Headlines from May 2017 on THE BEER BEAT.

Okay, okay -- I'm two weeks late.

Previously, I explained several reasons why this blog has gone on hiatus, and explained that my thoughts about beer will be posted alongside my utterances about everything else, over yonder at NA Confidential. You'll find them there via the all-purpose tag, The Beer Beat.

However, whenever the urge strikes -- probably monthly -- I'll collect a few of these links right here. Following are May's ruminations, with the oldest listed first. Some are more topical than others, and I'm past the point of caring about it.

Thanks for reading, if belatedly.

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THE BEER BEAT: Schaller’s Pump has closed, but why was Chicago's oldest bar called a "Pump," anyway?

The demise of any 136-year-old bar is both newsworthy and regrettable. What strikes me about Schaller's Pump is the name itself. Nowadays, you simply don't see too many bars referring to themselves as "pumps," although there are a few newer establishments around the country that have borrowed the rare old-school usage.

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THE BEER BEAT: The Pour Fool nails it yet again, as "Budweiser Finds Another Sell-Out" -- this time, Wicked Weed.

Like others before it, Wicked Weed Brewing has died. That's unfortunate, indeed, but from the moment the ownership of Wicked Weed passed to AB InBev, this previously independent brewery was transformed into something else. Now it's Wicked Trojan Zombie Afterlife Weed. We'll always have our memories.

Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't drink a WTZAW beer with Donald Trump's lips.

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THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (is) by the wonderfully named Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He is not a Groucho Marx character from Duck Soup, but a German-born cultural historian operating from a decidedly (Karl) Marxist perspective.

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THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Given the perpetual linkages between education and personal advancement, why is it that people choose to devalue the notion of education, eschewing the why, how and wherefore, and substituting in their place a solipsistic, narcissism-driven, knee-jerk, me-first hedonism?

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THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Let's explore anti-local craft beer unconsciousness" (2013).

We don't need Bourbon County Stout when other versions of wood-aged stouts (and other styles) produced by genuine indies are in the same league.

We don't need whatever sour specialty used to be brewed by Wicked Weed before its untimely demise.

Instead, we need to log off Untappd, hide the phone, find a local brewery and enjoy a fresh beer with living, breathing humans.

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THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Localism + Beer" (2012).

It makes no sense to labor over writing a fresh new essay when we've all been here before, and whether or not the "keep politics out of my narcissism" caste
realizes it, we've been here ever since Goose Island died.

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THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever. Localism is the salve for your cognitive dissonance.

There are plenty of laws that might be enacted to put AB InBev in its place, but these are unlikely to be written, because who benefits the most from robber baron multinationals if not the politicians accepting their campaign contributions?

Accordingly, if vile politicians give money to AB InBev with the aim of preserving monopolies and suppressing choice, why would you even consider doing the same -- even if it's your precious Bourbon County Stout?

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THE BEER BEAT: It has been three years since BSB's original kitchen closed, so let's return to "Ice Cold WCTU (A Modest Proposal)."

By January of 2015, I'd decided to run for mayor and take a leave of absence, which turned permanent shortly thereafter -- and no, they haven't paid me a dime yet. Perhaps it's time to make an attorney rich.

All in all, it's been a charmed life, and I have few regrets. One of them is that it wasn't possible to follow through on what undoubtedly was my greatest idea: Ice Cold WCTU, a museum and conceptual memorial to the victims of Prohibition, doubling as the unique shtick to draw customers to the brewery.

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THE BEER BEAT: Moss the Boss and his L’ Eblouissant (The Dazzling), one of my favorite pubs in the world.

Even then, we almost missed The Dazzling. There was no sign apart from a back-lit Murphy’s Stout oval, adorning an accurate facsimile of an Irish pub front. We stepped inside, only to find the pub officially closed to make room for at least two dozen Namur locals gathered there to celebrate their recent return from a tour of Sri Lanka.

At this juncture, our first acquaintance was made with the Belgo-Irish force of nature known as Alain Mossiat, to be forever known as “Moss the Boss.” Moss welcomed us, albeit a bit warily at first. His resistance began to crumble when it became evident that our beer pilgrim credentials were exemplary, and so an impromptu compromise was reached.

