BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Why is Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout on tap at Pints&union?

Last night my pal Blake asked a perfectly legitimate question, which I'll paraphrase to suit this family-oriented publication.

How can the guy who always spoke so persuasively and brilliantly against the robber baron brewing conglomerate AB-InBev and its craft brewery acquisitions -- particularly Goose "Trojan Goose" Island -- now be pouring Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout at the pub where he programs beer?

It's a very good question, and I'm surprised it took a whole week for someone to ask it.

This fact alone hints at part of the answer: It's true that my career in beer goes back a very long way, but when Pints&union debuted in August, 2018, one book closed and another opened. A new beer narrative began, in which I no longer was Reggie Jackson's "straw that stirs the drink," but rather the guy playing rhythm guitar in someone else's band. 

And this, my friends, is genuinely relevant in the context of reinventing oneself. Logically speaking, a reinvention without change isn't a reinvention at all.

In the space below you will find the longer explanation of how diplomatic relations were restored between the Beer Socialist (that's me) and the firm of LC Nadorff and Son, purveyor of AB-InBev wares in Floyd County. Since the Rhinegeist keg purchase in April documented below, Pints&union has added Bud Light, Michelob Ultra and Boddington's -- all from Nadorff's book.

I'm not a fan of these beers. Our customers are. Nothing more needs to be said.

When Nadorff's Jason Mott asked me if we'd like to have the only 1/6 barrel of Bourbon County Brand Stout that his wholesale house was allocated, I thought about it long and hard before immediately agreeing to purchase it.

By doing so I was happily patronizing a locally-owned business with deep roots in New Albany. The beer itself always was fine, and so far our customers have approved in spite of a necessarily dear price tag. Do I like where the profits go? No. Do I plan to make it a habit? Beats me; probably not.

But if Nixon went to China, I can be a cussed contrarian without losing sleep.

Ultimately it all has to do with the sole aspect of our lives that stays the same, namely change. I kept one ball in the air for 25 years, then it was finished and I departed, hoping to find some way for an old dog to learn new tricks. Now I'm liberated, if only temporarily. There'll be new orthodoxies, because there always are. The dialectic never ends.

However, my fundamental belief systems remain intact, although maybe ... just maybe ... I'm learning that 85% internal compliance is perfectly impeccable. A guy has to relax every now and then, and play against type.

At least I possess fundamental belief systems, something quite a few Christian fans of Donald Trump might do well to consider while gazing into their mirrors.

I appreciate Blake's question and I hope this has been an adequate answer. Here's the April post mentioned previously.

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BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Fruited sour dark ale from the Bud Light handlers, or how my acquaintance with LC Nadorff and Son was renewed.

America's three-tier distribution system for beverage alcohol has eroded at the edges in recent years, but it remains largely intact.

The post-Prohibition regulatory model was designed to separate producers (brewers, distillers, vintners) from direct involvement in retail sales by inserting a wholesaler middleman into the transaction.

Nowadays the most obvious exceptions to the three-tier norm are small brewers and winemakers, who are allowed to sell directly to the public from their tap rooms and tasting areas.

In 35 states (including Indiana) some form of self-distribution is allowed. For instance, so far at Pints&union I've purchased directly from the Donum Dei brewery, which is perfectly legal because we're all situated in Indiana. Conversely, to buy from a Louisville brewery would require the beer to be handled by a licensed wholesaler in Indiana.

All this is prelude to today being a momentous and perhaps even an historic occasion, because for the first time since 2002 (or thereabouts) I'll be accepting delivery of a keg of beer for resale at Pints&union via the beer wholesaler known as LC Nadorff and Son.

Therein lies a brief story about the way that one's point of view evolves over time. To begin, I subscribe to the Pour Fool theory of a beer drinker's (and beer vendor's) life.

The Pour Fool rules: "FUCK Budweiser: Your Basic Early Morning, Fed-Up Rant."

Why sugarcoat it? Everyone knows my feelings about the matter, and historically, Nadorff as a wholesaler has been what we would call a "Bud House," with a measure of territorial exclusivity for the distribution of Anheuser-Busch brands (and later the merged AB-InBev range).

Start with decades of personal antipathy toward Budweiser, and add into the mix a long tenure at NABC's Pizzeria & Public House devoted to purging mainstream beers from the premises, it's easy to see why there came a point in time roughly two decades ago when there was little interaction between Roger and LC Nadorff.

It wasn't that I ever had anything against Nadorff, because they've always been pleasant people. However, as befits the position of any beer wholesaler in America, Nadorff always occupied the very middle of the chain between a multinational brewing conglomerate and a publican who despised the conglomerate.

When NABC began brewing its own beer, we made the decision to eliminate mass-market beers from the building. As such, Nadorff was taken out of the loop. 

But here's the thing.

I might well be included on AB-InBev's "enemies" list, but I'm also a strident supporter of independent local businesses, and while Nadorff's bread and butter always has been the AB-InBev portfolio, it remains a family-owned firm with deep roots in New Albany -- so much so that 120 years ago there was a Nadorff family brewery in town.

Six or seven years ago when NABC did a beer tasting event on behalf of the Carnegie Center museum we were positioned adjacent to Nadorff's table. I began chatting with Jason Mott, a youthful member of the founding family. This was prior to AB-InBev's various "craft" brewery acquisitions, but we had a good conversation and I finally began considering Nadorff in the context of localism.

At this juncture I was full-tilt with trying to sell NABC-brewed beers, and subsequently there was my departure from the company, followed by years in the wilderness contemplating next steps. Resurfacing as Joe's beer director at Pints&union, I was at the pub one morning earlier this year when in walked Jason, accompanied by the area sales rep for Cincinnati's Rhinegeist.

There'd have been a time when Nadorff's contract with AB-InBev might have excluded the presence of an American "craft" brewer like Rhinegeist, but times have changed, and we had yet another delightful talk. These days Nadorff carries beer from a few small Indiana brewers and imported brands as well as Rhinegeist and the AB-InBev acquisitions (Goose Island, Elysian, et al).

I expressed interest in occasional draft visitations with Rhinegeist's brands, which brings me full circle to this afternoon, when Nadorff will drop off a sixth-barrel of Rhinegeist Ruby Paradox, a "fruited sour dark ale."

That's right, fruited sour dark ale from the Bud Light handlers, but the Bud Light handlers are the local New Albany guys, and at this point in my life it's a distinction that matters to me. Whatever the merits and demerits of the three-tier system, the fact remains that at least in Indiana, there aren't many wholesalers like Nadorff still standing.

While it's probably impossible to be a true "underdog" conveying AB-InBev products, in wholesaler terms Nadorff is scrambling like all the rest to find their place in the crazy quilt of the Post-Craft Beer Era.

Owing to the nature of the beer program we're trying to build at Pint&union -- traditionalist, with occasional flights of fancy -- I can't predict how often we'll be pouring Nadorff's portfolio, and yet it's invigorating to renew a local connection.

We need more of that, not less, so cheers to a renewed acquaintance.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Samson, or an unexpected twist in the Budweiser vs. Budvar beer trademark war.

That's me in the cellars at the Samson brewery in České Budějovice during the glorious 2004 motorcoach tour. I believe it was a strong dark lager, and my recollection is that it was very tasty. It was fun visiting both the city's breweries, Samson and Budvar.

Meanwhile Evan Rail's essay about the current prospects for these two companies is wonderful. In the early 1990s, the FOSSILs homebrewing club was a tad politicized on the topic of Budvar -- I've no clue why -- and a favored theme was protecting the brewery from the predations of rabid St. Louis-based imperialists, if necessary by forming international brigades to travel to Southern Bohemia and guard the brewhouse.

