entities, or tiers. Established in the aftermath of prohibition, the idea was that an intentionally inefficient system would keep the alcohol industry’s once-formidable political power in check. Decades later, those safeguards against vertical integration helped catalyze the craft revolution.

Small brewers argue that the acquisitions should be illegal nationally (in most states, it already is), pointing out there is no incentive for a distributor owned by Anheuser-Busch to carry anyone else’s brew. The controversy has come to a head most recently in Kentucky, where earlier this month the House approved a bill backed by independent brewers that could require Anheuser-Busch to sell its distributors in the state.

And yet, perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of these David vs. Goliath scenarios comes when Goliath starts crying like a hungry and abandoned baby.

Damon Williams, director of sales and marketing for Anheuser-Busch in Louisville, Kentucky, told Al Jazeera in an email that the bill "has nothing to do with craft beers and everything to do with greedy special interests."

Damon, my man ... takes one to know one, doesn't it?

Czech president says "American beer is just filthy water."

Back in the mid-1990’s, when Anheuser-Busch resolved to violently poach Budweiser Budvar from the citizenry of the Czech Republic as a means of “resolving” the century-old trademark dispute between the American industrial alcopop monolith and the traditional Czech craft beer maker, several enterprising journalists traveled into Bohemia with units of American Budweiser in tow.

Impromptu taste tests were organized with local beer drinkers, and unsurprisingly, the verdict was rather abysmal for the brewing philistines from St. Louis. I’ll always remember one man’s response when asked to pass judgment on Budweiser:

Not fit for humans to drink, but ideal as pet shampoo.

Given Milos Zeman's recent record of public buffoonery, it isn't clear whether the Czech president is a reliable commentator on anything, much less beer. "Craft" beer definitely exists in his country, and traditional lager makers also clearly excel. What he actually knows about beer isn't clear, and doesn't matter.

But the funniest aspect of all this is that Zeman made his comments to Nursultan Nazarbaev, who became Communist party leader in Kazakhstan before the Berlin Wall even came down. My guess is they weren't drinking beer while chatting.

Thanks to DW for the link.

‘American beer is just filthy water’ - Czech President (RT)

The Czech president Milos Zeman eulogized his country’s trademark beverage, while insulting US beer as “filthy water” during a presidential business summit in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

Asked about which beer is the best in the world, by the longtime Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbaev, Zeman did not hesitate.

“We have built several breweries here already. We might make good planes, cars or other products, but most importantly, never forget - Czech beer is the best in the world,” said the 70-year-old.

“No American company that offers some filthy water instead of beer, can compete with us.”

THE PC: Football, swill, brain death and the American Dream.

THE PC: Football, swill, brain death and the American Dream.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

RING RING RING RING RING

“What the … ?”

(Old school, rotary dial – it was 1989, for chrissakes)

“Yeah.”

“We’re cooking and drinking.”

CLICK.

Translation at the speed of hangover …

This undoubtedly meant it was Sunday morning (who’d have known?) and the football games would be starting soon. Barr lived just a few miles away. It would have been senseless calling back.

So, I threw on some clothes, brushed my teeth and drove right over. The house smelled like chili, pre-game shows were blaring, and of course there wasn’t any beer.

That’s not quite true. There was beer, although far short of the amount needed to carry us through the entire day. Because Indiana prohibited carry-out beer on Sunday, the inevitable trip across the Sherman Minton to the West End needed to come sooner rather than later, when highway driving would be inadvisable.

The really dumb thing about our Sunday beer shortages was their frequency. Most of the time, I’d have worked a Saturday shift at the liquor store, and it would have been easy for me to pick up a case of something/anything, receiving my employee discount on top of it.

But no; advance planning would have made far too much sense. Perhaps there was a secret, nostalgic enjoyment about these runs to Louisville, and actually we were reliving junior high school.

There we’d be, cruising down the Interstate, allowing the chili to simmer for another 35 minutes or so as we tried to time our arrival at the front door of the package store to the precise moment of its 1:00 p.m. opening time. Once inside, pushing past the crowds of fellow Hoosiers, the hunt for acceptable swill began in earnest.

---

Kindly note that by this point in our drinking lives, we knew what good beer was; it’s just that we weren’t always interested in paying the price for it, especially when purchased in bulk during times when the hot pepper content of the chili threatened to render one’s taste buds null and void.

As celebrity chef David Chang recently observed in GQ, mass-market swill pairs with any food owing to its vigorously carbonated flavorlessness. But these were the days of $5.99-per-case Wiedemann and Top Hat, beers to which the words “benign” and “tasteless” seldom were attached. They had plenty of flavor, just the wrong kind, and consequently a process of thoughtful triage was required.

