BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: "Light Beer? Not Here," and other Public House beer list views from 1998.

Earlier this week, I hesitantly delved into the archives for a look at the (in)famous Public House beer binder.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Recalling "Love on the Beach" and taking note of changing times.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: On beer lists, beer-speak, and beer geeksplaining.

The views that follow are from the beer list in early 1998, pre-binder. Note the scribbling in the margins. Like a collection of demos shaped only gradually into a song, they chart the relentless evolution toward the fondly recalled three-ring presentation.

The first real desktop computer we had probably came along in 1996. It cost somewhere around $3,500, possessed all the requisite bells and whistles, and wouldn't be able to power a solitary Facebook memory today without flashing "tilt."

I dimly recall someone loading Microsoft Publisher on the new computer. Probably none of these beer lists would have happened had I been restricted to the embryonic word processing capability we had before the pricey computer purchase.

Looking back, it isn't clear where I found the time to write these surprisingly detailed beer lists, although it's worth noting that until 2001 or 2002, there also was a monthly edition of Walking the Dog (the newsletter of FOSSILS) to write, print, collate, staple, stamp and mail.

Someday I'll rediscover them, too.

The actual number of bottled beers on the list in early 1998 was 150 or so, with perhaps seven draft lines.

At times I wonder what would have happened had we not chosen to pursue brewing on premise, and stuck with the "good beer bar" motif without our own house beers as part of the mix -- and the investment.

Consequently, what strikes me about viewing these 20-year-old beer lists is the relative absence of American craft beer. Of course, we didn't refer to it as "craft" back then.

These microbrews were just beginning to trickle into range, often sporadically. There was a big dip when the dot.com brewery bubble burst at the end of the decade, and as we know, it was only a prelude to the current tsunami.

Crazy days, indeed, and I suppose I'm lucky to have survived to tell the tale, although it would be nice to be able to remember a little more of it.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Recalling "Love on the Beach" and taking note of changing times.

In my view, the game is won.

Numerous details remain to be sorted through, but in large measure, decades of struggle toward greater choice in better beer have brought us past the period where heightened vigilance is necessary. I can relax, live a little and have some fun.

As in this most ancient of beer jokes: Why is American beer like making love on the beach (or in a canoe)?

Because it's fucking close to water.

The joke has become obsolete, but it illustrates the beer lover's mindset during those long, lean years from the advent of mass-market "light" beer (late 60s) through the 1990s, when the first wave of the beer revolution crested. Those were watery times, but during the past 15 years, the American beer scene has changed beyond recognition.

Perfection is an unattainable state of existence, and yet the pendulum has swung decisively toward greater choice in beer, to the extent that rather then critiquing too few good beers on an establishment's list, contrarians like me can't complain that too many of them are hoppy IPAs.

“Love on the Beach: Our Finest Swill List,” was an indisputable classic from the Public House beer list binder during the 1990s. It addresses a state of consciousness in wartime, emanating from righteous indignation that seemingly few beer drinkers would step outside the norm and try something different.

Contrary to popular wisdom, there always were suitable alternatives.

The first draft lager featured at the Public House was Carlsberg, later replaced by Pilsner Urquell. There were milder beers in bottles, like Warsteiner. Happily, most visitors ultimately were willing to give choice the old college try. Some never escaped brand loyalty to the giants, and this always struck me as sadly limiting. 

Granted, I could be an asshole about it, but most of the time a helpful one.

Swill left the building entirely in 2002 with the advent of brewing on site, but in the interim, the King of Beers eventually rose in price to $8.50 at a time when most places asked $2.00 — and one schmuck actually bought one. I hope it was royal enough for him.

That was then, and this is now.

Pints & Union, or Pints&union (stay tuned for the explanation) will be opening at some point in the next 10 days. There'll be alcoholic drinks other than beer, including wine, cider, distilled favorites and cocktails, but of course my role is to devise and administer the beer program, and toward this end pub owner Joe Phillips and I spent much time brainstorming (and drinking) beer.

As stated previously, the beer list will be firmly classicist, with many legacy/heritage brands and golden oldies -- the greatest beer hits of the 1300s through the 1900s.

However, there'll also be "new" classics, maybe even a hazy IPA, as well as a few beers I'd never have opted to offer at the Public House: Old Style, Stroh's and Little Kings among them.

But -- and this is very important -- Pints&union isn't the Public House, and it so happens that Old Style, Stroh's and Little Kings were personal favorites of mine in the pre-craft era.

I'm not a beer snob any longer, and Joe's joint won't be trading in white whales. His goal is egalitarian, and I eagerly subscribe to this ethos. Diversity in beer implies a broad range and hard thinking about price points. Taking these into consideration isn't a compromise at all. 

I'll always be synonymous with the "Love on the Beach" subsection of the beer binder, and that's fine by me. It is inseparable from a time and place, and I'm proud of the work we did. Two decades have passed, and the Public House remains even though I've moved on.

