Catching up with Cannelton, Part 2: Indiana Landmarks announces development opportunities in Cannelton.

Can-Clay outlined in red.

Catching up with Cannelton, Part 1: Recalling fun times at the Cannelton Heritage Festival.

NABC poured beer three times (2012, 2013 and 2014) at the Cannelton Heritage Festival. When Rob called in 2015, there wasn't much I could do to help him; my time at the brewery was drawing to a close, and I always knew our involvement wouldn't last forever.

I've no idea what happened next. It seems that Diana and I might have driven through Cannelton in 2016 for some reason, but this isn't clear, and in all likelihood four and a half years had passed since my last visit when Mark Cassidy invited me to accompany him on an errand to Tell City earlier this year. We planned lunch at the Pour Haus and Mark resolved to show me around his old haunts in Tell City.

After lunch, I suggested a Cannelton drive-through. Mark confided that it had been a very long time since his last time there. In all honesty, it looked like little had changed from 2014; Can-Clay must have just closed, and frankly the shuttered factory with its mounds of clay pipes reminded me of derelict sites in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.

This is not to be taken as critical. Both Mark and I were deeply affected by the extent of the problems facing Cannelton. Obviously the city isn't unique in America. Perhaps those three festivals gave me a rooting interest in the outcome. 
Here's the Indiana Landmarks release that prefaced these ruminations.

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Cannelton Announces Development Opportunities

Indiana Landmarks is working with Cannelton city and economic development leaders on two projects that could help spur much-needed revitalization.

In the late 1800s, coal, cotton, and easy access to the Ohio River made Cannelton a bustling commercial center, its streets lined with handsome houses and commercial buildings. More recently, decades of economic decline have taken a heavy toll on the Perry County community, leaving many of those buildings vacant and landing the Cannelton Historic District on Indiana Landmarks’ 10 Most Endangered list two years in a row. Today, we’re working with the city and economic development leaders on two projects that could yield big results and help spur much-needed revitalization.

The first involves an unassuming-looking building targeted for demolition adjacent to Cannelton City Hall. Local preservation group Renew Cannelton and Indiana Landmarks convinced city officials to grant the building a temporary reprieve to see if a rehab-minded buyer would step forward. Built in 1855 as a German Methodist church at the corner of 7th and Taylor streets, the building occupies a key location in downtown Cannelton, where its redevelopment could have a big impact. The city is looking for a developer who will restore the building to its historic appearance and renovate the interior for office or commercial use. Proposals are due by Friday, September 27.

We’re also working with the City and the Perry County Development Corporation on a larger-scale project at the former Can-Clay property, now owned by the county’s redevelopment commission. The Can-Clay business closed earlier this year after more than a century of manufacturing clay sewer pipes and chimney flues. The city’s original plans called for clearing the 30-acre site in hopes of attracting new development, but Indiana Landmarks encouraged local leaders to see the property’s historic buildings – including a four-story factory and several beehive kilns – as assets that could be the centerpiece of a unique redevelopment. We’re currently applying with local community partners for a grant through the American Institute of Architects to develop a vision for the property.

Can-Clay factory, CanneltonTo learn more about either of these projects, contact Greg Sekula, director of Indiana Landmarks’ Southern Regional Office, 812-284-4534, gsekula@indianalandmarks.org.

Catching up with Cannelton, Part 1: Recalling fun times at the Cannelton Heritage Festival.

This musing is prompted by an Indiana Landmarks mailing about two projects in Cannelton, Indiana. These will be the subject of the second part.

Catching up with Cannelton, Part 2: Indiana Landmarks announces development opportunities in Cannelton.

Some readers with long memories will recall NABC's appearances dispensing beer at the Cannelton Heritage Festival. It can't possibly have been seven years since the first of three appearances (2012 - 2014).

These posts are from 2013.

One lovely Saturday in Cannelton, Indiana.

NABC at the Cannelton Heritage Festival on Saturday, October 12.

I wrote a longer essay in October, 2012 as a recap to our first visit. It was published at the long defunct Louisville Beer Dot Com, and has not appeared in its entirety at NA Confidential.

Now's the time.

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Tastes like coffee, just different.

Earlier this year, I was contacted by a civic-minded resident of Cannelton, Indiana, which is situated amid verdant hills on the Ohio River, a few big navigational loops downstream from Louisville. If you’re not traveling by boat, Cannelton is about an hour and a half away.

My contact, Rob, wanted to know if NABC would pour craft beers at an important annual municipal function in October: Cannelton’s Heritage Festival, which in 2012 was slated for double duty as the city’s 175th birthday celebration.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the preceding paragraph isn’t that someone in Cannelton would conceive of the idea of bringing better beer to the party. It’s that Cannelton actually is a city, as legally constituted, and not a town as many of us would perceive it. The population is only 1,200, making it one of the smallest city in Indiana.

Conversely, I grew up in Georgetown, Indiana, where 2,800 people live; rest assured, Georgetown never has been a city in most accepted urban senses of the word.

