BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: When Old Mister Lew tells a story, you're advised to listen closely.

It's an American "craft" (microbrew?) history lesson from Professor Bryson, but don't panic. Think corrections, not catastrophe. The scene may seem to be in upheaval, but as Lew entertainingly points out, we've all been here before -- in the late 1990s.

As an aside, which may or may not be relevant to Lew's thoughts, I've finally started reading a book previously only skimmed: Michael Jackson's Great Beers of Belgium, first published around 1992.

My copy is the revised hardback edition from 2006, which was given to me as a gift. Jackson updated the text one last time in 2007, just before his death, and it came out in paperback form the following year. The book is wonderful, and Jackson's prose styling remains elegant and informative.

I miss his writing tremendously.

Whether good, bad or indifferent, the past few years for me have been a period of reckoning. Chronology afflicts me; so many deaths, so much change. Outside the walls of our house, where Diana and I constantly remind each other of how fortunate we are to be together and to live rich, loving lives, the chaos seems unceasing.

I'm a realist, and while circumstances differ, it's all happened before. When I look back on periods of my life that seem wonderful in retrospect, most of them were just as chaotic and uncertain as now. Perhaps one aspect was fantastic, and that's the part I've chosen to remember, and the way to keep the dissonance at bay.

There isn't one answer to a multiplicity of life's questions, but we can do as Lew advises -- and in his own unique voice, Jackson surely would have seconded -- by filling a glass, breathing deeply and embracing the narrative. Put down your phones, and have a conversation. Tell stories. Teach and be taught.

In a universal context, time's always running out for each one of us. The trick is to address those diminishing sands in the hourglass by slowing down, not speeding up. 

THERE ARE REASONS FOR CONCERN, BUT THE SKY ISN’T FALLING, by Lew Bryson (All About Beer Magazine)

 ... The sky is falling!

Breathe, brothers and sisters. Grab a can, fill a glass, take a seat at the bar … and breathe, while Old Mister Lew tells a story.

THE BEER BEAT: "Bock brings the Germans rushing to the beer garden."

In the USA: on the Bock imagery of goats.

Doppelbock is the perfect example of a seasonal beer style redolent of history and faraway places, and yet deemed insufficiently sexy for narcissistic, hop-laden, shoe-gazing geeks.

No bitterness in this soul, mind you.

There actually was a Bock Fest in NuLu yesterday, and maybe I should have gone over and taken stock, but after being in Munich 20-odd years ago during Starkbierzeit (strong beer time) ... well, you know.

It might not be the same, although I commend the organizers for furthering Bock recognition in Louisville.

Apart from every other consideration, and whether one prefers malty or bitter, it is the seasonal nature of Doppelbock that we found enticing during the dawning age of better beer consciousness. Celebrator and Salvator were available during the warm weather months, but who wants to drink them in July?

Summertime was, and remains, intended for Bavarian-style wheat ale.

Even before the inception of Gravity Head, we'd time the arrival of draft Doppelbocks at the Public House for the Lenten season, as in Bavaria. More often than not, is was still chilly outside. In a word, ideal.

At Pints & Union, we'll keep a bottled version of Doppelbock (as well as Hefeweizen) year-round, but there'll be only two spare faucets for rotating drafts, and these will be scheduled to pour as we used to do it, traditionally and seasonally.

No one ever described the theory and practice of Doppelbock quite as wonderfully as the late Beer Hunter, Michael Jackson. This piece is from 1998.

Bock brings the Germans rushing to the beer garden

After the dark months of winter, the Bavarians are now venturing cautiously into their beloved beer gardens, even though the weather is not yet reliably warm enough to ensure comfort.

They can always give themselves a little central heating with a Bock Beer. In Germany, this is a brewery's strongest beer, unless - as is often the case - it also has a "double" Bock.

Both variations are seasonal specialties for cool weather, and the Doppelbocks are especially associated with Lent. Extra-strong beers were originally made at this time of year by monastic breweries as "liquid bread" to see the brothers through the weeks when their diet forbade not only meat but also fish.

