BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Odds and ends about beer, from Hanoi to the neighborhood persimmon tree.

This exercise in seldom recall is dubbed "beer with a socialist," and it's time for free association. Seeing the CNN video about "street life" in Hanoi (and beer) gives me the excuse to insert a Roxy Music video ... right here.

Back to Hanoi, there's something to softens this travel-crazy curmudgeon's heart: cheap beer, out on the avenues, with plenty of street life.

World's cheapest draft? Where to try bia hoi, Hanoi's 25 cent beer, by Justin Solomon and Kate Springer (CNN)

... It wasn't until the late 1950s that bia hoi was introduced as an affordable options for everyday citizens. A brewery opened on Ta Hien Street, selling the fresh lager at just a few cents a mug. This local staple is a light and refreshing lager, with an alcohol content of less than 3%.

The idea? You can drink it for long sessions to cool off after working all day in Hanoi's sweltering temperatures.

"Some will actually say it is 'instant beer' like instant noodles, since it is made quickly and sold quickly," explains MacDouall.

"The alcohol content is low and that was because people wanted to consume it rapidly."

Over the years, countless bars and restaurants have populated Ta Hien Street, bring with them swathes of tiny stools and metal tables that flank both sides of the sidewalk.

Love it, love it, love it. What appeals to me the most is the non-pretentious authenticity of it. In turn, this is why so much of American "craft" beer leaves me cold these days.

I'm going to use Sun King as an example at this juncture not because there's any animosity, but simply because this link arrived earlier today via an e-mail news aggregator.

Be aware that I'm a fan of Sun King, especially the brewery's everyday classics (Cream Ale, Pale Ale and Scottish Ale) and it's not my place to suggest that beer fans refrain from chasing the white whales.

Sun King Brewery Announces Royal Order Beer Subscription Program

Don't you know that you can count me out?

Special privileges, rare exclusivity, VIP areas at fests, and other anti-egalitarian maneuvers gripe my cookies. But rest assured that we'll continue to vend Wee Mac at the pub.

Speaking of which, the keg of Bloomington Brewing Company Persimmon Ale I've been mentioning for weeks will be tapped soon. I'm eager to taste it. Here's an interesting overview of the use of persimmons in brewing.

The Amazing Stories of Persimmons in Craft Beer, by Mark E. Lasbury (Indiana on Tap)

Persimmon beer.

Poor and prominent communities alike in early America used persimmons to ferment an alcoholic drink. In this case, the persimmons alone were used, with the fructose in the fruit being a good source of fermentable sugar. It was called beer, but was really more like a wine, sherry, or liquor.

The fruits would be boiled in water for a good period, and then mashed to a pulp. Straining several times would yield a sugar containing liquid that might be supplemented with honey or sugar. Putting this in an open jug with some yeast allowed for fermentation, and more pulp or sugar could be added in more water to keep the fermentation going as liquor is poured off over the weeks.

Finally, following up on the demise of All About Beer, as mentioned here in mid-October. It appears that Chris Rice's popularity has dipped almost as low as Donald Trump's.

For 39 Years, Local Mag All About Beer Shaped the Craft Beer Scene. This Is How It Collapsed, by Michael Venutolo-Mantovani (Indy Week)

Editor John Holl first suspected something was amiss in the fall of 2016, when his boss—Chris Rice, the owner and publisher of the venerable Durham-based All About Beer magazine—told him the company would no longer use direct deposit, instead reverting to paper checks.

It was temporary, Rice assured him. Holl and his staff trudged along, resigned to the reality that print publishing is full of uncertainty, and maybe Rice just needed flexibility. But then, Holl says, Rice started asking him to hold on to those checks—to wait until the weekend was over, until the company was flush again.

Sometimes, Holl says, those periods stretched beyond the weekend. Sometimes Holl, managing editor Jon Page, and other employees waited as long as two weeks before getting the green light to cash their paychecks. Other times, they were told to cash them, and Rice would cover whatever fees they incurred if the checks bounced.

The troubles only mounted from there.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: R.I.P. All About Beer magazine.

First issue, 1979.

I'd yet to taste my first Guinness or Pilsner Urquell in 1979. In fact, having consumed a fair amount of lesser beer the previous years, I'd failed to attain legal age in 1979. Two long years of rampant lawlessness remained ahead of me.

