BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: I suppose even the racists, fascists and bad actors need their own craft brewery.

Among other things, COVID-19 has proven to be the most effective (albeit inadvertent) truth serum of my lifetime.

The virus is especially effective at targeting and exploiting pre-existing conditions -- in the sense of an individual's physical health, but moreover, the mores and "mental" (British usage) condition of our society overall.

Consequently, given that the American brewing business at all levels, whether macro or craft, always has been (shall we say) "diverse" socially and politically, the coronavirus has made it easier than ever before to see whether your personal system of values is compatible with the brewery (or restaurant, cafe, diner, food truck, espresso stall or weenie stand) you patronize.

The equation need not be restricted to COVID, although it exposed more than a few local operators of the narcissistic anti-science persuasion. The truth serum extends to realities like Black Lives Matter, too.

Lots of folks have operated from the assumption that "craft" beer is left/liberal/progressive matter. They've been mistaken. It's never been quite that simple, and nor should we expect it to be. 

The Steam Hollow Brewing situation in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder has been a staple of the Twitter feed these past few days. Rather than attempt a summary in this space, allow me to redirect you to a site called Absolute Beer, where the story is told clearly and comprehensively.

As a side note, the owners having scrubbed their social media presence, it's not possible to check if they were science doubters during the COVID "lockdown" period. 

Steam Hollow Brewing Faces Backlash for Claiming George Floyd Murder was a Hoax

While millions of people around the country continue to mourn and speak out against last week’s police murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, systemic racism, and police brutality, one brewery in Illinois has taken a particularly controversial stance.

Natalie White, the co-owner of Steam Hollow Brewing, based in the small town of Manteno, stated on her Facebook page: “George Floyd isn’t dead, he is a porn star/actor who knows the officer, who isn’t even a real officer. Wake the f up.”

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Read Lew Bryson's latest article or I'll disown your sorry butt.

My Monday column is out at Food & Dining Magazine: Hip Hops: One of those bucket list lager days.

For knowledgeable beer drinkers during my lifetime, lager often has constituted a Jekyll-Hyde proposition. Thirty-five years ago, the American mass-market way of doing lager (fizzy and flavorless) was the original impetus for the “craft” beer rebellion. At the same time, touring the Central European heartland always provides bountiful examples of how satisfying lager can be when traditional thought processes and methodologies are retained.

Otherwise, and as usual, Lew Bryson has the take of first (and best) resort. This truly is a must-read, with a conclusion more optimistic than you might imagine from the header.

"Brewers will be tightening their belts like the rest of us. It’s a scary future, but a little more community feel is going to help get us all through it. If everyone gives a little, fewer people will have to give a lot. After all, it just might save your favorite beers."

Did I mention this essay is a must-read?

Coronavirus Could Kill Craft Beer. Will Any Brands Survive? by Lew Bryson (Daily Beast)

I’ve been watching the craft beer industry collapse over the past few months.

After 20 years of writing about how upstart craft brewers have steadily taken customers from mainstream brands, it’s a shock to see this whole world shatter under the hammer of the coronavirus pandemic.

Given that everything is now upside down maybe I shouldn’t be shocked, but overall, things are pretty grim. The disease has broken the long growth curve of craft beer, which had outperformed the overall category for more than a decade—and it only took a month ...

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Risks and rewards when breweries take social stances.

1989: Capitalists in a Commie joint. 

Bryan Roth is a fine writer and this is a thought-provoking piece.

To be honest, I'm conflicted. There is a big part of me that hasn't moved past my "these machines kill fascists" period, and yet also a feeling of dismay at the seeming inevitability of placing breweries, pubs and hospitality-oriented establishments into political categories.

A Show of Hands – Breweries Take Political and Business Risks Mixing Beer and Social Stances, by Bryan Roth (Good Beer Hunting)

Political stances are nothing new in the generally progressive world of beer, but as companies across all industries step deeper into the political fray leading up to the 2020 election, a new question arises: is taking action inevitable?

"We are more aware and more comfortable doing these things that show our ideas and values," says David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and host of the Electing to Drink podcast. "When the president himself gets involved in deeply divisive cultural-political issues and won't let them go, he forces people to take into consideration actions they never would have thought about before."

