PINTS & UNION PORTFOLIO: If beer choices constantly rotate, then it's revolutionary to rotate them less often -- or not at all.

The Spring 2019 issue (Vol. 63) of Food & Dining Magazine will hit the streets in March. My beer column is returning with a brief overview of Pints&union, emphasizing our revolutionary beer program.

My stand is clear, and the time for a “back to basics” movement is now. I believe there exists a silent majority among American beer drinkers who find the kaleidoscopic tilt-whirl of short attention spans – this frenetic hamster wheel approach to beer appreciation – utterly bewildering.

If you're thinking this isn't revolutionary at all, I beg to differ. The core definition of revolution is "involving or causing a complete or dramatic change." There's an inescapable relativity to this. If beer choices constantly rotate, then it's revolutionary to rotate them less often -- or not at all.

Ah, but BUSINESS -- consumers demand kaleidoscopic hamster wheels, therefore businesses are compelled to provide them or go bust.

Not entirely, and in fact I've never really believed this is true. If I had, would there have been a Rich O's Public House in 1990 offering unknown beers when consumers were demanding a dozen more tasteless frozen light lager "choices"?

Besides, if every bar in town is showing the Stupor Bore, then I want my joint to do something different as a haven for the minority preferring anything but football. Businesses are compelled to find markets, not pander to any particular model.

This is as good a segue as any into a nationwide campaign to restore a dollop or three of equilibrium to the reign of short beer attention spans.

Why #FlagshipFebruary?

What sometimes gets lost amid the constant stream of special releases are the beers that paved the way for today’s remarkable global beer market, or in other words, the flagship beers that got us here.

When the current keg of Monnik Mild George depletes, there'll be two kegs of Anchor Steam to pour in connivance with #FlagshipFebruary, although I can't say exactly when this will begin.

San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Co. is widely acknowledged to be the first modern-day craft brewery in the United States. It is less appreciated that the company’s flagship beer, Anchor Steam Beer, is the first American craft beer in modern times. Because of its status as the last survivor of the steam beer style, which was once widespread in the American West, the beer appears to be a missing link between historic and craft beers. However, the circumstances of its reinvention in 1971 show it to be something far more important.

Finally, at Good Beer Hunting the forever well-informed and provocative Bryan Roth turns the very notion of "flagship" inside out. It's very interesting reading, which makes me more determined than ever to create, nurture and sustain an alternative beachhead.

We’ve Created a Monster — What Does it Mean to Talk Flagship Fatigue?

... Advocates spent the last 40 years decrying the problems of mass market Lager and clamoring for more options and experiences via “small and independent” craft brewers. They can hardly complain when those wishes come to fruition, and when 85% of 21-and-over Americans live within 10 miles of a brewery. This is the future liberal, promiscuous drinkers want, old-guard flagships be damned.

I've been one of these advocates, who now finds his innate contrarianism to be as infinitely mutable as the beer marketplace itself. I'm proud of what we've accomplished so far, and I will continue to work on improving the beer experience at Pints&union.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: #FlagshipFebruary is right in my wheelhouse, and Pints&union will do its little bit for the cause.

When can we get those cans?

I'm a beer-first kind of guy, which isn't altogether hard to understand. But if we take it a step further and inquire exactly which beer comes first, things get a tad murkier.

I've answered this question in many different ways during the past four decades. There were imports, and later microbrews; the latter morphed into "craft" beers, and eventually "craft" beers were being imported, too. I was fine with St. Pauli Girl until it became clear that the very best German beer originated in an obscure valley somewhere in Franconia; last month in Munich, I drank my weight in Paulaner. I was a hophead, a gravity head, a sourpuss and a dedicated follower of fashion.

Then I wasn't any longer.

I suppose there are many more reasons for this conversion than sufficient space allotted to list them, although in a very fundamental sense, if one awakens each morning to a planet seemingly gone insane, it's understandable to begin reconsidering the merits of focus and stability.

What gives us hope and strength even if they take our iPhones away? A pint of tasty, timeless and honest beer, that's what.

