Like the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky before me, I am a “permanent revolution” theorist.
In beer drinking terms, the revolution is the ongoing process of opting out of the prevailing Swillocracy and rejecting the stifling uniformity of its pale, tasteless lagers.
Having thus elected to eschew the monotony of the mainstream, the discerning, liberated beer drinker finds numerous options available, and it is his or her response to the multiplicity of choices that determines the ultimate success of the revolution, in both personal and collective terms.
One among many.
As a means of illuminating this point, we must consider the example of a particular beer style, one of many in the multitudinous worldwide pantheon of brewing interpretations: German-style wheat ale. Beer style guidelines – or to some, beer style “commandments” – provide understandable parameters for German-style wheat ale, or as it usually is presented, “Hefe-Weizen.”
Half (or more) wheat and half (or less) barley, Hefe-Weizen is fermented with a special ale yeast that imparts flavor characteristics often associated with apples, bananas and cloves, although none of these actually are present in the recipe.
“Hefe” is the German word for yeast, and “Weizen” means wheat. “Weisse,” or white, is often used somewhat synonymously, as the cloudy appearance of wheat ale prompts descriptions of it as “white.”
This same phenomenon is to be found in Belgium, where “Wit” beer is referred to as white, and is made with wheat, but bears no further resemblance to the German variety. The Belgians use orange peel and coriander to spice their wheat ale, and these ingredients are forbidden by the beer purity laws in Germany.
(American-style wheat ales generally are tasteless and dreadful, barely suffice as lawnmower beers, and are best forgotten. Their makers will someday be punished, but that’s another story.)
Occasionally, German-style wheat ale can be found in its filtered incarnation (“Kristall”), but most often it is not.
Most are golden, but “Dunkel” indicates a variety with dark malts. Schneider’s famous Hefe-Weizen, certainly Germany’s finest example of the style, is as dark as Franziskaner’s Dunkel, but Schneider sees no need to tout this on the label, reminding us that beer style groupings aren’t always exact.
In fact, most of the world’s classic beers were conceived and brewed before the advent of stylistic guidelines, and the glove doesn’t always fit tightly.
Traditionally, Hefe-Weizen was a warm weather libation, and admittedly an ideal one at that. It often wasn’t available year-round, even on its home turf in Bavaria, where the style staged a remarkable comeback in the 1980’s after very nearly dying out. Now, German-style wheat ale can be consumed every day if so desired, in many parts of Germany and abroad as a result of aggressive export strategies.
To me, that’s a big, big problem.
“See Spot run” was just the beginning, right? RIGHT?
There was a time when I defended Hefe-Weizen as the ideal starter beer, the sort of authentic style that didn’t stand to overtly threaten Liteweights, but retained an integrity that made it helpful in luring converts.
I liked it as an example of an unfiltered beer, one that would help move beginners past their fear of cloudiness. Likewise, Dunkel Weizen eased the timid when it came time to experience darkness.
Nowadays, I’m not so sure whether it’s good or bad.
Whereas Hefe-Weizen quite possibly remains the best “starter beer” for many beer drinkers, far too often it is the “finishing” beer as well, in the sense of it constituting a comfort zone that the consumer clings to as though dangling from the edge of a cliff, and subsequently has no intention of vacating any time soon.
Even worse, the comfort zone often doesn’t even comprise the many different varieties of Hefe-Weizen that are available for sampling; rather, it is reduced to one word: Franziskaner.
It will come as a surprise to some readers, but Franziskaner is not “German for wheat beer.” There are other wheat ales brewed in Germany, many of which are better examples of the style than Franziskaner (see “Schneider” above).
Moreover, thanks to the transforming ethos of the American microbrewing revolution, it is possible that better examples of Hefe-Weizen than Franziskaner are brewed right here in the United States.
Brewmaster Ed Herrmann of Upland Brewing Company in Bloomington, Indiana, brews an authentic German-style wheat ale that cannot be distinguished from its German cousins.
Last year, a 20-ounce pint of Upland’s Dunkel Weizen was being sold at Rich O’s for $4.00, and still the majority of Franziskaner drinkers opted for 16.9-ounce bottles of their “finishing” beer for $5.25.
I grimaced, shrugged, stuffed their money in my pocket, and took consolation that at least we’ve been able to wean most of them (but not all) from ruining their Franziskaner with a lemon slice.
I suppose you pour ketchup on filet mignon, too?
And while we’re at it, let’s be clear about the use of citrus fruit in beer.
here is no use for citrus fruit in beer. Period.
If lemons were intended for use in German-style wheat ale, then lemons would grow in Germany. They don’t. Do oranges grow in Belgium? They don’t grow in Golden, Colorado, either, so they have no place in a glass of Coors’s mock Belgian Wit ale, Blue Moon.
When you place a slice of citrus fruit in a beer, whether it is a competently conceived and brewed wheat ale or the wretched beer-flavored and carbonated Mexican urine Corona, you are mindlessly following the marketing dictates of someone you’ll never know, and who makes more money deceiving you than you will in your life in your own chosen career. Is that clear?
Training wheels are just that, and at some point, it’s time to learn how to ride the bike.
The customer is always … huh?
My career in the beer business, and as a leader of the beer revolution, can be viewed as a constant struggle to resolve certain nagging elemental, cosmological problems.
Does one survey the world’s teeming diversity with a view toward finding the “one,” or the “many”?
Does one find the perfect song and listen to it to the exclusion of all others, or listen to many songs, finding the pleasure in each?
Does the beer drinker find one brand or style of beer, lavishing it with the personal and social implications of brand loyalty, or does he regard the whole world of beer as a vast puzzle, with the right beer for the right season, activity, meal or even time of day?
My business objective as Publican and my private imperative as a beer aficionado in the vanguard of the revolution are one and the same: To have access to as many different styles and interpretations of beer as possible, and to encourage their uses in a broad, sweeping, infinitely changing fashion.
Life is too short to drink the same beer every time.
Slavish brand loyalty negates revolutionary consciousness. There is a certain utility in knowing that particular breweries can do no wrong, or that a particular brewery produces a beer that is the yardstick for its style.
However, once the beer drinker has demonstrated an ability to see past mainstream brand loyalty to the bright and sunny paradise outside, it is no more conducive to further personal development to drink only Franziskaner (or Guinness, or Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) than it was to drink only Budweiser or Miller Lite.
FDR wasn’t talking about beer when he warned against fear itself, but his uplifting words are perfectly applicable to the beer menu you hold in your hands when you visit Rich O’s or any other establishment where a premium is placed on stylistic choice.
Years ago, the beer writer Michael Jackson said that the pursuit of the perfect pint should last a lifetime. He meant that there’s always another great beer around the corner, somewhere over the next hill, down the street in the brewpub, and we just have to revel in the unfettered joy that derives from searching for it.
In this way, the beer drinker’s tastes constantly undergo reinvention, and the ensuing revolution truly remains a permanent one.
Those seated cautiously on the sideline, fondling their lemons and gazing at their monks, are indeed comfortable. They’re safe, cozy, and risking nothing. But they’re missing out on the game, and I genuinely feel sorry for them – even as I profusely thank them, take their money and indulge in fevered speculation as to whether they’ll pay even more for the trouble.