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Josh Hambright steps away from Central State Brewing. A job well done, sir.

Last week Josh Hambright, co-founder of Central State Brewing in Indianapolis, used his personal Facebook portal to announce his forthcoming transition from brewing to civilian life. Brief excerpts are below.

I made Josh's acquaintance at some forgotten juncture during the past decade and have become very fond of him, as well as respectful of Central State's progress. The brewery is innovative and singular, and I'm a fan. I'll continue to be.

Being good at any job is hard work. Combining this learning curve with long hours of indie business ownership and the daily showmanship expected of craft beer purveyors, and it's very possible at some point that you look in the mirror and wonder what it would be like to have your life back.

Eight years ago while sitting on my porch with Jake (Koeneman), we hatched the idea to start a brewery that would produce all the styles of beer we were seeking out from other parts of the planet that we couldn’t get right here in Indianapolis.

Four and a half years ago that dream became a reality as we started selling what would become Table, a simple farmhouse table beer that lead the way for what Central State would become. A bit after that we started playing around with Gose, another favorite style of ours, and eventually launched Garden into the market. Both of these beers are shining examples of simple yet complex beers that are accessible and easy to drink, something we’d always sought to create.

Beyond those two flagships we’ve created over 100 other beers, all of them a labor of love on our part. Along the way we convinced other folks to join our dream. We built a team of like minded lunatics, hell bent on creating the best beers we could, and delivering those to the masses. Always rooted in pushing boundaries and improving on the last batch, we’ve brewed close to eight thousand barrels of beer. Most of those batches were brewed by myself personally.

I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with some of the best breweries in the world, more than I could ever list here, and along with that I’ve made some of my closest and dearest friends because of the opportunities afforded to me because of the brewery. We’ve sent beer to 16 different states and 2 other continents, we’ve poured at some of the most prestigious events in beer, had our beers on taps at some of the best bars in the world, shared pints with countless friends and family members along the way ...

But at some point, we all need to take care of ourselves. I completely understand Josh's decision, perhaps more than many do. I wish him all the best.

... I have decided to step away from Central State Brewing and retire my title of Head Brewer. My last day with the company will be Sept 28th. I will continue to help the crew out a bit behind the scenes and offer them advice and guidance when and where I can but I will be stepping away from all day to day operations of the brewery. Central State will live on without me, which means the world to me. CSB will keep pushing boundaries, keep innovating and keep making some of the best beer in the state of Indiana and I know that it’s in the good hands of folks who care about it just as much as I do.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: "Craft is being assimilated by the mainstream, but not entirely on the mainstream’s own terms."

Three pieces to an ongoing puzzle, though still too early to glimpse the larger picture.

All shook up: When craft beer goes mainstream, by Pete Brown (Imbibe)

With craft brewers selling out to multi-nationals and global giants acting like craft brewers, it’s a confusing time in the world of beer. Pete Brown takes a look at how we got here and where we might go next

When looking at the beer market, it might be tempting to see craft beer as a discreet little niche, a bubble that operates differently and separately from the mainstream. But if you’re invested in the beer market, such thinking is dangerously wrong. Craft and mainstream are converging, and stories that look quite separate from each other are starting to intertwine. Let us explain …

Pardon a massive snip, straight to the conclusion.

... In one sense, craft is simply the latest stage in the ongoing, permanent state of evolution in beer, of consumer education and rising expectations. But crucially, unlike any other innovation in recent history, this one happened without the permission of the biggest brewers in the world, and those corporations were powerless to prevent it.

Craft is being assimilated by the mainstream, but not entirely on the mainstream’s own terms. After trying to belittle it, they have been forced to accommodate and accept it, and they’ve had to recognise the seismic difference that craft has made to what drinkers expect from any beer.

Two additional links provide informative reading about the booze and beer scenes. First, the great Lew Bryson. Feeling all shook up? Sometimes it's better stirred, not shaken.

PODCAST EP 118 – STIRRING THINGS UP – WRITER LEW BRYSON, at the Full Pint

We are joined by veteran beer and whiskey writer Lew Bryson. We share stories, laughs and hot takes on covering booze.

Items of discussion include:

– Why Danny loves Lew.
– Our admiration of tech writer John C. Dvorak.
– