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: "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. 

---

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.

---

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.

---

* Now known as Cafe & Brewhouse

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.

Yawn.

At times like this, I turn to the Pour Fool -- because the Pour Fool gets it. In today's agitated WTZAW obituary, Steve Foolbody makes an excellent point, to which I'll confine my quotations -- but be sure to click through to the whole piece, and absorb the beautifully righteous anger.

I can only hope the shoe-gazers among the solipsistic beer narcissist contingent can someday feel some of that anger. The world would be a far better place.

Another One Bites The Dust: Budweiser Finds Another Sell-Out, by steve foolbody (The Pour Fool)

These acquisitions have ZERO to do with wanting to "support ALL breweries, EVERYWHERE". These are all about Influence. Leverage. Insinuating themselves into a culture which is, at least in LARGE part, a reaction to and rejection of everything AB has stood for…

The ugly news broke, just this morning, of the impending sale of Asheville, North Carolina’s Wicked Weed Brewing….to a company which doesn’t give two shits about WW’s beer, P&L sheet or anything else about it…except its LOCATION…

OKAY…here’s a little primer, as we get all set to watch another fine American brewery lose its “Indie Beer” status for good… With these breweries – these, in effect, TOOLS – they can legitimately pry open the doors to state governments in places where Indie Beer is strongest.

The Pour Fool proceeds to list AB InBev's Trojan Zombie Afterlife breweries by state.

Breweries by state: WA: Elysian; 32% of Red Hook / OR: 10 Barrel; 32% of Widmer Brothers / CA: Golden Road Brewing / AZ: Four Peaks Brewing / Texas: Karbach Brewing /VA: Devil’s Backbone Brewing / IL: Goose Island / CO: Breckenridge Brewing / NY: Blue Point Brewing / HI: 32% of Kona Brewing

Then he looks at brewing states by size.

THE LARGEST BREWING STATES, BY # OF BREWERIES:
1. California
2 – 4. Varies between Colorado,Washington, and Oregon
5. Michigan (No AB ownership)
6. Pennsylvania (No AB ownership)
7. New York
8. Wisconsin (No AB ownership)
9. Texas
10. North Carolina
11. Illinois

It's a fairly obvious pattern. AB InBev's acquisitions are about chess, power and shelf space, not necessarily in that order. He notes that breweries in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have been approached ... and among the targets coming into the multinational's cross-hairs?

The HOTTEST UP & COMERS:
1. Florida
2. Indiana
3. Virginia
4. Ohio
5. Arizona

That's right, Hoosierland; for someone, the lottery's about to hit.

Greedhead Brewers in PA,WI, FL, IN, and OH, think fast. Your payday is coming…

When it does, could brewery owners please take the Twitter advice of legendary beer writer Stephen Beaumont ...

... and pop star Steve Miller: No bullshit and fables; just take the money, and run.