THE BEER BEAT: Michael "Beer Hunter" Jackson's epochal book at 40, his 1994 visit to Louisville, and the color red.

How did this happen? Keep reading.

Ironically, given the book's influence on me, I seem to have lost my copy of it. But no matter. As the years pass, it's ever clearer to me that Michael Jackson's World Guide to Beer perfectly captured the beer world at a crossroads between old and new.

Furthermore, having been inspired by the text, I had the first-hand opportunity to experience the historic European side of this tableau before modernity began to alter it irrevocably, then to apply all these lessons at my own pub to what became the American beer renaissance.

I've been very fortunate in these instances, and I was even more fortunate to meet the man himself.

MICHAEL JACKSON’S WORLD GUIDE TO BEER ENTERS A ROBUST MIDDLE-AGE, by Tom Acitelli (All About Beer Magazine)

By the start of 1977, Michael Jackson was a mildly successful, 34-year-old newspaper and television journalist whose biggest coups to date were editing the in-flight magazine of Dutch airline KLM and filling in for another writer on a 1976 book called The English Pub (the photo-heavy affair covered exactly what its title implied).

Jackson would exit 1977 as the leading authority on beer in the English-speaking world, maybe the whole world. For it was during that year that publishers Prentice-Hall and Littlehampton Books Services released his World Guide to Beer in the U.S. and the U.K., respectively. It was a groundbreaker in terms of explaining and popularizing beer.

This essay first appeared a few years ago at LouisvilleBeer.com, which appears to have become moribund. That's too bad, though as we're learning on an hourly basis in 2017, change is the only genuine constant. If you've read this piece previously, persevere, because there's a twist to the reprint.

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Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red.

Michael Jackson unexpectedly visited the former Rich O’s Public House in November, 1994, a tad more than two years after we opened. If I hadn’t been drinking for much of the same day, tagging along with David Pierce as the Beer Hunter made pre-arranged appearances at Bluegrass Brewing Company and the now defunct Silo, I’d have been far too nervous to properly function as host.

I’ll be forever grateful that Jackson consented to accompany our ragged band of awed and inebriated fledgling beer enthusiasts on yet another beer hunt, this one at 9:00 p.m., from downtown Louisville across the Ohio River to an embarrassingly unfinished strip mall space that at the time could offer only three beers on tap.

Moreover, knowing that most of the regulars would be following Jackson through Louisville, we’d closed the pub for the day. Minutes ahead of the approaching motorcade, there was barely enough time to dash inside, flick light switches, sweep up and make the barroom somewhat presentable.

Coming on the heels of a long day of one-ounce samples, Jackson proceeded to order and consume a full 20-oz Imperial pint of Sierra Nevada Porter, and upon departure an hour and a half later, made this wry observation:

“I’ve been to many pubs in America, and I’ve never seen one quite like this.”

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I’ll say it again: It is impossible to overstate the influence that Michael Jackson had on thousands upon thousands of beer drinkers, who continue to find in his elegant and precise prose a purposeful rationale for their pursuit of the perfect pint.

Some describe Jackson as comparable to William Shakespeare in terms of reach and pervasiveness. To me, far more flattering is the suggestion that he is the beer world’s Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century English essayist who established expository norms for non-fiction and wrote a dictionary of the English language. 150 years later, Jackson synthesized Johnson’s style and words and did the same for the language and vocabulary of beer.

Jackson did not invent the notion of beer styles, but he introduced them for the consideration of a bland lager-soaked planet, though it is Jackson’s association of beer with place that survives as the finest representation of his genius. Those 20th-century industrial monoliths complexes may have stolen beer from its traditional point of localized orientation, but Jackson stole it back — first a little, and then a lot.

Jackson generally refrained from writing about technical brewing details, possessing instead an intuitive ability to filter hyperbole of the sort favored by marketers, and to viscerally reconnect beer to its “terroir” in terms of physical geography, human culture and social conditions. He did so factually, wittily, majestically, and always with supreme lyricism.

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A few years after Michael Jackson’s nocturnal pub visit, I was in Denver for the Great American Beer Festival. A few samples under my belt, I was loitering somewhere on the mezzanine, leaning against a vacant table and chatting with the beer writer Stan Hieronymus, who suddenly asked me if I had brought a book for signing. With my face registering cluelessness, he motioned behind me – and there was Jackson, settling in for another afternoon with his reading public.