After all, even revolutionaries gotta make some profit, eh, Leon?
("The Potable Curmudgeon: Your Cozy Rut Is Showing" was previously published in 2003. Only the prices quoted in the preceding have been changed)
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Drink beer with bitter hops, eat morning soup with garlic, and you will live long.
In 1991, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to indulge a dream.
Communism had fallen, and suddenly there were opportunities for English-speakers in countries where language instruction in Russian hadn't prepared people for the newly opened worldwide market.
Working through a now defunct agency, I landed a job at the teaching hospital in Kosice, the largest city in eastern Slovakia -- then still part of Czechoslovakia, and not a territory known for beer.
It didn't matter, and I've never regretted for one moment accepting the first placement that came my way. I've been back to Kosice several times since 1992, but of the people mentioned below, I was able to find only Jozef. Meanwhile, Slovakia is independent and a member of an expanded European Union.
The article, entitled "An Evening on the Town," was written in 1992.
~~~~~~~
Jozef, a dentist, was a late addition to the roster of my conversational English class. He had attended only once prior to a Friday afternoon session in early November, yet I had formed a firm opinion that he and I had more in common than stature.
A big man with a relaxed, open outlook, Jozef had played hockey and soccer in the semi‑professional Slovak leagues of the recently‑ended Communist era.
My hunch that we were thinking alike was borne out during that Friday afternoon class when I noticed his eyes widen as I told the group about my forthcoming pilgrimage to Plzen, site of the Pilsner Urquell brewery.
Jozef approached me at the end of the hour. "On next Wednesday," he said, "what will you do at night? May we make a meeting? We can go to a good restaurant in Kosice for beer, and my colleagues will go, too."
There were no objections from the lectern.
After class on the appointed evening, Jozef reminded me to meet him and the others in the hospital's main lobby at 5:00 P.M., and when I came down the stairs, he was waiting. Two other student‑dentists, Ludmila and Vladimir, waited with him.
Together we piled into Jozef's weather‑beaten, dull, red, four‑door Skoda. It isn't easy to place a year of birth on Communist‑era cars, since the same models were reissued again and again; over the rumbling of the engine, I guessed it was a 1970 model. The other passengers laughed heartily. It was a '79.
We sputtered from the hospital parking lot to the street and lurched downhill toward the center of the city. Past the 130‑year‑old city brewery onto Vojenska Street, the Skoda veered right and slowly accelerated up Moyzesova, then left into the pitch black of Malinovskeho.
Everyone laughed at the provincial ambience of the lampless, deserted street. "It is like Las Vegas, yes?" said Vladimir, and Ludmila answered: "yes, Las Vegas in Slovakia."
"Do you know this street?" asked Ludmila. "We go to the back way," said Jozef. "It is better to park."
The brawny dentist gently eased the Skoda into a space. The car coughed rudely. We began walking, passing through an arched alleyway with chipped, peeling walls, and entering a courtyard dotted with stacks of rotting building materials.
The back door to the Zlaty Dukat (Golden Ducat) was open, behind a veil of steam the kitchen staff was busy, and a greasy man in a well‑traveled black suit seemed delighted to see us. He greeted us warmly and nodded knowingly as Jozef spoke.
We were led to the large ground‑floor room where clusters of local men and an occasional woman sat at small, square tables ‑‑ no music, no television, just Slovaks seated in groups, drinking, smoking and talking, in a room devoid of decoration except for 1950s‑vintage curtains and a scattering of yellowed Pilsner Urquell posters high up on the walls.
Plumes of acrid cigarette smoke rose from the tables and were dispersed by the motion of a single waitress navigating the floor with a tray of half‑liter draught beers held expertly aloft so as to avoid the unconscious gesturing of the thirsty storytellers.
The man in the black suit ushered us into a curtained cubicle marked as "RESERVE" on a hand‑lettered strip of paper. The cubicle was to be our refuge for the evening. In a space the size of a walk‑in closet there were six chairs, a table and hooks on the wall for coats. It was intimate, to say the least.
Having settled into our seats and dispensed with small talk, it was time for the business at hand. Jozef ordered four beers. Ludmila leaned over and asked me if I wanted to eat; I was reminded of a German war bride, a Hollywood character actress and a Gabor sister as she spoke good, though heavily accented, English.
Jozef announced his unshakable preference for a dish called t'lacinka: "Do you like our food?" he asked. "T'lacinka is Slovak food of tradition. At this restaurant, it is very good. Okay?" He actually smacked his lips.
"Maybe it isn't so good for you," said Ludmila. "Maybe your stomach is not good for our Slovak food." Vladimir laughed. Jozef looked dismayed. "No, no," he said, "it is best food for beer. We eat t'lacinka and drink beer. Yes?"
Yes.
The beer arrived. One taste confirmed that it was Pilsner Urquell. Three tastes later, it was gone. So was Jozef's. Vladimir, good‑natured and quiet, abandoned his half‑full glass to find the waitress and order another round.
I told Ludmila that Slovak food was fine. The previous evening, I'd gone with another student to the Gazdovska wine cellar, an atmospheric, slightly scruffy restaurant where the specialty is bryndza hluska, which I'd heard much about but not sampled.
Every Slovak I'd spoken to considered it to be incompatible with American tastes, perhaps owing to its topping of melted sheep's cheese. Naturally, the Gazdovska's bryndza hluska was excellent: pea‑sized dumplings in a white gravy, topped with tangy cheese and real bacon bits, and accompanied by a glass of golden Tokaj wine.
Back at the Zlaty Dukat, Ludmila was impressed by my familiarity with Slovak cuisine. Moments later, two platters of t'lacinka arrived.
In the lunchmeat section of the typical American supermarket, you'll find t'lacinka. It's called headcheese.
With obvious relish, Jozef said "watch me, okay?" He shifted a stack of raw, chopped onions onto slices of the compressed, unidentifiable, gelatinous meat. He ladled vinegar from a small tureen, dousing the quivering stack of meat by‑product and onion.
After that, all was flashing forks and lengthy drinks of the world's finest pilsner beer. I didn't hesitate to follow suit, and the t'lacinka was good. Why waste time contemplating internal organs and slaughterhouse scrapings so long as they taste good with beer?
Later Jozef had a main course of turkey breast stuffed with ham and cheese with what looked to be a full pound of fries. So did I. Then he had another platter of t'lacinka. I didn't, but only because I was full.
All the while, half‑liters of Pilsner Urquell disappeared as Jozef, Ludmila and Vladimir regaled me with tales of Slovakia.
Contempt for Communism and for local beer was freely expressed. Jozef, who voiced a preference for Budvar over Pilsner Urquell, delighted in telling a "true" story about Cassovar, the beer made by Kosice's brewery ‑‑ the one just down the hill from the hospital.
"Our brewery sent a bottle of Cassovar to Plzen for tests ‑‑ you know, to the laboratory," began Jozef, "and the brewers wait for an answer. They wait for one week, then another week. And nothing!"
Jozef paused, frowning.
"Then comes back the letter to Kosice, and it said 'there is no need to worry; your horse will be okay'."