The notion of beer as liquid bread is not fanciful. In the dawn of civilisation, bread was baked as a raw material for brewing and in some corners of the world "traditional beers" are still something of an alcoholic porridge.

A rich, malty beer like a Doppelbock is quite filling and does not, like the lighter, hoppier styles, further arouse the appetite ...

THE BEER BEAT: A Pints & Union preview video at New Albany Social ... plus the new Falls City taproom and a Michael "Beer Hunter" Jackson birthday greeting.

Kelly and Joe. This is not a link.

Joe Phillips did a live Facebook video earlier today at Pints & Union, courtesy of Kelly Winslow and her New Albany Social juggernaut. Embedding seems a challenge, so here's New Albany Social video link -- as well as a couple of interior shots (below) from when I ambled past this morning and chatted for a bit with Resch's crew.

Joe says it all, which means I can turn to beer news from Louisville, courtesy of Kevin Gibson at Insider Louisville.

Falls City Brewing set to open new brewery, taproom on Friday

Falls City Brewing Co. announced today it will open its new brewery and taproom on Friday, March 30. The newly renovated facility will be dedicated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Mayor Greg Fischer at 11 a.m. that day.

The new complex, which was built nearly a century ago, is located at 901 E. Liberty St. — in the NuLu/Phoenix Hill neighborhood — and features a seven-barrel brewhouse set in a roughly 5,100-square-foot space, as well as a taproom area that is nearly 4,000 square feet, and an outdoor beer garden that tops 3,000 square feet. For the last several years, Falls City had been part of the Over the 9/Old 502 Winery complex on 10th Street near Portland ...

In closing, today would have been the legendary beer writer Michael Jackson's 76th birthday (he died in 2007). I can say without a shade of exaggeration that if not for Jackson, I probably wouldn't be in the position of shepherding Joe's beer program at Pints & Union.

For more, this story from last year. My misplaced copy of the Beer Hunter's first great book recently turned up, and I'm absorbing some timeless wisdom.

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

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

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

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

THE BEER BEAT: Remembering Michael Jackson and revising the beer tasting syllabus.

On August 23, I conducted a beer tasting (with yummy appetizers) at Mesa: A Collaborative Kitchen in New Albany.

THE BEER BEAT: Thanks to Mesa (A Collaborative Kitchen) for a great inaugural beer night.

It had been a while since I led a sampling that wasn't filled with NABC beers, these occasions having devolved somewhat into urgent (futile?) salesmanship as much as balanced education, so it seemed prudent to rethink the approaching evening in thematic terms.

Given the bewildering complexity of the beer world these days, what are the essential points, apart from information about the specific beer being sampled?

The brewing process, of course. Just the basics about ingredients and their use in the brewhouse, as would be offered on any brewery tour, without going into mind-numbing detail.

As a corollary, the difference between ales and lagers. Why the yeast and fermentation temperature matter, and how this played out over the history of brewing, especially in Central Europe when "lager" as we know it originated.

Local brewing history, or in our specific case, how those German lager brewers came here and recreated their world, with similarities and differences.

How these factors and so many more come together in terms of beer style, reflecting my fundamental belief that in a majority of cases, human beings must know the rules before they break them -- and, moreover, that familiarity with styles makes one a happier consumer.

In short, it's back to basics, both for me and anyone else who is interested in thinking a bit about where we've been, so as better to see where we're going, and toward this end I took my archival copy of Michael Jackson's original book The World Guide to Beer to the tasting and passed it around.

Most attendees hadn't ever seen it, and accordingly the book will be a staple at all future tastings.

The Mesa gig was on August 23. I knew the 10th anniversary of Jackson's passing was coming soon, but wasn't sure exactly when; while eating lunch at Brugge Brasserie on Wednesday, I glanced at my e-mail and saw the notification of Tom Acitelli's letter perfect tribute in All About Beer, linked here.

In fact, Acitelli's essay is a "must read" for anyone seeking the rounded, "whole beer" experience. Jackson was a memorable prose stylist, but moreover, he systematized a language of style that beer people speak every day without once reflecting about its origins. I think we need to know these origins.

You are commanded to click this link, now. Read first, drink beer later. I'm hoping to do another Mesa tasting in October, and I'll keep you posted.