The war, whether internal or external, is over, at least for the moment. It gladdens my heart that a unique and distinctive tradition will be created at Pints & Union, which will be a synthesis of all the experiences preceding it.

We're just about there. In the coming days, I hope to keep readers informed of our progress.

Flight documentaries: Oasis: Supersonic depicts a time (and music) that won't be repeated.

I finally got around to watching the 2016 documentary Oasis: Supersonic while on the flight home from Amsterdam. This account in Spin offers a solid summary.

The New Oasis Documentary Reminds You Why They Mattered, by Kyle McGovern

 ... The Gallagher brothers themselves—always entertaining interviews—are articulate and speak with self-awareness, reminding you how sneakily sharp they can be, despite regularly behaving like parodies of themselves in public. It really is a small miracle that Liam and Noel—now 44 and 49, respectively—both agreed to be involved with this project, coming aboard to executive produce and be questioned separately. Even more amazing is how warm they are when discussing the band they both anchored for nearly two decades. They each attempt to describe their dynamic—Noel says it’s as simple as the differences between a cat and a dog—but there’s virtually none of the pettiness and ugliness that’s hung over the brothers since Oasis imploded in 2009. No one’s torn down or compared to a potato, and their still-ongoing feud is merely alluded to, never addressed directly. (Of course, when Liam saw the film, he apparently couldn’t help but throw popcorn at the screen every time Noel appeared.)

There's not much to add. The documentary does not attain unflinching honesty, but warts are allowed to appear. The framing device of Oasis' 1996 shows at Knebworth is significant, because if there is any one "moral" to the story, it's that such a phenomenon won't be witnessed again.

Two-and-a-half million people applied for tickets

More than four per cent of the population applied for tickets to see Oasis at Knebworth, the largest ever demand for concert tickets in British history. A whopping 250,000 people got to see the band over two nights - another record - but incredibly, Oasis could have sold out another 18 Knebworth shows.

The conventional wisdom holds that Knebworth was the peak of the Oasis' trajectory; after two timeless classic albums -- Definitely Maybe (1994) and (What's the Story) Morning Glory (1995) -- and loads of hysteria, the band left the rails for good with Be Here Now, its third album, released in 1997, finally disintegrating in 2009 after another four workmanlike but hardly inspired releases.

But there is a worthy exception to this thinking. At the 1:25 mark of the trailer (above), a song can be heard that does not appear on either of the first two Oasis albums. It's the title track from The Masterplan (1998), a collection of B-sides and other songs recorded early in band's career, but not included on the two seminal LP releases.

In essence, The Masterplan functions as the third album of what should be viewed as a career-beginning tryptych. At AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine explains there was even more where The Masterplan came from.

For American audiences, the phenomenal worldwide success of Oasis was a little puzzling. That's because they only had part of the picture -- unless they were hardcore fans, they didn't hear nearly three albums of material released on B-sides and non-LP singles. Critics and fans alike claimed that the best of these B-sides were as strong as the best moments on the albums, and they were right.

None of the albums had a song that rocked as hard as "Fade Away" (cleverly built on a stolen melody from Wham!'s "Freedom"), "Headshrinker," or "Acquiesce." There was nothing as charming as the lite psychedelic pastiche "Underneath the Sky" or the Bacharach tribute "Going Nowhere"; there was nothing as affecting as Noel Gallagher's acoustic plea "Talk Tonight" or the minor-key, McCartney-esque "Rockin' Chair," nothing as epic as "The Masterplan."

Most bands wouldn't throw songs of this caliber away on B-sides, but Noel Gallagher followed the example of his heroes the Jam and the Smiths, who released singles where the B-sides rivaled the A-sides. This meant many American fans missed these songs, so to remedy this situation, Oasis released the B-sides compilation The Masterplan.

Oasis unfortunately chose to opt for a single disc of highlights instead of a complete double-disc set, which means a wealth of great songs -- "Take Me Away," "Whatever," "D'Yer Wanna Be a Spaceman?," "Round Are Way," "It's Better People," "Step Out," a raging cover of "Cum on Feel the Noize" -- are missing. But The Masterplan winds up quite enjoyable anyway. Apart from the sludgy instrumental "The Swamp Song," there isn't a weak track here, and the brilliant moments are essential not only for Oasis fans, but any casual follower of Britpop or post-grunge rock & roll.

If you're an Oasis fan and haven't viewed the documentary, or if you're indifferent to Brit Pop but have a taste for what now must be regarded as ancient history, consider watching it.

For better or worse, rock and roll simply isn't going to see another Oasis.

The Joshua Tree at 30? Okay, fine, but what I'd give to hear U2 perform Pop all the way through for its 20th anniversary.

U2's Pop Mart tour came through Prague on August 14, 1997. I was at Strahov Stadium for the garish spectacle of lemons, space ships and disco balls, frankly reveling in the pop culture excess, and contrasting it with the Czech Republic's recovery from excesses of a different sort.

I'm an unapologetic U2 fan, and to me, Pop was the culmination of my most favored phase of the band's existence. Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop make up a trilogy that continues to define the 1990s for me -- not that there weren't numerous other musical high points, some of which offer memories as cogent.