I’d witnessed it countless times while working at the liquor store. Standing in front of the glass door, we’d begin by eliminating the brands we couldn’t or wouldn’t stomach – essentially, all of them – before beginning Round Two by working backwards and nominating two or three of the least objectionable choices. Price points briefly were parsed, cash collected, and within minutes we were back in the car, pointed toward Indiana and safety.

Subsequently, those cryptic words from the telephone came vibrantly to life, usually achieving saturation around halftime of the afternoon game. The feast would continue into early evening, but because Sunday night football had yet to be invented, there was a two minute warning in the form of the weekly and obligatory viewing of 60 Minutes.

Maybe a final cigar … and the last dregs of a Schaefer.

By then, I’d have beered myself totally sober (or so came the slurred insistence), and would take the back road home. By Monday, almost all of it had been forgotten, making an encore performance the following Sunday all the more likely.

---

Thinking back 25 years to those hours of chili, swill and football, it was all about the camaraderie with wonderful people, not specifically the cooking, drinking and watching. I miss it for that reason alone. Granted, the chili was good. The beer usually wasn’t, but what strikes me today is the football component of the equation, and the way times have changed for me.

We always used to joke about the damage being done to our brains while watching football, never realizing that the carnage on the field was no laughing matter. Today, ignorance no longer constitutes an excuse.

I played football only briefly as a lad, and never was a diehard football fan. Twice I attended college football games, and both were utterly forgettable, not because of the quality of the games themselves, but reflecting my own level of inebriation.

Professional football always appealed to me more; even so, my attention span over the period since those halcyon Sunday couch occupancies has waned steadily, to the point where in recent years, I've seldom seen more than a quarter or two of action prior to the playoffs. This year, I haven’t seen a single down, and probably won’t.

I’ve turned away from football because of the increasingly well-documented, regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by the players. It isn't just the professional game. The more I read about youth football injuries, the greater my disconnection. We begin to see difficult subsequent lives, erratic adulthoods, and eventual dementia in a different light, and it’s easier to look away – not from the sadly afflicted, but from the violence of the game itself.

The gladiator as metaphor stops being entertaining when the suffering and death are real, not just implied in a voiceover.

And if it ever required so much good, bad or indifferent beer to fuel those entire days seated in front of the television, soused and insensate, screaming slogans and pumping fists … well, perhaps the memory of it also compels me to look away from the collisions in the modern coliseum.

Into yonder mirror.

Chang, Oliver and the inevitability of folding metal chairs in the ring.

Earlier this year, it finally started making sense to me.

At this point, as it pertains to my chosen hobby and profession of all things beer, I've come to an outsider’s position analogous with Willie and Waylon, circa 1973. I'm a congenital malcontent, completely out of synch with the prevailing narcissistic selfie-impelled beer culture, unwilling to accept the New Orthodoxy of better beer as equal parts Viagra and contrived WWE bout, and as good as rendered outright outlaw -- if not the resident argumentative crank.

In WWE bouts, there is theatricality. Posturing, grimaces and noise are choreographed. One is advised to take it exactly for what it is. Even Waylon Jennings himself commented that his identity as outlaw was a manifestation of marketing. He merely continued playing music as he always had, and ignored the tag.

So, there's this NYC chef guy named Chang.

My Name Is David Chang, and I Hate Fancy Beer

For years I've watched craft-beer aficionados go on about their triple-hopped IPAs and cocoa-flavored English milk stouts while inside I've harbored a dark secret: I love cheap, watery swill. Singha, Tecate, Miller High Life—they're all the champagnes of beer, and for more reasons than you think ... there's no beverage that I've drunk more of in my life than Bud Light. (Except water, but what's the difference?) And there's no drink I love more. I love it more than any great white wine, more than any white Burgundy, which I love very, very much. In my fridge, the only beer—practically the only foodstuff I've ever purchased for home—is Bud Light bottles. And since I live in New York City, I don't even have to mow a lawn to earn one.

And a NYC brewer, Oliver.

My Name Is Garrett Oliver, and I Hate Crappy Beer, in which "the brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery fires back at David Chang over his paean to cheap, watery swill."

 ... It's not the fancy beer you don't like. You don't like us, your people. You have a "tenuous relationship with the Epicurean snob set?" You are the epicurean snob set! I've seen you with champagne in one hand and a Noma lamb leg in the other, chatting up celebrities. Why you frontin'? You spent your first three paragraphs insulting people just like you…is the cash, fame and luxury not working out?

Yawn. I detect a plot twist, coming soon.

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next week, it’s on to something else.

