Foodies, pretentiousness and "a pox on your loft."

Yes, the mag's mentioned.

Wait -- you don't think a few of Powell's razor-sharp observations (well, only two or three dozen of them) are applicable to "craft" beer?

Substitute the words "beer snob" for "foodie," and have a deep think.

Curb Your Foodieism: How pretentiousness undercuts Louisville’s food scene, by Michael C. Powell (LEO Weekly)

... Additionally vexing, many people who fall somewhere on the spectrum of the creative class often toss around this term carte blanche, even though there’s nothing particularly creative about being a foodie. You’re not creating something — that’s what the chef just did, even though “foodie” is a badge worn proudly with at least a modicum of self-congratulatory importance by the same folks. Identifying as a “foodie” does not define anything about an individual, save for one simple fact — it is a public proclamation that a certain amount of disposable income is available for you to eat at trendy restaurants at will. And that, friends, is an odd thing to brag about in the same sentence as your preferred sports franchise, unless actively posturing a sense of exclusivity based on your means is worthy of note. In which case, nuts to you. A pox on your loft.

__

The PC: As I’ve been saying since 1980, alcohol is a different matter entirely.

The PC: As I’ve been saying since 1980, alcohol is a different matter entirely.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

35 years ago, give or take a few hats filled with hollow, my friend Bob and I were seated on a bench in the public “commons” area of Indiana University Southeast in New Albany.

The topic of our conversation that particular day has long since been forgotten, but to be candid, it easily could have been a discussion of where we'd go for beers after class. After all, while not exactly Animal House, our informally chartered local "fraternity" had a reputation for tippling. We drank; therefore we were.

In fact, I believe it was proudly written into our constitution.

As we sat, comparing notes on who knows what, a female classmate with whom we enjoyed a casual campus acquaintance walked up, sheets of paper in hand.

"You two might be interested in this test," she said, and walked away.

It’s been a long time, and I can’t speak for Bob, but I’ve never forgotten the sensation of thinking I’d done something wrong, almost like being rebuked, even before so much as looking at the words on the page. Maybe it was something in her tone of voice, which was brusque, sad, annoyed and exasperated all at once.

Something like 15 numbered questions were on the sheet, with instructions to reply "yes" or "no," then to flip over the paper to learn the meaning of the results. First puzzled, we promptly saw our fully intended reflection in a mirror of wayward, dissolute youth.

Do you ever drink alone?
Do you ever black out while drinking?
Do you ever drink and drive?

The test’s aim was obvious, but we vowed to be as honest as possible, and began scribbling: Yes, no, yes …

Two or three of the questions could not be answered in black and white; as an example, both of us were uncomfortably between jobs, so missing work because of drinking fell into the "N/A" category – and this wasn’t funny, not at all, because there'd need to be employment fairly soon, or we'd be completely depleted of beer money.

And then what?

When the “exam” was finished, we'd each replied affirmatively to 9 or 10 of the questions. It was time to take our diagnostic medicine. The paper's back side tersely revealed that just one "yes" constituted flagrant problem drinking, two affirmatives pointed to full-blown alcoholism, and three ... well, three was really bad.

Had we selected our tombstones yet?

I'm being slightly facetious, and it was easy enough to dismiss the whole exercise as transparent propaganda.

Seriously, you mean to tell me that a man or woman living alone, enjoying an alcoholic beverage each evening (but never more than one) was barreling headlong down the road to perdition? Now, a quart of vodka ingested alone – that would be different, wouldn’t it?

Except for me, it wasn’t about the slanted wording of the ambush. Rather, it was unsettling to me because in effect, someone I barely knew was in my yard, on my porch, religious tract in hand, trying to frighten me, or save me, or move me, or wield some other obscure motive, when all I wanted to do was muddle through life until something finally made sense.

This I proceeded to do, and 35 years later, it’s still the way I feel. Deciding what you want to do when you grow up is hard. Having a few beers? That’s easy.

If memory serves, I didn’t see her around school much after that. Maybe we both graduated. Surely we both moved on.

---

Lots of miles have accumulated since then, and nowadays Bob is a skilled amateur winemaker, and as you know, I (as yet) own a brewery and know a little bit about beer.

At various points during the last 35 years, I'll freely admit to have gone through periods of elevated alcohol consumption, compared with what I’m told is the average, but never once has it become a physical addiction with me. I drink, and then I don't. There are no tremors, crawly spiders or drunken delusions that differ substantively from the ones I assiduously cultivate while perfectly sober.

Since March 1, I've had exactly two beers, both consumed on the same evening with a pleasant dinner of fish and chips. I may drink five beers tomorrow, but more likely none, because I have a head cold, and customarily refrain from drinking when I can neither smell nor taste it. During my last medical checkup, the sawbones declared me healthier than at any point in a decade.