The laughter had barely subsided when the curtain parted to reveal Andrej, a youthful surgeon from the same English class. Several days earlier, I'd helped him write a letter to a European surgical society, a note in which he expressed genuinely heartfelt thanks for being accepted as a member and equally sincere regrets that he would be unable to attend the annual conference.
He couldn't afford a journey to Amsterdam on a Slovak surgeon's salary, which in his case wasn't much more than the 2,900 crowns ($100) monthly paid to me to teach conversational English.
"Welcome," said Jozef, as yet showing no signs of either slowing or of becoming drunk. "We are eating t'lacinka and drinking Prazdroj. Please, you must sit with us and drink. Okay?"
Okay.
Our slippery, black‑suited host chose this moment to enter and speak with Jozef. When he left, Jozef said "last Saturday, I have duty. I treat 38 patients in this time. My pay for this day is normal, like any other day."
Nothing extra for weekend duty?
"No," he replied, wiping foam from his mustache, "for this day I am paid 150 crowns."
Five dollars.
"And this man, this restaurant man, he wants to make a meeting for me to examine his teeth. He does not wish to pay me, but these waiters make more money than me."
"More than all of us," said Ludmila.
Vladimir shrugged from behind his glass: "It is a problem."
We spoke of other problems and of the system in the bad old days, and the wonderful beer encouraged candor. Andrej said, “we want the changes, but for us it is difficult. Maybe we will be like America some day."
Jozef reacted to Andrej's words. "My friend was a player for the Czechoslovakia national team in hockey,” he said, "and then he played in Los Angeles with Wayne Gretzky. He tells to me in a letter that all is good in America except one thing. The beer is very bad. It is true, that the beer in America is bad? Why?"
Why ask why? I merely nodded sadly and finished my Pilsner Urquell.
It was 8:15 P.M. Closing time was at 9:00 P.M., so we ordered more beer. The waitress told Jozef that beer could not be served any longer on that particular night. Jozef asked her if the restaurant had run out of beer. She said no, there was plenty of beer and they had decided to quit serving it. The reason? None. I was reminded of the time at the pizza place in my hometown when the new employee panicked because the beer had quit coming out of the wall.
The Zlaty Dukat was emptying, the restroom attendant had abandoned his post ‑‑ not unexpected given the stench and his high level of intoxication ‑‑ and the ashtray woman was in the process of completing her only job: shifting mounds of butts into a garbage can.
Ludmila sighed. "It is not private," she said, "so the workers don't care.” Vladimir and Andrej laughed, and Andrej added "maybe it will change."
Jozef snorted and waved through the open curtain, but not even his black‑suited future patient could reverse the closing decree. It was time to go. Jozef paid the bill for the evening's festivities; it came to 300 crowns, or $10 – two days’ pay. We called it a night, and I walked up the hill, past the brewery that housed the ill horse, and home.
Communism had fallen, and suddenly there were opportunities for English-speakers in countries where language instruction in Russian hadn't prepared people for the newly opened worldwide market.
Working through a now defunct agency, I landed a job at the teaching hospital in Kosice, the largest city in eastern Slovakia -- then still part of Czechoslovakia, and not a territory known for beer.
It didn't matter, and I've never regretted for one moment accepting the first placement that came my way. I've been back to Kosice several times since 1992, but of the people mentioned below, I was able to find only Jozef. Meanwhile, Slovakia is independent and a member of an expanded European Union.
The article, entitled "An Evening on the Town," was written in 1992.
~~~~~~~
Jozef, a dentist, was a late addition to the roster of my conversational English class. He had attended only once prior to a Friday afternoon session in early November, yet I had formed a firm opinion that he and I had more in common than stature.
A big man with a relaxed, open outlook, Jozef had played hockey and soccer in the semi‑professional Slovak leagues of the recently‑ended Communist era.
My hunch that we were thinking alike was borne out during that Friday afternoon class when I noticed his eyes widen as I told the group about my forthcoming pilgrimage to Plzen, site of the Pilsner Urquell brewery.
Jozef approached me at the end of the hour. "On next Wednesday," he said, "what will you do at night? May we make a meeting? We can go to a good restaurant in Kosice for beer, and my colleagues will go, too."
There were no objections from the lectern.
After class on the appointed evening, Jozef reminded me to meet him and the others in the hospital's main lobby at 5:00 P.M., and when I came down the stairs, he was waiting. Two other student‑dentists, Ludmila and Vladimir, waited with him.
Together we piled into Jozef's weather‑beaten, dull, red, four‑door Skoda. It isn't easy to place a year of birth on Communist‑era cars, since the same models were reissued again and again; over the rumbling of the engine, I guessed it was a 1970 model. The other passengers laughed heartily. It was a '79.
We sputtered from the hospital parking lot to the street and lurched downhill toward the center of the city. Past the 130‑year‑old city brewery onto Vojenska Street, the Skoda veered right and slowly accelerated up Moyzesova, then left into the pitch black of Malinovskeho.
Everyone laughed at the provincial ambience of the lampless, deserted street. "It is like Las Vegas, yes?" said Vladimir, and Ludmila answered: "yes, Las Vegas in Slovakia."
"Do you know this street?" asked Ludmila. "We go to the back way," said Jozef. "It is better to park."
The brawny dentist gently eased the Skoda into a space. The car coughed rudely. We began walking, passing through an arched alleyway with chipped, peeling walls, and entering a courtyard dotted with stacks of rotting building materials.
The back door to the Zlaty Dukat (Golden Ducat) was open, behind a veil of steam the kitchen staff was busy, and a greasy man in a well‑traveled black suit seemed delighted to see us. He greeted us warmly and nodded knowingly as Jozef spoke.
We were led to the large ground‑floor room where clusters of local men and an occasional woman sat at small, square tables ‑‑ no music, no television, just Slovaks seated in groups, drinking, smoking and talking, in a room devoid of decoration except for 1950s‑vintage curtains and a scattering of yellowed Pilsner Urquell posters high up on the walls.
Plumes of acrid cigarette smoke rose from the tables and were dispersed by the motion of a single waitress navigating the floor with a tray of half‑liter draught beers held expertly aloft so as to avoid the unconscious gesturing of the thirsty storytellers.
The man in the black suit ushered us into a curtained cubicle marked as "RESERVE" on a hand‑lettered strip of paper. The cubicle was to be our refuge for the evening. In a space the size of a walk‑in closet there were six chairs, a table and hooks on the wall for coats. It was intimate, to say the least.
Having settled into our seats and dispensed with small talk, it was time for the business at hand. Jozef ordered four beers. Ludmila leaned over and asked me if I wanted to eat; I was reminded of a German war bride, a Hollywood character actress and a Gabor sister as she spoke good, though heavily accented, English.
Jozef announced his unshakable preference for a dish called t'lacinka: "Do you like our food?" he asked. "T'lacinka is Slovak food of tradition. At this restaurant, it is very good. Okay?" He actually smacked his lips.
"Maybe it isn't so good for you," said Ludmila. "Maybe your stomach is not good for our Slovak food." Vladimir laughed. Jozef looked dismayed. "No, no," he said, "it is best food for beer. We eat t'lacinka and drink beer. Yes?"
Yes.
The beer arrived. One taste confirmed that it was Pilsner Urquell. Three tastes later, it was gone. So was Jozef's. Vladimir, good‑natured and quiet, abandoned his half‑full glass to find the waitress and order another round.