Completely by accident, there I was at the head of a gradually lengthening line, and without a book to have autographed. However, I had a GABF program tucked under one arm, and it was duly proffered to Jackson as I reintroduced myself and asked if he remembered the Public House. He smiled in affirmation, adding that the FOSSILS newsletters being sent to him in London were entertaining.

“You’re quite the polemicist,” said Jackson.

I blushed crimson as Jackson pushed away the program and said, “Have I told you why your Red Room made such an impression on me?”

It surprised me that Jackson even noticed the Red Room, which had only recently come into being when he visited. It was (and remains) a small seating area at the pub, with one wall painted red and a massive three-part Soviet-era poster of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the wall, since augmented with other examples of Communist paraphernalia.

“No,” I replied.

Jackson put down his pen and began telling the story.

It began in 1945 with his earliest childhood memory at the age of three: The post-war British election campaign that ended in Labour’s sweeping victory and Winston Churchill’s fall. Jackson’s father, whom he described as the family’s main political agitator, was at work, and so his mother – normally apolitical – took young Michael to a rally for their Yorkshire constituency’s Labour candidate, an erstwhile journalist who was an unapologetic Socialist.

Jackson never forgot the rally’s uniformly red buntings and campaign banners. The candidate handily won the seat and began a long and distinguished career in Parliament, so long that after the adult Jackson graduated from university in the mid-1960’s and began his own journalistic career, the same politician still held the seat he’d won in 1945.

Jackson was assigned to interview the aging MP, and he learned that the politician had lived in America prior to the second war, and had worked for …

“The leftist Louisville newspaper,” Jackson said that day in Denver. “What is the name of your leftist Louisville newspaper?”

By now I was becoming uncomfortably cognizant of a horde queued behind me. What newspaper in Louisville would fit Jackson’s description? He tried his best to jog my memory.

“The newspaper’s owners were wealthy liberals,” he said, “and they sold the paper to a huge media company.”

I blurted out: “The Binghams? The Courier-Journal?” Jackson came up out of his chair.

“Yes! The Courier-Journal, the Binghams – that’s it!”

And so it was that the member of parliament – the man whose campaign rally had been burned into Jackson’s memory by virtue of the color red – also had worked for the Louisville Courier-Journal. He had spoken of Louisville when interviewed by Jackson so many years before, and this was the cognitive impetus for Jackson’s reaction when he walked into our pub in 1994.

Red Room, geography, colors, politics and beer … all combining to make dozens of other beer lovers grudgingly wait their turns while the dots were connected for my sole benefit by the world’s greatest beer writer … well, I’ll remember these moments until the day I join Jackson at the celestial tap room, when I intend to ask the one question that most needs answering:

What was the journalist/politician’s name?*

I was lucky to chat with Michael Jackson twice more before his death in 2007, and while there’ll be no return visit to Louisville, it seems to me that in 1994, he gave the city’s re-emerging beer scene his seal of approval.

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AN UPDATE

* In January 2017, I finally got busy and compared notes on Jackson's childhood in Yorkshire with a list of parliamentary constituencies there and the results of the 1945 election, and the journalist/politician whose name I'd forgotten almost certainly was J. P. W. "Curly" Mallalieu, profiled here and here. The Courier-Journal isn't mentioned, but the Lexington Leader is. I'll have to think of a different celestial tap room query ...

Old Albania, 1994: Beer in the Land of the Eagle (Part 3 of 3).

Part 3 of 3.

Back in the Brewing Business in Tirana.

In contrast to the brewery at Korça, the plant dating from 1952 in Albania's capital city of Tirana is a utilitarian, white-tiled facility resembling a dairy more than a brewery. It was built with Soviet assistance, and looks it.

Our ride from the port city of Durres to the brewery in Tirana took us past rustic villages, abandoned and dilapidated concrete irrigation channels, wandering herds of livestock, Albania's sparkling new Coca-Cola bottling plant, row after row of shabby socialist tenements, and finally a vast lot where the burned-out remains of the city's Communist-era bus fleet reposed in blackened, skeletal lines.