More power to anyone and everyone who defines their beer lives via the new norms of brute strength, elusive rarity and sheer hoardability. I'm happy to have done my part in bringing you to this juncture. Rock on and have fun, while I reverse field, flee the neo-conformist pack and recall the wonderful wisdom of Joe Stange, quoted in this space just last year.

What one word, or phrase, do you think should be used to describe beer that you’d like to drink?

Comfort.

In the beers I try I'm not looking for one-night stands. I'm looking for future wives. I'm looking for the ones you invite into your house because you might want to live with them, to grow more familiar with them; they walk in on you in the bathroom and you don't even mind. Few beers are so easy to get along with. Few offer the sort of depth that allows a lifetime of getting acquainted.

Thus the beer program at Pints&union, once aptly described by my wife as a conscious attempt to recreate a portion of the Rich O's Public House ambiance  from around 1997 -- with or without the couches in the barroom.

• Or, beer's greatest hits ... and some that will be.
• Or, 47 beautiful beer classics ... and four ugly ones (Louisvillians will know the reference)
• Or, comfort beers, golden oldies, brews you can sing along to ...

Here's the list, updated last week.

What the majority of these beers have in common is being idiotically undervalued in on-premise settings, having been supplanted by the "always a new beer hourly" approach of coddling short attention spans.

Last week the beer writer Stephen Beaumont addressed this phenomenon and offered an idea to do something about it.

A New #FlagshipFebruary Campaign Aims To Save Core Beer Brands Before They Disappear, by Tara Nurin (Forbes)

Deservedly or not, millennials get blamed for a lot of things, not least of all the slow demise of the flagship beer. Called everything from fickle to promiscuous, millennial craft beer drinkers stereotypically flit between the newest, hottest, rarest releases with no regard for the workhorse core brands that, to apply the most common cliché, “keep the lights on” for brewers who bank on their steady sales for sturdy ongoing revenue.

Beer writers like me do a lot of hand wringing over this, particularly as it pertains to the old classics–Sierra Nevada Pale Ale gets mentioned most often–that built the craft beer industry in the first place. Our laments are more than sentimental. The nation’s most pioneering and influential old craft breweries, all of which built their businesses on a flagship or two, are struggling mightily – and not so successfully -- to compete in a world where a decent number of upstarts don’t even craft a core beer.

“A lot of beer drinkers have developed a sort of ADD with respect to the beers they drink, so going for a glass of beer at the bar or pub becomes less a pleasant distraction and more a relentless search for what’s new and exciting. In this mad rush towards the unusual and unknown, we tend to forget the great, familiar and still-wonderful beers that guided us all along the path to the craft beer renaissance,” emails globally renowned beer journalist Stephen Beaumont, who’s authored 13 books on the subject.

On Tuesday, Beaumont decided to officially do something about this important but admittedly first-world problem. He’s launching a campaign called #FlagshipFebruary, a month-long international celebration of flagship beers.

Bravo! This is my kind of crusade; so is Lew Bryson's Session Beer Project, which is referenced in the article.

At Pints&union, where the beer program largely has been built around the notion of rediscovering classic and flagships, we'll be doing our little bit for #FlagshipFebruary by tapping Anchor Steam at month's beginning. We're getting two kegs, which is all the wholesaler has; as I've learned during the past seven months, it's not easy to return to a flagship mentality when wholesalers systematically reduce the presence of classics in favor of overstocking one-offs, seasonals and specialties.

On the general topic of my beer life as of January, 2019, the following was ranted last evening at Facebook. I approve these words, given that I wrote them; moreover, they're a composite snapshot of my mood entering the new year.

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Back in the early 1990s at the original Rich O's Public House, we started selling what I considered to be "good" beers to lots of you who remain friends today. I didn't always know what the hell I was doing with these beers, but I believed strongly in the VALUE and SUSTAINABILITY of what I was doing with them. Although I'm unsure from whence this confidence came, there was no doubt in my mind that better beer was a trend, not a fad.

I cared very little about what others were doing with their beer programs, because for the most part, beer programs didn't even exist -- and I knew I could do it better than most of them, regardless. The local scene has changed IMMENSELY since then, and in metro Louisville, lots of folks are doing wondrous things with beer, whether as brewers or better beer bars. No one appreciates their success more than me. But I still have my shtick, and my shtick abides.