At some point in the 1990s, Daniel Bradford and I had a tremendous dust-up about something. I'd tell you more, but it's probably a testament to the many beers I've enjoyed since 1979 that I have no recollection of the dispute.

Julie Johnson was part of the beer writing symposium organized by Jeff Rice at the University of Kentucky a few years ago, and we chatted. She was delightful, and so was her magazine.

At this precise moment, thousands of beer fans believe they're getting the minimum daily requirement of knowledge from the ephemera at beer ratings aggregators. They're sadly mistaken. There is far more to loving beer than crowd-sourced numbers on an app and the ability to memorize images. Monkeys can be trained to do that.

I've always understood that my own skills as a writer come nowhere close to the caliber of those contributing to magazine like All About Beer. In compensation, I've always tried to push attention their way. Granted, it's still possible to read the words written by the pros, as published at various web sites and blogs, but one must prioritize finding these writers, and perusing their efforts past the opening paragraph.

It's one thing to have a score of 95 out of 100. It's another to explain whether this is correct, and why it matters. The herd simply can't do that, hence the job description of the shepherd.

And, by extension, the reason to regret the passing of All About Beer magazine. Too many sheep, not enough shepherds; it's an imbalance impacting wool, lamb chops ... and beer appreciation.

AFTER 39 YEARS, ALL ABOUT BEER MAGAZINE IS DEAD, by Jeff Alworth (Beervana)

No one likes to talk when things end badly.

Two weeks ago, on October 2nd, I received a tip that the venerable All About Beer magazine—which remarkably preceded the craft beer renaissance—was effectively defunct. I’ve spent the intervening time trying to confirm the news, but those close to the situation didn’t want to speak on the record. Yesterday, however, editor Daniel Hartis emailed to confirm he was no longer at the magazine and that he had been one of the last employees on staff. The “staff” page at allaboutbeer.com would seem to confirm that—the sole name listed is publisher Christopher Rice’s.

THERE BEFORE THE BEGINNING

Founded in 1979 by Mike and Bunny Bosack, All About Beer was the first magazine devoted to beer. It was a strange time in American brewing. Consumption and sales were at their peak, but consolidation had reduced competition and diversity to all-time lows. There were fewer than a hundred breweries in the country and beer culture, such as it was, had become as mass-market and homogenized as the beer itself. The early issues of the magazine reflected this situation. Julie Johnson, who along with Daniel Bradford took over the magazine and brought it in line with the burgeoning craft beer market, wrote in 2015: “Features on imported beer, beer can collecting or homebrew techniques were interspersed with articles about chili cook-offs, football, barroom lore and other topics apparently tailored for a male audience.”

Despite the desultory launch, AAB had one thing going for it: timing ...

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Throwback time, or "Finding Sanctuary on September 11."

We flew to Baltimore earlier this week. It was September 11, 2018, a date determined by the major league baseball schedule, just another flight on Southwest into BWI on a Tuesday morning and back out again on Thursday.

Tuesday's major news item was the apocalyptic approach of Hurricane Florence, with remembrances of 9-11-01 being reduced to those few airport televisions not already tuned to the Weather Channel.

At some point I began thinking about the terrorist attacks 17 years ago on September 11. They were strangely sepia-tinted, suggesting a whole different world. Perhaps this owes to the fact that for me, it really was.

My father had died earlier that summer of 2001, and my first marriage was rapidly disintegrating amid escalating preparations to build the original NABC brewery on Plaza Drive. It was a period of grief, stress, uncertainty and self-doubt.

I won't deny my alcohol consumption was at an all-time peak even before the fateful day in September, which occurred less than two weeks before a "beer travel" group tour of Eastern Europe I'd been planning for many months. There was little choice except to postpone the trip, which eventually departed in May, 2002.

However, my first airplane voyage after the attacks occurred a couple of months prior to the international flight, circa March, ironically was from Louisville to Baltimore.

It was a very strange experience. People were still on edge. Seemingly overnight, air travel had changed in ways that now seem inevitable given what we know about Osama bin Laden's efforts at inciting planetary war, but at the time were jarring and a tad Kafkaesque.

I'm digressing considerably, because the reason for this post is an e-mail I received while seated at the Max's Taphouse bar in Fell's Point this past Tuesday afternoon. It showed me this:

Something about it seemed very familiar, and for a moment I suspected a time warp, but no, Diana was right there beside me, and a repeat of the previous evening's Washington Nationals game was showing on one of the televisions.