REMEMBERING THE BARD OF BEER: WHY THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER MICHAEL JACKSON

 ... “If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style.” That was Jackson toward the start of World Guide.

With a generation’s hindsight, it’s an unremarkable statement. But in 1977, it was positively revolutionary. Jackson was the first critic to write for a consumer audience about beer styles in much the same way that wine critics had long written of wine styles. Before Jackson, beers were fitted into “divisions,” “species,” “types,” “varieties” and “classes,” but never styles.

That etymological flourish by itself would have made his contribution to the beery canon memorable. But he spent the next three decades refining and expanding it, putting on quite an intellectual performance for a subject not used to the scrutiny.

The painter Bruegel might come up in a discussion of lambic, or topography in an examination of the origin of lager, or immigration in the rise of beer in the U.S. Throughout, too, Jackson dove into the technical nitty-gritty of Plato, IBU, ABV, etc., as well as the back stories of breweries and brewers, hop farmers and beer merchants.

30 years ago today on THE BEER BEAT: Visiting the Carlsberg brewery just prior to the Altercation in Copenhagen.

Previously: 30 years ago today: Copenhagen, and the calm before the Clash of the Titans.

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Day 118 ... Wednesday, August 12 (Part One)
Copenhagen. Altercation in Copenhagen. Classic evening

Kim was at work on Wednesday, and I knew the way to Carlsberg, so there was no doubt that Barrie's limited amount of time on the ground in Copenhagen would include a brewery tour.

It wasn't necessary to twist his arm.

Carlsberg would be a return visit for me, and this passage from the 1985 travel narrative sets the scene as well as reiterating what led us to beers of the world in the first place. I've inserted the 1987 photos into 1985 commentary.

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In 1985, the performer Michael Jackson’s (1958 - 2009) savvy pop music was ubiquitous throughout Europe – also in America, unoccupied islands off the coast of Antarctica, and the remainder of the planet.

It’s no surprise. After all, Jackson’s Thriller album already was timelessly epochal a mere two years after its release, and today, years after his death, it has sold 65 million copies worldwide.

This astounding quantity is considerably more than the total number of books sold by Michael Jackson, the beer writer (1942 - 2007), although three million units is no small achievement in itself.

Honestly, Michael Jackson the entertainer's music never did much for me, apart from his “Willard” theme. To this day I refuse to accept “King of Pop” as his honorific. Maybe it applies to Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra, but not to Gary's Moonwalker, though this is a matter of personal taste.

Conversely, a compelling case can be made that Michael Jackson the Yorkshireman fully deserves to be remembered as “King of Beer,” far more so than A-B InBev’s classically insipid American Lager.

Jackson’s book The World Guide to Beer (1977) almost singlehandedly elevated beer to the status of a topic important enough to discuss in mixed company, although ironically, it probably didn’t achieve critical mass in America until long after the initial publication, when it could be found remaindered on the discount tables of chain bookstores in malls across the country.

That’s where I found The World Guide to Beer, and I wasn’t the only one. A whole first generation of “beer geeks” took its cues from Jackson’s classic survey of world beer history.

It was a big, heavy, coffee-table book, and I didn’t haul it to Europe in my gym bag, but it was every bit as important to me in 1985 as budget travel guidebooks like Let’s Go: Europe and Europe on 25 Dollars A Day.

Why?

It’s all about the power of words.

While the canon of pop music has been enriched by the singer Michael Jackson’s output, its everyday vocabulary is not directly referential to his body of work. However, the language of beer indisputably passes directly through Michael Jackson, the writer.

He was among the first to systematically consider and explain beer styles, and to show how aspects of the brewing process, historical practice, geography, chemistry and myriad other human experiences pertained to them, demonstrating that our enjoyment of the genre is enhanced by greater overall knowledge.

All of these facets taken together form a shared language of “beer speak,” and Jackson shaped it in an enduringly readable way, neither dumbing down his material nor assuming the role of lofty pedant. He was an erudite prose stylist in addition to his journalistic skills as a nuts-and-bolts reporter.