But whatever its organizational nomenclature, Cannelton has a long, rollicking and fiercely independent history. The city was founded 175 years ago by a group of regional investors, some from Louisville, with the objective of creating a riverside, coal-fired textile manufacturing center (“cannel” is a type of coal), and while this dream never came to fruition, Cannelton prospered – for a while.

The most prominent remaining symbol of Cannelton’s bygone industrial past is a huge sandstone cotton mill building by the river. When constructed around 1850, it was the largest such structure west of the Alleghenies. Recently refashioned into 70 low-income apartments, the hulking structure stands only blocks away from Cannelton’s public high school, the second smallest in Indiana.

Perry County is hilly, forested and sparsely populated, and in a statewide Hoosier context, its two population centers (Cannelton and the nearby county seat of Tell City) are quite isolated from commercial mainstreams. As one might expect, Cannelton hardly enjoys immunity from the litany of societal ills afflicting rural areas throughout the United States. As Rob freely divulged when I drove down for a look-see in August, “Our biggest problem is poverty.”

But there seems to be a spirited group of people working hard to perpetuate Cannelton’s sense of community, and now I know that at least some of them might like to drink a craft beer every now and then.

In approximate terms, this is how NABC came to be enjoying a brilliant autumn afternoon in Cannelton on Saturday, October 13, setting up shop at the Heritage Festival at 9:30 a.m., central time, and pouring until dusk, when attendees gravitated a couple blocks away for an all-classes school reunion and evening finale at the mass-market beer garden.

The usual NABC festival rig had been packed: Four-product cold plate, pop-up tent, cups, tools, change bag, banners, propaganda, and of course, kegs of beer. In addition to our own Gold, Community Dark and Hoosier Daddy, we hauled Upland Wheat and represented for our friends in Bloomington.

The serving area was in a small pocket park off Washington Street, near tables and tents where a quartet of Hoosier vintners was pouring samples and selling bottles of wine. Our catering permit allowed samples and full pours of draft beer. If we could have sold growlers, there’d have been more than a few takers.

The street was blocked off for the festival, and there were booths lining the sidewalks, staffed by artisans, craftsmen, church congregations and civic organizations. Not unexpectedly, the scale was far intimate than New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming, where the sheer immensity of the temporary festival typically obscures and overwhelms the physical setting downtown. In Cannelton, the festival blends more harmoniously with the streetscape.

It would be possible to imagine the historic old commercial buildings, many in obvious disrepair, brooding with ghostly intent behind the booths. However, to me there were strange inanimate grins emanating from the architectural embellishments, as though there was delight in the appearance of life in the streets.

To be sure, the daytime festival crowd in Cannelton wasn’t so much a drinking crowd, whatever the adult beverage, although the ones who ventured into our licensed enclosure were curious and open to trying something new. This suited me just fine, as I find it increasingly refreshing to talk beer with people who are relatively new to the craft beer world.

While it’s true they often harbor pre-conceived notions (for instance, the darker the beer, the stronger it must be), they also are blessedly absent the type of overbearing and often misplaced concerns, which can be both boorish and irrelevant when it comes to garnering craft beer’s next five percentile.

Explaining why a Belgian-style Wit tastes the way it does, and being compelled neither to trace the specific agricultural lineage of the organic coriander used within, nor recall the late Pierre Celis’s shoe size, is liberating for me. Better yet, it’s plenty enough for the folks standing metaphorically just outside our collective craft beer tent, waiting patiently for the motivation to enter … in layman’s terms.

They’re interested, and they’re looking for beers and breweries to believe in, and to be loyal to. They may come to the geeky complexities later, or not at all. I say to them: Pull up a pew and have a few. After all, there’s no sense letting anyone languish in the corporate mockrobrew section of the aisle if a solid, locally-brewed alternative lies nearby.

Education always has been the key, and I believe this pendulum is swinging back with a vengeance. Events like Cannelton’s strengthen my resolve to do promote exactly that, and to spend more time teaching. This year, a keg in daylight; next year, maybe two at night.

One lovely Saturday in Cannelton, Indiana.

Funny, but the Perry County Health Department did not visit the NABC Pouring Center.

NABC at the Cannelton Heritage Festival on Saturday, October 12.

Last year NABC was delighted to be invited to serve craft beer at the Cannelton (Indiana) Heritage Festival, and so in 2013, we’re making it an encore performance, joining local wineries from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. in “the shadows of the Indiana Cotton Mill.”

I wrote about it at LouisvilleBeer.com last fall: Tastes Like Coffee, Just Different ...

 ... The street was blocked off for the festival, and there were booths lining the sidewalks, staffed by artisans, craftsmen, church congregations and civic organizations. Not unexpectedly, the scale was far intimate than New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming, where the sheer immensity of the temporary festival typically obscures and overwhelms the physical setting downtown. In Cannelton, the festival blends more harmoniously with the streetscape.

We're taking Community Dark, Black & Blue Grass, Hoosier Daddy and Hoptimus. If you're heading that way, stop by and say hello.