At the same time, I’m not blind to the realities of life.

I have absolutely no doubt that alcohol is sheer and unmitigated poison for some people, and that their only recourse is to stop drinking altogether, lest it kill them. I’ve seen it happen, and mourned at the funerals. But I know just as squarely that for others, this isn't the case at all. They manage low-intensity social consumption just fine, and merely need to be left alone to live their lives free from the interference of do-gooders, well-intentioned or otherwise.

Is it nature or nurture?

Bob and I were raised in what amounted to non-drinking households. Our parents set excellent examples of teetotality, which subsequently, when older, we chose to ignore. His folks abstained entirely, as did my mother, and by the time I was in grade school, my father would nurse a beer or cocktail only on widely scattered occasions. He said drinking made him sleepy, so he refrained.

I was an athlete in high school, and against all odds, hung out with an intelligent, artistic and mostly non-athletic crowd that enjoyed drinking beer and partying, although with rare exceptions, my drinking was confined to the off season, in summer, and never during training. Once the season started, I generally played it straight.

Wait -- are there gasps in the peanut gallery? This must be the magical moment of confession, so yes, that’s right: I drank beer before the legal age. Strange, isn't it? When you're in the beer business, you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to stop this from happening.

Readers can make of this what they will, although to me, it's primarily indicative of a relatively normal Southern Indiana upbringing, which led eventually to the highly sought after 21-year age threshold, when drinking at last became a legal pursuit, then later to a reasonably productive adulthood, much of which has been spent in the business of alcoholic beverages when not engaged in consuming them, thereby destroying the evidence.

You're bound to be asking: What prompted this rant?

It’s simple. Want to critique the business of selling drugs? Then go into pharmaceuticals, or enlist in the DEA. I’m a beer guy … and that’s just plain different.

---

Recently an area Boy Scout wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper about "the drug problem in our schools and neighborhoods," and the editor duly asked for adults to respond.

A response: Drug problem is complex, by Shea Van Hoy (News and Tribune)

I am a Boy Scout with a troop from Floyds Knobs. I am writing about the drug problem in our schools and neighborhoods.

Too many kids my age can get drugs and sell them. How can this problem be so bad with all the laws and police officers we have? I feel like more resource officers and locker searches may help in our schools. The officers in schools should be more open and visible.

I also think that more drug testing needs to be done on athletes and students. This is how me and a lot of my friends feel.

Do you have the sense that this young man is referring to drugs, drug sales and locker searches in the context of alcoholic beverages? Is he pointing a finger at the dangerous classmate who is bootlegging liquor out of his backpack before geography class?

I don't think so.

The executive director of Our Place Drug and Alcohol Education Services Inc., an agency in New Albany, provided commentary on the scout’s concerns

She warned that it isn't possible for police to "arrest" these sorts of community issues, and correctly noted the civil liberties aspect of drug testing. But as one interested in words and their uses, what followed strikes me as noteworthy.

Substance abuse is an issue that is multifaceted and requires an entire community to work together to address the problem. From parents, to schools, to businesses and community leaders, we all need to be on the same page in order to address the issues surrounding substance abuse.

First, the wording shifts away from “drugs" to "substance abuse." Next, supply, demand and poor parenting.

This starts with parents setting good examples with their own behavior, and not buying into a negative community norms that “all kids use” so it is no big deal, or looking the other way — claiming “not my child.” Worse yet are parents who mistakenly believe if they supply it, kids will stay home and use, believing that this is a safer alternative.

Seems the concepts are being broadened. Are we still talking about drugs – or alcohol? Granted, some parents would supply marijuana or methamphetamines to their children in the hope of keeping them home, but in reality, most of us read alcohol into this example, because we delineate between the illegal-for-all-ages-at-all-times substances and the more socially and culturally malleable alcohol. Kids "who stay home and use" with the cooperation of their parents tend to be drinking, not smoking crack.

It is about business leaders who recognize that sometimes making money is less important than doing the right thing and getting their product sold is less important than the safety of those potentially buying it. If we are concerned about drug and alcohol abuse, then is it OK for stores to sell “moonshine” with cute bows on it next to the candy aisle?

BOOM – there it is. It may have taken a couple hundred words, but now the linkage has become explicit, and heroin officially is conflated with Bud Light. From drugs to substance abuse, and now to "drug and alcohol" abuse.

Did I expect this merging of targets to occur?

Of course I did. However, whenever I see this game of ideological semantics being played, it annoys me. In this specific instance, given what the scout originally asked, his obvious concern pertained to substances other than alcoholic beverages. However, by the time the drug and alcohol educator is finished, we’re back to digging the foundations of Prohibition – and not only for the teens.