The “Beer Hunter” always told wonderful stories, while never forgetting the newspaperman’s facts-first orientation, and I persist in believing that Jackson is best compared to figures like Samuel Johnson and other great essayists of the English tradition.

As such, I feel quite fortunate to have made Jackson’s acquaintance, chatting with him on more than one occasion. In fact, in 1994 he visited my pub and drank a pint, but first he showed me the way to Carlsberg in Copenhagen, where I experienced my first Old World brewery tour.

I’d gravitated back to the Vesterbro neighborhood stretching beyond the Vista restaurant’s front door, stepping off the “S” near Carlsberg’s 19th-century rail yard complex in Valby, the brewery’s gently undulating locale.

This observation alone provided a valuable lesson for future European beer hunting expeditions, because breweries of a certain pre-automotive age almost always are located near railroad tracks or navigable waterways – the interstates of their age.

(At the time of my visit, formerly independent Tuborg* still brewed beer at its own historic plant on the other side of town, despite having merged with Carlsberg. Tuborg, which I toured in 1989 prior to its closure, had its very own shipping docks.)

Carlsberg remains an iconic international beer brand, recognizable the world over for the green label and unique script of its flagship, Carlsberg Hof, a mild Pilsner-style golden lager. Significantly, the beer wasn’t always golden. Nor was it always a lager. Carlsberg’s first batches in 1847 were dark-colored ales.

Founder J. C. Jacobsen was the son of a brewer, and his career began at a propitious time, because numerous factors were converging to make possible the seismic transformation of the beer business, from a typically localized and smaller-scale brewing of ales to the eventual global reach of mass-produced golden lagers as brewed at factories just like the one I visited.

Jacobsen had no specialized academic background, but he was industrious and astute. His European contemporaries Gabriel Sedlmayer and Anton Dreher were pioneers of lager brewing, and because they didn't think in proprietary terms, the Dane freely borrowed from their expertise, making frequent journeys south for continuing education.

It is said that Jacobsen transported fragile lager yeast from Munich to Copenhagen, keeping it cool in his stovepipe hat. More importantly, he funded a laboratory and commenced a rigorously scientific approach to brewing, correctly foreseeing the value of a consistent, replicable product in the context of a global economy.

However, neither Jacobsen nor his son and eventual successor Carl were robber baron capitalists. To them, brewing was more about technology than art, but the profits were a different story. Father, son and Carlsberg became models of 19th-century industrialized philanthropy, with the family’s brewing interests bequeathed to a foundation with numerous scientific, cultural and artistic non-profit imperatives.

Much about Carlsberg has changed since my first glimpse of Copenhagen. There have been mergers and acquisitions, and a structural reformatting of the company after the fall of Communism. Large scale brewing has moved to a different location in Jutland, and the “old” brewery in Copenhagen survives as a company headquarters, tourist destination, and historic site, producing specialty “craft” brews. The former acreage of the industrial plant nearby is being redeveloped as a whole new city quarter.

However, Carlsberg still fulfills its philanthropic mandates as a foundation, and I’ll always feel better drinking a multinational Carlsberg than a beer brewed by the likes of AB-InBev. Unlike the Jacobsens, the Busch family legacy is unsightly, indeed.

Carlsberg’s most enduring architectural feature is the imposing stone Elephant Gate lying just outside the historic brew house. Generation of multi-lingual brewery tour guides have been drilled to immediately disavow the presence of swastikas carved into the elephants’ pedestals.

Paraphrasing:

“These are ancient symbols of auspiciousness, luck and well-being. The word ‘swastika’ itself is Sanskrit, not German, and these have nothing to do with that other fellow during the war.”

Point taken.

As I came to understand with notches subsequently added to my belt, brewery tours at the Carlsberg level of operation seldom rise above the introductory. I’ve heard and repeated the gospel several thousand times since. Grain is malted and mashed, sugar water created, hops added during the boil, and yeast eating sugar to create alcohol and carbonation. The inevitable conclusion comes while looking over the throbbing, cacophonous bottling line.

Thirsty yet? Well, come right this way.