I told Ludmila that Slovak food was fine. The previous evening, I'd gone with another student to the Gazdovska wine cellar, an atmospheric, slightly scruffy restaurant where the specialty is bryndza hluska, which I'd heard much about but not sampled.
Every Slovak I'd spoken to considered it to be incompatible with American tastes, perhaps owing to its topping of melted sheep's cheese. Naturally, the Gazdovska's bryndza hluska was excellent: pea‑sized dumplings in a white gravy, topped with tangy cheese and real bacon bits, and accompanied by a glass of golden Tokaj wine.
Back at the Zlaty Dukat, Ludmila was impressed by my familiarity with Slovak cuisine. Moments later, two platters of t'lacinka arrived.
In the lunchmeat section of the typical American supermarket, you'll find t'lacinka. It's called headcheese.
With obvious relish, Jozef said "watch me, okay?" He shifted a stack of raw, chopped onions onto slices of the compressed, unidentifiable, gelatinous meat. He ladled vinegar from a small tureen, dousing the quivering stack of meat by‑product and onion.
After that, all was flashing forks and lengthy drinks of the world's finest pilsner beer. I didn't hesitate to follow suit, and the t'lacinka was good. Why waste time contemplating internal organs and slaughterhouse scrapings so long as they taste good with beer?
Later Jozef had a main course of turkey breast stuffed with ham and cheese with what looked to be a full pound of fries. So did I. Then he had another platter of t'lacinka. I didn't, but only because I was full.
All the while, half‑liters of Pilsner Urquell disappeared as Jozef, Ludmila and Vladimir regaled me with tales of Slovakia.
Contempt for Communism and for local beer was freely expressed. Jozef, who voiced a preference for Budvar over Pilsner Urquell, delighted in telling a "true" story about Cassovar, the beer made by Kosice's brewery ‑‑ the one just down the hill from the hospital.
"Our brewery sent a bottle of Cassovar to Plzen for tests ‑‑ you know, to the laboratory," began Jozef, "and the brewers wait for an answer. They wait for one week, then another week. And nothing!"
Jozef paused, frowning.
"Then comes back the letter to Kosice, and it said 'there is no need to worry; your horse will be okay'."
The laughter had barely subsided when the curtain parted to reveal Andrej, a youthful surgeon from the same English class. Several days earlier, I'd helped him write a letter to a European surgical society, a note in which he expressed genuinely heartfelt thanks for being accepted as a member and equally sincere regrets that he would be unable to attend the annual conference.
He couldn't afford a journey to Amsterdam on a Slovak surgeon's salary, which in his case wasn't much more than the 2,900 crowns ($100) monthly paid to me to teach conversational English.
"Welcome," said Jozef, as yet showing no signs of either slowing or of becoming drunk. "We are eating t'lacinka and drinking Prazdroj. Please, you must sit with us and drink. Okay?"
Okay.
Our slippery, black‑suited host chose this moment to enter and speak with Jozef. When he left, Jozef said "last Saturday, I have duty. I treat 38 patients in this time. My pay for this day is normal, like any other day."
Nothing extra for weekend duty?
"No," he replied, wiping foam from his mustache, "for this day I am paid 150 crowns."
Five dollars.
"And this man, this restaurant man, he wants to make a meeting for me to examine his teeth. He does not wish to pay me, but these waiters make more money than me."
"More than all of us," said Ludmila.
Vladimir shrugged from behind his glass: "It is a problem."
We spoke of other problems and of the system in the bad old days, and the wonderful beer encouraged candor. Andrej said, “we want the changes, but for us it is difficult. Maybe we will be like America some day."
Jozef reacted to Andrej's words. "My friend was a player for the Czechoslovakia national team in hockey,” he said, "and then he played in Los Angeles with Wayne Gretzky. He tells to me in a letter that all is good in America except one thing. The beer is very bad. It is true, that the beer in America is bad? Why?"
Why ask why? I merely nodded sadly and finished my Pilsner Urquell.
It was 8:15 P.M. Closing time was at 9:00 P.M., so we ordered more beer. The waitress told Jozef that beer could not be served any longer on that particular night. Jozef asked her if the restaurant had run out of beer. She said no, there was plenty of beer and they had decided to quit serving it. The reason? None. I was reminded of the time at the pizza place in my hometown when the new employee panicked because the beer had quit coming out of the wall.
The Zlaty Dukat was emptying, the restroom attendant had abandoned his post ‑‑ not unexpected given the stench and his high level of intoxication ‑‑ and the ashtray woman was in the process of completing her only job: shifting mounds of butts into a garbage can.
Ludmila sighed. "It is not private," she said, "so the workers don't care.” Vladimir and Andrej laughed, and Andrej added "maybe it will change."
Jozef snorted and waved through the open curtain, but not even his black‑suited future patient could reverse the closing decree. It was time to go. Jozef paid the bill for the evening's festivities; it came to 300 crowns, or $10 – two days’ pay. We called it a night, and I walked up the hill, past the brewery that housed the ill horse, and home.
~~~~~~~~~
Czech folk proverbs & popular sayings about beer:
God bestows a blessing on the mother who gives birth to a brewer
Where there are good friends and good beer, there is a merry and meaningful life
Good food and good drink are the foundations of a complete life
Where there are brewers, there needn’t be a baker.
Drink beer with bitter hops, eat morning soup with garlic, and you will live long
DRINK THE BEER YOU’VE BREWED YOURSELF!
Monday, February 07, 2005
Introduction to Danish lunch lore.
From my Danish fellow traveler "Big Kim" Andersen comes this link to an article that explains the institution of the Danish lunch.
Although beer is not the focus of this piece, it's worth noting that it certainly has a place at the table. As noted, Danish lunch is no place for oenophiles.
In the far-off time of my youth -- 1989, to be exact -- I was introduced to the home-cooked version of Danish lunch by Big Kim and our friend Allan Gamborg.
The day began with crates of serviceable mainstream Danish lager, passed through multiple courses of special local foodstuffs, and culminated with Polish buffalo grass vodka and chocolate ice cream. The ending shall be left to the imagination of the reader, at least until there's time to record the whole unfortunate episode for posterity.
Later, in 1998, Barrie Ottersbach and "Boris" Lawrence joined Kim and I for Danish lunch "out," served at one of the last places to indulge the custom on a regular basis. The eggs, fish, and steak were raw, the beer and schnapps were consumed with a far more judicious temperament than the first time, and the afternoon (and eventually, the evening) was passed in pleasant conversation with a pair of crusty old Danish merchant mariners.
Danish lunch lore, by Nikki Werner (from the bi-monthly magazine Good Taste).
Although beer is not the focus of this piece, it's worth noting that it certainly has a place at the table. As noted, Danish lunch is no place for oenophiles.
In the far-off time of my youth -- 1989, to be exact -- I was introduced to the home-cooked version of Danish lunch by Big Kim and our friend Allan Gamborg.
The day began with crates of serviceable mainstream Danish lager, passed through multiple courses of special local foodstuffs, and culminated with Polish buffalo grass vodka and chocolate ice cream. The ending shall be left to the imagination of the reader, at least until there's time to record the whole unfortunate episode for posterity.