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THE BEER BEAT: Starlight Distribution's entire inventory was destroyed by Friday's flooding.

Condolences to Starlight Distribution and solidarity with the recovery. The same goes for all the folks north of us who suffered damage from yesterday's flooding.

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THE BEER BEAT: It should be in a museum, but the original Public House keg box has a new, loving home.

It was dubbed the Jouett Meekin Memorial Keg Box. For a while, I kept beer tapped to drink at home, and used the keg box for Harvest Homecoming Parade parties and occasional social gatherings. I’m quite attached to this hunk of metal and draft lines, but the time has come to find her a better home.

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THE BEER BEAT: Odds and ends from the month of May. I can't remember anything before that.

It's good by me. Any effective strategy for dealing with sexism in "craft" beer is likely to be incremental. We're talking attitudes, and these take time. Speaking of time, I'm a history nut, and "extinct" styles fascinate me.

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THE BEER BEAT: Fest of Ale is almost here, though New Albany Craft Beer Week wasn't.

In 2016, I took a stab at organizing a New Albany Craft Beer Week to precede Fest of Ale, and to culminate with it. It's a common promotional device, and one exercised widely. It didn't happen in New Albany this year.

AFTER THE FIRE: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism (2014).

AFTER THE FIRE: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism (2014).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Originally published in 2014, and with a strange sort of resonance as the most insufferable political campaign in American history limps to the finish line.

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Are you fed up with words you don’t understand?

Tired of scrolling down to your favorite contrarian beer columnist, then coming to a screeching halt when he uses words like “local multiplier effect” and “egalitarianism” in the very same sentence?

Hi, Roger A. Baylor here with an amazing new product – you’ve got to see it to believe it – called the Dictionary, and it’s a do-it-yourself confusion remover with professional results … guaranteed!

Just pick the word you want to define, match it to the alphabetical listing in the Dictionary, and read the answer.

It’s that easy.

And, because it’s wireless, there are no plugs, cords, batteries, tools or wiring to worry about.

With the amazing Dictionary, you can even learn how to pronounce the word!

The Dictionary contains all the words that you’ll ever encounter in this or any other column, and yet it’s small enough to put one in every room where you might find yourself reading the newspaper. Place one next to the toilet so you don’t have to go back downstairs to the den. Keep another on the porch for smoke breaks. The amazing dictionary fits in the glove box, in your purse or on top of the coffee table.

The Dictionary’s powerful information technology lets you define old words and learn new ones. It cuts through those multi-syllable, compound nightmares with ease, and talk about shock-absorbency … Watch while I shield my head with the Dictionary as my assistant attempts to beat my brain senseless with a RateAdvocate beer review.

See? Even after continuous pounding, my synapses are still transmitting neuron signals … and my session ale remains delicious.

That’s the power and protection of the Dictionary, folks.

Call now and you’ll get the Dictionary for only $19.99. You’ll also receive my handy Sticky Notepad and Self-Sharpening Pencil, absolutely free. Just copy the problem word from my column and stick it to the Dictionary until you feel like looking it up.

Yes, you’ll get the Dictionary, the Sticky Notepad and the Self-Sharpening Pencil, all for only $19.99. But if you call right now, I’ll double this entire offer. Just pay shipping, and you’ll get two Dictionaries, two Sticky Notepads and two Self-Sharpening Pencils. But you can only get this special two-for-one offer by calling now …

---

Way back in 2010, when 10 Barrel Brewing was but a gleam in Carlos Brito’s numbers-crunching testes, President Barack Obama returned to a theme often broached during his historic campaign for the White House. It happened during the 2010 State of the Union address.

“The best anti-poverty program around is a world class education.”

No, not the Indiana wholesaler.

Naturally, the precise components of a “world class education” are open to interpretation, discussion and debate between open-minded citizens, assuming you can find any of them in these idiotically polarized times, but the overall sentiment that education is a corrective to impoverishment has been proven to be truthful again and again.

I submit that the word “impoverishment” has more than one meaning as used in this context. We’d be correct in the assumption that there are clear and compelling correlations between education and the eradication of material impoverishment.