Pop capped a particularly tumultuous period in my life. I'm fortunate to have stuck with alcohol. My own career Pop came later, circa 2009, and I've yet to discover a professional follow-up mirroring All that You Can't Leave Behind. Maybe metaphors need to be mixed, and I'm due for "Rockin' in the Free World" instead.

I'll be there at Papa John's Capitalist Stadium in June for the complete 30th anniversary performance of The Joshua Tree, but if I had my druthers, it'd be the 20th birthday cycle of Pop songs.

In defense of Pop, U2's most hated album, by Michael Brendan Dougherty (The Week)

Pop is a trashy, vulgar, spiritually insightful, heart-shattering record. It takes a vandal's thrill in deploying the self-declared world's greatest rock band to deface rock and roll. It shapes the echoing blips, tape distortions, and drum loops of electronic music into a political statement as substantial and tightly packed as a pipe bomb. It rummages through the refuse of modern pop culture and finds a God worth loving still. And its critical failure was a miscarriage of justice.

And:

Review: U2 – Pop, by James Hunter (Spin)

This review first ran in the April 1997 issue of Spin. To mark the 20th anniversary of U2’s Pop—originally released March 3, 1997—we’re republishing it here.

Out of this uncertainty, out of this very tangle, U2 have reformed their music again. On 1991’s Achtung Baby, they immersed themselves in noise; on 1993’s Zooropa, no bets hedged, they upended the record-making process. Now, on Pop, they just let various unpolished, inconsistent elements zoom, traipse, and scatter through space. And, because they are U2, they hope. At album’s end, on “Wake Up Dead Man,” as a Bulgarian village soprano valiantly tries to cut through the muddy air, Bono guesses that there must be order somewhere amid all this disorder. And he asks if he can rewind everything, “just once more,” and listens for clues.

And:

Pop Turns 20, by Ryan Leas (Stereogum)

All of that being said, here are the other things Pop is. Pop is the freakout and comedown at the end of their ’90s road, where they lost the battles of Zooropa and fully embraced rockstar trappings, the dirty glamor, the glitz and crassness. The album signaling U2’s last brush with unfettered and fearless experimentation. The album where the mingling of sex and religion from Acthung Baby continues, but is pushed into Pop Art overdrive while deepening the conversation: sin and materialism and indulgence are entangled with shaken faith. The album where they bred European textures with boom-times Americana, getting at something more real and immediate and sinister and shiny than those late ’80s ventures where they supposedly got closest to American themes. Almost written out of their narrative but pivotal to it, Pop is the album that remains most perplexing and fascinating and layered in a career of thoroughly analyzed classics.

Finally:

U2’s ‘Pop’: A Look Back at Their Most Misunderstood Album, by Brian Ives (Radio)

As Bono said while discussing another underrated Pop gem, “Gone,” “‘Gone’ is a portrait of the young man as a rock star, trying to cut himself free from responsibilities and just enjoy the ride, the suit of lights, fame: ‘You change your name, well that’s ok, it’s necessary. And what you leave behind you don’t need anyway.’ But I think what this album tells you is that some things you can’t leave behind. That’s really it. It’s like the university professor who just can’t dance. Deep down we weren’t as shallow as we’d like.”

ON THE AVENUES: It’s never too late to beer all over again.

ON THE AVENUES: It’s never too late to beer all over again.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

It isn’t that I’ve fallen out of love with beer. We’re not divorced or anything. A better word is estranged, which implies an alienation of affection, but doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility of reconciliation.

These thoughts occurred to me recently as I was contemplating the future of The Potable Curmudgeon, my beer-themed blog. It dates to 2005, and has enjoyed some fine moments over the years, though recently my commitment to maintaining it has waned.

Slightly less so Roger’s Simple Beer Pleasures, a page at Facebook that I started in late 2015. It is far better suited to the truncated social-media-driven attention spans ruling the planet at present, including my own, at least as it pertains to beer and brewing.

In spite of my efforts, I can’t seem to make The PC blog and Simple Pleasures work in harmony the way NA Confidential’s blog and Fb page do, primarily because my efforts are half-hearted.

There’s the rub.

I care more about what I’m writing at NA Confidential than The Potable Curmudgeon, so I’m willing to make the time at one and not the other. Taking it a step further, this indiscipline owes to my sense of estrangement from the world of beer and brewing. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy writing about beer, thinking about it and even drinking it, just that it isn’t a daily priority at present.

Consequently, I’ll be altering the routine in the weeks to come. The beer writing I undertake will be featured here at NA Confidential, and I’ll allow The Potable Curmudgeon to remain dormant as an archive.

Perhaps Fridays will be NAC’s Beer Day, or some such. Since so much of my beer writing has sought connectivity between beer and other interests in my life, putting them all in one place rather than separating them makes the most sense.

That is, until it doesn’t.