Bud and Miller hijack ALL beer cultural values, not just craft's.

Phony, ersatz and "craft" -- these words aptly summarize the situation. Kudos to Tom Philpott for a clear-headed analysis.

Big Beer has been, and shall remain, the oppressor. Being the oppressor is how it came to be Big Beer in the first place. That's what robber baron capitalism is all about, and if you doubt it, perhaps it's time to read a history book.

When you tithe for ersatz, whether it's Blue Moon or the 100%, fully-owned-by-the-oppressor Goose Island, you're providing the familiar oppressor with even more money to continue its oppressive tactics.

To oppress YOU.

Sorry if saying this aloud bugs you, but truth is truth ... and sometimes, truth hurts.

Bud and Miller Are Trying to Hijack Craft Beer—and It’s Totally Backfiring, by Tom Philpott (Mother Jones)

 ... For its part, Big Beer has responded to the declining popularity of its goods in two ways. The first is relentless cost cutting. When Belgian mega-brewer InBev bought US corporate beer giant Bud in 2008, it very quickly slashed 1,400 jobs, about 6 percent of its US workforce. And the laser-like focus on slashing costs has continued, as this aptly titled 2012 BusinessWeek piece, "The Plot to Destroy America's Beer," shows.

The second is to roll out phony craft beers—brands like Shock Top and Blue Moon—and buy up legit craft brewers like Chicago's Goose Island, which InBev did in 2011. Other ersatz "craft" beers include Leinenkugel, Killian's, Batch 19, and Third Shift. The strategy has been successful, to a point. Bloomberg reports that InBev has seen its Goose Island and Shock Top sales surge.

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

One thing’s for sure.

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

Doing so just might require me finding mine.

Finally, the path forward is becoming clearer.

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

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

Very, very interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Bud Light? Early 1980s.

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

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

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(last week's first part)

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

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

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

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

It all started a bit after I was born.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mission accomplished.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Coors 2: "We bought a craft brewery in Georgia" and can Keystone it as we please.

The Denver Post's Jeremy Meyers does a truly masterful job in helping swill scion Pete Coors portray himself as a doddering incompetent, as in the previous excerpt.

However, in the passage below, Coors makes quite plain certain truths about the nature and reality of craft: Once his "crafty" DNA (even HE knows the difference) is spattered on 'em, they're damaged goods, in spite of what shoe-gazing beer narcissists insist as they suckle at the Bourbon County teat.

Read as Coors speaks of craft beer acquisitions as though they were baseball trading cards, and imagine him confiding in his fellow monopolists during the annual sex on the beach beer baron confab that if Terrapin doesn't work out, he'll just toss it on the remainders table.

Pete Coors is a windbag and a has-been. I'm not sure what it says about you if you give him (or AB-InBev) your money.

But he appreciates it, thank you very much.

Pete Coors, big beer industry continues to grapple with craft beers, by Jeremy Meyer (Denver Post)

 ... (Pete) Coors said to continue to be fresh, the company is looking at developing more new beers, looking at the possibility of acquiring more breweries and even pushing its new cider brands. He mentioned the 2009 purchase of Terrapin Beer Co. in Georgia as one experiment.

“We know a lot about brewing crafty beers and we are looking at new things all the time,” he said, adding that Colorado Native and Batch 19 have been popular additions. “We have a whole portfolio. Anheuser-Busch has a huge portfolio. They have acquired Goose Island and others. We bought a craft brewery in Georgia, Terrapin. We are a minority interest, which isn’t working out the best. So we are learning about that. And we have a growing cider brand.”

"Playing Nice With Bad Beer"? I'd rather not, although adjuncts aren't necessarily the deal killer.

I generally agree with what the Brewers Association does for my industry, but even after these many years, there is an element of wariness. After all, it's the house that Charlie Papazian built. There's also a palpable infusion of Kremlinology when it comes to observing the workings of the BA.

Conceding from the start that "craft" as an adjective has long since descended into utter nonsense, even if I still use it as a variety of colloquial shorthand, for a very long time the BA has chosen to impale itself on the use of adjuncts. Perhaps finally this is changing.

"While this division made sense in earlier days of the craft brewing revolution, we see evolution leading many craft brewers to consider the use of adjunct grains in their recipes," the association said. "Some craft brewers do use adjuncts to bring greater palatability by lightening some of their stronger beers. Other brewers are deliberately going for lighter bodied beers in sessionable offerings. When one looks at the millennia of brewing practice, one common thread for the vast majority of time is that brewers employed ingredients that are readily available to them."