The Pints&union beer program is getting close to where I want it, although there's still tweaking to be done and a few adjustments to be made. The chief virtues of this list are stability and timelessness, and there are no apologies to be made for this "greatest hits" approach.

As Irving Thalberg told the Marx Brothers prior to Night at the Opera, it can't be constant comedic fireworks and ceaseless hamsters spinning their wheels; comedy has to play AGAINST something fixed and solid. So does good beer.

If you need to have a different beer every time you come in, there are approximately 60 on this list -- that's more than two months' worth, and let me know when you come out the other side; I'll see what I can do in a post-graduate sense.

I'm too old to be all adrenaline-charged and cocky, and yet the beer I know how to do, I can still do well. I've had 35 years of practice. Thanks again to Joe C Phillips for the opportunity to prove it.

PINTS & UNION PORTFOLIO: It's my State of the Beer address for 2019.

Pints&union has passed the six-months-in-business hurdle, so here's a brief State of the Beer report.

Overview: the state of our beer is fairly excellent, and we're in range of sustainability over a long haul. As with sporting endeavors, it's about building a roster according to a system of thought (beer's greatest hits, and some that will be), putting a competitive product out on the field, then making adjustments. 

In terms of draft beer, what I'm hoping will be the final piece in the puzzle currently rests in the walk-in: the first keg of Fuller's London Porter, which will be tapped when the Edmund Fitzgerald depletes. The starting lineup will then be complete.

Bell’s Two Hearted Ale
Falls City Classic Pilsner
(Fuller's London Porter)
Fuller’s London Pride
Guinness Stout
Pilsner Urquell (new tapping system coming very soon)

+ seasonal rotating beer (lengthier engagements)
+ heritage rotating beer (often St. Bernardus or another Belgian ale)
+ serendipity rotating beer (usually high gravity)
+ cider (currently scrumpy from Thomas Family Winery)

We've added a number of bottles and cans to the list during the past few weeks, and there now are 50 daily selections embracing a broad range of styles. There'll be a couple of additions next week, then the tweaking begins. The following have been added since November:

Anchor Porter
Arrogant Bastard
Celebrator Doppelbock
Daredevil Lift Off IPA
Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron
Duchesse de Bourgogne
Firestone Walker Union Jack
Founders Breakfast Stout
Gulden Draak
Old Engine Oil
Paulaner Salvator
Rodenbach Alexander
Rogue Dead Guy

Also, there's a permanent space in the cooler to house rotating bottles and cans. There's an old favorite coming today, Carlsberg Elephant Beer, as well as the first in a series of Mile Wide cans on shuffle (Idlewild), to be followed by two of the brewery's seasonal can releases when they arrive.

Finally, if it ever gets cold, the 2017 and 2018 vintages of Thomas Hardy's Ale are available for sipping at room temperature. A few bottles of each will be cellared until next year, and so we'll roll.

Note that my job-related resolution for the coming year is to work harder toward enabling the beer information capability at Pints&union, which is to say that there is much information to disseminate about the beer program at the pub, and this information should originate with the pub itself, and not on this blog platform.

In short and for the most part, if it has to do with Pints&union, it needs to be coming from Pints&union. In my previous life at NABC, I seldom differentiated between the company's outreach and my own soap box. All my public and private roles were mixed up amid an ongoing determination that "you're entitled to my opinion."

This wasn't necessarily a mistake. I've always held that political and big business cults of personality are almost uniformly bad, not ones associated with small-time indie business figureheads like me. Still, this time around the effort needs to be delineated, because I'm no longer an owner. In the coming weeks this will be my aim.

Your patronage is appreciated in ways I can only vaguely reference with the written word.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Ordering beer, watching movies, dreaming of Bavaria and oiling our hops.

Back into a routine.

Monday mornings surveying the empty spaces on cooler shelves, lifting kegs, making space for reinforcements and placing pen to paper. It's all very old school, right up to the point when I text my orders to wholesaler reps.

I've missed this sort of work.

It's been at least ten years since I was actively involved with a beer program like the one at Pints&union now; once Bank Street Brewhouse began construction in 2008, it was all about selling NABC's beer, which proved to be multitudinous Groundhog Days of frustration for me.