---

Returning to the topic of beer estrangement, I'm actually optimistic about the potential for reconciliation, and yet those who have been burned tend to shun the fire the longest time.

My last few years at NABC weren’t excessively happy ones, a frustrating situation admittedly arising in part from my own mistakes as well as a bit too much foundational hubris, coupled with self-imposed stressors related to living and working full-tilt-gonzo.

Consequently, I’ve been compelled to examine these previous experiences in great detail, and it’s precisely like being in therapy, with pain and pleasure in maddeningly shifting measure. It’s getting better all the time, although for my own self-protection, I’m adamant about my priorities being in need of clear delineation before I consider re-upping in small business stewardship, whether on my own or in partnership with others.

Beer was my full-time job for 25 years, and it was part-time for a decade before. In many respects, beer has been my life, and while it is not my life at this precise moment, it remains important to me, enough so that lately I’ve been considering the potential terms of such an employment-based rapprochement, and during the year about to conclude, there have been more green lights than red.

I’m encouraged by a few emerging opportunities and have chosen to emulate the timeless wisdom of the hedgehog, confining myself to one big idea rather than an array of smaller ones.

This big idea goes something like this: “In terms of better beer, there still is a market for what I know how to do – and correspondingly, what I know how to do is undervalued in today’s beer marketplace.”

What I know how to do is educate and entertain in comfortable pub confines, and what I’ve learned not to do is try conquering the world. I’m hoping that accumulated insights will help me avoid previous missteps.

---

In 1990, there was a paucity of choice in the beer marketplace. I set about providing these options at Rich O’s Public House, which at the time meant featuring classic imported brands, primarily from Europe. The genre eventually to be named “American craft beer” began filtering into metropolitan Louisville at roughly the same time, and a few years later we reformatted as NABC and began brewing our own beer.

This house-brewing decision led to alternating evolutions and digressions. Years passed, and the competitive landscape became altered beyond recognition. By some measures, NABC’s brewing operation has been successful these past 15 years; by others, less so, but either way it should come as no surprise, because all businesses face similar challenges.

Perhaps the problem for me is that while market conditions and business necessities changed, I didn’t.

There’s no one to blame for this situation except me. The simple truth is that the more “craft” beer became a business, the less business I had inside it. This was a necessary lesson for me to learn, and our experience at Bank Street Brewhouse (now renamed NABC Café and Brewhouse), taught it to me good and hard. I'm micro, not macro. Rinse, repeat.

For better or worse, I remain a reluctant capitalist, harboring absolutely no interest in business books, business seminars and business envy. It is possible for capitalism to suit me in small doses, so long as I’m not required to wear an actual suit. With Bank Street Brewhouse, I placed myself in the position of having to be more of a straight numbers-crunching businessman, and less of an iconoclastic teacher.

In retrospect, this wasn’t a good fit for me. The business survived, if not thrived, while I gradually died inside. It came to a point where the only way forward was severing ties with the past, which isn’t ever easy. My self-identity had become inseparable from the “craft” beer business, but the “craft” beer business had become both distant and impervious to my whims and commands. We needed to be apart for a while.

Like I said … an estrangement.

---

To this very day, only one facet of “business” interests me much, and this is the notion of undervalued assets – not exactly in the sense of an undervalued stock, though similar. If the beer market is 95% insipid golden lager, then better beer is undervalued, and worth the investment in time and money. When better beer “wins,” and newcomers flock to IPA, it’s time to advocate other ways of better brewing and drinking.

My advice to myself is to allow the pendulum to swing way over to the other side. It can’t hurt me there, but I must be prepared for the time when it comes back in my direction and be ready with a deft sidestep, like Fred Astaire, because when I'm on the side of the ascendant pendulum, that’s when I can no longer win; then it's an opportunity for the folks who’ll always have more money than me, and they take the joy right out of it.

The overarching point is that 25 years later, what I started doing in the 1990s – a relentless focus on quality and the gradual process of acclimatization borne of incessant education – has gone completely by the wayside. Hardly anyone has the patience for it, and our collective shrinkage of attention spans has led to marketing by electronic flash card.

Screw that. I can do it, and I like the idea (and the odds) of following my muse full circle back to the origins, and featuring beers I know from breweries I’ve visited, both here and abroad, in a reasonably suitable setting, with boring predictability, not unlimited rotation.

It’s what I’m hoping 2017 will be about, because it’s about time, right? I need to go to the mattresses and get in beer again, and this town really needs a soap box for the resistance.

---

Two July columns that explore this topic in greater detail. 

AFTER THE FIRE: Before the deluge, or knowing how this whole beer business started.

ON THE AVENUES: An imaginary exercise tentatively called The Curmudgeon Free House.

---

December 1: ON THE AVENUES: Once more with feeling, because as the notable American philosopher Moe Bandy once sang, “Here I am, drunk again.”

November 17 and 24: (BYE WEEKS, literally and figuratively)

November 11: ON THE AVENUES: Kind-a full-a you know what, but now we're going to find out whether Jeff Gahan has any cattle under his hat.

November 10: ON THE AVENUES: Don't be a Dickey, local Democrats. The verdict is in, and it's time for a change.

ON THE AVENUES: An imaginary exercise tentatively called The Curmudgeon Free House.

ON THE AVENUES: An imaginary exercise tentatively called The Curmudgeon Free House. 

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In my previous column, published earlier at The Potable Curmudgeon blog, I recalled the growth of the "better" beer program 20 years ago at the Public House formerly known as Rich O’s, and found myself musing – is this word copyrighted? – whether a retro, back-to-basics, “better beer” pub program still might make sense in an era of HopCat and its 132 IPAs on tap.

AFTER THE FIRE: Before the deluge, or knowing how this whole beer business started

 ... My contrarian instincts tell me that the beer climate is ripe for a modest, thoughtful return to basics, emblemized by a relatively small list of classics on draft, and in bottles and cans, to be accompanied by some good, old-fashioned beer education, which seems to have been tossed aside in the era of mile-wide, inch-deep “craft” fandom.

It should be obvious that any conceivable template I might offer in this context, whether or not it has an immediate future, has been custom-designed in my brain for a specific potential user.

Namely, me. That's purposeful, by the way. I don't make detailed plans very often, and when I do, they're on cocktail napkins.

While it is true that I’ve often railed against cults of personality in the local political realm, and pined for the seemingly unreachable ideal of teamwork and multiple minds coming together, what I'm imagining here is a small, sustainable specialty beer café, not a multi-million-dollar City Hall filled with obscure departments and shuffling time servers.

At least it wouldn't be boring having a personality aboard ship who is capable of staging a floor show in addition to sweeping up and taking out the garbage. Entertainment and education? Been there and done that. Anyway, differentiation seldom has been a problem for me.

At the present time, I’m only thinking aloud, curious about the possibilities. Before describing them further, you must endure a digression.

---

It's a story I’ve told on many occasions.

In a year’s time, Diana and I bought an old house on Spring Street in New Albany (in 2003), and George W. Bush was re-elected to a second term (2004).

These two seemingly unrelated occurrences converged with a third contingency, because by 2005, I was looking back on 15 years as a principal player in the New Albanian Brewing Company. It proved to be the right time for a sweeping reappraisal, with a mind toward the future.

Where was I going personally? What about the business, not to mention the whole country?

Providentially, my private life already had evolved for the better, because Diana completed me. It’s always best to have a solid foundation. We did, and do.

Next came a survey of the blighted downtown New Albany landscape of the period, and an insatiable urge to know what caused these empty urban doughnut holes in America – and by extension, why self-described local “leaders” seemed powerless to do anything about them.

Finally, with the curse of W forced on me a second time, there came an epiphany. As an individual, there was next to nothing I might do to change the wider world. However, perhaps the local grassroots provided the best opportunity for participation, to improve the basic building block of community, and to help make it a more solid foundation.

NABC had raised the local bar for better beer. Might my personal future as well as that of my business also be tied to the revitalization of the city’s most undervalued assets, its historic downtown business and residential districts?

Beginning in 2005 and 2006, I embarked upon a journey through a labyrinth of ever-widening learning curves pertaining to urbanism, independent business, street engineering and the enduringly senseless nature of small town hack politics. It truly has been a Long March, and the accumulation of wisdom along the way has proven exhausting.

Eventually I lost an election and gave up the business, but in the process, I regained some semblance of a soul. The jury remains sequestered in deliberation, and the learning curve goes on forever. It should suffice to say that as progress in New Albany pertains to politics, beer, business and urban affairs, there remains much work to be done.

As for me, at some point I'll have to do something with my life, right?

---

In consideration of these interrelated themes, and noting the strengths and weaknesses of the startling “out of nowhere” downtown New Albany food and drink scene, a hypothetical plan is taking shape in my brain. It’s just for the fun of it, and here is the overview.

The Curmudgeon’s (purely imaginary) Free House would need a suitable location in downtown New Albany, close to my home. Why? Because it’s better to live as you preach. City officials might even try it sometimes -- you know, walk to lunch.

Limited square footage is preferable, so as to make the Free House affordable. Walkability and bikeability are musts, but as I’ve noted previously, the implementation of these realities depends entirely on the whim of King Gahan the Unclothed.

A stopped clock is right twice each day, and he’s past due. Cross your fingers, and hope that no one else is killed before he finally gets the memo.

With numerous indie eateries located near this fictional location, a crucial bit of cost reduction stands to be achieved, because absolutely no food will be served, save for that required by Indiana ATC statute. The infamous $10 prepackaged frozen weenie sandwich springs to mind, as microwaved by the eater himself, thus ensuring minimal health department involvement.

Customers would be free to order carry-out or procure delivery from the establishments nearby. There’d be bags of pretzels and crisps. That’s all. What is needed is a beer classroom, not another eatery struggling to find, train and keep workers.

An easy and inexpensive two-way Indiana beer/wine license would suffice, allowing for a few supplementary whites, reds and ciders if so desired. There is no need for liquor, and after all, the Grant Line Road location of NABC never once had a three-way permit.

