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.

Loathing of prohibitionists comes first, and only then print magazine ads for booze.

I was under the impression that the real problem in our current electronic age was the abject refusal of Young America to pay the slightest bit of attention to magazines and print media of all types.

Not only that, but I was under the impression that this condition is why we must go to ridiculous lengths to appease prohibitionist fatwah issuers by requiring age verification on beer websites, which in a land brimming over with cowardice and stupidity might be the single dumbest bureaucratic requirement yet invented.

Now I'm told that not only does youth still voraciously consume print, but it is being unduly influenced by what it sees in the pages of magazines seldom opened.

Does the world of corporate alcohol vending seek to influence future choices of youth? Of course. Is this any different than it ever was? Of course not.

Tempest, meet teapot. I'm no friend of bloated multinational business, but one needs to maintain healthy priorities, among them a balanced hatred of prohibitionists.

Are America’s biggest alcohol brands targeting the country’s underage youth?, by Roberto A. Ferdman (Washington Post)

Underage drinkers — those between the ages of 18 and 20, most specifically — are more heavily exposed to printed alcohol advertisements than any other age group, according to a new study. And it's America's biggest booze companies that could be to blame. The makers of Bud Light, Smirnoff Vodka, Coors Light, Absolut Vodka and a number of other popular drinks were among those whose advertisements were most heavily exposed to the underage drinkers.

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(last week's first part)

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

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

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

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

It all started a bit after I was born.

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mission accomplished.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The PC: Swill in the Time of Pornadoes.

(Published at LouisvilleBeer.com on March 24, 2014 ... it's a reworking of a piece originally posted at NA Confidential)

---

Swill in the Time of Pornadoes.

I suppose we might consider the breathtaking, cosmic significance of Oberon Day, and the joy of warm-weather beer arriving to crowd store shelves long before it should ever matter climactically, during a frigid March week, primarily because craft beer now insists on being just as vapid as the rest of corporate America.

But since this one paragraph already constitutes rhetorical overkill, let’s move on to what used to be the unquestioned highlight of spring, namely the illicit consumption of wretched swill.

Specifically, it was a long-anticipated spring weekend, planned for weeks amid bursts of testosterone-laden impatience ...

News agencies throw bar under the bus for "many fake IDs," as ATC tells violators to ride, not walk.

Obviously, the young woman's disappearance is far more grave than considerations of under-aged drinking; still, this article provides an interesting glimpse into ATC methodology when it comes to enforcing probably the single dumbest law in America.

Of particular interest to me: "“We have to see them get into that vehicle."

However, note that the citations being issued are for fake IDs, not drunkenness. Just as with the compulsive Prohibitionist's assumption that all drinkers under the age of 21 would drink uncontrollably if not barred from drinking, which leads to them drinking uncontrollably, anyway, and illegally (and dangerously) at that, now there's an injunction against walking home after a violation, even if home is right around the corner.

Huh? Is this a reporter error?

Bar that missing Indiana University student visited draws many fake IDs

... Travis Thickstun, spokesman for the state alcohol and tobacco commission, said patrolling excise officers focus their enforcement efforts on groups of young-looking people or in places where they have complaints. He said they don't target specific businesses ...

... Thickstun said excise police focus on places where underage drinkers are known to congregate.

He said tickets for fake IDs are issued mostly outside bars and that officers seize the ID. They also require those who receive tickets to get rides home from sober friends or call a cab.

“We have to see them get into that vehicle,” he said. “They cannot walk home, even if it's just a few blocks away, by themselves.”

Color-blind underaged drinkability?

Thanks to Eric for directing my attention to this story from earlier in the year.

Seeing red
According to the law, Dustin Zebro wasn't doing anything wrong. But so far, the 18-year-old senior's school doesn't see it that way. The Wasau, Wis., teenager staged a party on March 1 at his home that every parent dreads: hordes of teens, drinking games, and a keg. Police were called to the party and arrived to find dozens of high-schoolers drinking from red plastic cups. But a funny thing happened: Nobody scattered, and when police began administering breathalyzer tests—90 in all—every kid passed. That's when police searched the keg to discover not beer, but a quarter barrel of 1919 Classic American Draft Root Beer. Zebro said his root beer party was designed to prove kids could have fun without alcohol, but also to make fun of the school for what he assumed would happen next. As soon as pictures of the teens at the party drinking from red cups hit Facebook, school administrators handed down extracurricular suspensions to Zebro and others. "They assumed there was beer in the cups," Zebro said.

The moral of the story?

Don’t drink root beer out of plastic cups, either. Had the kids been using glasses, and the otherwise paranoid school administrators gazing at the photos on Facebook could see dark liquid, they’d have properly smelled a rat – all underaged kids drink yellow beer, right?

In turn, this would have permitted the kids to drink Porter and not get busted.

You have to think these things through. That's what education's all about, anyway.