That's in the past. We depleted the better part of two kegs of Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest in five days last week, and also tapped a quarter barrel of Founders Harvest Ale (it will be pouring when the pub opens for business Tuesday).

Draft sales have been gratifyingly brisk so far, and within the next two weeks, both Fuller's London Pride and Anchor Porter should be back at their stations.

To me, the big challenge so far has been to make the best use of limited space for bottles and cans, and assembling a great classicist "short list" of 40 to 45 choices. It's a work in progress, but comments like this one from Monnik's skilled brewer Scott Hand really help my morale.

Interestingly, another friend said he'd invited a few notable beer geek enthusiasts to come to the pub, and they begged off because the beer at Pints&union isn't interesting enough.

Come to think of it, this might be the highest praise of all. 

Now, for a few links.

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Last Friday we attended a 4:00 p.m. screening of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 at Baxter Avenue Theatres Filmworks in Louisville. It's a measure of how seldom I watch movies that Friday's visit was my first to BATF since the cinema remodeled back in 2016, an investment that included the debut of a bar with real adult beverages.

Consequently I was delighted to find this bar situated at the entrance to our chosen screen, and even happier to note the presence of local beers on tap. Moore's documentary might be his finest yet, and my outraged enjoyment was facilitated by delicious draft Gravely Hefeweizen and Vienna Lager.

As a caveat, stadium seats implies stadium pricing, but as I noted, it's a rare splurge for me, anyway.

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For the photo alone.

10 of the best brewery tap rooms in Europe: readers’ tips (The Guardian)

Our tipsters try everything from a Peak District brewpub crawl to a beer in Ukraine named in ‘honour’ of Vladimir Putin

This brewery on the banks of a glacier-carved Alpine lake is in a monastery with tables that reach to the water’s edge, and for a price that vanished long ago in Britain … This is the Tegernsee brewery tap in southern Bavaria. It serves its own Helles, a crisp golden beer, Dunkle, which is darker and malty, and Wiessbier, a refreshing wheat beer. It also sells one of the most satisfying low-alcohol Helles I know. The interior of this brewery tap is a cathedral to beer.

• Open daily 9am-11pm, braustuberl.de

For me, this image is heavenly.

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Finally, from my friend Stan, a deep dive into distilled hop oils in brewing. The rumination is particularly relevant given the prospective arrival of the Our Lady of Perpetual Hops brewery up the hill in Floyds Knobs.

Just the Essentials — How Distilled Oils are Expanding the Impact of Hops, by Stan Hieronymus (Good Beer Hunting)

The process of extracting desirable odor compounds from plant matter—think: roses, lavender, or other prefered fragrances—is rather basic. It produces the results it does because compounds can be distilled at temperatures below that of the boiling points of individual constituents, preserving their characteristics. Steam is pumped through the matter under pressure, softening the cells, freeing essential oil and turning it into vapor. After cooling, the steam condenses into water and the vapor into essential oil. Because the oil is most often lighter than water, the two may be easily separated.

Avicenna, a Persian polymath who lived from 980 to 1037 A.D., is credited with being the first to use steam distillation for isolating essential oils from flowers, starting with rose water. Although the process now has multiple other industrial uses, it remains the most common method for producing aromatherapy-grade essential oils.

This is where hops come in.

PINTS & UNION PORTFOLIO: Sign of the times, and a beer update.

David "Lad of the Village" Thrasher's take on the classic pub sign now has been mounted above the door to Pints&union. It looks incredible, and I believe the hours of operation have settled into predictability:

Sunday: Noon to 4:00 p.m.
Monday: Closed
Tuesday - Saturday: 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

I'm the beer guy, so here's a beer update.

The current draft list includes two pinch-hitters (Wychwood Hobgoblin in for Fuller's London Pride, and Bell's Porter temporarily replacing Anchor Porter). Rounding out the lineup (* signifies a seasonal beer):

Guinness
Pilsner Urquell
Bell's Two Hearted Ale
Falls City Classic Pilsner
*Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier
*Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest

We have two conventional keg boxes with a free tap in each capable of pouring a slim 1/6 barrel keg. So far we've briefly used only one of them (for cider), but if things break the right direction, next week we'll tap kegs on each of them.