Opportunism is the watchword. Limited business hours would be timed to coincide with peak times for neighboring food and drink businesses and civic events, with groups and seminars by appointment. The object is to construct a one- or two-person operation, limiting expenses and enhancing expertise.

Finally, why have distracting gadgets like televisions when everyone has a smart phone? Persistent rumor insists that Emperor Gahan of Eastridge is bringing wi-fi hot spots to downtown. That'd be useful. Otherwise, FM radio channel WFPK works just fine, and I’d be free to bring a few CDs with me to work – Bulgarian Women’s Choir today, Queens of the Stone Age tomorrow.

In short, just like the old days at the pub, when we listened to what I wanted to hear.

---

I’ve put together an imaginary opening beer list. The rationale includes brevity, availability and diversity of style. There’d be appropriate glassware, which doesn’t mean “branded” glassware, just the right kind of vessel.

There’d be two everyday drafts, and one or two rotating taps (depending on the size of the keg box). Permanent fixtures would be Guinness Stout (nitro) and Victory Prima Pils, with the third spout pouring some hoppier English or American ales. A seasonal tap would take up the fourth tower.

Generally speaking, drafts would be at or near session strength (4.5% or 5% abv, depending on the definition).

The organizational conceit for a bottle and can list of 30 or so selections is my own personal experience. They’d be exclusively drawn from (a) breweries I’ve visited, both in America and abroad, and (b) breweries right here in Indiana.

BELGIUM
Cantillon Classic Gueuze
De Dolle Oerbier
Delirium Tremens
Drie Fonteinen Schaerbeekse Kriek
Fantome Saison
La Chouffe
Orval
Poperings Hommelbier
Rochefort 10
Rodenbach Grand Cru
Saison Dupont

GERMANY
Aecht Schlenkerla Marzen Rauchbier
Reissdorf Kolsch
Schneider Weisse
Uerige Classic

UNITED KINGDOM
Fuller’s ESB
JW Lees Harvest Ale
Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout

UNITED STATES (brands to be determined)
Bell’s
New Holland
Rogue
Alternates to be named

INDIANA CRAFT BEERS (cans only)

Lots and lots of choices exist at the present time: Black Acre, Bloomington Brewing Company, Central State, Daredevil, Flat12, Salt Creek, Sun King … and others.

You may be wondering about the emphasis on imports, given my advocacy for American-brewed beer. It’s a valid question, and of course, there’d be an American “craft” beer presence (in cans) on the list.

The short answer: So goes the mind of a contrarian.

My career in beer began with imports, and then I spent many years advocating for American "craft." Now American “craft" is everywhere, and the Old World classics have been overwhelmed and often forgotten. Maybe it’s time to pick up the abandoned string of Classic Beer where it started, in Europe, and once again allow the presentation to evolve where it will, as it did 25 years ago.

Will any of this actually happen?

I’ve no idea. These hypotheticals are by no means impossible, but they rely on controlling costs and curtailing bells and whistles. The more spartan the setting, the greater the importance of effective performance art and other intangibles.

Perhaps that's the point. These simple factors also have been neglected in an era of sheen and polish. I used to think that an intelligent beer bar wasn't a contradiction in terms, and still do. I believe in fundamentals and essentials; as you may recall from the 2015 campaign, these strike me as vital every single day, as opposed to every now and then.

Can better beer be repurposed this way, and taken back to the future? It’s an enticing thought, so as always, tell me what you think.

Who knows?

---

July 21: ON THE AVENUES: We have our own Big Four Bridge. They’re called Main, Market, Spring and Elm.

July 14: ON THE AVENUES: Weeds, porch appliances and our civic Gospel of Appearances.

July 7: ON THE AVENUES: You say you want a resolution?

June 30: ON THE AVENUES: Irv Stumler screams, "We don't deserve two-way streets!"

June 23: ON THE AVENUES: There's no business like no business -- and it's none of your business.

WITHIN CITY LIMITS: Episode IX, The Nineties Are Calling ... They Want Their Politicians Back.

Within City Limits

Episode IX, The Nineties Are Calling ... They Want Their Politicians Back.

By Nick Vaughn, Guest Columnist

With Evan Bayh announcing he is seeking his old senate seat and Hillary Clinton being endorsed by Bernie Sanders, I felt like a baby again. Being born in 1997, I am only familiar with the political landscape by looking backwards, something Democrats are never advocating -- until now.

When President Obama was running for President and reelection, he had the slogans of “Forward” and “Progress,” but today's Democratic Party is running on nostalgia and backwardness. You can argue with me about platform points and “evolving on issues” like gay marriage, but the bottom line is that these politicians who are the standard bearers for the Democratic Party nationally and on an Indiana state level are still the same politicians who were the standard bearers in the 1990s.