It's all summarized in this catch-all post of mine from 2012.

As the Budweisers still battle, let's look back to 1997 and "Anheuser-Busch, Gone Home."

 ... The defunct St. Louis Cultural Center wasn’t a cafe. It was meant to be a nice, big, fat, succulent carrot to be waved in the deprived, grubby faces of the citizens of Ceske Budejovice, those only recently roboticized socialist drones, and one meant to entice them, to inflate (and fellate) their expectations, and to purchase their acquiescence as Anheuser-Busch negotiated for a stake in the city’s famous brewery. It was the American imperialist’s Trojan Horse, its magnanimous surface glitter concealing the industrial technologists, the glassy-eyed bean counters, the soulless pitch men and the corporate strategists without whom A-B would be nothing more than a mere brewer of second-rate beer.

Rail considers the century-plus-old controversy over the "real" Budweiser, then delivers the sweeping curve, because what none of us considered was the possibility that AB InBev would take over not Budvar but Samson, and proceed to make it better for primarily local distribution.

It doesn't sound threatening at all.

Yet.

The Original Originals — In the Czech Republic, the Budweiser War Opens an Eastern Front, by Evan Rail (Good Beer Hunting)

Beer trademark wars might feel like the result of a crowded contemporary marketplace, but breweries have been filing C&Ds since way before Stone sued Keystone. That high-profile case seems to be taking a while, but it pales in comparison to the infamous global battle over the name “Budweiser,” which has gone on for about 112 years—long enough to merit its own Wikipedia entry. The commonly told version of that battle says that the original Budweiser actually comes from the Czech city of České Budějovice, a spire-capped, tower-filled South Bohemian burg that German speakers traditionally call Budweis. Unfortunately, the commonly told version is wrong.

As the story goes, in 1876, a St. Louis brewery started making a Lager it called Budweiser, meaning “from Budweis,” after the famous beer from the historical Czech town. The “original” Budweiser, it notes, is actually Budvar, a small Czech brewery that has been fighting the giant Anheuser-Busch—and now its parent company AB InBev—on multiple fronts for the right to use the Budweiser name since before World War I.

That version of the story has a couple of big holes, starting with the fact that Budvar—aka Budweiser Budvar—was founded in 1895. The American version dates to 1876. If the Czech Budweiser is 19 years younger, you might ask, how can it be the original?

Like many tales involving language, ethnicity and identity in the palimpsests of Central Europe, the answer isn’t exactly straightforward ...

snip

... Cynics will probably say there has to be some kind of long game in play, a chance for AB InBev to muddy the waters or gain some leverage. That might be true. But at the most basic level, it’s hard not to appreciate that a floundering Czech brewery with a boatload of history was saved when the Brazilian-Belgian giant bought Samson. Additionally, it’s easy to like what’s in the glass: I tried a grocery-store-purchased Samson this week, and it was delicious.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Meet my new hero, Josh Noel of Seattle's Cloudburst Brewing, who flashed an important message to AB InBev.

Photo credit: from Noel's article.

Thanks to JH for the link.

I've loathed Anheuser-Busch (later AB-InBev) for so long that I couldn't begin to specify an anniversary date. Apparently the Pour Fool has, too, and in this snippet he offers partial explanation.

TRY to get this straight: The ONLY corporate interest about which you need to have ANY worries as a buyer or partner of a craft brewery is Anheuser Busch, aka AB/InBev. PERIOD. They are the only corporation on the face of the planet which combines the toxic mix of the arrogance to truly believe that we don’t need and shouldn’t be allowed to have any choices available to us in beer with the arrogance and deep enough pockets to think that they can really, literally set about pursuing a strategy that will force all of us who drink craft beer back into being just peachy with a lifetime of mindlessly, soullessly swilling tepid, watery adjunct lagers and nothing else.

Oddly, the particular brand of American beer I despise the most is not manufactured by AB-InBev, although this isn't particularly relevant at the moment.

Meanwhile, here in Nawbany it is Harvest Homecoming, our annual autumn street festival. This weekend there'll be hundreds -- nay, thousands -- of natives and visitors cranked on vile liquids like Bud Light and Michelob Ultra.

Over time, I've learned to ignore the carnage ... mostly.

After all, few folks in the beer business locally have been in the position of working in an AB-InBev-free environment, as I did at NABC all those years.

It was sheer bliss of my own inspired creation, and we proved that it wasn't necessary to pander to low common denominators. Nothing lasts forever, but it was great fun at the time, and now I/we move on.

As for that guy at the Great American Beer Festival: you rock.

So, about that T-shirt … by Josh Noel

A chuckle rippled through the craft beer industry a couple of weeks ago when one of three people to accept a Great American Beer Festival medal on behalf of Seattle’s Cloudburst Brewing used his 10 seconds of fame to unbutton his flannel shirt and display a salty sentiment to the crowd, both in the auditorium and those live streaming the event at home.

In red letters, below a mischievous grin and a Seattle Mariners cap, his white T-shirt read:

FUCK

AB-INBEV

While the identity of that scalawag made the rounds — it was Cloudburst founder Steve Luke — what slipped past most people was Luke’s background: he worked for Elysian Brewing when that brewery sold to Anheuser-Busch (the American subsidiary of the world’s largest beer company, Anheuser-Busch InBev) in 2015. He wasn’t simply a passive observer.

An informative interview follows, including this main point.

Q: It’s interesting you say that about being “the little guy” because there’s this quote from Felipe Szpigel, who runs Anheuser-Busch’s craft portfolio, that made it into Chapter 30 of the book, where he very directly refutes that notion: “The concept of big versus small in craft is both old and unrealistic. There have never been so many beer options available to consumers, and that’s great. Consumers, just like retailers and wholesalers, have options. From our perspective, our focus is on celebrating, and amplifying, the beers, brands and cultures we have in our craft portfolio to provide great options to enjoy. We welcome all the brewers and cider makers that are focused on consumers and sharing amazing beers, ciders and experiences, as we are.” What do you make of that — the idea that there’s no such thing as big and small craft breweries competing anymore?

A: It shows me how scary good they are at bending the truth and blurring reality. A lot of what Felipe says, especially the second half of that statement, is a shared sentiment with small, independent craft brewers. But the story and reality of big versus small is alive and well, and will be forever. As a giant, ABI has the financial resources, the scales of economies, the vertical integration of ingredients, and the deepest of distribution networks that no small brewer will ever have. With those advantages, ABI has the ability to undercut every player in craft beer at a moment’s notice — and they do! They do this in every market, on the shelves and in bars. Their focus behind scenes is on choking out the beers, brands, and cultures of craft brewers — not celebrating and amplifying them.

THE BEER BEAT: This just might be the Pour Fool's greatest rant: "Open Letter to The Bud Sell-Outs: Cowboy Up, Whiners."

"There is one old saw that the 'owners' of these former craft breweries should take to heart and if any of you have never heard it, allow me ... 'You Made Your Bed, Now Lie In It.' "

Ladies and gentleman, give it up for Steve Foolbody (The Pour Fool).

It's the best summary yet offered, as truthfully attesting to the phenomenon of Trojan Zombie Afterlife Breweries and their former owners. Here's a relevant non-brewing history lesson.

Vidkun Quisling, in full Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonsson Quisling, (born July 18, 1887, Fyresdal, Norway—died October 24, 1945, Akershus Fortress, Oslo), Norwegian army officer whose collaboration with the Germans in their occupation of Norway during World War II established his name as a synonym for “traitor.”

It's too bad the word Quisling has gone out of fashion, isn't it?