Clicking through, I saw Stan's and Daria's All About Beer story from January 1, 2002. First, a sobering thought.

Children Born After 9/11 Are Now Eligible to Serve in Our Endless War in Afghanistan, by Jacob Weindling (Paste Magazine; September 13, 2018)

We have become completely numb to our forever war in Afghanistan. It is the longest war in American history, and it barely makes the front pages anymore—despite the fact that the Taliban is getting stronger by the day ...

... Tuesday marked the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. You can enlist in the army at age 17. Which means that babies born after the September 11th tragedy can now fight in the war launched in its name. If that doesn't break your brain even a little bit, your brain is already broken.

As of July 27, 2018, 2,372 American military members have died in Afghanistan. Another 20,320 have been wounded. Civilian deaths are notoriously difficult to track, especially since our military is loath to admit their failures on this front, but a rough estimate pegs the total civilian deaths in Afghanistan at over 31,000. And for what? What is the mission in Afghanistan? Why are we still there?

In other words, I could have been drinking beers in Baltimore for the last 16 years, and the war Osama actually did incite in Afghanistan still would have served as backing track -- after he was killed, a new building erected at the WTC site, and I was divorced, remarried and completely out of the NABC orbit.

Are we still taking our damn shoes off?

Anyway, the All About Beer article having returned to my consciousness after a long hiatus as I drank at Max's, I could remember when Stan phoned to ask questions about the mood at Rich O's on September 11, 2001. Clarity through the haze.

I hope the magazine doesn't mind the full reprint below. Be advised that their website is an excellent source of information, especially the style essays, so please consider a visit to make their advertisers happy.

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Finding Sanctuary on September 11, by Stan Hieronymus and Daria Labinsky (All About Beer Magazine)

In the hours immediately after terrorists flew airplanes into the Pentagon and New York City’s twin towers on September 11, Rich O’s Public House publican Roger Baylor paced anxiously between his pub and Sportstime, the restaurant/bar next door that he also owns. Sportstime has television sets; his pub does not.

“I was freaking out, basically,” he said. He began to think of the many people with whom he wanted to talk, whom he should call. “Then I realized that I didn’t have to. I thought, ‘They’ll all be in here.’” Sure enough, as shifts ended, regulars began to drift in. “There’s a group of us; well, I’m always here; we all sort of appear at the same time,” Baylor said.

The regulars discovered that Baylor had put a television on the counter up front–the first time a TV had been in the bar in three years. Those who wanted the latest news could get it, then find seats out of television range. “People would retreat back into the bar to talk, to get away from these images for a while,” Baylor said. “The first few days there was only one thing that they talked about.”

Television news stories in the following days sometimes showed bulging barrooms across the United States, and other times, empty ones in tourist destinations. TV news reported patrons flocked to bars because they did not want to be alone while they watched the horrible images on the television screen, but did not differentiate between people watching alone in a crowd and those who sought familiar faces.

“People wanted to go to a place where they felt like they were with family,” said Daryl Woodson, who has been running the appropriately named The Sanctuary in Iowa City, IA, for 27 years. “They didn’t say that, but people who come in normally at 10 were in at 8.”

The Sanctuary has two fireplaces (one working) but usually not a television. Woodson brought one in on September 11, and took it out the next day. “People wanted to watch what was happening while the story was still unfolding,” he said. “One of our regulars asked where I got a TV with such lousy reception. I told him it’s called a cheap antenna.”

Throwbacks to Another Era

Rich O’s and The Sanctuary offer a broader selection of beer than do most bars–the best-selling beer at Rich O’s is Three Floyd’s Alpha King, and if an interesting specialty beer is available in Iowa, The Sanctuary is probably the first place in the state to offer it. These bars may be more noteworthy, however, because they are throwbacks.

The population of the United States has more than doubled since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, but the number of licensed drinking establishments has shrunk by as much as two-thirds. In Chicago, for instance, there were more than 10,000 tavern licenses at the end of World War II, and now there are fewer than 2,500.

In The Great Good Place, author Ray Oldenburg notes that what he calls “third-place” taverns have been particularly hard hit. Oldenburg writes that not only have such taverns disappeared or changed–so have post offices, drug stores, grain elevators and similar “third places” (after home, first, and workplace, second) that provide informal gathering spots essential to the survival of any community.