The top three candidates on the Democratic ticket in Indiana are all rehashes from a bygone era where the state's economy was in the toilet, brought on by large deficits and high taxes. We looked a lot like Illinois back then. Hillary Clinton, John Gregg, Evan Bayh; all rehashes. While their talking points are much different than they were back then, they are still the same people. 1990s politicians should not be the ones solving the problems of the 2000s and beyond.

Beyond my displeasure and discontent with the rehashing of candidates, all three represent special interests, Wall Street, and back room politics at their absolute worst. John Gregg is still taking advantage of the state’s healthcare for elected officials being paid by the taxpayers, a practice that has ended. Furthermore, Gregg was a lawyer for the Bingham McHale law firm, where lobbying records show he was a well connected lobbyist for various topics. You can read more about his lobbying here: Gregg's lobbying record doesn't worry Democrats.

Evan Bayh used to be a public servant until he decided to retire from the U.S. Senate to take a lobbying job. Bayh epitomizes what is wrong with Washington, D.C. He went there as a senator and cashed in on the special interest money by fighting the laws he helped pass (including Obamacare). Plus Bayh just recently moved back to Indiana. He had previously lived in DC in a $2.9 million dollar home and had a modest vacation home in Florida worth over $3 million.

Bayh saying he will represent everyday Hoosiers might be the biggest lie of the campaign season. He is out of touch and filled to the brim with special interest money. Read more about Bayh the Lobbyist here: Lobbyist Evan Bayh Lit On Fire By The Left and here Evan Bayh Won’t Rule Out Becoming A Lobbyist After His Term Ends.

Hillary Clinton. Well, enough said.

So that I get my point across, I think it is inherently hypocritical and ironic that the Democrats have long been the party of vilifying the rich and lobbying class that infests Washington, D.C. and Indianapolis, yet all three of their candidates at the top of the ticket have deep ties to Wall Street, special interest money, and lobbying. For Pete’s sake, two of them are former lobbyists! Not to mention all three are rehashed candidates of a bygone era.

My question is: will the people of Indiana hold these three accountable? Or will they be fooled by the talking points? Also, do the Democrats who reject the Wall Street, special interest, and lobbying culture of Washington, D.C. and Indianapolis hold their nose and vote for three candidates who epitomize what is wrong with our system of government? Or will they stand for what they believe in and hold their party and their candidates accountable?

And as always, I leave you with the quote of the day: “In 2005, the progressive watchdog group Public Citizen reported that 43 percent of the members (of Congress) who retired from 1998 to 2004 registered as lobbyists.” -- Huffington Post

ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

There’s a venerable joke, wherein a man dies and is transported to his permanent home on the other side – not high in the sky astride a cloud bank with a harp (the instrument, not the lager beer), but to the other place.

After ID checks and processing, the devil’s service associate shows the man his various options for eternal punishment, each worse than the last, until finally there is a seemingly benign alternative. In a room with pleasant classical tunes playing, people are standing knee-deep in raw sewage, sipping coffee.

The man takes his place in the coffee line, but before he’s even been handed a mug, the supervisor appears.

“Okay, coffee break’s over. Back on your heads.”

For reasons that remain obscure, this joke always resurfaces just as the taxi rolls to a stop in front of the departures terminal at (fill in name of the European airport), and I must sadly face the facts, because by the end of the day, the coffee break’s over -- and it’s back to NA.

Yes, the missus and I just returned from a week in Tallinn, Estonia. It was the first foreign excursion for us since my failed mayoral bid last year, and the concurrent period of my ongoing disassociation from the New Albanian Brewing Company.

This latest stint abroad wasn’t nearly long enough for me. Are they ever? However, a seven-day coffee break is better than none at all, and thankfully, in addition to the sightseeing and “continuing education” aspects of the journey, there was ample time for thinking and conversation while drinking.

This always pleases me.

In 2015, when I took a leave of absence from NABC in order to campaign for mayor as an independent, there wasn’t much time for reflection. I leaped from one treadmill to another, shifting overnight from devoting a disproportionate number of waking moments to beer and business, to embarking on a breakneck municipal affairs learning curve.

It was only after my final decision to leave NABC, and the subsequent thumbs-down electoral verdict from our voters, that strange things began popping in my noggin.

Not to put too grandiose a spin on it, but it just might be that I’m rediscovering the joy of pure discovery, or vice versa, many aspects of which were placed into cold storage during that quarter-century of involvement in the food and drink trade.

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Late last year, I commenced an obsession with YouTube documentaries, to which I’d previously been indifferent.

First came a wave of videos about Eastern European history during the Communist era. Then I shifted into current events in and around Estonia and Sicily, where we’ll be visiting later this year.

For decades, an interest in volcanoes had remained latent. With Mt. Etna in our future, it suddenly resurfaced. Besides that, I haven’t been to Italy since 1989.

After reading a biography of poet Ezra Pound, whose Italian sojourn yielded mixed results, my gaze shifted to documentaries about all sorts of writing and writers. First came Englishmen (Larkin, Burgess, Amis), then expatriated Americans in Europe (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), but also a few Americans remaining stateside (Philip Roth and John Steinbeck).