We support efforts to reduce social availability of alcohol and we also work in collaboration with Indiana University Southeast to address college-age issues.

And so we come full circle. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I'm the one feeling brusque, sad, annoyed and exasperated all at once.

35 years later, and the two of us remain on opposite sides of the alcohol divide. One went into promotion, and the other prevention. Somehow I expect to see an alcoholism self-test atop the patio furniture tomorrow morning. I'll be sure to file it along with the Watchtowers and candidate spiels.

Nope, sorry. Alcohol and drugs are different. But for the first time in days, a beer sounds really good right about now.

Trillin hilarity with ACI: "A new way of measuring pretentiousness."

The parallels with "craft" beer are immediate, stunning and entirely accurate.

ACI: A new way of measuring pretentiousness, by Calvin Trillin (Slate)

... No sooner had I ordered a drink than we had occasion to exchange glances that communicated dismay: Three men who were sitting at the other end of the room had begun discussing wine in voices that seemed intended to enlighten oenophiles who were strolling past Rockefeller Center.

The man at the end of the bar nodded in their direction and said, “Among people who think of themselves as wine connoisseurs there’s a 61 percent ACI.”

I was puzzled. “What’s an ACI?” I asked.

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.

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.

"From Gin Lane to the height of sophistication," now with interaction.

Thanks to B for this link.

When gin was full of sulphuric acid and turpentine, by Finlo Rohrer (BBC News Magazine)

It's 250 years since the death of William Hogarth. His famous work Gin Lane still informs the way people think about the drink.

It's arguably the most potent anti-drug poster ever conceived. A woman, her clothes in disarray, her head thrown back in intoxicated oblivion, allows her baby to slip from her grasp, surely to its death in a stairwell below.

She's the centrepiece in an eye-wateringly grim urban melee - full of death, misery, starvation and fighting.

The year was 1751. The drug in question was gin. And the engraving was a conscious effort by William Hogarth, along with his friend novelist Henry Fielding, to force the government to do something about a drink that was threatening to tear apart the social fabric of England.

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.

"So if you want my beer, you need to keep me happy."

Whenever I read Kevin Patterson's essays, I'm transported through the beer time warp, back to the period 1992-2002. I was much younger, a tad more temperamental, and ensconced behind the Public House bar almost every day. The amazing aspect of my subsequent reputation as one unable to suffer fools is how often I actually did. Some days, when the fastball isn't crackling and the curveball isn't breaking, you get by on guile ... and then overcompensate afterwards by suckling at the taps and consuming profits.

I say this in jest, Kevin, but are you sure you're not somehow plagiarizing my subconscious coping mechanisms from the grunge era? I resemble so many of these remarks.

Screwed Up Beer Week (vol 12) - Don't Be "That Guy"! Here's How...

... Get the hell out of my bubble!: When folks drink, there seems to be the need for them to crawl up in my shirt in order to talk with me. Don't be that guy! I don't need your halitosis and stout breath sticking to my hair to have a good chat. Especially if I'm behind the bar. That's my space- not yours. You cross that imaginary line where the business side of the bar starts and the friendly side ends and I have full permission to put your ass to work! We're probably not as close as you think. Simply put, don't chase me around the bar.

Baylor on Beer at LouisvilleBeer.com: "Domestic? Yes and no."

It all depends on how you don't look at it.

Domestic? Yes and no.

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

Ever since Anheuser-Busch was folded into the international monolith currently known as AB-Inbev, there has been no single polemical activity quite as entertaining as reminding flag-waving, chest-thumping, God-fearing patriots that their carbonated urine of choice no longer emanates from an American-owned brewery.

Rather, it has become the possession of a dastardly multinational conglomerate. That’s right: Controlled by the same overseas shareholders who likely speak vernacular European (where the phrase for unfathomable dishwater is pronounced “Stella Artois”), routinely torture poor geese for use of their fattened livers, and not only know what a bidet is, but also how to use it.

Wednesday Weekly: The Jackson I miss the most.

The idea is to stay disciplined by continuing to write Wednesday columns here at the blog, but to try posting one each week instead of every other week (as was the case for the late Mug Shots in LEO).

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Last week (June 25) marked the passage of a year since the American entertainer Michael Jackson died.

In two months, it will have been three years since the death of Michael Jackson, the British beer writer.

Although ever willing to concede that it’s a chronologically relative kind of thing, I never once bought into the “King of Pop” tag for Jackson the singer. Maybe Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra, or Hound Dog Elvis Presley fits the bill, but not the Moonwalker.