Open Letter to The Bud Sell-Outs: Cowboy Up, Whiners

 ... To be precise about this, there is no more "Ely**an Brewing" in Seattle. That brewery is now, accurately, Anheuser Busch Seattle. It's the same with all those others who sold out. Breckenridge Brewing is now Anheuser Busch Colorado. Devil's Backbone is now Anheuser Busch, East Bicycle, Virginia. Karbach: AB Texas. Four Peaks? AB Arizona. Golden Road Brewing is now ABLA. 10 Barrel is now Anheuser Busch of Bend, OR. Blue Point Brewing is now ABNY. Wicked Weed is now Anheuser Busch North Carolina, RateBeer.com is now ABRateBeer.com...

...and the first craft brewery to sell out to AB, Goose Island Brewing of Chicago, is now, literally and practically, Anheuser Busch Brewing Company of Chicago, Illinois.

This is not hyperbole or any attempt to insult all these breweries and their present staffs or anyone except their former owners...I'll get around to them in a few minutes. What this is IS an attempt to introduce some honesty into this ongoing discussion. These companies may have retained the original owners as figureheads - hood ornaments, as I have come to think of them - but they are, in fact and legally, owned by Anheuser Busch and its parent company, AB/InBev, based in Leuven. Belgium and in Brazil. They may have the same signage and you probably will never see any banners around that say, "A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of AB/InBev", but that's just because AB knows now and has known for at least the past 25 years that MOST of us who have been involved in the Craft Beer Boom see them as the minions of Satan, if not actually Satan himself. Their 120 years history of corporate thuggery and ruthless suppression of the entire American beer industry was what drove me to hate them but then they also set themselves up as a blatant and committed adversary to the entire Indie/Craft culture, speaking and acting as if our decision to drink something else was either just youthful folly or an organized attempt to usurp what they see as their Divine Right to dominate All Things Beer in America. They endlessly ridicule small, independent American brewers as "amateurs" and the beers as "bitter and stale", ridiculing the idea that creative brewing is a worthy idea, with smarmy, self-congratulatory ads like their notorious Super Bowl TV spot, in which they singled out - as the sign of effete craft pretension - a "Peach Pumpkin Ale"...which a brewery they had acquired about sixty days earlier, the aforementioned "Ely**an", has just produced a month before. These are the people who declared open war on craft brewing, while saying, out of the other side of their mouths, they see themselves as "a friend to brewers everywhere".

Many of the owners of those craft breweries who bent over and greased up for AB had, themselves, made loud and brash statements about the evils of AB.

SNIP

All of these people are different personalities and make different beers. But one thing about them has become suspiciously and almost eerily identical: suddenly, as though by magic, selling a brewery to the avowed enemy of the culture that built their own businesses...was okay. Just like that; many of them literally the same day that they signed the papers. It may be a little Alex "Douchebag" Jones-y of me to suggest it but it's...it's almost like Anheuser Busch's marketing department produced a list of talking points for their newly discredited hood ornaments to use in speaking about their Whore-Out Moment and told them to just keep on repeating that and For God's Sake, STAY ON MESSAGE!

"This will help us grow and make Better Beer!"

"This will make it easier for you to get our products!"

"This will mean that our brewers can be even more creative!"

"This doesn't mean, anything, really!"

"We expect a great partnership* with AB/InBev and they're just here to advise us and make us more efficient!"

And my own favorite...

"Nothing has changed!"

I have personally watched people parrot that last nugget twice, in person, and saw actual spittle flying from their mouths. That's the Hail Mary of these empty phrases; the fall-back exclamation when it appears that your bullshit is not selling. "Nothing has changed! Really. We're just the same company you've known and trusted (translation: "handed over your money to"), all this time!"

Bullshit.

THE BEER BEAT: Just so you know, Devil's Backbone is a Trojan Zombie Afterlife Brewery, Beer Necessities has perished, and AB InBev remains a pack o'vermin.

Look, everyone.

It's another marvelous handcrafted "craft" brewer from somewhere else, coming to Louisville because ... America.

Virginia brewery expanding distribution to Louisville, by Bridgett Weaver (Business First Louisville)

Beer ye, beer ye: A Virginia brewery, focused on lagers and other traditional German-style beers, soon will distribute to Louisville.

Devils Backbone Brewery, located in the hills of rural Virginia, will join Louisville's growing brew options. It will appear on tap to Louisville bars and restaurants early next month, shortly after the Super Bowl. Bottle distribution at retailers, bars and restaurants is expected to start in April.

The reporter follows with a Horatio Alger-like story of a small, growing indie brewer, and that's really nice and everything, but unfortunately she omits a highly pertinent fact: Since 2016, Devil's Backbone has been stone cold dead, at least insofar as independent "craft" brewers are concerned.

You see, 2016 was when Devil's Backbone was swallowed whole by the brewing python otherwise known as AB In-Bev, a fact that caused the Trojan's Backbone Brewery an embarrassing problem back in August, 2016.

Amid deal with Anheuser-Busch, craft brewery gets kicked out of its own festival, by Fritz Hahn (Washington Post)

Next weekend, representatives of 85 breweries from across Virginia will gather in the fields surrounding Devils Backbone’s Basecamp Brewpub in Roseland, Va., for the fifth Virginia Craft Brewers Fest. They’ll be joined by a crowd of 3,000 beer lovers, some of whom will be camping — and even “glamping” in deluxe tents — in the adjacent meadows. Three Sheets to the Wind, a yacht rock cover band, will perform.

The event has come a long way since 2012, when two dozen breweries brought 48 beers to the same location for a crowd of 1,250 to taste, and a few dozen beers were judged in the first Virginia Craft Beer Cup competition. Devils Backbone’s Schwartz Bier was named best of show, the first of the brewery’s three consecutive titles. (Talk about a home-field advantage.)

But 2016 is a transitional year for the festival: This will be the first time it won’t include the announcement of the winners of the Virginia Craft Beer Cup, which has grown to award medals in 30 categories. This will be the last time the festival will be held at Devils Backbone, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And for the first time, the brewery that helped found the festival and hosts it won’t be eligible for any awards.

That’s because on April 12, Devils Backbone, Virginia’s largest and most decorated brewery, announced it was being acquired by Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Budweiser, for an undisclosed sum. The backlash was immediate. On the brewery’s Facebook page and in online beer forums, former fans posted screeds accusing the brewery of selling out and swearing they would never buy another Vienna Lager. (Those were the nicer ones.)

Yes, Devil's Backbone is yet another Trojan Zombie Afterlife Brewery in AB-InBev's High End collection of trophies. In 2015, the Pour Fool provided context for deals like this one.

Cigar City vs. AB: An Open Letter to Joey Redner, by Steve Foolbody (Pour Fool)

 ... Sooner or later, some brewery owner is going to stare down the barrel of one of those prohibitive buy-out offers from Anheuser Busch or AB/InBev or whatever that pack o’ vermin is calling itself this week and they’re going to think beyond the planetary-scale impact such dollars will have on their own bank accounts and realize that pulling the trigger on this deal, while making that villa in the Bahamas a lot more feasible, is also going to sentence them personally and their staffs to forever being considered sell-outs and greedheads and douche-nozzles by many, many of the same people they saw come into their taprooms and growler stations when they were just starting out. It will permanently remove them from serious consideration when American craft beer fans speak of the country’s great breweries. Because the instant the last curlicue at the end of their signature trails out on that sales agreement, that brewery is no longer a part of that booming American phenomenon called “Craft Beer”. It cannot be. Because it is now nothing more than a regional outpost for corporate greed, bean-counting, arrogance, and Money Is Everything thinking.

Beautiful: "Pack o’ vermin."

Subsequently it was revealed that Redner actually had made it all the way to the altar with AB InBev before the deal fell through, after which Cigar City quickly eloped with Fireman Capital, which owns Oskar Blues, among others.

Al this preceding background was necessary for a welcomed death notice.

Actually I'm glad I barely knew Beer Necessities existed, or I'd have been compelled to crusade against it.

Repeat after me: "Pack o’ vermin." Like a plague virus, nothing AB InBev touches can be considered healthy or good.

I reiterate: Follow the money. There's enough excellent beer out in this and any other market to preclude supporting vermin with your money.

THE BEER BEAT: On inauthenticity, disinformation, RateBeer and those disembodied breweries of the Trojan Zombie Afterlife.

Today, recommended reading.

Jim Vorel's essay appeared in mid-2017, and nicely outlines a position of beer-drinking principle when it comes those breweries in the Trojan Zombie Afterlife Quadrant.

The BS Arguments of Craft Beer Sell-Outs: How Brewery Buyouts Hurt Craft Beer, by Jim Vorel (Paste Magazine)

Let me tell you who I care about, in the world of beer: I care about the craft beer industry as a whole. I care about selection and availability of great craft beer, and at night I dream of a world where great beer from independent breweries can be accessed just about anywhere.

That dream is currently under attack, primarily by so-called “Big Beer,” but not entirely. For all of the wrangling and shady dealing that AB-InBev and MillerCoors are conducting in the American beer market, equally disturbing is the propensity of beer geeks and even food & drink publications to rationalize and apologize for the buyouts and practices that are currently driving craft beer into the most dangerous situation it’s faced in more than a decade. In some cases, would-be allies are willingly parroting back the exact marketing copy that AB-InBev would love to place in their mouths. Other times, beer drinkers are simply accepting the bullshit reassurances of just-purchased breweries who have huge monetary incentives to be dishonest.

But don’t take our word for it. We’re not here to simply rant and rave—we’re here to give you specific examples of BS rationalizations you’ll see in the wake of every major brewery buyout. We’re here to point out the logical chasms and blatant hypocrisy that proliferate in the public response to buyouts. And we’re here to point out exactly why these buyouts are so capable of devastating the craft brewing industry.

More recently, Fritz Hahn brilliantly connects the dots between AB-InBev, ZX Ventures and RateBeer.

The world’s biggest brewing company is thirsty for your data, by Fritz Hahn (Washington Post)

Anheuser-Busch InBev is the biggest brewing company in the world, but it has a problem it can’t shake ...

... But as sales of hoppy IPAs continue to surge, and sales of Light (and Lite) macrobrews continue to drop, AB InBev is recalibrating its approach. Rather than buying up as many craft-beer producers as it can, it’s using its vast resources to buy data — tons of it — through a little-known division called ZX Ventures.

"So where are the growth opportunities?"

That’s where ZX Ventures comes in. According to its mission statement, “ZX Ventures is hopelessly dedicated to creating and analyzing the data necessary for determining our ideal strategies, products and technologies. We believe that the more we know and learn about our consumers and products, the better chance we have of anticipating their needs in the future.”

Translation: They want to know everything about purchasing patterns and decisions. What are customers looking for? What are influencers thinking? How can they make it easier to get AB InBev’s products into the hands of people who might want beer?

ZX Ventures’ broad portfolio includes last year’s purchase of Northern Brewer Homebrew Supply and Midwest Supplies, two of the largest home-brewing businesses in the country. It also has a minority stake in PicoBrew, the countertop home-brewing system that uses Keuriglike “PicoPacks” to make beer in a certain style or mimic the recipe of an existing brand.

In October 2016, ZX Ventures purchased a minority interest in RateBeer, a 17-year-old international beer-rating site that has grown to become one of the largest online databases of crowdsourced beer, brewery and bar rankings in the world. But neither RateBeer nor ZX Ventures publicized the deal until June 2017, when beer website Good Beer Hunting published a story about the move. ZX Ventures did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Because it's all about the information, and RateBeer is like a homing device fixed to the throats of the "craft" beer sheeple.

If e-commerce is off the table, then the most important way for AB InBev to make money in an increasingly crowded marketplace is to get the right beer in front of the right customers at the right time. And right now, the world’s biggest brewer is tapping into a steady flow of data that can help it do just that.

If Trump were to consider deporting counter-revolutionary swine like these, I might consider voting for him.

ZX Ventures is a global incubator, operator, and venture capital team backed by Anheuser-Busch InBev. We are a small army of futurists, dreamers, doers, designers, engineers, scientists, marketers, brewers, builders, and data geeks.

MAINTAINING CONSUMER BONDS
Our goal is to make products, services, and technologies that bring people together and provide solutions for consumer needs. We want to positively impact society and our environment and celebrate the best this life has to offer. We're not afraid to break the mold of tradition, including launching businesses that sell directly to our customer-base. Yes, our aim is to generate profits, but those won’t come without first creating smiles, laughs and making the world a better place through innovative products, technologies, experiences and services. The more positive connections we facilitate, the more we learn about our consumers and products, and the better chance we have of anticipating their needs in the future.We truly believe that the consumer is the boss and constantly center our actions around what best fits their needs.

I'll venture one prediction about the future, in the sense that "IPA" already is sucked dry of meaning and lost to those of a "craft" persuasion. Just as decades of mass-market insipidity rendered the style "Pilsner" moot, so will the supermarket aisle stacks of Trojan Zombie Afterlife "IPAs" commoditize the concept.

Not a bold prediction, just an obvious one.

THE BEER BEAT: Scofflaw Brewing flies the bird as AB InBev shareholders watch with preda-masturbatory glee.

Photo credit: Paste.

The ensuing scenario can be easily imagined.

Somewhere deep inside the bowels of AB InBev, one among a legion of highly paid thievery consultants peruses the Paste article with ill-contained and growing enthusiasm.

"It's just what we need," he says to himself while frantically calculating shelf space algorithms.

"An edgy vibe, perfect for capturing the 'screw you' market segment."

Within weeks, a new photo appears.

Now, Scofflaw's friends and foes alike at last find common cause to unite, rejecting the newborn mockrobrew to find the next greatest Northeastern IPA, and lofting those middle fingers in the precise direction this most honest of all personal salutes always should have been pointed.

To AB InBev ... over and over ...rinse, repeat ... and bartender, can I have a Bell's Two Hearted Ale, please?

Breweries vs. Fans: Craft Beer on Social Media, by Jim Vorel (Paste)

Take a look at the photo above. The crowd of assembled, bearded brewers (and a few ladies) belongs to Atlanta-area brewers Scofflaw Brewing Co. You may have noticed that they all have their middle fingers raised in salute—I assure you that this will become relevant soon enough. But first, a little bit of background.

Scofflaw is one of the young stars of Atlanta’s beer scene, having gathered a huge amount of hype for a company that hasn’t yet celebrated its one-year anniversary ...

 ... But there’s always a flip side to such stories, and according to many Scofflaw drinkers, the pressing issue is consistency and replicability of the company’s flagship beers such as Basement IPA ...

 ... What is uncommon is a brewery reacting to those types of concerns with combative words and upturned middle fingers. That’s what Scofflaw did via Facebook yesterday, firing off a post that has lit up the Atlanta craft beer scene and ignited debate on both sides.

THE BEER BEAT: Dollars and cents remain the most rational arguments against AB InBev.

Consider it equal time.

The author makes excellent points about the nadir of debate and dialectic, and the tribalism, and the chest-thumping.

Still, my fundamental stance v.v. AB InBev and other manifestations of Monstrous Chainthink remains unchanged, and for reasons that aren't at all emotional.

Rather, it's factual. Lots and lots of people with no connection whatever to beer or brewing already have done their homework as it pertains to what independent local business means; where the money goes, and where it stays. Two of them are here:

American Independent Business Alliance

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

My rule of thumb: To know these principles is to be able to walk the walk when making beer choices.