Later, in 1998, Barrie Ottersbach and "Boris" Lawrence joined Kim and I for Danish lunch "out," served at one of the last places to indulge the custom on a regular basis. The eggs, fish, and steak were raw, the beer and schnapps were consumed with a far more judicious temperament than the first time, and the afternoon (and eventually, the evening) was passed in pleasant conversation with a pair of crusty old Danish merchant mariners.
Danish lunch lore, by Nikki Werner (from the bi-monthly magazine Good Taste).
You Can’t Go Home Again.
The following was written in 1998, and it is republished here for the umpteenth time. Consider it the longest business card in the world, and it just might make more sense.
I had my back to the light and my face was upon the things where the light fell. My face, by which I looked upon things that were in the light, was itself in the darkness ... Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
There may be Biblical precedents for the notion of the self-analytical literary confession, although to my knowledge the first writer to explore the idea that "it takes one to know one" was Augustine (born 354 A.D.), later made St. Augustine, but at the time just an ordinary cleric obsessed with his sinful past.
From the vantage point of later life, and during the course of various ruminations that were designed to make the case for conversion to Christianity, Augustine freely referred to his youthful lusts, debaucheries and indiscretions, cataloguing and dissecting them, and offering them for the painful scrutiny of his readers. By doing so, he became perhaps the first public figure to emit a primal scream, predating John Lennon by at least 1,550 years, unburdening himself as a means of seeking catharsis for seemingly irreconcilable inner desires, addressing his internal dissonance, recognizing it, and conquering it in the name of something far better.
For Augustine, the problem was sin.
For the Curmudgeon, it is swill.
It has been a long and arduous path to self-knowledge, trudging upwards from the desperate and degraded depths of Schaefer "Weekender" 30-packs to the sublime pinnacle of vintage Alaskan Smoked Porter, but at least the swill-soaked years of my wayward youth were not passed in vain. From them are derived valuable glimpses into the human psyche, and possible explanations for why the majority of American beer drinkers remain in the same abject, leaden state of bondage that I managed to forego.
How do I know this shtick so well? Because I was there, baby. I could spend the next decade drinking Guinness, and I’m still not sure the overall balance of a lifetime would be tilted to good beer over bad. The truth is, I was really bad for a long, long time … and then I got better, although it took a long, long time. Now I’d like to see to it that you don’t have to go through the same thing. I want to make the world safe for drinkers of good beer, and for the next generation to be spared the hardships we had to endure.
There are questions: Must one necessarily experience bad beer to gain an appreciation for good beer, or can understanding and knowledge of the good somehow be gained in the absence of the bad, and without that point of comparison? What happens to you when you gain knowledge of the good, but see so much bad still entrenched all around you?
How the hell did I get here?
Apart from a handful of wee nips as a child, taken from bottles of my father’s beer, my first solo "cold one" was consumed at a junior high school party. Actually, four of us split a can of (shudder … cough … it wasn’t easy for Augustine, either) Budweiser. The primary objective of this action, which took place out in the woods, a safe distance from the prying eyes of the hostess’s parents, seemed to be the establishment of street credibility by having beer on our breaths and mimicking the outward appearances of drunkenness, with which all were familiar, if not by personal experience.
It was a stormy April a year later when the gang staged the first of many campouts at the Floyds Knobs farm of one of my closest friends at the time. I dutifully helped to drag three cases of Fall City longnecks up a wooded bluff, leading from the chilly waters of a creek where they had been hidden by a sympathetic senior football player. For these efforts, I was amply rewarded with by first genuine and unstaged bout of inebriation, a rite of passage made tolerable by the icy flavorlessness of the beer, which numbed my teeth, bolstered my confidence, and gave me an escape from shyness.
We were oblivious to the elements, paying no heed to the rising wind and rain that heralded the arrival of a storm, but Jeff’s parents were paying attention, and soon we saw the headlights from their pickup truck coming down the dirt path. We were told that tornadoes had been spotted, and we’d best move the party, beer and all, to the barn by the house. Our paranoia subsided once we realized that they didn’t care about our drinking as long as we stayed put, and we piled into the bed of the pickup, lay on our backs, stared up into the swirling eternity and swore through stinging raindrops that we could see tornadoes fornicating – except that wasn’t the exact word we used.
Another year later, when my friends began getting their driver's licenses, the bountiful paradise of Louisville’s west end liquor stores beckoned to us, just beyond the provincial confines of New Albany, down Vincennes Street to the K & I toll bridge, and over the Ohio River into Portland. It was then that the frustrating struggle to find a brand of beer that did not totally disgust me began in earnest.
Owing to my sadistically youthful appearance, I wasn’t often the one chosen to go inside Liken’s or the Corner Store and try to get served, so I was at the mercy of my companions’s tastes in beer. This was problematic, because at this stage the "flavor" of a beer was little more than an unpleasant impediment to ingesting its alcohol and trying to look cool while grimacing. My friends liked Sterling and Pabst; I didn’t, but they were doing the work, and I was in no position to argue, so I had to adapt.
I was never very good at math, but some numbers added up for me: The colder the beer was kept, the less taste it would have, and the more I could drink of it. My mission in life became cooler maintenance, to take the cheapest styrofoam cooler I could find, nurture it, protect it from harm, and most importantly, to keep it filled with ice. If I could keep the bottom from falling out and find a safe place to stash it, we could save a buck or two the following weekend.
This helped. However, summertime meant that I had problems finishing the beers before they began to get warm. This led to embarrassment on more than one occasion. I would be jammed into the back seat of a late model junker, without the female companionship that the backseat imagery of rock ‘n’ roll demands, but with an ice-cold can of beer straight from the cooler, gamely making it through the first frozen gulps, then suffering the dismaying recognition that it still was Sterling, Pabst, and Falls City, and realizing that it tasted too bad to finish.
After a sufficient interval had passed, and I determined that I was supposed to have finished the now warmed and thoroughly vile beer, I would throw the "empty" out the window -- but in the still of a humid summer evening’s drive in the countryside, I sometimes misjudged the distance from the open window of the moving car to the stationary, muffled cushion of a grassy roadside. The ignominy was instant and damning: A loud "thump" as the half-full can hit the unrelenting pavement, and the abuse that followed, not all good-natured, because after all, we drove all the way to Louisville for that beer and spent every last dime we had on it, so how the hell can you waste it like that!
It was in this manner, slumped shamefully in the back seat of my friend’s car trying to choke down a warm Sterling, that I resolved to become a better beer drinker than all of them. I was an athlete then, and contrary to legend, I never drank during basketball season (although beer and baseball went together like, well, beer and baseball), so my beer drinking practice sessions had to be squeezed in during summer and off-seasons. Others began to plan their careers in physics, cosmetology, and insurance sales; meanwhile, I conspired to be the best at beer. Gradually, over time, things began to fall into place.
I found a beer that I really liked: Schlitz in the 16-oz "tall boy" cans. Next, there was a craze for Little Millers and Little Kings; at only 7 oz each, they 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." I learned that malt liquor packed a punch, especially when clad in those bright silvery blue cans of the Bull.