Conversely, a highly convincing case can be made that Michael Jackson the Yorkshireman fully deserves the title “King of Beer,” and in a far more plausible way than A-B InBev’s classically insipid American Lager ever will be able to claim.

From their respective vantage points in music and writing, both Jacksons brilliantly synthesized artistic and stylistic themes that preceded them, but of the two, only the beer writer can be said to have annotated, denoted and connoted his source material into what amounts to a living language of beer, one that aficionados speak every single day of their beer drinking lives.

Pop music certainly is enriched by the canon handed down by Michael Jackson, and yet its everyday vocabulary is not referential to his body of work. The language of beer surely does pass directly through Michael Jackson. Even the swill merchants speak in his voice with their “triple hopped” this and “bock” that.

Yes, it is true that Jackson the beer writer did not create this vocational tongue from the ether, in the sense that a musician like the other Michael conjured melodies and choreographed dance steps, and yet our beer man clearly was the first to systematically consider beer styles, to explain them, and to show how aspects of the brewing process, historical practice, geography, chemistry and myriad other human experiences pertained to them, demonstrating in the process that our enjoyment of the genre is enhanced immeasurably by greater knowledge and linguistic “beer speak” aptitude.

What’s more, our Jackson performed this feat in an entertainingly and enduringly readable way, neither dumbing down nor assuming the role of lofty pedant. He far exceeded the journalist’s basic mandate to clarify and explain, because he was an erudite prose stylist in addition to his skills as reporter. He told wonderful stories while never forgetting the newspaperman’s facts-first orientation. I persist in believing that Jackson is best compared to figures like Samuel Johnson and other great essayists in the English past.

Some beer writers working today have equaled Jackson. None have surpassed him. Meanwhile, time marches forward, and matters like these fill my mind during those times when I toy with melancholia. I’d caution you that a changing of the guard is under way, except that it is likely to have already occurred.

I note merely that many of the same socio-economic, technological and cultural reasons why there’ll never again be recorded music “album” sales in the multi-million range of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” also preclude the emergence of another beer writer of Michael Jackson’s caliber and far-reaching influence.

There remains much wonderful music to enjoy, and there exists prolific writing about beer, with reams of both available on-line. Just as musical choice has proliferated far beyond what a relative handful of corporations formerly permitted us to hear, so has beer writing expanded in all directions, documenting the expanding choices, and encapsulating the Internet-driven democratic ethos that we’re all experts, even if some (most?) are slightly less expert than others.

My personal annoyance is that so very little of what is written nowadays about beer so much as touches the writer Michael Jackson’s elegant classicism. What annoys me even further is that this absence seems not to bother others in quite the same way that it disturbs me. Changing times, indeed.

Plainly, beer appreciation in its modern interpretation has been with us for long enough to pass across one and maybe two generational lines, and differing ways of conceptualizing and processing information on the part of succeeding generations are not confined to popular tastes in art or music. Shift happens in beer, too.

It already has, and even as we celebrate the growth of beer consciousness, there is acute awareness that the social shifts prefacing the decline of the compact disc and the newspaper inevitably must have an impact on what we do, too.

In short, with all the facts at our fingertips, are missing the crucial back story, essential history? More folks than ever know their beer styles – do they grasp the intrinsic stylishness of those styles? Had Jackson himself come to maturity during our present age, would there would be a medium to serve his talents?

I have no answers, no solutions, and I cannot rule out that I’m completely wrong in all of this. The simple fact is that I miss Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson -- alive, working and drinking in our world. As should be obvious, he was an enormous formative influence on my career in beer, which always was as much about storytelling and writing as understanding enzymes and identifying precise hop types.

But that’s for another day. Get a good beer, and one of Jackson’s books, and see what I mean.

Publican's rant: Restaurant operators, know thy market!

My wife is a vegetarian by philosophical principle, and she cannot consume dairy products owing to lactose intolerance. Consequently, she reckons herself a vegan, but one who’ll still eat eggs and the occasional fish.

Meanwhile, I’m an omnivore, and a meat and cheese lover of long standing who has learned that it is both easy and tasty to prepare suitable meals at home that satisfy both of us. It’s simply amazing how little effort it takes to adapt recipes and menus so as to accommodate vegetarians and vegans.

We live in New Albany, a city that is placing a great deal of revitalization hope in its steadily expanding downtown dining and entertainment zone. At the same time, ours is a city apparently inhabited by a gene pool that by all rights should be the topic of a major university’s study into the thinking habits of natives never exposed to thinking. The absence of empathy here is a startling and disturbing feature of daily life.

Not that we aren't used to it by now. When the time comes to eat out at restaurants, it takes little in the way of forethought for us to conclude that places like steakhouses might not be the best bet for vegetarian fare. Accordingly, we seldom dine together at such places. I simply eat my meat at other times.