In turn, this yielded to visual artists, primarily painters: Kokoschka and Schiele from Austria; Englishmen Sickert, Bomberg and Nash; Magritte and de Lempicka in Paris (1928). There also was a fascinating BBC series on the origins and artistic uses of the colors gold, blue and white. It’s something that never occurred to me.

Admittedly, apart from a film about the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, these various immersions have occurred within the familiar outline of the "Western" canon. There have been far too few diversions to topics that don’t feature white males like me, although one of two current reads, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, has been nothing short of revelatory.

The same is true of the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. If you believe that writers of the Renaissance have nothing to say about sex, and in particular, about diverse female perspectives, it’s time for a reappraisal. 650 years on, the naturalness and candor of these vignettes are astonishing.

Being at loose ends is simultaneously daunting and liberating. Previously, I’ve likened it to awakening from a self-inflicted coma. Personal interests long submerged beneath the weight of My Life in Beer and Brewing are returning with a vengeance. Of course, they never went away. I scratched these various itches throughout the NABC era in my available time, but now there’s a window allowing better concentration, and while the coffee break lasts, I’m undeniably fortunate.

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It remains true that music is vital. In musical terms, I generally prefer listening in the present tense, not the past. This does not stem from a desire to be hip and trendy. Rather, it’s an expression of evolution as an individual, feeding fresh data into the system to see what comes out the other side. What interests me is the way I hear music, and how this process changes along with my own growth.

My simple goal is to keep abreast of what’s new in music insofar as it pertains to whatever styles of music make me happiest. As an example, while rock and roll may be “dead” as a genre, the world still manages to disgorge youthful rockers, and some of them are damned entertaining.

I customarily allow myself to listen to “oldies,” but only in a controlled and rationed context. The ghosts of my consciousness are profuse and insistent, and they cannot be allowed to frame the present via the past, especially since in musical terms, the reactions engendered are so very personal.

The idea is to interpret one’s past through music, not relive it.

When my father was a much older man, the way he heard Glenn Miller’s songs owed directly to his first experiences with them, as a Marine in the Pacific Theater during World War II. My dad played these songs for me, and to this very day, I hear them differently, as a boy in the milieu of the 1970s.

Same tunes, radically different worlds – and yet a common language of enjoyment for both of us.

It so happened that two weeks ago, it occurred to me to make a list of my favorite 1990s albums, because an oddity had become apparent and needed to be addressed.

Rock and pop releases from this decade are of inestimable and deeply affecting value to me, and yet I’d gotten to the point of excluding them entirely from the rotational retrospective, even past my own point of calculated limitation.

Why was I doing this?

Well, sometimes it takes a martini to sort through it. For me, the decade of the nineties was about building a pub and pizzeria business. It was a period of personal and professional inception in many senses, which led to other beginnings as well as a few ends, and these albums were absolutely integral to all of it.

They were the soundtrack, inexorably connected to those crazy times, but since the jury’s out with regard to many of those memories, the music becomes just as complicated.

In the present time, with an altered personal view of my relationship to the beer and pizza business – pride, disillusionment, appreciation, annoyance, and perhaps stages of mourning that I didn’t even realize were being suppressed – my ever-alert inner watchman seems to have filtered the playlist to protect me from possible discomfort.

Well, enough of that.

I believe it’s time to move past my mind’s weird and circuitous coping mechanisms, reclaim the music I cherish, and restore it to a place in the narrative. Once the 1990s album list is complete, there’ll be an exception to normal practice, and over a period of days, I’ll listen to them all.

Given that the list is close to 75 in number, perhaps it will take weeks, and that’s even better.

Because: If one serving of coffee is all that stands between upright bliss and deluge revisited, then we’d best make it a bottomless cup. There’s more time to learn things that way.

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April 28: ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

April 21: ON THE AVENUES: The Green Mouse tells all.

April 14: ON THE AVENUES: Forever NA, the wrong way ... from 2012, through 2014, to 2016 and beyond, forever more.

April 7: ON THE AVENUES: The Six Session Beers of Session Beer Day.

Bill Clinton's Black Lives Matter comments: "Slick Willie can't talk his way out of this one."

I'm so old, I can remember when Hillary Clinton evolved on the issue of same-sex marriage.

That'd be 2013.

Bill Clinton's Black Lives Matter Comments Were Revealingly Honest, by Lincoln Blades (Rolling Stone)

For once we got to see a white person who's done real harm to our community say what he truly believes

... There are some, both within and outside of the black community, who will say former President Clinton should be banned from public events after this week's outburst. But I disagree. Bill Clinton's Nineties-era policies, with Hillary Clinton's support at the time, have irreparably harmed the black community by using racially coded language to support mass incarceration and damaging "welfare reform" — yet they've retained much of the goodwill Bill earned them by donning his Blues Brothers shades on Arsenio Hall. For Bill Clinton to more or less announce that he doesn't give a damn about the Black Lives Matter movement is great to hear as a supporter of the movement, because I really appreciate knowing where people stand.