Finally, America’s beer barons came through with the ultimate solution for the problem of teenage drinkers who wanted to drink beer, but couldn’t cope with the rough pungency of the full-flavored beers of the post WWII era: Light, low-calorie lagers, of which Miller’s Lite was the first widely distributed example, although there were others, like Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light.
The advent of light beer was a revolution, albeit a regressive one, and after a quarter century of light beer, it’s almost impossible to remember the time before it became as much a part of the fabric of American life as 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; this was the point then, and it remains the point now, and it’s easy to see why light beer became such a phenomenon.
When I became a bit older and began visiting bars -- not before 1979, when I was 19, and gaining in frequency to the present day – most of the old men were drinking traditional manly beers like Pabst, Sterling and Miller High Life. At some point shortly thereafter, I became aware that almost all of them had switched to Lite, Bud Light and even Old Milwaukee Light. Price seemingly wasn’t the issue; if anything, they’d traded up and were paying more to cover the cost of Miller’s television ads.
After long consideration, I concluded that a lifetime of Sterling and City finally had gotten to them, and when they realized that light beer was socially acceptable to their peers, under the rationalization that it was less filling, thus enabling them to drink even more beer than before, they fled their traditional brands as fast as their terminally damaged taste buds would carry them. Better the nothingness of wet air than something terminally foul, and you could hear the sighs of relief in air-conditioned lounges and softball fields all across the nation.
The advent of light beer, the castrato of the world of beer, had the same effect on me, at least initially. Less flavor in a beer really was desirable when compared with the odiousness of full flavor at the time, and in the absence of any other standard of comparison that might define full flavor in a positive fashion. In an odd sort of way, and one that might have been avoided if other stylistic choices were readily available as they are today, light beer became a step-ladder for me. I was able to drink enough of it, and sufficiently often, to finally develop a taste for the generic entity of "beer flavor," which I would define as those qualities helping to differentiate between beer, cola and orange juice, and which light beers do possess, albeit it in a substantially diluted form.
The olfactory convenience of light beer bought me some time, and in sheer bulk it helped to satisfy some of the frantically hormonal cravings of my college days. It wasn’t drinking, it was swallowing; it was affordable, and this suited me at the time.
It didn’t suit me for long. Light beer may have been a utilitarian means to an end, and a temporary release (not unlike masturbation), but to me it never was an end itself, even when I was drinking it. When I reached the magical, mystical age of 21, the legally mandated pressures of adolescence were suddenly gone (although the self-imposed cultural ones remained), and finally I could examine the wares at Cut Rate Liquors in Jeffersonville at my leisure. There were many imported beers, a few of which were British ales, and many more international lagers. Money was a problem, so sampling these beers meant splurging, but at least they were different, and they hinted at broader horizons.
Fortunately for me, two good friends intervened at this juncture and were able to provide personal testimony for two of the mysterious beers on Cut Rate’s import shelf, and the impact of tasting these two previously unknown beverages would have a profound effect on my way of thinking about beer. Larry went away to college and returned with Guinness Extra Stout, and Dave did the same, introducing 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, and something that I didn’t remember experiencing before? Dave wasn’t sure, but he thought it was the hops. Whatever it was, I liked it, and the Guinness, black like coffee, dry and heavy, macho in some way that I was not able to put into words, was unlike any "dark" beer I’d ever had.
You mean there were different sorts of dark beers, too? Dark beers were not 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 that cut a swath through my soul. Early on, in ’78 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’s shelves by Augsburger Dark. Occasionally we had purchased Lowenbrau Dark, having accepted without question Miller’s advertising strategy of "tonight, let it be Lowenbrau," and saving the Americanized version of a German dunkel for special times.
There had been other sightings of dark, but none like Guinness. Don Da Leon’s, a deli and imported foods store located in the Quadrangle in Jeff, was far ahead of its time (I had a bottle of Kirin there in 1978) and put Schlitz Dark on draft some time around 1981, but even before that, Mario’s Pizza on Charlestown Road in New Albany had a dark beer, the brand now forgotten, on draft. Just after having Guinness for the first time, I saw Stroh’s Bock and tried it. What was bock? It was what was left over at the bottom of the vats after spring cleaning each year, or so I was told, with serene and authoritative confidence, by an old man at Steinert’s who said he wouldn’t touch the dark stuff for fear of its 20% alcohol content. Later, when I learned that the tales of spring scrubbing and heightened potency were utter nonsense, I was embarrassed for having been so stupid.
At first, we mixed the Guinness with lager beers; on more than one occasion, we took a six-pack into the K & H Café in Lanesville and made black and tans with draft Budweiser. The Gods saw fit not to punish me for this transgression, and soon I graduated to straight Guinness … and I’ve been there ever since. As Mark Francis once noted, the perfect Black and Tan isn’t halves of stout and pale ale mixed in a glass, it’s a pint of each, mixed in your stomach.
Unfortunately, there were many years of practice and refinement yet to come, because merely being introduced to good beers like Guinness and Pilsner Urquell did not automatically transport me to a state of pure bliss and enlightenment. Progress was painstaking and incremental, with old, tested temptations and new, unexplored domains vying for hegemony over my mind, my palate and my wallet.
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, micros were still several years away), and I continued to do this right up until 1992, when I went into the business at Rich O’s. Beginning around 1984, I would no longer drink light, low-calorie beer. In 1985, I traveled to Europe for the first time, and this was followed by journeys in 1987, 1989 and 1991, and others since. After each trip, it was harder than the one before to go back to my old haunts and to drink cans of Strohs or draft Budweiser, but I must confess that I did go back and do precisely that, at least until 1992. Even the inception of FOSSILS in 1990 did not entirely divert my attention away from the swill that had ruled my youth, although I can truthfully say that Budweiser has not touched my lips for almost
six years.
I don’t know why it took so long for these obvious lessons to take root. For ten years, between my first Guinness and my last can of atrocious Budweiser aboard an Amtrak train bound to Chicago for a job interview and a visit to Goose Island, around four lengthy trips to Europe and submersion in the continent’s still vibrant beer culture, and right up through the first year and a half of FOSSILS, swill remained a part of my life. I can say that swill’s hold over me steadily diminished during this time, but this does little to absolve me. However, I can spot a few trends that help to understand my actions, and by extension, provide some insight into the motivations of the unenlightened majority of the population, for whom the arguments I’m setting forth here are no more relevant than the theological abstractions of the medieval academics who transformed Augustine’s earnestness into dogma to undergird the Inquisition.
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.
This last part is the hardest part. It comes when you’ve been able to do these things, and by doing so, you find yourself utterly and irrevocably at odds with the culture of your upbringing. The past and the people who populated it retain a pull on you, but you know that you can never go back to it. It, and they, will have to come to you – or be damned.
It is unlikely that Augustine drank beer. If he did, it wasn’t beer as we know it today, but human nature is a constant that pulses throughout the long, intervening centuries. He lived in an age when certainties were being methodically stripped away as the Roman empire disintegrated into chaos, and numerous other forces competed to occupy the resulting vacuum. In the midst of societal disarray, he looked at himself and saw obvious parallels with his past, with his own aimlessness, lewdness, and overall lack of thought and misdirection, and although his memories of earlier times were in many respects remarkably balanced, seemingly to the point of nostalgia in some instances, they symbolized a life and a mode of thinking that were no longer options for him. They comprised a life he could no longer live. His mature Christian beliefs were a framework for self-interpretation, as well as providing the foundation for his advocacy of Christian belief as the balm for troubled days in the present, and as a means of transcending the old ways collapsing all around his world.