Apart from the sort of traditional places that we know to avoid, it remains that in today’s diverse and multicultural world, it’s hard to imagine any eatery seeking status as “up-market” or “upscale” or just plain “in tune with society” not having a slight notion of purpose-made vegetarian/vegan options, ones that exceed the incredibly tired cop-out of “just put a few of our vegetable side dishes together and make a meal.” That’s the sort of thing you’d expect from the VFW or Elks lodge kitchen some time during the Ford administration.

In fairness, I’m aware that the friendlier (and more professional) of chefs will often prepare something to suit upon request – where have you gone, Dave Clancy? – but why place this onus on the customer at a time when all aspects of the dining scene point to greater choice?

Granted, a typical restaurant can’t be all things to all people, and yet if you’re already doing pasta and have olive oil close by, a good veggie stir fry is only moments away. Why not keep the comparatively few ingredients required to make such a stir-fry from scratch, prep the presentation, and list it as an everyday option right there on the menu? Why discomfit an increasingly growing segment of the population by constructing bills of fare still built almost exclusively around meat?

Haven’t we gotten past chicken fried steak as the star menu dish? For heavens sake, even today’s truck stops do better than that – and they don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are.

The reason why this is starting to annoy me so greatly is because it reminds me far too much of what I’ve gone through for so long in my life as a beer lover, and particularly, of the typical tavern owner’s clueless, and perhaps even gutless, refusal to cater even slightly to that segment of the population wishing to drink something other than a mass-market swill.

Because: Not only is ignorance of a constantly changing marketplace an insult to customers who’ve already done their homework and know what they want, it’s also damaging to the bottom line. Vegetarians and vegans want to spend their money just like anyone else, and they are sadly accustomed to accepting less than their due – eating wretched iceberg lettuce salads stripped of all things “chef” and making do with French fries (and not thinking about how the fries were prepared).

Why not accommodate these potentially loyal customers up front, rather than force them to ask for something special … especially when the scant knowledge required to pro-actively anticipate such conditions is something we have a right to expect from operators who’ve been around long enough to know better, and who remind us of their vast experience at every turn?

The preceding rant stems directly from an experience with a recently minted restaurant located in New Albany, as well as with the situation at another local establishment, where a special musical event included a meal, and the options for the meal were two choices of meat, but nothing vegetarian or vegan – and, where apparently no one present ever considered that such a question might arise. I simply find it inexcusable that the former restaurant bills itself as “upscale,” but doesn’t have a single vegetarian/vegan menu item on the menu except hummus – which wasn’t in stock when I visited.

In the latter case, it required a great deal of effort on my part, as well as the welcomed assistance of a veteran waiter (you know who you are, and thanks) who went well beyond the norm, both in advance and on the day of the show, to ensure that Diana would be able to dine at what, in the end, was a rather expensive event.

Why is enlightenment so elusive in this benighted locale?

Here's a promise. We don't plan on having an extensive menu at the NABC Bank Street Brewhouse, but there'll be more than one thing there on a daily basis for vegetarians and vegans. These will be there, on the menu card, available for ordering without feeling self-conscious asking for them. I predict that whatever these items turn out to be, there'll be a demand, because I already know the demand is there.

So there.

Monday evening at Tommy's.

Maury Goldberg is a former New Albany city councilman, a Lion’s Club stalwart, and a habitué of Tommy Lancaster’s Restaurant.

If ever there were such a thing as a civic institution, Tommy Lancaster’s qualifies for landmark status. It has been nestled on Market Street within spitting distance of the rail crossing since the early years of the Eisenhower administration, and the founding Lancaster family still ran the establishment until 2004 or thereabouts.

While it is true that there have been periodic updates at Tommy’s, jalapeno poppers, designer salads and draft Blue Moon among them, America’s imperial Betty Crocker era cuisine (fried chicken and fixings on the buffet table) remains the restaurant’s chief selling point, and with each passing year, the restaurant increasingly resembles a museum as much as a place of business – and as I’ve come to realize, that’s a considerable compliment to them.

What they do, they continue to do quite well. As the Curmudgeon ages, his thoughts begin to turn to meat loaf and mashed potatoes; not necessarily how they taste, but what they mean.

Broadly speaking, I inhabit a world of symbolic objects, and it didn’t dawn on me until recently that the upholstered booths, venerable paneling, uniformed servers and other manifestations of my childhood in the 1960’s need not exclusively represent discordant notions in need of fleeing. Perhaps they might also symbolize the good intentions of the post-war era. Honest food and drink at a fair price, and offered in a clean, well-lighted place, need not be the realm of contemporary Miller High Life television ads. We all own a piece of it.