However, we might also consider impoverishment in creative, artistic and cultural contexts, and how one’s attitude toward the general topic of knowledge, pertaining to its veracity as an end onto itself as well as the tangible benefits gained from expansive education as opposed to a confining illiteracy, shapes what we know and the uses to which we put our knowledge.

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who drank wine: “With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it."

What I think he meant is that possessing something of supposed value for the sole purpose of the object’s ability to reflect its “value” back on the holder somewhat misses the point. The true value is derived from the object being used wisely, and a well-rounded education supplies the means to make this determination.

Given the perpetual linkages between education and personal advancement, why is it that people choose to devalue the notion of education, eschewing the why, how and wherefore, and substituting in their place a solipsistic, narcissism-driven, knee-jerk, me-first hedonism?

Perhaps it’s the logical outcome of our American strains of materialism and consumerism. When it comes to pulse-quickening snobbery, exclusionary avarice and frenzied hoarding, the very last thought surfacing in one’s fevered, acquisitive brain is the possibility that all is not what it seems.

Do you still desire the object once it is revealed that the profit chain leads straight into the Texas-sized mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, or to the owners of factory-farmed chickens wallowing in their own feces, or to that bastard Obama’s pocket … or, into the very coffers of ISIS (read: AB-InBev).

Except you really want it, don’t you? You want it right now – and by “it” I refer not to a mass-produced Trojan Goose barrel-aged ale, but to a blissfully unexamined version of capitalist doltishness, wherein there are no reasons whatever for diagnosing the nature of the itch, only interminable scratching.

The writer Aldous Huxley called this phenomenon soma. If you don’t know the source of this reference, perhaps it’s time to read a book.

But I’m nothing if not stubborn. Ideas matter, and yet at present, both the country at large and my own beer and brewing milieu are dismally stupid and mercilessly tacky places. These daily tsunamis of crass materialism and consumerist greed have come to define the American experience, and even when the topic is “craft” beer – perhaps modern America’s signature accomplishment – we have digressed just as quickly into 24-7, must-have shopping zombies, pausing occasionally to thank Jesus for the blessed privilege of possessing our baubles, and ignoring what’s happening in our own back yards because there’s not enough status in mere localism.

It’s the old Chinese proverb – yes, you guessed it, the one printed on plasticized card stock suitable for framing, and available not from the heirs to Billy Mays, but from Wal-Mart via Guangdong Province:

"It’s all about me."

Yes, it is.

And that’s also why YOU don’t interest ME any longer.

---

What would happen if you combined classic sacred choral music with a thesaurus? You’d have a synonym for a seminal hymnal!

Hi, Roger Baylor here for the Sing ‘o’ Saurus. It’s no ordinary reference book.

Watch this!

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September 12: AFTER THE FIRE: England, or one man's heightened cholesterol panic is another man's nostalgic repast (2013).

September 5: AFTER THE FIRE: Beer stories and bedtime for gonzo (2013).

August 29: AFTER THE FIRE: In the Red Room, we’re all left – right?

August 22: AFTER THE FIRE: Drink, smoke and enjoy.

__

"Upland Wheat, and an End to Pretension."

Damn it, Indiana on Tap -- stop using all caps in your headers. You're guilty of annoying the curmudgeon's style manual. You and SmartTowns.org ...

Apart from that, here's a much needed corrective to the prevailing hoarders' narcissism. There's nothing at all wrong with dependable daily treats, whether Upland's Wheat Ale or a Bell's Two Hearted.

Great article.

This Week on Tap: Upland Wheat, and an End to Pretension, by Adam T. Schick (Indiana On Tap)

Being a craft beer fan can be exhaustive. It can be a pain in the ass constantly searching for the next big thing, or spending Thanksgiving camping out in front of a liquor store waiting for an annual bottle release, or scouring the internet looking for someone who can rush ship you a can of an IPA released once every blood moon in the unmapped woods of Vermont. Personally, it often weighs on me that I can’t just drink a beer without first having to inspect its aroma, inquire about its hop profile, and chew it around in my mouth. It’s so stressful being a snob!

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?

The PC: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism.

The PC: This week in solipsistic beer narcissism.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Are you fed up with words you don’t understand?

Tired of scrolling down to your favorite contrarian beer columnist, then coming to a screeching halt when he uses words like “local multiplier effect” and “egalitarianism” in the very same sentence?