At the time of our visit, the Tirana brewery hadn't yet been privatized, but it was working again. Typically, upon arriving at the gate we encountered reluctance at letting us enter. Eventually a wiry, chain-smoking worker with an impressive five o'clock shadow and darting, nervous eyes took an interest in us and went off in search of the plant director, who couldn't be found -- but by that time we were in, our guide Genci having persuaded someone to make a decision and let the foreigners come inside out of the blazing, midday sun.

Minutes later, we met the "lost" director in the hall, and he hastily grunted retroactive permission to enter, no doubt thanking his lucky stars that he no longer lived in a nation where such negligence might be rewarded with a trip to the eastern Albanian ore mines or the dungeon-like prisons of the citadel in Gjirokastra with its handy rooftop garden once used by firing squads, but now serving as a convenient point from which to survey the ancient hilltop town and surrounding mountains.

We were met by a diminutive, white-coated brewmaster who happily led us around the spartan, functional plant and answered questions through our interpreter. Like the older brewery in Korça, Tirana's brewery had ceased to function for quite some time. According to the employees, it closed because the former brewery bureaucrat had been paid off by entrepreneurs who were engaged in importing Macedonian Skopsko Pivo, and who were intent on eliminating the local competition.

Only one beer, a Czech-style pilsner, was being brewed at the time of our visit. Hops are purchased from Germany and barley from Italy. Yeast bought in Italy is being cultured in a so-called laboratory; some was foaming merrily in a kitchen-sink sized steel receptacle.

After 5 to 7 days of primary fermentation, the beer is pumped into the secondary tanks in the basement for 21 days of lagering at near-freezing temperatures. As we enjoyed the contrast in temperature between the frigid lagering cellar and the sunbaked streets outside, the brewmaster's assistant tapped off some two-week old, unfiltered "Tirana's Best" and proudly offered glasses to each of us. It was surprisingly tasty, and it was better than most of the Italian imports on sale in Albania.

Later, we sampled the filtered, bottled, final 11-degree product and noticed the lack of labels -- they haven't quite gotten to that yet, but they hope to soon. Appropriately, the beer is priced to sell below the lowest-priced imports; this is a sound strategy in a country as poor as Albania. On both sampling occasions, first in the cellar and then at the bottling line, we were joined in our tasting by the wiry, chain-smoking employee from the guard shack, who had accompanied us the entire route through the brewery.

As we surveyed the women from the bottling line, who were taking a break as the line was repaired, I spotted our guide discretely posted behind a machine, taking a final, furious drag on his smoke as he removed the cap from an unguarded bottle and drained most of it in one swallow. In my view, it was his well-deserved reward for being responsive to the visitors, and I thanked him for it.

Plenty of Beer to Wash Down Your Qofte.

With only one brewery operational, and another fighting to revive, the thirst for beer in Albania must be met from elsewhere.

Albania's economy now is entirely open, and the entrepreneurial spirit seems to have taken root with a vengeance. Numerous small restaurants and bars are in operation, and street stalls and kiosks -- some no more than tables set up around the perimeters of dusty squares and thoroughfares -- vend all necessary consumer goods. Much of the import-export trade centers on cash-and-carry middlemen who have purchased used trucks from Germany and Italy, and who make buying trips abroad and purchase whatever is for sale and can in turn be resold in Albania.

In short, Albania still is in the transitional economic phase known as Big Lots Capitalism.

Although this wide-open business climate is bringing plenty of beer into Albania, the country is no Germany when it comes to beer. At least tolerable foreign brands are available, most commonly Amstel and Kronenbourg (both brewed under license in neighboring Greece) and a number of Italian brands, which attests to the status of Italy as prime investor in Albania at this time.

Some of the Italian brands aren't bad: Dreher, Splugen Oro and Moretti, all spritzy, mild lagers, do a fine job of taking the edge off the Albanian heat if served cool. All these imports are available at reasonable prices that range from 50 cents to a dollar, depending on the venue, but they are numbingly similar in terms of flavor.

It should be noted that the Albanians themselves don't seem to care, and we can only speculate as to the availability of beer during Communist times. Our guides said that beer from Tirana and Korça was generally available in the old days, and reminded us that the traditional beverages of choice in the country are wine and raki (brandy in various forms), as well as non-alcoholic beverages like coffee and tea -- legacies of the Turkish presence over five centuries.