Once each year in summer, my brewery releases a Pre-Prohibition Pilsner brewed with adjuncts. While clocking in at a higher ABV than I prefer, it is nonetheless delicious. It can be done, but of course, doing so is not the same thought or brewing process as churning out alcoholic soda pop.

Which leads me to Kevin Patterson's recent column. It reads so much like my 1990's era pieces in the FOSSILS newsletter that I'm tempted to begin comparing passages to see if I've been sampled.

(Not really, of course)

After 12 years owning a brewery, I've modified my stance only a little. Ya gotta have science in the brewhouse, even if I failed it in high school. But Kevin's right: As it pertains to stirring the heart and emboldening the mind, we need art. Art sometimes tries the patience, but that's better than wet air, anyday.

As is true love.

Screwed Up Beer Week (vol 9) - Playing Nice With Bad Beer- Not This Guy!, by: Kevin Patterson (LexBeerScene.com)

A diplomat walks into a bar. And by diplomat, I mean a professional craft beer brewer. While not exactly a diplomat, he was acting all diplomatic when he was talking with his customers and fans. Taking the high road when asked about the efforts of "big beer," such as Budweiser, Miller, Coors, Pabst, etc., He was happy to lament on the difficulty of their tasks, how tough it is to make beers so light, so clean, so consistent- acting like his mind has been blown at the success of such large enterprises. And though I applaud him for being the bigger man, I call bullshit!

Can I think of any needed Improvements to Louisville Slugger Field? Hmm, well ...

Why, yes. In a pinch, racking my brain ... I may be able to come up with two items.

Local Beer.

Unfortunately, for as long as that football-field-sized AB InBev billboard keeps hold of management's collective wallets and conceptual cojones, it would be foolish to envision beer reform.

City to hire firm to evaluate Slugger Field, suggest improvements, by Marcus Green (WDRB)

Metro government plans to hire a firm to evaluate Louisville Slugger Field and suggest renovations, repairs and other improvements to the 14-year-old ballpark.

City officials are reviewing bids submitted last month for the work, which Louisville Bats president Gary Ulmer said is a first step in understanding the stadium's needs in the coming decades.

I've written about this issue numerous times in the past, in a saga that stretches back to Cardinal Stadium days prior to Slugger Field's construction. The song remains the same: Bats + craft beer = yearly embarrassment.

Here's a LouisvilleBeer.com piece from 2013 that summarizes the bleakness. In Louisville, we always "play ball" -- with the multinationals.

The Sahara of Slugger Field

The Triple-A Louisville Bats began play earlier this month amid the usual hot stove and cold fridge speculation as to whether Louisville Slugger Field finally would join the craft (beer) (food) (bourbon) (dining) (localism) (choose one) revolution currently underway in Louisville, as well as in most other baseball outposts scattered through the remainder of the United States.

If you’ve lived in these parts for any amount of time and possess the patience to read this far, you’ve already guessed the answer.

Nope.

What's the big deal? watery parts is watery parts.

(Better late than never)

Item: InBev Sued For Overstating Budweiser Alcohol Content

If suing AB-InBev for misrepresenting alcoholic content requires admitting you've been drinking case after case ofAB-InBev alcoholic soda pop ... well, whatever happened to "wouldn't say swill if you had a mouthful"?

Accusing AB-InBev of watering its beer is like blaming Burger King for minced horse Whoppers: Adulteration is the very nature of the (corporate) beast, and there’s no need for redundancy, because “watered down” is another way of saying flavorless, and flavorlessness is implicit when it comes to mass-market lager, which thrives by offending as few prospective swallowers as possible.

Watering? It hardly matters which stage of the process results in the most dilution of essence, when such conceptual futility is the aim of the exercise from the very start.

I must admit that the lawsuits against AB-InBev are amusing. Watching people confess to buying a six-pack a day of Budweiser for five years, only now suffering from pervasive mental anguish borne of the realization that they never got quite as wasted as they thought, hits almost as close to the mark as eating the Rally's dollar menu every day before suddenly awakening to the verdict of poor health.

Responsibility, anyone?

The PC at Louisville Beer: "Tom Long is Full of Something, and it Ain’t Craft Beer."

Tom Long has about as much to do with genuine craft beer as the Publican does with advanced cataract surgery.

Tom Long is Full of Something, and it Ain’t Craft Beer

Years before most of us were born, there was an Englishman named Eric Blair, who is better known by his pen name, George Orwell.

During a lifetime cut regrettably short, Orwell spent much of his writing career pondering abuses and misuses of the English language. Orwell decried the mutability of language and words, particularly when these bastardized word meanings were deployed unnaturally, to become instruments of bad intent, or sometimes even de factoweapons against freedom itself.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. (Orwell)