Yes, it's a matter of shift, and no one's playing to be perfect, because when it comes to philosophical concepts, perfection simply doesn't exist.

There'll always be exceptions, but life is about the everyday. In the main, as a consumer, I'd like to know exactly where my money is going. Whenever possible, I'd like to see my money directed to indies.

It's as simple as that. If I couldn't get good beer without my money going to multinationals, then I'd either submit or stop drinking. However, this isn't the case.

Yet.

Dialectic Lost – We Can’t Talk about Beer Rationally Anymore, by Oliver Gray (Literature & Libation)

... There’s no dialectic where people are trying look at big beer’s practices objectively or taking a real critical eye to the BA, to figure out whos and whys and hows. There’s certainly never any talk of collaboration, because obviously, you never work with an enemy. There’s hardly even any exploration in why a thing deemed so bad is actually bad; I only need two fingers (one and two) to count the number of well written articles directly about AB-InBevs strategy. The rest of the bad will stems for theoreticals and hard headedism.

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever. Localism is the salve for your cognitive dissonance.

It's been roughly a week since Wicked Weed Brewery sold out to AB InBev, qualifying the story as ancient news in an era of attention spans measured by the length of a gnat's middle finger.

I've used the occasion to play a set of best-loved ditties (below), but today, a new song.

Or, you might choose to return to your swapping, ratings, selfies and narcissism; however, if anyone is interested in learning something, let the Pour Fool provide a brief lecture, prefaced by a few comments of my own.

THE BEER BEAT: The Pour Fool nails it yet again, as "Budweiser Finds Another Sell-Out" -- this time, Wicked Weed.

Like others before it, Wicked Weed Brewing has died. That's unfortunate, indeed, but from the moment the ownership of Wicked Weed passed to AB InBev, this previously independent brewery was transformed into something else. Now it's Wicked Trojan Zombie Afterlife Weed. We'll always have our memories. Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't drink a WTZAW beer with Donald Trump's lips. There are hundreds of other choices, and no commensurate need to deposit money in the coffers of the enemy. It was nice while it lasted, but it's all over now.

At Indiana On Tap, Mark Lasbury makes a laudable effort to grope forward and explain the cognitive dissonance, which might be defined as the nagging fear that something's not quite right.

How To Kill The Wicked Weed Growing In The Garden Of Craft Beer, by Mark E. Lasbury (Indiana On Tap)

AB-InBev is acquiring Wicked Weed. That bit of information almost broke the craft beer channels of the internet Wednesday, but the trend started long before then and will continue long into the future, unless there is a concerted effort on the part of craft beer brewers and drinkers. I don’t know much about business, but here is an opinion, a fact, and a question that keeps hurting my brain.

Beer isn't the only topic to suffer from historical amnesia. Given current events, it is by no means the most important topic we might be discussing in this context, and yet it remains (in the words of the philosopher) that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Whatever else might be said about AB InBev and the multinationals, we can be sure they remember the past -- and are determined to repeat it.

The "craft" brewing revolution broke out because it was necessary to fight on behalf of change, both within and against prevailing capitalist and regulatory orthodoxies. Still, the revolution did not seek to abandon capitalism, or to deny the veracity of regulation. Rather, it sought necessary modifications, and in the main, these have been achieved.

But there is no action without an opposite and equal reaction, and that's why the AB InBev empire strikes back against threats to its hegemony, and in the only way it can: with lots and lots of money ... and scorched earth. Monolithic corporations attain their clout with cash and brass knuckles -- now, always, forever.

There are plenty of laws that might be enacted to put AB InBev in its place, but these are unlikely to be written, because who benefits the most from robber baron multinationals if not the politicians accepting their campaign contributions?

Accordingly, if vile politicians give money to AB InBev with the aim of preserving monopolies and suppressing choice, why would you even consider doing the same -- even if it's your precious Bourbon County Stout?

As I write these words, there are thousands of local breweries in America pursuing a business model of brewing solid local beer for local consumption. They're selling beer by the pint, growler, cans and bottles. Most of what they sell goes out the door in their own buildings. Their beer won't be on a package store shelf two thousand miles away.

Accordingly, I can think of three very effective ways to reinvigorate the beer and brewing revolution. Dispense with the self-absorbed narcissism that diverts attention from the obvious, and think about concepts like ...

Personal value systems
Individual consciousness
Acts of conscience

In various other areas of the human experience, progress is about every day, not every now and then. It's about the fundamental undertow that prefaces civilization, a bedrock foundation from which creative expression arises. Evolution is to be encouraged, but change for the sake of change is the ideology of a hamster on his wheel.

Speaking for myself, it's all about thinking globally and drinking beer locally. It's about interacting with local breweries, giving them honest feedback, and watching them move forward. It's about this bar, that room, and the patio over there -- or the front porch of my house with a growler and a cigar.

It's also about shift. The way we spend our money plays a large role in determining the sort of world in which we live. There's no evading this fact, although there isn't always an effective way to avoid playing the robber baron capitalist game.

That's why the concept of "shifting" spending is so crucial. Whenever possible, I try to spend locally, within the community. It's not all or nothing. It's a conscientious individual act of consciousness reflecting a personal value system that needn't be broadcast to a wider world in order to retain its validity.

Beer is communal to me. It's not narcissism at all, and it isn't hoarding via black markets. It isn't necessary to calculate my purchases based on what I want you to see me drinking. Rather, it's the intensely mystical nature of the liquid in the glass, a quality that is enhanced when I'm around good people, at good places, in the act of conversing, eating and enjoying life.

I was managing quite nicely to do without Wicked Weed. Now Wicked Weed has died, and it's even easier for me not to care. But I do care about the locals in Asheville who believed in Wicked Weed.

They're the ones who have the best reason to mourn. I'm sorry for their loss. May they feel peace, and start patronizing other breweries that live right.

You?

Numerous other choices await. You're invited to join me in making the revolution as locally based as is humanly possible.

And by the way: Fuck off, AB InBev.

---

Earlier this week:

Thursday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Localism + Beer" (2012).

Wednesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Let's explore anti-local craft beer unconsciousness" (2013).

Tuesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Monday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

Also: Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Localism + Beer" (2012).

It makes no sense to labor over writing a fresh new essay when we've all been here before, and whether or not the "keep politics out of my narcissism" caste
realizes it, we've been here ever since Goose Island died.

My excruciatingly personalized essays from five whole years ago continue today, but first, a reminder of why you should consider the nature of the threat AB InBev poses to our nice little panacea of highly rated white whales.

Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew

Previously this week:

Wednesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Let's explore anti-local craft beer unconsciousness" (2013).

Tuesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Monday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

Yesterday afternoon I joined friends on the patio of Buckhead's in Jeffersonville. The bar was pouring Falls City's Calliope Pils. I drank it from a plastic cup while enjoying fellowship and a fine view of the Louisville skyline. You see, the revolutionary idea in the beginning was to build local beer and brewing culture. Let's nurture them, and leave those obsessive white whales to Captain Ahab.

The following first appeared here on November 9, 2012. First the 2012 preface, then the main text.

---

HIP HOPS: LOCALISM + BEER

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
--Henry David Thoreau

It always has been my aim to accurately describe various aspects of my beer-infused everyday world, but even as I’ve done so, my everyday world persists in evolving. Apart from necessarily using the word “beer,” I’m increasingly unsure how to view any of the rest of it.

Long ago, good beer was about imports exclusively, because there wasn’t very much good beer in America. Several thousand domestic brewery start-ups later, there’s plenty of good beer here, and these days, we refer to it collectively as “craft” beer. This term is fine by me, except that the definition of craft beer starts on a tiny end with the scant barrels produced by a nano-brewery, and ends voluminously with the nationwide airport lounge availability of Samuel Adams.