It remains that Tommy’s is not a frequent haunt, although we enjoy taking my mother to eat there every Thanksgiving. Beer’s the thing, and there is little in the way of good beer there, but that’s where Maury comes into the picture. On behalf of the new owners, he asked me to come, make a sales pitch on behalf of NABC and offer a bit of education about craft beer. It seems that they’re interested in a local draft product.

And so it occurred. I brought a sampling of NABC drafts in growlers, and a date was made for me to return next Tuesday to offer samples of Community Dark to the regulars who come in for $1.50 draft night. I met a fellow who collects Hot Wheels model cars, chatted with the bartender who started work the year I was born, and was pleased to note management’s interest in local products. We may have a beer on tap at Tommy's in a few weeks.

It was an informative and educational evening.

For me.

We now live in a Third World country …

… but with plenty of guns, gas-guzzlers and mass produced alcoholic soda pop.

Once upon a time, a customer asked the bartender at one of the Hops chain of bland brewpubs, “How many different colors can you guys make Budweiser?”

Now, NABC’s brewer Jesse Williams asks: “How many different heather ales can we make?”

No one’s laughing any more when the topic turns to the medieval practice of balancing malt sweetness with tree bark. For now, the worldwide hop shortage is real, and malt’s not cheap, either, since farmers can more profitably grow corn for inserting into our gas tanks so we can continue driving 50 yards to the foot of the driveway to collect the mail.

Stainless steel? It’s all in China.

And, you have to be ever vigilant and ready to unleash the Taser lest a local meth head is spotted climbing up the wall outside in broad daylight to filch thirteen inches of copper wire.

Our current house guest, a native of Plymouth, England, just nods her head as I complain. After all, she grew up in the UK during the 50's and 60's, and watched first hand what happens after the empire goes away.

Roger Waters did, too, and he said it best:

“Hello … is there anybody in there …”

Harvest Homecoming's "swill walk" an emblem of clashing demographics.

I'll be cross-posting this essay later in the week at NA Confidential.

New Albany’s annual Harvest Homecoming festival started life quite small and inconspicuously four decades ago, and it has since grown into what its organizers claim is the second largest gathering of its type in the state of Indiana, trailing only the Indianapolis 500 celebration.

There are numerous themed events for two weeks preceding the yearly parade, then four “booth days” during which streets in the heart of New Albany’s historic business district are closed, yielding to want amounts to an enormous food court with games, information and music thrown in for good measure. At its best, the ideal of Harvest Homecoming is civic-minded and predominantly local in nature, with generations frequenting the same rolled oyster booth or chicken dinner emporium run by the same church or charity.

When Harvest Homecoming took its embryonic shape in the late 1960’s, and unbeknownst to most people living at the time, New Albany’s downtown was about to commence a long, painful and degrading descent into dormancy. As my ruminations today are not intended to constitute an essay about the familiar phenomenon of inner-city urban decay, I’ll leave it at that, and observe that Harvest Homecoming’s governing committee might plausibly say that for a long period of time, certainly by the 1990’s, the festival’s four-day, early October run was about the only game going downtown.

Consequently, Harvest Homecoming has been planned accordingly. Now, with stirrings of downtown revitalization far too strong to be ignored, the plan likely will have to be modified in coming years. Unfortunately, a case can be made that Harvest Homecoming’s demographic and the demographic spearheading downtown revitalization are heading in opposite directions, with potential difficulties that might as well be addressed now rather than later.

For those who have glimpsed a bit of the planet outside New Albany, and who have had the good fortune to be exposed to post-secondary education and its expansion of consciousness, there almost inevitably exists a measure of ambivalence about Harvest Homecoming as the institution has evolved – some would say “devolved – over the years. This ambivalence does not imply rejection of it, but simply a recognition that sometimes the closer one is to something, the harder it is to see how it really looks.

The festival’s stewards are “lifer” volunteers who work hard year-round, and while any fair critique of their performance might point to a deeply ingrained conservatism and a general reluctance to think outside the Bud, their fundamental aim of maintaining a family-oriented annual celebration is admirable.

Admirable, yes, but certainly not easy to ensure, and no single Harvest Homecoming “event” grandly compromises the committee’s goal of a family friendly festival like the Friday afternoon “beer walk,” which might be termed the “swill walk,” and so I think I will.

From the outset, make no mistake: The official Harvest Homecoming committee is no friend of the swill walk, and bristles when people contact the organizers for information about it. Although in the past, I merely shrugged and considered the committee’s attitude toward the swill walk to be an extension of its customary stodginess on other matters, this year I made it a point to observe the swill walk in progress.

The committee is right on target. It isn’t a pretty picture. In fact, the swill walk is a civic embarrassment, and as part and parcel of a litigious society, it’s probably only a matter of time before something ugly occurs and the torts begin flying. Speaking personally, at a time when many in my sector of the beer business are trying to raise the bar when it comes to responsible beer consumption, the swill walk sadly reminds us that neo-Prohibitionists occasionally have something approximating a valid point, and that the activities of the nation’s mass-market swill merchants are as much of a daily threat to our ability to offer the populace a changed paradigm as those who would eliminate alcohol entirely on grounds of its intrinsic “evil.”

Like many other aspects of life, there surely are evils intrinsic to the consumption of beer. Most of us are devoted to the ideal of lessening these, so why encourage their exaltation?

The way it works is this. Every year on the Friday afternoon of Harvest Homecoming, a style show is held at the riverfront “beer tent” (“swill tent” is more like it) during lunchtime, and the show’s conclusion is the unofficial signal for hundreds of people to begin, or in many cases to continue, drinking while traversing a jagged route through the blocked-off and humanity-packed downtown streets where food and activity booths hold sway.

The ubiquity of gratis Anheuser-Busch advertising paraphernalia, which is generated in-house at the local wholesaler at a scale that would humble the propagandistic Communist and Fascist regimes of old, provides ample evidence as to the underlying grease that lubricates the phenomenon of the swill walk, namely, that the local A-B wholesaler has agreed not to cash the checks written to pay for two-story stacks of Bud Light until the week following the festival’s conclusion, something that is of borderline legality in the state of Indiana.

Meanwhile, duly oiled, the denizens of the swill walk surge through the most congested harvest Homecoming area, participants stumbling from one bar to the next, slamming liquor shots and chugging beer from cans that are seldom recycled while screaming obscenities in proximity to children, then urinating in places that even someone like me – a veteran of Oktoberfest in Munich and Pamplona’s festival of San Fermin – is hard pressed to imagine.

Once I saw a port-a-can being nearly toppled by drunks. Around the corner, bikers clad in ominous black costumes queued a short block away from where this year’s “teen scene” stage was erected. How Pamplona manages to achieve a balance between its children and an invading wave of Euro trash is beyond me; perhaps we might ask, because the New Albany way doesn’t seem to be working.

The family-unfriendly effect of all this is hard to exaggerate in print, and when taken in the context of an overall festival that sadly has devolved over the decades into low, lower and lowest common denominators – a metaphor applicable to the city as a whole – it’s frustrating, indeed, to witness the chaos and know that I’m in the same business.

I’m neither naïve, nor out to bring the furies crashing down on the urine-stained drunks gracefully bellowing at each other during the swill walk. It is not my intention to frown on the profit motives of downtown bar owners, who probably reap several weeks of revenue in three days during Harvest Homecoming, and who are happy to accept largesse as offered by wholesalers eager to see the cash registers hum.

Of course, I well understand that my “good beer” segment of the marketplace is small, but I also maintain that this niche is upwardly mobile and in keeping with humanity’s constructive (as opposed to anarchic) instincts, and furthermore, that it is capable of sense and sensibility in addition to windfall weekend profits.

If NABC’s projected downtown brewing project comes to fruition, I hope to be able to illustrate that beer quality can be good, not bland, and that better beer can be consumed responsibly in a wholesome, entertaining and better atmosphere – which, after all, is the lesson any thinking human being takes away after sitting for a couple of hours drinking beer in a Bavarian beer garden, with playground equipment and young children generally in close proximity. Our future beer sales during Harvest Homecoming will be contained and controlled as far as humanly possible, and we’ll try to offer a higher common denominator. We may fail, but we’ll try.

Disclaimers aside, and in spite of my reluctance to tempt unfavorable karma by saying it aloud, the swill walk that takes place during Harvest Homecoming is aided and abetted by a blind eye to illegality, and while I can understand this coming from the local gendarmes, I find it curious that the state tolerates it.

You’re free to disagree.

Play ball: Madison Mallards take the Louisville Bats to school -- and Bats ingloriously flunk out.

(Crossposted at NA Confidential)

Before I make the mistake of sweeping generalizations, there’s a disclaimer: Chain-infected mass-market monoculture infects the city of Madison, Wisconsin (population 208,000) just as it does the remainder of an increasingly sterile exurban America.

Familiar generic entities like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Anheuser-Busch are as entrenched in Wisconsin’s capital city as anywhere, especially in the predictably cookie-cutter outer districts surrounding the historically progressive city center.

But, now for the good news, at least from the point of view of one who vows death to chains.

You simply can’t help but notice that in Madison, some of the most abrasive and insulting aspects of suburban and exurban sprawl are at least softened and made more tolerably human by virtue of vigilant planning and aggressive code enforcement. To cite just one example, commercial signage is discrete and typically hugs the ground, and mandated trees and landscaping provide a soothing alternative to the pervasive concrete of the oft-repeated American look-alike tableau.

Furthermore, worker-owned companies (including a prominent taxi service) and cooperatives abound, green consciousness is widespread, bicycles are everywhere, and the Saturday morning farmers market that surrounds the majestic capitol building on all four sides is one of the oldest, largest and best-attended in the country.

We ended our stay with baseball and beer, and found in these bookends of summertime Americana even more evidence that in some locales, things are just better than in others.

The Madison Mallards are the city’s baseball team. It is an amateur team in the short-season Northwoods League, one composed entirely by unpaid collegiate players who are housed with local families and work in the community when they’re not playing ball. On the field, they use wooden bats, not aluminum, in preparation for the future employment a precious few of them will enjoy within the ranks of paid, professional baseball.

The Mallards play at the Duck Pond, a charmingly human-scale park on the north side that holds a bit more than 7,000 people, 210,000 of whom viewed the 32 home games played during the recently concluded 2007 season. We were part of a sell-out crowd on the final game of the season, which doubled as fan appreciation night, and as bearers of $25 tickets, we were admitted to the riotous seating area within the Great Dane Brewing Company’s Duck Blind, in turn entitling us to unlimited ballpark food, draft beer and soft drinks in addition to the game itself.

Note that in a testament to the ready availability of public transport, reasonably priced taxis and bicycles, beer is served until the last out is recorded. Are there no attorneys in Wisconsin?

The Duck Blind is a funky, sprawling wooden warren of picnic tables, bleacher seats and elevated platforms that might have been designed by the Swiss Family Robinson, all nestled in the park’s right-field corner. The all-you-can-eat park/pub grub unfortunately does not include the sushi that can be purchased elsewhere on the grounds, but instead is the sort you’d expect straight from the coals of the backyard grill – burgers, brats and the like.

The open-minded diversity of the beer selection is noteworthy, for while ample quantities of fizzy yellow swill are available for the enjoyment of the unwashed and flavor impaired, the selection is balanced by a half-dozen local microbrews, most of them drawn from the sponsoring Great Dane brewery, but also including two from the German-inspired Capital Brewing in nearby Middleton.

Understand that no one, not even the ever radicalized author, denies that a ballpark is a business proposition even if the team is spared the burden of salaries, and as with other major and minor league venues, including Louisville Slugger Field, the Great Dane Brewing Company must “pay to play” at the Duck Pond’s Duck Blind.

Accordingly, I inquired of a friend in Madison’s beer community about the probable price of sponsorship, and while I’ll not quote it publicly, it should suffice to say that (a) the cost to the brewery is reasonable, (b) the cost is a sum that does not preclude the smallish brewery from making a profit on keg sales, and (c) the cost is part and parcel of an agreement that graciously permits mass-market swill also to be sold alongside local craft beer in an area primarily sponsored by the local craft brewery – something that is seldom the case in reverse, when multinational mega-breweries pay the big bucks for beer placement with the express intent and expectation of excluding competition, enforcing a de facto carbonated dishwater monopoly, and denying any measure of genuine choice for the consumer.

In short – let’s come right out and say it – a Madison Mallards game offers the consumer an experience the polar opposite of that regularly (and tepidly) teed up by the Louisville Bats, who offer a brand of baseball on the field that is at least four levels better than Madison’s, but whose management routinely succumbs to a colorless, chain-think, pocket-stuffing Philistinism that deprives discerning fans of the best aspects of locally-based cultural diversity in beer, in food, and by extension, in life itself.

As I’ve noted so many times before, here and elsewhere, the lowest-common-denominator bottom line practiced by the Bats is hypocrisy of a high and galling order, for it violently contradicts the stated aim of the team in providing Louisville fans with a locally-based baseball and entertainment alternative to the higher-priced major leagues.

On the other hand, Madison’s Mallards obviously get it. Why does Madison’s ball club have a far better grasp of the philosophy involved? Why does it offer a far better overall package than Louisville’s?

Part of the answer involves the presence in Madison of sufficient numbers of progressive, thinking baseball fans who demand a better product, but another crucial aspect of it – not coincidentally, the shading that consistently eludes Louisville’s primeval team management – has to do with Madison’s brain trust being progressive itself, responding not only to the dully predictable profit imperatives of the lowest common denominator in the traditionally underachieving fashion of the Bats, but also actively participating in shaping its market, not just pandering to it.

To me, it’s another manifestation of the Louisville metropolitan area’s congenital refusal to admit that knowledge really matters when it comes to the advancement of the human species … and that will have to await another day’s rumination.