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.
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.
I had my back to the light and my face was upon the things where the light fell. My face, by which I looked upon things that were in the light, was itself in the darkness ... Augustine, Bishop of Hippo
There may be Biblical precedents for the notion of the self-analytical literary confession, although to my knowledge the first writer to explore the idea that "it takes one to know one" was Augustine (born 354 A.D.), later made St. Augustine, but at the time just an ordinary cleric obsessed with his sinful past.
From the vantage point of later life, and during the course of various ruminations that were designed to make the case for conversion to Christianity, Augustine freely referred to his youthful lusts, debaucheries and indiscretions, cataloguing and dissecting them, and offering them for the painful scrutiny of his readers. By doing so, he became perhaps the first public figure to emit a primal scream, predating John Lennon by at least 1,550 years, unburdening himself as a means of seeking catharsis for seemingly irreconcilable inner desires, addressing his internal dissonance, recognizing it, and conquering it in the name of something far better.
For Augustine, the problem was sin.
For the Curmudgeon, it is swill.
It has been a long and arduous path to self-knowledge, trudging upwards from the desperate and degraded depths of Schaefer "Weekender" 30-packs to the sublime pinnacle of vintage Alaskan Smoked Porter, but at least the swill-soaked years of my wayward youth were not passed in vain. From them are derived valuable glimpses into the human psyche, and possible explanations for why the majority of American beer drinkers remain in the same abject, leaden state of bondage that I managed to forego.
How do I know this shtick so well? Because I was there, baby. I could spend the next decade drinking Guinness, and I’m still not sure the overall balance of a lifetime would be tilted to good beer over bad. The truth is, I was really bad for a long, long time … and then I got better, although it took a long, long time. Now I’d like to see to it that you don’t have to go through the same thing. I want to make the world safe for drinkers of good beer, and for the next generation to be spared the hardships we had to endure.
There are questions: Must one necessarily experience bad beer to gain an appreciation for good beer, or can understanding and knowledge of the good somehow be gained in the absence of the bad, and without that point of comparison? What happens to you when you gain knowledge of the good, but see so much bad still entrenched all around you?
How the hell did I get here?
Apart from a handful of wee nips as a child, taken from bottles of my father’s beer, my first solo "cold one" was consumed at a junior high school party. Actually, four of us split a can of (shudder … cough … it wasn’t easy for Augustine, either) Budweiser. The primary objective of this action, which took place out in the woods, a safe distance from the prying eyes of the hostess’s parents, seemed to be the establishment of street credibility by having beer on our breaths and mimicking the outward appearances of drunkenness, with which all were familiar, if not by personal experience.
It was a stormy April a year later when the gang staged the first of many campouts at the Floyds Knobs farm of one of my closest friends at the time. I dutifully helped to drag three cases of Fall City longnecks up a wooded bluff, leading from the chilly waters of a creek where they had been hidden by a sympathetic senior football player. For these efforts, I was amply rewarded with by first genuine and unstaged bout of inebriation, a rite of passage made tolerable by the icy flavorlessness of the beer, which numbed my teeth, bolstered my confidence, and gave me an escape from shyness.
We were oblivious to the elements, paying no heed to the rising wind and rain that heralded the arrival of a storm, but Jeff’s parents were paying attention, and soon we saw the headlights from their pickup truck coming down the dirt path. We were told that tornadoes had been spotted, and we’d best move the party, beer and all, to the barn by the house. Our paranoia subsided once we realized that they didn’t care about our drinking as long as we stayed put, and we piled into the bed of the pickup, lay on our backs, stared up into the swirling eternity and swore through stinging raindrops that we could see tornadoes fornicating – except that wasn’t the exact word we used.
Another year later, when my friends began getting their driver's licenses, the bountiful paradise of Louisville’s west end liquor stores beckoned to us, just beyond the provincial confines of New Albany, down Vincennes Street to the K & I toll bridge, and over the Ohio River into Portland. It was then that the frustrating struggle to find a brand of beer that did not totally disgust me began in earnest.
Owing to my sadistically youthful appearance, I wasn’t often the one chosen to go inside Liken’s or the Corner Store and try to get served, so I was at the mercy of my companions’s tastes in beer. This was problematic, because at this stage the "flavor" of a beer was little more than an unpleasant impediment to ingesting its alcohol and trying to look cool while grimacing. My friends liked Sterling and Pabst; I didn’t, but they were doing the work, and I was in no position to argue, so I had to adapt.
I was never very good at math, but some numbers added up for me: The colder the beer was kept, the less taste it would have, and the more I could drink of it. My mission in life became cooler maintenance, to take the cheapest styrofoam cooler I could find, nurture it, protect it from harm, and most importantly, to keep it filled with ice. If I could keep the bottom from falling out and find a safe place to stash it, we could save a buck or two the following weekend.
This helped. However, summertime meant that I had problems finishing the beers before they began to get warm. This led to embarrassment on more than one occasion. I would be jammed into the back seat of a late model junker, without the female companionship that the backseat imagery of rock ‘n’ roll demands, but with an ice-cold can of beer straight from the cooler, gamely making it through the first frozen gulps, then suffering the dismaying recognition that it still was Sterling, Pabst, and Falls City, and realizing that it tasted too bad to finish.
After a sufficient interval had passed, and I determined that I was supposed to have finished the now warmed and thoroughly vile beer, I would throw the "empty" out the window -- but in the still of a humid summer evening’s drive in the countryside, I sometimes misjudged the distance from the open window of the moving car to the stationary, muffled cushion of a grassy roadside. The ignominy was instant and damning: A loud "thump" as the half-full can hit the unrelenting pavement, and the abuse that followed, not all good-natured, because after all, we drove all the way to Louisville for that beer and spent every last dime we had on it, so how the hell can you waste it like that!
It was in this manner, slumped shamefully in the back seat of my friend’s car trying to choke down a warm Sterling, that I resolved to become a better beer drinker than all of them. I was an athlete then, and contrary to legend, I never drank during basketball season (although beer and baseball went together like, well, beer and baseball), so my beer drinking practice sessions had to be squeezed in during summer and off-seasons. Others began to plan their careers in physics, cosmetology, and insurance sales; meanwhile, I conspired to be the best at beer. Gradually, over time, things began to fall into place.
I found a beer that I really liked: Schlitz in the 16-oz "tall boy" cans. Next, there was a craze for Little Millers and Little Kings; at only 7 oz each, they 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." I learned that malt liquor packed a punch, especially when clad in those bright silvery blue cans of the Bull.
Finally, America’s beer barons came through with the ultimate solution for the problem of teenage drinkers who wanted to drink beer, but couldn’t cope with the rough pungency of the full-flavored beers of the post WWII era: Light, low-calorie lagers, of which Miller’s Lite was the first widely distributed example, although there were others, like Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light.
