NABC beer will be on tap at the House of Bread Thursday through Saturday during booth days.

Frank Zappa once wrote:

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

He might have added, "a real festival."

For those of us who've been living here for a while, an alternative to mass market swill during Harvest Homecoming is rather hard to fathom, given the eternal inertia of ostructionism and the low common denominator generally espoused hereabouts.

Fortunately, people are working to achieve it.

Accordingly, it gives me great pleasure to report that in conjunction with the House of Bread restaurant (corner of Bank and Market in downtown New Albany), locally brewed craft beer from the New Albanian Brewing Company will be available in the restaurant's excellent outdoor seating area during the Harvest Homecoming festival's "booth days" (Thursday, October 6 through Saturday, October 8).

A necessary disclaimer: NABC is a small brewery in terms of capacity, and depending on demand, we might deplete available stocks and have nothing left to sell to the restaurant. We'll play it by ear.

We're projecting two beers on tap: Community Dark and Elector.

Community Dark is brewed with English barley malt, hops and yeast, and is a dark-colored, light-bodied ale known in the U.K. as Mild. Originally, the style was decidedly blue-collar, being brewed for miners and factory workers to replenish fluids after work.

Elector is reddish-amber, with the same base malt and yeast as Community Dark, but stronger, and with American hops used at a much higher hopping rate. In terms of style, Elector traces a lineage to England, but is to be considered a stylistic hybrid in keeping with the artistic license fostered by the microbrewing revolution in America.

Remember, it's the House of Bread's gig and licensing, and they'll be determining serving sizes and pricing. I hope to be there at various times during the weekend, so perhaps I'll see some of you and celebrate the breakthrough.