Of course, a brewery like Carlsberg is able to place these tours in a compelling architectural and historic context. If 19th-century industrial buildings like these did not continue to fascinate modern man, we wouldn’t rush to convert them into condos, and if advertising graphics from the same era didn’t cease to exert feelings of loyalty and cultural identification, we'd have no breweriana collectors.

Unfortunately, the litigiousness of our modern world has gone far toward spoiling the ultimate objective of brewery tours, because who would endure the factory stroll without a prospect of tasting the bounty?

At the end of my first Carlsberg tour, the participants were seated at tables in a room festooned with brewery ads and graphic art. Sample beers in lightly chilled bottles already were lined up and ready on each table, with a few salty snacks and gratis souvenirs – stickers and decals, maybe some paper labels. There was joy and delight all around.

It seemed odd to me at the time that families with young children would be taking the brewery tour, but they were. It was free-wheeling Europe, not puritanical America. There were soft drinks for the kids, and only later did I do the requisite math and learn the solo traveler’s best strategy at such times: Stick close to the families and be smilingly gracious, because when they occupy a table set for six with a single spare seat and invite you to join them, only the adults will be drinking.

And this, of course, means more beer for me.

---

We were able to do some light sightseeing, then returned to Kim's apartment to begin preparations for a memorable evening at the Elephant & Mouse pub, in the company of "Big Kim" Andersen, as opposed to "Little Kim" Wiesener, who wanted us to meet his old friend.

30 years later, we're all old friends.

There'd be special beer at this pub, too: Carlsberg's Elephant Beer, on draft.

Here are labels from some of the Carlsberg beers we drank:

And a stray:

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* 1987 photos featuring Tuborg, which I took after Barrie's departure, as well as a couple of beer labels.

Next: Elephant, Mouse, wonderful friends and a Titanic Struggle.

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

How did this happen? Keep reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red.

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” I replied.

Jackson put down his pen and began telling the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the journalist/politician’s name?*

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

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AN UPDATE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson, Louisville, and the Color Red

Posted by Roger Baylor in Baylor on Beer | 0 comments

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

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

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

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

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

Potpourri: Sandkerwa N.A. tonight; Downtown Saturday tomorrow; remembering beer writer Michael Jackson.

New Albany’s second in a monthly series of Downtown Saturdays runs tomorrow from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. More than two dozen merchants in the city’s historic business district will be open, and many are offering special sales and promotions for the occasion.

Among them are three featuring prominently in a Louisville Eccentric Observer “Eat ‘N’ Blog” article this past week: North of the river, things are looking bright.

Now, three more restaurant openings in the city’s historic district — Treet’s Bakery Café, Speakeasy and Connor’s Place — have brought the New Albany dining scene close to critical mass … and there’s more coming.

If you’re downtown tomorrow, be aware that Treet’s will be open for breakfast and the Speakeasy for standard lunch hours, with Connor’s Place unlocking the doors on Saturday circa 2:00 p.m.

For more on the Downtown Saturday concept and the people who are organizing it, consult the latest issue of Develop New Albany’s newsletter, “The Renaissance Chronicle.”

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The past week began fractiously. A disinformation campaign by discredited congenital obstructionists aimed at sliming the Carnegie Center was revealed here as bogus, and then, not to be outdone, a perpetually underachieving city council happily commenced suing itself.

A theocratic Indianapolis attorney came to town to stroke the inflamed libidos of trognonymous bloggers, ostensibly (and opportunistically) on the basis of property tax relief, although it bears noting that Eric Miller probably would be sending gays and atheists to Git-Mo if he were dictator.

The week ends with sadness as we note the death at 65 of renowned beer writer and journalist Michael Jackson, the colossus who was the founder of the good beer movement.

My thoughts are at the Potable Curmudgeon blog:

Grieving the Beer Hunter's passing: Michael Jackson, the Red Room and Louisville.

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Speaking of beer, NABC's the place to be for the next week or two as we present our first-ever draft appreciation of primarily Northern Bavarian beer styles:

Sandkerwa NA, an homage to Bamberg’s beers, begins Friday, August 31.

Sandkerwa NA approaches on Friday, August 31 (final list and pricing).