Hi, Roger A. Baylor here with an amazing new product – you’ve got to see it to believe it – called the Dictionary, and it’s a do-it-yourself confusion remover with professional results … guaranteed!

Just pick the word you want to define, match it to the alphabetical listing in the Dictionary, and read the answer.

It’s that easy.

And, because it’s wireless, there are no plugs, cords, batteries, tools or wiring to worry about.

With the amazing Dictionary, you can even learn how to pronounce the word!

The Dictionary contains all the words that you’ll ever encounter in this or any other column, and yet it’s small enough to put one in every room where you might find yourself reading the newspaper. Place one next to the toilet so you don’t have to go back downstairs to the den. Keep another on the porch for smoke breaks. The amazing dictionary fits in the glove box, in your purse or on top of the coffee table.

The Dictionary’s powerful information technology lets you define old words and learn new ones. It cuts through those multi-syllable, compound nightmares with ease, and talk about shock-absorbency … Watch while I shield my head with the Dictionary as my assistant attempts to beat my brain senseless with a RateAdvocate beer review.

See? Even after continuous pounding, my synapses are still transmitting neuron signals … and my session ale remains delicious.

That’s the power and protection of the Dictionary, folks.

Call now and you’ll get the Dictionary for only $19.99. You’ll also receive my handy Sticky Notepad and Self-Sharpening Pencil, absolutely free. Just copy the problem word from my column and stick it to the Dictionary until you feel like looking it up.

Yes, you’ll get the Dictionary, the Sticky Notepad and the Self-Sharpening Pencil, all for only $19.99. But if you call right now, I’ll double this entire offer. Just pay shipping, and you’ll get two Dictionaries, two Sticky Notepads and two Self-Sharpening Pencils. But you can only get this special two-for-one offer by calling now …

---

Way back in 2010, when 10 Barrel Brewing was but a gleam in Carlos Brito’s numbers-crunching testes, President Barack Obama returned to a theme often broached during his historic campaign for the White House. It happened during the 2010 State of the Union address.

“The best anti-poverty program around is a world class education.”

No, not the Indiana wholesaler.

Naturally, the precise components of a “world class education” are open to interpretation, discussion and debate between open-minded citizens, assuming you can find any of them in these idiotically polarized times, but the overall sentiment that education is a corrective to impoverishment has been proven to be truthful again and again.

I submit that the word “impoverishment” has more than one meaning as used in this context. We’d be correct in the assumption that there are clear and compelling correlations between education and the eradication of material impoverishment.

However, we might also consider impoverishment in creative, artistic and cultural contexts, and how one’s attitude toward the general topic of knowledge, pertaining to its veracity as an end onto itself as well as the tangible benefits gained from expansive education as opposed to a confining illiteracy, shapes what we know and the uses to which we put our knowledge.

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who drank wine: “With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it."

What I think he meant is that possessing something of supposed value for the sole purpose of the object’s ability to reflect its “value” back on the holder somewhat misses the point. The true value is derived from the object being used wisely, and a well-rounded education supplies the means to make this determination.

Given the perpetual linkages between education and personal advancement, why is it that people choose to devalue the notion of education, eschewing the why, how and wherefore, and substituting in their place a solipsistic, narcissism-driven, knee-jerk, me-first hedonism?

Perhaps it’s the logical outcome of our American strains of materialism and consumerism. When it comes to pulse-quickening snobbery, exclusionary avarice and frenzied hoarding, the very last thought surfacing in one’s fevered, acquisitive brain is the possibility that all is not what it seems.

Do you still desire the object once it is revealed that the profit chain leads straight into the Texas-sized mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, or to the owners of factory-farmed chickens wallowing in their own feces, or to that bastard Obama’s pocket … or, into the very coffers of ISIS (read: AB-InBev).

Except you really want it, don’t you? You want it right now – and by “it” I refer not to a mass-produced Trojan Goose barrel-aged ale, but to a blissfully unexamined version of capitalist doltishness, wherein there are no reasons whatever for diagnosing the nature of the itch, only interminable scratching.

The writer Aldous Huxley called this phenomenon soma. If you don’t know the source of this reference, perhaps it’s time to read a book.

But I’m nothing if not stubborn. Ideas matter, and yet at present, both the country at large and my own beer and brewing milieu are dismally stupid and mercilessly tacky places. These daily tsunamis of crass materialism and consumerist greed have come to define the American experience, and even when the topic is “craft” beer – perhaps modern America’s signature accomplishment – we have digressed just as quickly into 24-7, must-have shopping zombies, pausing occasionally to thank Jesus for the blessed privilege of possessing our baubles, and ignoring what’s happening in our own back yards because there’s not enough status in mere localism.

It’s the old Chinese proverb – yes, you guessed it, the one printed on plasticized card stock suitable for framing, and available not from the heirs to Billy Mays, but from Wal-Mart via Guangdong Province:

"It’s all about me."

Yes, it is.

And that’s also why you don’t interest ME any longer.

---

What would happen if you combined classic sacred choral music with a thesaurus? You’d have a synonym for a seminal hymnal!

Hi, Roger Baylor here for the Sing ‘o’ Saurus. It’s no ordinary reference book.

Watch this!

It does not get more "WORD" than this: "The Short Life and Ugly Death of 10 Barrel Brewing."

We can join The Pour Fool in recalling what it means to stand up for matters of principle, and to remember how we got to where we are today.

Or, we can sing along with Ray Stevens, and circle jerk some narcissism.

As for me, this probably is the best piece of beer writing I'll read this year. Kudos. My effort pales by comparison: Diary: On the Gooseislandization of 10 Barrel Brewing by the aesthetic assassins at AB-InBev.

The Short Life and Ugly Death of 10 Barrel Brewing


... I cannot and will NOT – EVER – enable and validate the ongoing attempt by the world’s largest and most soulless “brewery” to buy what they already KNOW they can never earn on their own merits: credibility within the rapidly-expanding world of American craft brewing. No matter how wonderful and popular 10 Barrel may become in the future, the whole enterprise is now tainted. I’m not planning to even taste their beers, ever again, even if Tonya and Jimmy keep their jobs. The simple fact is that Anheuser Busch and now AB/InBev has a long and sordid history of crushing all competition, manipulating markets and distribution arrangements, and even resorting to outright bribery – the infamous “Tied Houses” of the early 20th Century – to achieve the supremacy they enjoy in the world’s beer markets. It was never about the beer, which its founder, Adolphus Busch, flatly refused to drink, calling it “that slop”. Anheuser Busch is and always has been about marketing, promotions, omnipresence in the marketplace and throwing money at every problem because that was the one and only resource they had in greater supply than any other brewery on the planet.

Amid the KBS auto-erotic narcissism, Dale Moss grasps a good point.

Prior to the e-borne fragmentation of traditional print media in metropolitan Louisville, the Courier-Journal was the newspaper of record for the region. There was an Indiana section, and in it, Dale Moss wrote about a quarter-century's worth of columns before moving on just a couple years ago, as the C-J's death throes disgorged another group of long-serving journalism veterans.

Now he has returned, and can be read at the News and Tribune, the local (CNHI chain) newspaper of Floyd and Clark counties.

MOSS: Some thoughts while dreaming of a nap, by Dale Moss (News and Tribune; beware the paywall guard towers and really mean dogs patrolling them)

... Anyway, as part of my reintroduction to you, after all those years in that other newspaper, here is some else of what I believe:

I believe New Albany’s Roger Baylor, and his soulmates around the world, are to be toasted for convincing we rubes to drink better beer. The good-beer evolution resembles revolution. Just check the beer aisle at mainstream sellers such as a Meijer.

I'm glad Dale mentioned this, not so much because I need to see my name yet again in print (or my company's best selling beer referenced at an orchestral performance), but because I spent much of the past week reading various on-line portals inhabited by real salt-of-the-earth beer narcissists, complaining bitterly because they couldn't get enough Founders KBS to earn their personal geek points and merit the inevitable masturbatory selfie on Instagram.

This new age whimpering self-aggrandizement constitutes devolution, not evolution or revolution. The revolutionary part is as Dale Moss views it: Good beer on the shelf at a chain grocery; good beer at ballgames, and good beer enjoying ready availability in places where you spend the times of your life. That's the point. It's what we've spent 25 years pursuing.

And by good beer, I mean just that: Pale Ale, Porter or maybe even a Pilsner done right.

We continue to grow this thing we call craft beer not by commending narcissists for the forbearance in the face of pitiable discrimination, but by expanding the market penetration of good beer and taking the time to chat with those folks standing outside the tent, and wanting to step inside so long as they're not criticized for failing to discern the faint petunia nose on a soured breakfast stout, bottle conditioned with eau de tangerine, and corked, not capped, with a set of Chinese-made pliers conveniently attached ... only $30, if your local liquor store respects your patronage enough to shun and abuse the others who want it, too.

Thanks, Dale. I needed that. Good points have a way of getting you back on point.

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

Part one here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part two here

A barside conversation.

Someone said to me: Help me get it straight.

I said sure.

He asked, so who makes Stella?

AB InBev, I replied.

What about Bud Light?

That’d be AB InBev, too.

And Goose Island?

I looked at him with compassion.

Give it to me straight, he said.

AB InBev.

Thanks, that’s what I thought.

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

Now, can you tell me about economic localization?

Sure. It’s the antidote to narcissism …

Time off for reinvention.

It's all somewhat hazy at this point, but I suppose there was a time when it seemed to me that my viewpoints about beer might be separated from those pertaining to the wider world, and as such, it seemed reasonable to put the beer thoughts all in one place -- namely, this blog.

Perhaps I can see more clearly now.

The target keeps moving, and the pendulum always swings. In recent years, I've come right back to where I started: Beer doesn't exist in a hedonistic vacuum. This point has been reinforced so many times that an exhaustive list of references is impossible. In part, this may be because the craft/better/good beer business has gotten so much larger, and as it has grown, so has my own company's activities. Now, as before, it strikes me that overlap is the rule, and it all bleeds together: Beer, healthcare, beer, bureaucrats, beer, bridge tolls, beer, Middle East, beer, travel, beer, religion, beer and food ... and on, and on.

At the same time, what were once priorities are now irrelevancies. The search for a perfect pint was supposed to last a lifetime, except that the modern culture of beer narcissism doesn't play a long game. With thousands of self-identified experts rating, arranging and pontificating beer, expertise naturally has gone the way of the Model T's hand crank. There us none. As much as 90% of what passes as beer writing (or videos, or audio, or commentary) is repetitious gibberish ... and rubbish is the positive part. The shining city on a hill is beset with one-upmanship, garish end zone celebrations and counter-productive snobbery.

It's probably time to start all over, and if such a cleansing and beginning anew cannot embrace all of us who want to lay claim to a stake, at least it can happen in my own world, right now. It will, and it is.

Consequently, lately when the urge to write about beer has struck me, I've generally paused and hoped it would pass. Sometimes a gin & tonic or a bottle of red wine (local works just fine) has soothed the wait. Make no mistake: Beer is my life as much as it ever was; it's just that taking occasional breaks from a jaded milieu that has become insufferably inane become a necessary self-defense mechanism -- rather like drinking itself. As the reinvention has proceeded, or at least as a new pattern has started taking shape in my brain, the notion of "beer snobbery as usual" has become steadily, and I believe inexorably, alien to me.

But I'm not depressed. I'm relieved, and it feels quite good, actually. I enjoy the rejuvenating idea of reclaiming my heritage, diving back into broader education (the "classics" always appeal to me), speaking truth to megaswill's power, and working other sides of the corn and different aisles. In what little spare time I have, a new narrative is coming together. When the narcissistic clatter subsides and the self-indulgent morons finally are weeded out, I'll still be standing. Bob Dylan's never-ending tour, as adapted to better beer, begins right here.

When I feel like blogging about real beer, I've been publishing the results at NA Confidential, and this will continue to be the case. I've often referred to NAC as my personal blog, emphasizing politics, civic affairs and the world as I view them. As such, why arbitrarily separate beer from life? To do so merely reinforces the dull predictability of those who know exactly which variety of hops are used in the highest rated beer, but couldn't name five state capitals with a waterboard pointed at their palates.

For a while at least, there won't be very much new here at PC. I'll still be doing twice-monthly columns at LouisvilleBeer.com, and quarterly columns for Food and Dining. Otherwise, you'll find me at NAC. Let's see where the pathway leads.