However, surprises lurk in the chaotic, nebulous Albanian beer market. We found a small, modern street side bar in Tirana that boasted Hacker-Pschorr (Helles) on draft and Pschorr-brau Hefe-Weisse in cooled bottles.

Genci and Agim weren't as taken with the Bavarian wheat beers as we were. The future of this particular establishment is somewhat in doubt, as it has changed hands once or twice since being opened (I think it is currently owned by an Italian tour company).

A Clean, Well Lighted Place.

Pending the completion of an Austrian-built hotel complex adjacent to the former Hoxha mausoleum, one of the most modern, well-appointed bars in Tirana is the Piano Bar, owned by two brothers who amassed capital while working in Germany and who developed a taste for German beers while in the process. The bar serves little food other than sandwiches, and it is being expanded to include a stage for live presentations and an underground keller where the stone walls and wooden beams were being cleaned and readied on the day of our visit. Of all the privately owned bars that we visited, the Piano Bar was the best and probably the beer-friendliest.

The Piano Bar sells a Greek-brewed, Henninger-licensed export contrivance known as Golden Lager, which turned out to be a solid, Helles-like lager. The owners are eager to begin selling Pilsner Urquell on draft as soon as they can purchase the necessary tapping equipment and find a way to ensure an uninterrupted supply. Also available are a half dozen bottled beers, including (drum roll, please) Rolling Rock.

Why? Because both Rolling Rock and Italy's Moretti are subsidiaries of Labatt's, and Moretti can be found throughout Albania.

In any case, Latrobe, Pennsylvania met Tirana, Albania on the last day of our visit when we bought a round of Rolling Rocks at the Piano Bar for Agim, Genci and Nico, the latter our affable driver who pronounced it wonderful as the others looked on with a great deal of skepticism.

It was too mild for them, and also for me, yet it was fun to watch their reactions as we drank the only American beer to be found in Albania -- at least until Anheuser-Busch or Miller rewards the Korça consortium with vast profits for their reconstruction efforts and begins churning out Black Elk Mountain Light in aluminum cans.

It took nine years, but I was able to locate and taste Albanian beer. Now I need a new obsession.

Are there hamburgers in North Korea?

Old Albania, 1994: Beer in the Land of the Eagle (Part 2 of 3).

Part 2 of 3.

One if by sea, 1985.

My first glimpse of the obscure and mysterious Balkan nation called Albania came in 1985. I was lounging on the deck of the ship traveling from Greece to Italy, eating straight from a tin of tuna with a camp fork and washing it down with Dutch Oranjeboom beer in a can, when the hazy shoreline of Albania became visible to the east.

After confirming our whereabouts on a nearby map -- the Greek island of Corfu could be seen to the west -- I went to the railing to investigate the shadowy headlands in the distance.

It didn't look like very much was there, only barren mountains sloping down to the sea and an occasional village. The bizarre concrete pillboxes and defense emplacements erected by the thousands by Enver Hoxha were not visible from the ship. I knew that Albania was the hardest of the hardline Communist regimes in Europe, and that Americans were seldom allowed to enter, but the biggest question of all was one that was unanswerable at the time.

Was there beer in Albania?

Two if by land, 1987.

My journey through Yugoslavia took me to Lake Ochrid, an ancient freshwater body of water on the border of the now-independent province of Macedonia and still inaccessible Albania. The public bus took me to the last village on the Yugoslav side, where I could go no further, and I was so intimidated by the soldiers and the fences at the crossing point that I was afraid to take pictures. Would they shoot the camera out of my trembling hands? Would it be an international incident?

Would I die not knowing whether there was beer in Albania?

Finally, 1994.

I finally was able to answer the question that had come up years before. By visiting the newly free and non-communist Albania for nine days, charting the progress and the problems in this living laboratory of social, economic and political change, and learning about the long and fascinating history of the Albanians, I now am able to confirm that yes, beer is being brewed and consumed in Albania.

The Korça Experience.

It would seem that Albanian commercial brewing history is entirely confined to the present century. There is no evidence to indicate that beer was a factor during five centuries of Turkish domination, although wine and raki (indigenous firewater of indiscriminate fermentable origin) make appearances throughout pre-20th century Albanian history and lore. For the record, raki is the chill-relieving, euphoria-promoting and paint-thinning social beverage of choice in Albania, and Albanian wine is honest if not spectacular.