One of these taps will be devoted to a legacy comfort beer (Belgian Tripel is sounding appropriate to me). This one will be considered a seasonal, rotating but not week to week.

The other tap will be subject to whim, and it usually will be one-off. The overall goal remains stability, but we also want to have some fun, so this one will feature creative craft brewers, many of them American. The only requirement is 1/6 barrel availability -- and for the beer in question not to be owned by AB-InBev. I have an idea for the opener, though beyond this hunch, I haven't thought much about it.

It shan't be hard to find suitable occupants for the whim tap. The legacy comfort beers actually are a bit more limited in terms of sourcing -- which helps to explain why they're neglected. Welcome to my conundrum.

Stay tuned for further updates. The first six weeks have involved laying out the basic beer program and observing the reaction. Beginning next week, I'll also start tweaking the bottles and cans, as well as announcing the beer class format and dates.

THE BEER BEAT: Narrower focus, deeper appreciation -- or, a few words about the Pints & Union beer program.

One of my biggest ambitions for the beer program at Pints & Union is to enable one of those dandy social media notification mechanisms of the sort that breathlessly advises you when a new beer has been added to the list.

Having done so, my objective will be to use it as seldom as humanly possible. Once or twice a quarter sounds about right to me.

If we both forget the notification mechanism even exists, that's better still.

The current projection calls for eight draft lines at Pints & Union, five of them unchanging and one devoted to cider from Steve Thomas at the Thomas Family Winery (the latter may also prove to be seasonal owing to the availability of apples; we'll see).

This leaves two draft lines to rotate, and my preference would be that one of these truly stays seasonal, perhaps changing only every other month -- or, in the case of Bavarian-style Hefe-Weizen during the warm weather months, pouring different brands of the same basic style.

The watchwords remain: traditions, classics, old school.

There'll be room for a tad more modernism amid the bottle and can coolers, although not until we're able to nail down our downtown's most representative list of quality beers from Belgium, Germany and the British Isles. A few of the 50 shades of American IPA, sours and pastry stouts can be accommodated by cans.

These probably will change more often than beers on tap, although the most important consideration is starting small to ensure freshness via sell-through, then gradually expanding the offerings. 

I'm going to be asked quite often if it isn't hypocritical of me to be emphasizing non-local beers at what will assuredly remain an independent local business. The simplest answer is that sometimes, it's all about me -- perhaps less insolently, it's all about my 35 years of experience in beer.

It will surprise no one to learn that my great passion in life is Europe, and when beer first became a thing for me, imports from Europe were just about the only game in town.

Since then, I've visited dozens of breweries in Europe (and America), developed rich and fulfilling professional relationships, and done my level best to honor the legacy of folks like Michael "Beer Hunter" Jackson, whose wonderful writing shaped my own point of view.

What's more, I'm older. I've done my time and worked my share of shifts promoting the American "craft" beer revolution, both at NABC and on behalf of Hoosier brewers during my terms on the board of the guild.

In 2018, for one to stand at the corner of Market and Pearl in downtown New Albany is to be within a three or four block radius of at least 100 beer taps, the majority of them pouring American-brewed "craft" beer.

By almost any reasonable standard, this denotes wild (and in some ways unanticipated) success as it pertains to what so many spent so long fighting to achieve in terms of self-sufficiency, choice and artistic achievement.

Victory is ours, and as such, I'm free to retrench and remind everyone that the previous generation of great beers has been neglected as a result, and consequently is undervalued -- and nothing interests me quite so much as an under-serviced niche ripe for specialized love and attention.

If you're curious about those five fixed taps, here's the way it looks to me today.

Guinness Stout
Pilsner Urquell
Fuller's London Pride
Anchor Porter or Bell's Porter
Bell's Two Hearted or Anchor Steam

Conjecture this lineup augmented by (for example) Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier, Tripel Karmeliet, as well as Steve's scrumpy; furthermore, imagine it remaining in place for two months, allowing repeated samplings of the sort that fix lasting and affectionate memories, rather than hurried reviews at a crowd-sourced scrum.

Never have Lennon's words spoken to me more clearly:

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one; I hope some day you'll join us, and the (beer) world will be as one."