The advent of light beer was a revolution, albeit a regressive one, and after a quarter century of light beer, it’s almost impossible to remember the time before it became as much a part of the fabric of American life as 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; this was the point then, and it remains the point now, and it’s easy to see why light beer became such a phenomenon.
When I became a bit older and began visiting bars -- not before 1979, when I was 19, and gaining in frequency to the present day – most of the old men were drinking traditional manly beers like Pabst, Sterling and Miller High Life. At some point shortly thereafter, I became aware that almost all of them had switched to Lite, Bud Light and even Old Milwaukee Light. Price seemingly wasn’t the issue; if anything, they’d traded up and were paying more to cover the cost of Miller’s television ads.
After long consideration, I concluded that a lifetime of Sterling and City finally had gotten to them, and when they realized that light beer was socially acceptable to their peers, under the rationalization that it was less filling, thus enabling them to drink even more beer than before, they fled their traditional brands as fast as their terminally damaged taste buds would carry them. Better the nothingness of wet air than something terminally foul, and you could hear the sighs of relief in air-conditioned lounges and softball fields all across the nation.
The advent of light beer, the castrato of the world of beer, had the same effect on me, at least initially. Less flavor in a beer really was desirable when compared with the odiousness of full flavor at the time, and in the absence of any other standard of comparison that might define full flavor in a positive fashion. In an odd sort of way, and one that might have been avoided if other stylistic choices were readily available as they are today, light beer became a step-ladder for me. I was able to drink enough of it, and sufficiently often, to finally develop a taste for the generic entity of "beer flavor," which I would define as those qualities helping to differentiate between beer, cola and orange juice, and which light beers do possess, albeit it in a substantially diluted form.
The olfactory convenience of light beer bought me some time, and in sheer bulk it helped to satisfy some of the frantically hormonal cravings of my college days. It wasn’t drinking, it was swallowing; it was affordable, and this suited me at the time.
It didn’t suit me for long. Light beer may have been a utilitarian means to an end, and a temporary release (not unlike masturbation), but to me it never was an end itself, even when I was drinking it. When I reached the magical, mystical age of 21, the legally mandated pressures of adolescence were suddenly gone (although the self-imposed cultural ones remained), and finally I could examine the wares at Cut Rate Liquors in Jeffersonville at my leisure. There were many imported beers, a few of which were British ales, and many more international lagers. Money was a problem, so sampling these beers meant splurging, but at least they were different, and they hinted at broader horizons.
Fortunately for me, two good friends intervened at this juncture and were able to provide personal testimony for two of the mysterious beers on Cut Rate’s import shelf, and the impact of tasting these two previously unknown beverages would have a profound effect on my way of thinking about beer. Larry went away to college and returned with Guinness Extra Stout, and Dave did the same, introducing 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, and something that I didn’t remember experiencing before? Dave wasn’t sure, but he thought it was the hops. Whatever it was, I liked it, and the Guinness, black like coffee, dry and heavy, macho in some way that I was not able to put into words, was unlike any "dark" beer I’d ever had.
You mean there were different sorts of dark beers, too? Dark beers were not 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 that cut a swath through my soul. Early on, in ’78 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’s shelves by Augsburger Dark. Occasionally we had purchased Lowenbrau Dark, having accepted without question Miller’s advertising strategy of "tonight, let it be Lowenbrau," and saving the Americanized version of a German dunkel for special times.
There had been other sightings of dark, but none like Guinness. Don Da Leon’s, a deli and imported foods store located in the Quadrangle in Jeff, was far ahead of its time (I had a bottle of Kirin there in 1978) and put Schlitz Dark on draft some time around 1981, but even before that, Mario’s Pizza on Charlestown Road in New Albany had a dark beer, the brand now forgotten, on draft. Just after having Guinness for the first time, I saw Stroh’s Bock and tried it. What was bock? It was what was left over at the bottom of the vats after spring cleaning each year, or so I was told, with serene and authoritative confidence, by an old man at Steinert’s who said he wouldn’t touch the dark stuff for fear of its 20% alcohol content. Later, when I learned that the tales of spring scrubbing and heightened potency were utter nonsense, I was embarrassed for having been so stupid.
At first, we mixed the Guinness with lager beers; on more than one occasion, we took a six-pack into the K & H Café in Lanesville and made black and tans with draft Budweiser. The Gods saw fit not to punish me for this transgression, and soon I graduated to straight Guinness … and I’ve been there ever since. As Mark Francis once noted, the perfect Black and Tan isn’t halves of stout and pale ale mixed in a glass, it’s a pint of each, mixed in your stomach.
Unfortunately, there were many years of practice and refinement yet to come, because merely being introduced to good beers like Guinness and Pilsner Urquell did not automatically transport me to a state of pure bliss and enlightenment. Progress was painstaking and incremental, with old, tested temptations and new, unexplored domains vying for hegemony over my mind, my palate and my wallet.
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, micros were still several years away), and I continued to do this right up until 1992, when I went into the business at Rich O’s. Beginning around 1984, I would no longer drink light, low-calorie beer. In 1985, I traveled to Europe for the first time, and this was followed by journeys in 1987, 1989 and 1991, and others since. After each trip, it was harder than the one before to go back to my old haunts and to drink cans of Strohs or draft Budweiser, but I must confess that I did go back and do precisely that, at least until 1992. Even the inception of FOSSILS in 1990 did not entirely divert my attention away from the swill that had ruled my youth, although I can truthfully say that Budweiser has not touched my lips for almost
six years.
I don’t know why it took so long for these obvious lessons to take root. For ten years, between my first Guinness and my last can of atrocious Budweiser aboard an Amtrak train bound to Chicago for a job interview and a visit to Goose Island, around four lengthy trips to Europe and submersion in the continent’s still vibrant beer culture, and right up through the first year and a half of FOSSILS, swill remained a part of my life. I can say that swill’s hold over me steadily diminished during this time, but this does little to absolve me. However, I can spot a few trends that help to understand my actions, and by extension, provide some insight into the motivations of the unenlightened majority of the population, for whom the arguments I’m setting forth here are no more relevant than the theological abstractions of the medieval academics who transformed Augustine’s earnestness into dogma to undergird the Inquisition.
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.
This last part is the hardest part. It comes when you’ve been able to do these things, and by doing so, you find yourself utterly and irrevocably at odds with the culture of your upbringing. The past and the people who populated it retain a pull on you, but you know that you can never go back to it. It, and they, will have to come to you – or be damned.
It is unlikely that Augustine drank beer. If he did, it wasn’t beer as we know it today, but human nature is a constant that pulses throughout the long, intervening centuries. He lived in an age when certainties were being methodically stripped away as the Roman empire disintegrated into chaos, and numerous other forces competed to occupy the resulting vacuum. In the midst of societal disarray, he looked at himself and saw obvious parallels with his past, with his own aimlessness, lewdness, and overall lack of thought and misdirection, and although his memories of earlier times were in many respects remarkably balanced, seemingly to the point of nostalgia in some instances, they symbolized a life and a mode of thinking that were no longer options for him. They comprised a life he could no longer live. His mature Christian beliefs were a framework for self-interpretation, as well as providing the foundation for his advocacy of Christian belief as the balm for troubled days in the present, and as a means of transcending the old ways collapsing all around his world.
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.
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.
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