Semantics aside, the real point of this digression is to acknowledge that I’m changing, too. Back in 1982, St. Pauli Girl probably was the best beer we had during my first-ever gig as a liquor store clerk. Thirty years later, there are dozens – nay, hundreds – of far better beers available hereabouts, and while I’m entirely comfortable in making a “good, better, best” value judgment, it isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Amid the giddy, exploding exuberance, which I’ve long professed and will continue to advocate, it seems that something important is lost. There exists an understandable zeal to embrace the unprecedented availability of international craft beer, but I find myself thinking back to points of origin, and what has made so many of my beer travels memorable: Localism.

It’s drinking great beer at or near its birthplace, primarily because it never tastes fresher than by doing so, but also because the place itself matters. Beer and community reflect each other, and although we must continue to think globally, I’m sensing a new imperative to drink locally.

Home, Not Away

My professional reputation as a beer purveyor was established owing to a stubborn determination to stock the best legally obtainable (well, most of the time) beer, as brewed in locales across the planet. Nowadays, I’m far less inclined to look past my own geographical proximity. The Louisville metropolitan area has its own great beer, with plenty more quality beer being produced within a hundred mile radius.

I’ll never entirely dismiss Belgian Lambics, German Maibocks and Irish Stouts. There’ll forever be a spot for India Pale Ales from San Diego and New York-brewed Saisons, and yet they’re no longer essential to me; rather, they’re for special sampling occasions, as they were years ago when availability was limited. Inexorably, my beer drinking is shifting to local and regional sources, and for the best of all reasons: Drinking local makes me happy.

Places, Not Prizes

Shift happens. It is perhaps the single, fundamental tenet of emerging economic localism, and when it comes time to have a beer, the concept of shift means putting this principle into liquid practice.

Having acknowledged the efficacy of buying local, as measured by factual indices consistently recognizing that localism keeps more money in one’s community, my household is incrementally shifting toward local sources of goods and services, whenever practical. Shift is a process, not an all-or-nothing crusade. If my shift to locally brewed beer implied being compelled to drink an inferior product, obviously I would think differently. Fortunately, it does not.

Another contemporary societal trend to consider is the notion of placemaking, generally described as “a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces.” Placemaking is a grassroots, community-based phenomenon, in which those ordinary people using a public space help to determine how that space is used. Placemaking may help in part to explain my re-emerging interest in community-based beer consumption -- keeping the beer drinking venues local, listening to the local beer drinkers, and knowing who supplies the beer.

Eyes and Palates, Wide Open

Not so long ago, Goose Island Brewing Company was a proud independent, but now it is 100% owned by the multinational monolith called AB-Inbev, meaning that in cold, hard fact, Goose Island is no more independent than an Ignatius J. Reilly-themed weenie wagon on the streets of Pyongyang, North Korea. Honkers Ale remains certifiably better than Budweiser, but to me, it really matters where the money goes … and dollars paid for Honkers ultimately travel to corporate headquarters in Leuven, Belgium, not Chicago, Illinois.

Sorry, but Goose Island sold out. Craft beer drinkers need to examine their consciences lest they sell out, too.

Session, Not Sledgehammer

I’m in my sixth decade, and my body reacts differently these days to the excesses of my profession. American craft brewing has excelled in the creation of highly alcoholic genre classics, including Imperial India Pale Ale, Barley Wine and Quadrupel, and while I still adore these styles, increasingly my palate turns to an evening’s reasonable sustainability, in the form of session beers.

The Pennsylvania-based beer writer Lew Bryson is the founder of the Session Beer Project, and he provides these helpful parameters.

Session beers are:

► under 4.5% alcohol by volume
► flavorful enough to be interesting -- no light beers, please
► balanced enough for multiple pints
► conducive to conversation
► reasonably priced

In brief, low-alcohol, but not low-taste. It's deliberately vague. The great thing about session beers, especially the ones that come in under 3.5%, is that you can enjoy several beers, and still have a BAC of under 0.04.

Craft Beer Is A Journey

Maybe some day I’ll come full circle, and find myself craving bottles of Bud Light iced in a pickle bucket. Doubtful, but entirely possible, because beer is less a destination than a journey, and you make the road signs yourself. All I’m asking is that craft beer drinkers resolve to be unafraid of where thinking can lead drinking, especially when thoughts turn to local options.

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Let's explore anti-local craft beer unconsciousness" (2013).

This week I'm reprising excruciatingly personalized variations on a theme of "Who Cares About Wicked Weed and All the Other Zombie Trojan Non-Craft Casualties of AB InBev and Its Brethren."

Of course, not that you shouldn't care about the nature of the threat AB InBev poses. This article goes deep in explaining why.

Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew

It's just that there is an unmistakable element of individual value systems in all these discussions. As Uriah Heep advised so many years ago, take a look at yourself.

Tuesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Monday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

We don't need Bourbon County Stout when other versions of wood-aged stouts (and other styles) produced by genuine indies are in the same league.

We don't need whatever sour specialty used to be brewed by Wicked Weed before its untimely demise.

Instead, we need to log off Untappd, hide the phone, find a local brewery and enjoy a fresh beer with living, breathing humans.

There are at least four Louisville area breweries I've yet to visit. Numerous other regional breweries beckon, too. You see, the revolutionary idea in the beginning was to build local beer and brewing culture. Let's nurture it, and leave the white whales to Captain Ahab.

---

The PC: Anti-local craft beer unconsciousness, revisited.

“Art can never take the place of social action … but its task remains forever the same: to change consciousness.”
-- Amos Vogel, from “Film as a Subversive Art”

When will craft beer finally change the consciousness of the American beer-drinking mainstream?”

I’m tempted to answer one question with another: Should mainstream consciousness ever be the desired outcome for craft beer?

But let’s play it straight. Some might say that craft beer consciousness already has arrived. Craft beer’s availability is wider than ever before, and statistically, most Americans live within close proximity to a craft brewer, even if the average measurement is skewed by Michigan as compared to the Deep South.

Slowly, even this imbalance is changing, and craft beer consciousness is penetrating all geographical areas of the country.

More tellingly, America’s copycat megabrewers are quite conscious of craft’s escalating impact. Through imitation and outright, unrepentant piracy – the only recourses for corporate regimes cruelly deprived of the creative gene – mass-market mockrobrews, from Blue Moon and Shock Top to zombie craft beers like those from the late, lamented Goose Island, now are routinely positioned to distract truth seekers. As always, bucket loads of marketing cash are wielded to pull soothing layers of mistruth and gloss over the eyes of the undiscerning.

Overall, my personal view about craft beer’s consciousness is that for all our obvious gains, we’re not quite “there,” at least yet.

Rather, when sociologists and psychologists at last begin studying craft beer drinkers close up and personal, we’ll know that mainstream consciousness has drawn to within a whisker, because there is no more reliable indicator of mass-market impact than the urgent need to understand the behavior of those consumers inhabiting segments poised for profit. That’s how the real money gets made.

While the analysts and shrinks are cogitating, perhaps they can help me with persistent examples of what might be termed cognitive dissonance in craft consciousness.

A prime example includes the inability (read: unwillingness) on the part of credentialed craft beer enthusiasts to tell the difference between craft and crafty as they avert their eyes from the Goose Gambit’s shelf-space-seeking drones, which are intended primarily to shift money to faraway corporate shareholders. It’s the most patently obvious bait-and-switch tactic since door-to-door driveway resealing, and yet it is ignored by many who plainly know better.

---

While we’re at it, these battered and blotted Rorschach findings also may help explain the most disquieting aspect of craft beer consumer behavior, at least to me: Anti-local craft beer unconsciousness.

It is my aim to re-situate the burgeoning craft beer movement within a context of economic localization, to revert the revolution to its point of origin, and to describe how the very consciousness of buying local is important both in non-beer terms, and in the specific way it impacts the craft beer ethos. Recently I wrote:

Shift happens. It is perhaps the single, fundamental tenet of emerging economic localism, and when it comes time to have a beer, the concept of shift means putting this principle into liquid practice.

Having acknowledged the efficacy of buying local, as measured by factual indices consistently recognizing that localism keeps more money in one’s community, my household is incrementally shifting toward local sources of goods and services, whenever practical.

Shift is a process, not an all-or-nothing crusade. If my shift to locally brewed beer implied being compelled to drink an inferior product, obviously I would think differently. Fortunately, it does not.

And yet for some otherwise knowledgeable practitioners of the craft beer ethos, “local” and “inferior” remain synonymous terms.

Why?

It is interesting to consider the contrasting reaction to “buying local” that exists, quite apart from the merits of local beer, when we speak of the retail sector: Hardware, groceries, clothing, floral arrangements and the like. I hear it often:

"But wait: You cannot compel me to spend more money than I wish to spend."

The perception is that buying local always entails higher expense to the consumer. Actually, numerous studies have addressed this perception, and the price differences therein typically are not as profound as imagined, if they even exist at all. Probably what doubters mean to say is that they cannot be compelled to surrender the big box, exurban shopping ease of finding all consumables under one roof – and that’s a different topic, one falling outside my parameters today.

But when it comes to craft beer, independent small brewers seldom hear objections about price, because craft beer enthusiasts understand that handcrafted products using higher quality ingredients within smaller economies of scale cost more than mass produced ones do. Consequently, a different and less readily explicable form of pushback occurs in the context of local beer and brewing.

How about some locally brewed beer, guys?

“No, because you cannot compel me to drink poorer quality beer. Only the best for me, you know."

This reply never fails to utterly befuddle me.

I’m a trained BJCP beer judge, and after thirty years in the beer business, obviously I’ve been around the block a few times – just ask my liver.

When I attend beer festivals these days, my samples invariably are drawn from “everyday” beers as made by small, local breweries, if only to remind me that seldom are these beers in any way unsuitable. On those rare occasion when there’s a quality problem, I’m constructively honest in identifying it, and if I can do so, in proposing a solution. Without dialogue, there cannot be a community. Without community, very little about craft beer interests me, anyway. Craft beer consciousness isn’t me against the world.

It’s us against the world.

Unfortunately, there exists a minority of self-identified craft beer opinion shapers for whom it’s never quite enough for local beer to be good, solid or sessionable.

What’s more, for them, local beer by definition simply cannot ever be “sexy” enough to justify a variant of beer enthusiasm sated only through insularity, exclusivity and narcissism, and before readers take me to task for erecting a straw man, permit me to add that I’m well aware of what such snobbery entails, because I’ve spent years now slowly recovering from its debilitating influence.

You’re damned right I’ve sinned, but consciousness is subject to evolution, and so is conscience. When I look back at my career in beer, I’m not always happy with my modes of expression, but know this: Narcissism’s not my gig, and never was. Expertise isn’t about keeping; with me, it’s all about teaching, and my record should speak for itself in that regard.

In my opinion, the breezy and frankly disdainful attitude that local beer cannot be good is a form of misplaced elitism and condescending snobbery ultimately injurious to craft beer’s larger interests. Attack mass-market swill at will; it deserves censure, but craft beer cannibalism is another matter entirely.

Beer as we know and love it does not exist in a societal, historical or ethical vacuum. Rather, craft beer consciousness exists within a community, and if we wish our community to grow sustainably, we must share our expertise broadly, not narrowly.

Consequently, I challenge the shadowy sect of narcissistic beer enthusiasts to help spread wisdom, not hoard it; to enhance local brewing and not detract from it; and in summary, to be part of the solution, not a collection of snarky Wonkas in the making. We have enough of that, already.

---

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I remain a realist. Nothing I write or say in this column can substantively change attitudes that derive from a wide variety of wants, needs and experiences. Life’s too complicated for simplicity and we’re all different as people, but what I can make absolutely clear is this:

I’ve got the backs of local, independent brewers in this region, and when the smack starts getting talked, I’ll be there to answer it. It’s a matter of deeply held principle.

Consider joining me by waving potential craft beer converts into the tent, not erecting barriers to their enlightenment. In such a fashion, consciousness changes – and grows.

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Yes, there's even a Black Market Brewery.

It's Greatest Hits Week at THE BEER BEAT, and rather than waste valuable drinking time trying to unravel the wicked and weedy issues surrounding the latest brewery sellout, I've concluded my spleen is more efficiently vented by reprinting a stellar selection of "wrote it all before."

Monday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

As we await the next brick in the wall, I'll be reprinting a few previous columns this week, with the aim of making the case that you're better off nurturing your local and regional brewing communities than chasing white whales.

Seeing as they've been dropping like flies these past few years ...

10 Barrel Brewing apparently was the most recently deceased when I updated the following in 2014. Merely substitute the words Wicked Weed, Elysian or The Dear Departed, and it should read just as well.

---

This week in solipsistic beer narcissism (2014).

Are you fed up with words you don’t understand?

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---

Way back in 2010, when 10 Barrel Brewing was but a gleam in Carlos Brito’s numbers-crunching testes, President Barack Obama returned to a theme often broached during his historic campaign for the White House. It happened during the 2010 State of the Union address.

“The best anti-poverty program around is a world class education.”

No, not the Indiana wholesaler.

Naturally, the precise components of a “world class education” are open to interpretation, discussion and debate between open-minded citizens, assuming you can find any of them in these idiotically polarized times, but the overall sentiment that education is a corrective to impoverishment has been proven to be truthful again and again.

I submit that the word “impoverishment” has more than one meaning as used in this context. We’d be correct in the assumption that there are clear and compelling correlations between education and the eradication of material impoverishment.

However, we might also consider impoverishment in creative, artistic and cultural contexts, and how one’s attitude toward the general topic of knowledge, pertaining to its veracity as an end onto itself as well as the tangible benefits gained from expansive education as opposed to a confining illiteracy, shapes what we know and the uses to which we put our knowledge.

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who drank wine: “With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it."

What I think he meant is that possessing something of supposed value for the sole purpose of the object’s ability to reflect its “value” back on the holder somewhat misses the point. The true value is derived from the object being used wisely, and a well-rounded education supplies the means to make this determination.

Given the perpetual linkages between education and personal advancement, why is it that people choose to devalue the notion of education, eschewing the why, how and wherefore, and substituting in their place a solipsistic, narcissism-driven, knee-jerk, me-first hedonism?

Perhaps it’s the logical outcome of our American strains of materialism and consumerism. When it comes to pulse-quickening snobbery, exclusionary avarice and frenzied hoarding, the very last thought surfacing in one’s fevered, acquisitive brain is the possibility that all is not what it seems.

Do you still desire the object once it is revealed that the profit chain leads straight into the Texas-sized mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, or to the owners of factory-farmed chickens wallowing in their own feces, or to that bastard Obama’s pocket … or, into the very coffers of ISIS (read: AB-InBev).

Except you really want it, don’t you? You want it right now – and by “it” I refer not to a mass-produced Trojan Goose barrel-aged ale, but to a blissfully unexamined version of capitalist doltishness, wherein there are no reasons whatever for diagnosing the nature of the itch, only interminable scratching.

The writer Aldous Huxley called this phenomenon soma. If you don’t know the source of this reference, perhaps it’s time to read a book.

But I’m nothing if not stubborn. Ideas matter, and yet at present, both the country at large and my own beer and brewing milieu are dismally stupid and mercilessly tacky places. These daily tsunamis of crass materialism and consumerist greed have come to define the American experience, and even when the topic is “craft” beer – perhaps modern America’s signature accomplishment – we have digressed just as quickly into 24-7, must-have shopping zombies, pausing occasionally to thank Jesus for the blessed privilege of possessing our baubles, and ignoring what’s happening in our own back yards because there’s not enough status in mere localism.

It’s the old Chinese proverb – yes, you guessed it, the one printed on plasticized card stock suitable for framing, and available not from the heirs to Billy Mays, but from Wal-Mart via Guangdong Province:

"It’s all about me."

Yes, it is.

And that’s also why you don’t interest ME any longer.

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What would happen if you combined classic sacred choral music with a thesaurus? You’d have a synonym for a seminal hymnal!

Hi, Roger Baylor here for the Sing ‘o’ Saurus. It’s no ordinary reference book.

Watch this!

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

Their latest shipment of Trillium has arrived.

Wicked Weed Brewery is in Asheville, North Carolina. As of last week, it is wholly owned by the Great Satan.

Read more: THE BEER BEAT: The Pour Fool nails it yet again, as "Budweiser Finds Another Sell-Out" -- this time, Wicked Weed.

The Pour Fool explains AB InBev's motives with perfect clarity. If you believe that the multinational brewing conglomerate's motives are pure, why not take the next step and book a holiday to Disney World?

I'm less interested in the familiar nuances of robber baron capitalism than the reactions of the "craft" beer community.

As for myself, it's simple. I haven't been to Asheville, and in my recollection, the only time I've ever tasted Wicked Weed's beers is when I sampled those brought home by a friend.

I trust they were good beers, but since I don't amass lists or seek the advice of ratings aggregators, who knows? My preference is for local moments and revelatory snapshots in time, not numerical data bases.

AB InBev has purchased several erstwhile "craft" breweries these past few years. Not a one of them brews a beer that we can't do without, primarily because thousands of independent breweries still stand, undefiled, with as many as 20 in metro Louisville alone.

Perhaps I'll walk down the street later today and purchase a growler.

In the interim, I'll be reprinting a few previous columns this week, with the aim of making the case that you're better off nurturing your local and regional brewing communities than chasing white whales.

In this first installment, you'll be subjected to one of my favorite comparisons.

Hint: The medieval spice trade was about social status, not spices. 

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Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors (2014).

I’m not in the habit of compulsively re-reading books, even those of the highly influential sort.

Of course, there are exceptions:

• The early beer writing of Michael Jackson
• The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, a sobering tome by John Barry
• Jim Bouton’s ribald baseball tell-all, Ball Four
• A Confederacy of Dunces, the classic New Orleans comic novel from John Kennedy Toole

Another is Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants, by the wonderfully named Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He is not a Groucho Marx character from Duck Soup, but a German-born cultural historian operating from a decidedly (Karl) Marxist perspective.

Two decades after Schivelbusch’s book was published, I still consult it with frequency. It’s neither long nor “heavy,” and boasts thoughtful essays on coffee, chocolate, tea, tobacco, hashish, opium and alcoholic beverages. Taken together, these have the effect of guiding readers from the Middle Ages through modern times, with the focal point being not pharmacology, but sociology.

At its European debut in the 17th-century coffeehouse, coffee officiated at the rise of the bourgeois technocrat; the brew's displacement from the coffeehouse to the home in the following century, the author argues, is a measure of the assimilation of bourgeois consciousness at the private hearth.
-- Excerpt from Publishers Weekly

We already know that coffee is caffeinated, while beer and wine are alcoholic. When the Muslim world introduced Europe to coffee, the beverage’s “dry” and sobering qualities were aligned perfectly with developing notions of a work ethic in the context of expanding capitalism – or, where Calvinism meets the Industrial Revolution. Coffee made workers more efficient, while alcoholic beverages rendered them less productive.

Even today, while at work, you’re generally free to consume as much coffee as you please, though not ale … and that’s a shame.

Beer itself is a pre-industrial, communal and organic beverage, reflecting the pastoral ethos of the countryside, and inexorably bound by nature’s limitations on maximum alcoholic strength attained through fermentation. Distillation – again, introduced to Europe by the learned Arabs, who used the process in chemical experiments – provided the means to concentrate the strength of alcohol as beverage, subsequently wreaking havoc on human beings unaccustomed to the potency of distilled spirits, or to their new, oppressively squalid homes in urban industrial slums. Greasy gin offered ready pain relief between ceaseless shifts at the factory, which yielded just enough cash to begin the cycle anew.

You see, it really does matter where your sneakers are fabricated.

Schivelbusch makes it clear that while alcohol has been subject to abuse since the beginning of time, temperance movements as we know them today began only when liquor became cheap, common and widely ingested. In the end, liquor’s debilitating tendencies became too much even for the exploitative robber barons, who formerly deployed the liquid as pacifier from the company store. Reversing course, the accumulators of capital forged an unholy alliance with religious fundamentalism.

By the late 1800s, the city of New Albany’s much-lionized plate glass magnate, Washington C. DePauw, was providing financial support for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) – the latter agitating for the complete prohibition of alcoholic beverages, either when on the clock or off, all from the cozy confines of its downtown reading room, located in a long-demolished house that occupied the space where Bank Street Brewhouse’s* beer garden now operates.

In this way, nowadays, we pay back those mad mothers with each pint of locally brewed goodness.

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Recently, listening with mounting fascination as local beer enthusiasts explained to me how this very same fresh, local beer cannot possibly be worth drinking, and must take a seat to the rear of the bus when compared to the newest, biggest, greatest phenomenon brought to metro Louisville from far, far away, Schivelbusch’s fascinating explanation of the medieval spice trade came back to me.

It turns out that fascination with the far-off is as old as humanity, too. When the spice trade commenced in Europe several hundred years ago, the newly posited “need” to obtain previously unknown Oriental spices was far less about their supposed usefulness in masking otherwise rancid food, as is often erroneously imagined today, but because the spices themselves were quantifiable, visible measures of social status according to prevailing subjective value systems.

In essence, back then, anyone who was anyone just had to have these spices – or, risk not being anyone, any longer. Possession of Oriental spices was a palpable, tangible symbol of status, and the key to their value was a basic reality: These spices were from somewhere else – exotic, expensive and hard to obtain, and therefore infinitely sexier than piddling local norms.

But it went even further, into the realm of sheer mysticism. In the beginning, spices symbolized the superiority of the far-off lands from whence they so rarely came. If the spices themselves were imbued with magical and totemic properties, then surely it proved conclusively that the other side of the planet was superior to the mud, blood, poverty and ignorance of Europe. Paradise was elsewhere, and spices provided tastes of this paradise. It was evidence of a raging subliminal inferiority complex, and comprised the most anti-local viewpoint imaginable.

Like the objectified beer porn selfie of 2014, no one thought it necessary to bother with explanations as to why the bowl of Oriental spice proffered at the wedding feast mattered. It simply was understood. Peers compared the quantity of their stashes to establish social pecking orders, and any stray servant or cowed peasant in proximity of the scene knew immediately that strength and power were conferred on those who possessed the requisite spicy symbolism … while he or she remained a degraded underling.

It’s that Billie Holiday song, all over again, like a mantra for the coming year: “Them that’s got shall have, them that’s not shall lose.”

It should be obvious that I highly recommend Tastes of Paradise; just exercise caution when reading near mirrors.

That’s because flying glass is dangerous.

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* Now known as Cafe & Brewhouse