The role of the tavern in American community life goes back almost to the time this country was settled. Parts of the American revolution were plotted in taverns. A century later, unions were born in taverns. Celebrations for soldiers heading to (and returning from) two world wars were held in taverns.

There are occasional reminders. Visit Cadieux Café, which has served Detroit’s Belgian enclave since Prohibition, and you’ll find a large display on the wall listing “Our boys at camp and overseas,” with the names of neighborhood boys who became soldiers.

Most such places are gone–torn down in old city neighborhoods, never built in carefully planned suburbs. Many watching the September 11 scenes from the rest of the country probably were surprised to find bars full of customers in much of New York City outside of lower Manhattan, but it is still a prototypical city, still has neighborhoods and still has bars that cater to those neighborhoods.

Neighborhood Bars

There are enough around that drinkers may choose a nearby place because the owner is Irish, because the happy hour prices are great, or even because the beer is more interesting than what’s next door. Across the country, beer with flavor has been an essential component in helping some bars build community, instantly giving would-be regulars something in common.

Beer is why many of the regulars started going to O’Brien’s Microbrew Pub in San Diego, but not why they were there the week of September 11. “Lunch times were ridiculous the first couple of days, nuts, just nuts,” said owner Jim O’Brien. Customers who usually visit only after work for the wide beer selection were also there for lunch, drawn by the food and televisions but also because they knew they’d find a friend on a nearby bar stool.

“We pretty much see the same faces on a day-to-day basis,” O’Brien said. “There was only one subject (of conversation). This place is never quiet and these guys aren’t afraid to be totally honest about what they feel.”

Things were quiet at the Country Inn in Krumville, NY, near the Ashokan Reservoir, which serves New York City and which was closed for safety reasons. “The original reaction was numbness; it’s still numbness,” said Larry Erenburg, the owner and guy behind the bar for more than 25 years.

The Country Inn doesn’t have a television, so customers sat quietly around a radio on September 11 before conversation returned to a normal level later in the week. Beer sales were up for the week, although the place was almost empty on Thursday when President Bush addressed the nation on TV.

“This place is a sounding board for people,” Erenburg said. But there are house rules against certain topics: politics, softball and chain saws. “There were flags waving, quite a show of patriotism in its own way, but it was just conversation rather than politics,” he said.

Politics is a more constant subject of conversation at Rich O’s, where The Economist and International Herald Tribune are always available for reading. “There’s a certain amount of discussion about the state of the world,” Baylor said, but also plenty about beer. “We always talk about beer,” he said, finishing with a laugh.

The discussion might center on what international company just acquired another smaller brewery or what to do with the firkin of Bell’s (Kalamazoo, MI) Two-Hearted Ale that accidentally got delivered to the bar. (The decision was to drink it.)

Woodson figures that about one-third of The Sanctuary’s customers come in for the live music (jazz, roots), one-third for the food (great pizza) and one-third for the beer and conversation. Few ask why there isn’t a television. “Having a TV is a good way to kill conversation,” he said.

His business was up in the weeks after the attacks. “I think people wanted to get away from it, seeing it all the time on TV,” he said. “Especially people who live alone.”

Affordable Luxury

Woodson, who in 27 years has seen more economic ups and downs than most of today’s brewpub and brewery owners, also doesn’t think that the economic downturn the attacks seem sure to worsen will seriously hurt a neighborhood tavern’s business.

“You are still going to go out for an reasonably priced meal, a decent evening, a few beers,” he said. “It is a luxury you can afford.”

Pam Brittingham, a bartender at The Globe in Athens, GA, saw a similar attitude in the weeks after September 11. The Globe opens at 4:00 p.m., so she and other employees listened to National Public Radio (the Globe has no television, and didn’t even offer one during the 1996 Olympics, some of which took place in town).

They kept the radio on in the first hours after the pub opened, but then changed to music at a low volume. “We wanted to give them some relief from what they had been listening to all day,” she said three weeks after the attacks. “By the weekend, people were needing to get out and do something normal, they didn’t even want to talk about it. It’s still probably what people talk about the most, but every three or four days somebody will say, ‘I can’t talk about this any more.’”

As important as neighborhood taverns were to so many people September 11, like too many other third places, they will probably continue to disappear at an alarming rate. But they really were “great good places” to be, and also to work, that day.

“There were definitely people coming in looking for each other,” Brittingham said. “It’s still going on. Everybody is extremely friendly and appreciative of each other.” And perhaps of having a good public place to gather.