The first commercial brewery in Albania in the 20th century was built in 1932 by an Italian company in the southeastern city of Korça (KOR-cha). The city is located in a fertile agricultural valley nestled in rugged mountains and is renowned for commerce (ancient trading routes with Greece and Macedonia), learning (the first Albanian language school was founded in Korça), ethnic culture, and as a hotbed of Albania's 20th-century quest for national identity.

The brewery is located on a tree-lined avenue on the outskirts of the compact city. Bulky iron gates bear the "Birra Korça" name in simple, red block letters. On the side of a building several yards away, a curiously pristine Communist-era historical marker notes the heroic action of anti-fascist partisans in 1945, who helped to liberate the area by burning some of the brewery's storage buildings.

As our guide Agim translated the words, I asked myself: How could this really be a victory if the beer wasn't liberated prior to the destruction of its home? Certainly the ideological struggle against capitalism could be suspended for a few rounds prior to the lighting of the arson's torch?

The Korça brewery reeks of faded, degraded elegance. It is constructed in the traditional tower layout, with the barley conveyed to the top for milling, the mash tun and brew kettle taking up the middle, and the fermenters and lagering tanks at the bottom. The mustard-colored, green-trimmed buildings are in decent shape in spite of the neglect of the past few years, but conditions were chaotic on the day of our visit. A horse and several dogs roamed the compound, and mounds of rusted machinery -- a staple feature of the contemporary Albanian landscape -- littered the yard. Inside, some windows were patched with cardboard and there were more than a few puddles made by leaking pipes

Yet, in spite of it all, the brewery at Korça -- the only one in Albania with a tradition of excellence, according to Agim -- is shuddering back to life following a period of inactivity since the collapse of Albania's economy in 1991-92.

It is being revived by a consortium of eleven investors who were victims of political persecution during the Communist era and who, as a means of settlement, were given a competitive advantage during the bidding to privatize industry.

On the day of our visit, the Korça brewery's first test batch of the new era was boiling in the kettle. The new owners have had to overcome formidable obstacles just to arrive at the point of brewing. The brewery was somewhere in the middle of the process renovation as we toured the building, and it had the littered appearance of a construction site. We were told that until the European Union chipped in several thousand cases of used, East German half-liter beer bottles, there was nothing in which to bottle the beer -- although a few dozen antique wooden kegs were left behind.

We briefly met with three of the new owners before departing. One of them worked in the brewery before and will now serve as the brewmaster, and he told us that they hope to resurrect Birra Korça's three styles: 12-degree pilsner, 12-degree dark lager and a special 14-degree lager. The pilsner will come first, and the others will follow.

Interestingly, the adjective used for "dark" to describe a dark beer is the Albanian word for "black." Owing to Albania's proximity to Montenegro ("Black Mountain"), the former Balkan kingdom and Yugoslav republic -- and more importantly, the birthplace of fictional detective Nero Wolfe -- marketing possibilities flowed liberally through my mind as we sat in the old, musty, high-ceilinged office and listened to the brewmaster explain his choice of German hops, Italian malt and yeast obtained at the brewery in Athens where Amstel is brewed under license.

I left with the impression that the consortium would be able to pull it off and put Birra Korça back on the brewing map.

Next: Tirana's beer.

Old Albania, 1994: Beer in the Land of the Eagle (Part 1 of 3).

Part 1 of 3.

Preface.

The only “corporate” day job I ever managed to hold for any length of time lasted from 1988 to 1989, with a solitary Christmas holiday in between. On the festive occasion of Yuletide, 1988, our office in downtown Louisville declared a contest for best work station decoration.

My friend and co-worker JP, who was well-connected within local radical leftist circles, went to work with entirely uncharacteristic zeal toward his stated goal of winning first prize.

He soon appeared with scissors, glue, armloads of construction paper and dusty old copies of the English-language edition of the “New Albania” propaganda magazine, which he’d borrowed from a socialist workers group somewhere in town.

Who even knew Louisville had such an organization – or that there were publications like this, filed hereabouts?

Come the day of judgement, Jeff had transformed his work pod into a veritable showplace of smudgy, dully-colored agitprop, with a few bright red placards bearing impenetrable phrases in the Albanian language, and photocopied images, stiffly posed, of Enver Hoxha and Ramiz Alia, the country’s Communist leaders.

But it was JP’s genuinely demented final touch that I’ll never forget, because snaking along the tops of his gray office partitions were strands of silver holiday tinsel, wrapped convincingly into menacing coils of barbed wire.

JP dubbed it “Christmas in Albania,” celebrating the world’s only officially atheistic state, and while contest judges couldn’t quite bring themselves to award him the top prize, he was given second place for sheer creativity alone.

It was a landmark moment.

The Albanians call their country Shqipëria.

My first and only visit to Albania occurred in 1994, when the obscure and isolated Balkan nation was struggling for a grip following the collapse of its rigid Communist regime.

Shortly after my ex-wife and I departed Albania, the country’s economy crumbled in the wake of an immense financial “pyramid” scandal, and sadly, boatloads of Albanians again took to the Adriatic, seeking refuge and a better life in Italy.

No sooner had Albania staggered back to its feet than the Kosovo conflict flared up. The NATO bombing of neighboring Serbia in 1999 involved Albania in more than a peripheral way, owing to Kosovo’s predominately ethnic Albanian population.

For 15 years since then, Albania has been reasonably stable, and remains engaged in a long, painstaking climb toward grabbing the economic carrot dangled by the European Union – except that now, in the midst of the EU’s various identity, immigration, ISIS and economic crises, when no one seems to know what being European means, the country’s oft-delayed acceptance into the EU is likely to be set back once again.

Nothing has been easy for the Albanians, arguably the continent’s longest-serving underdogs.

Perhaps that’s why Albania has been a recurring, seemingly eternal source of fascination for me. Three years ago, there was a brief correspondence with a brewpub operator in Tirana, during which we discussed brewing a New Albanian/Old Albanian collaboration beer. Nothing came of it, although it caused me to speculate on the status of people, businesses and breweries experienced so very long ago.

It’s probably time to go back for a follow-up. Until then, here is my account of the 1994 trip. In terms of updates, I’ve no desire to be exhaustive. The two breweries mentioned, one in Korça and the other in Tirana, are operational in the year 2016. There are a handful of others: Norga, Kaon, Stela and Puka among them.

As for the people – Genci, Agim, Nico and many others – I’m honestly clueless. I hope they’re doing well. Now, let's turn back the clock to the summer of 1994.

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Introduction: What is Albania?

Albania is nine overheated and gritty days spent in a pockmarked Fiat crisscrossing the central and southern Albanian landscape in the company of two successive guides and a deft, talented driver whose skill at dodging pedestrians, cyclists, horse-drawn carts, herds of sheep and sagging road shoulders put us at "ease" to focus on splendid mountains, peeling buildings, demolished Communist monuments, ubiquitous concrete pillboxes - and most importantly – the hardy, resilient, long-suffering Albanian people.

It is climbing the twisted, shadowed, cobblestone alleyways of the old city of Berat, a short and steep walk away from the rotting 60's-era public buildings and a restored mosque across the main square from the huge pile of gravel and broken concrete marking the spot where the statue of the former dictator Enver Hoxha once stood, and where the people with pick-axes and wheelbarrows could be seen physically dismantling the legacy of Communist rule within minutes (and centuries) of our vantage point amid the Ottoman dwellings that survived earlier tyrannies.

It is driving three hours on the "highway" from the coastal city of Vlore, where broad, shabby, tree-lined avenues lead to the port, a short boat ride from the place the Soviets used as a submarine base in the 1950s, and then ascending the forested mountains, pausing just before the crest to dine on freshly grilled lamb, black olives and tangy feta cheese, washed down with cold Italian lager, before going over the top for the 5 and 1/2 hour descent through a vertical cactus-and-sagebrush landscape giving way to sheer ocean cliffs that somehow had been made to cradle a tortuous and crumbling switchback asphalt ribbon without guardrails that demanded patience and concentration of all drivers, and the necessity of honking at every blind curve to clear the path ahead as the blue ocean incessantly meets the rocks, so far below.

It is being willingly and joyfully hustled by entrepreneurial urchins atop the craggy peak in Kruje that boasts the restored castle of Skanderbeg, national hero, slayer of Turks and role model for generations of Albanians, permitting the aspiring young businessmen to hawk postcards and needlework in fractured English -- but with considerable enthusiasm and a certain innocence, since Albania isn't yet overrun with tourists -- and being sure to sweep away the dried goat droppings before sitting on the boulders to haggle over wares in a midday sun made far more intense by the sleep-inducing beer enjoyed at the privately-owned roadside cafe on the way up the hill.

It is walking along the wharf at Durres and gazing up at the Chinese cranes, watching a handful of shirtless workers lazily chip away at the rust and cracked paint on the hull of a boat that may have witnessed the mass exodus of Albanians to Italy during the problematic winter when Communism collapsed, now reduced to serenely observing the re-enactment of those events by an Italian documentary film crew housed in the same seaside Italianate, pre-war grand hotel with lime green walls and red marble floors where we stayed, the film crew bitterly complaining about the quality of the $2.50-a-bottle Albanian Merlot wine and the greasy "beefsteak" before drinking and eating every bit of it, anyway, and retreating to the bar to watch the World Cup live from America.

It's enough to make a tourist awfully thirsty.

Next: The Korça Experience.

"The End of an Error," 20 years later.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-- George Santayana

Back on April 10, I was considering a special pub opening today to mark the occasion. Let's just say that it slipped my mind, but providentially, yesterday's iPhone photo deletion marathon provided a needed last-minute jolt.

Perhaps a special Sunday pub opening day on October 19?

Regular customer EN took this photo at the Public House yesterday. It's hard to believe that while so much has changed, this sheet still remains taped and tacked to the beam behind the bar after almost two decades. It's almost like a shrine, except that for the most part, generationally, Eddie LaDuke is forgotten. Not for me. It's a daily remind: Never promote otherwise capable sports writers to positions anywhere outside the sports department. Doing so simply cannot end well.

But there's always Bill Hanson. As Erich Honecker was to the Berlin Wall, Hanson is (and always will be) to the News and Tribune Paywall. When he's finally gone, perhaps another printout will be merited.

May it remain affixed proudly, another 20 years.

Perhaps a special Sunday pub opening day on October 19?

Regular customer EN took this photo at the Public House yesterday. It's hard to believe that while so much has changed, this sheet still remains taped and tacked to the beam behind the bar after almost two decades. It's almost like a shrine, except that for the most part, generationally, Eddie LaDuke is forgotten. Not for me. It's a daily remind: Never promote otherwise capable sports writers to positions anywhere outside the sports department. Doing so simply cannot end well.

But there's always Bill Hanson. As Erich Honecker was to the Berlin Wall, Hanson is (and always will be) to the News and Tribune Paywall. When he's finally gone, perhaps another printout will be merited.

May it remain affixed proudly, another 20 years.

"Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red," my column at LouisvilleBeer.com

I'll always be proud that the real Michael Jackson once set foot in New Albany. Even so early in my career of beer, it was an affirmation that I'd done it the right way. 

Louisville Craft Beer Week is here, and among the many things about LCBW that you should know is this tidbit:

"Text LCBW to 72727 to receive texts throughout Craft Beer Week reminding you of daily events, specials, and giveaways."

Meanwhile, I'm still thinking about what brought us here. But more than that, I'm thinking about what's next.

Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

It’s an old story, but one I delight in retelling, and Louisville Craft Beer Week strikes me as the perfect time to do so.

Michael Jackson unexpectedly visited the former Rich O’s Public House in November, 1994, a tad more than two years after we opened. If I hadn’t been drinking for much of the same day, tagging along as the Beer Hunter made pre-arranged appearances at Bluegrass Brewing Company and the now defunct Silo, I’d have been far too nervous to properly function as host.

I’ll be forever grateful that Jackson consented to accompany our ragged band of awed and inebriated fledgling beer enthusiasts on yet another beer hunt, this one at 9:00 p.m., from downtown Louisville across the Ohio River to an embarrassingly unfinished strip mall space that at the time could offer only three beers on tap.

Moreover, knowing that most of the regulars would be following Jackson through Louisville, we’d closed the pub for the day. Minutes ahead of the approaching motorcade, there was barely enough time to dash inside, flick light switches, sweep up and make the barroom somewhat presentable. Following hours of one-ounce samples, Jackson proceeded to order and consume a full 20-oz Imperial pint of Sierra Nevada Porter, and upon departure an hour and a half later, made this wry observation:

“I’ve been to many pubs in America, and I’ve never seen one quite like this.”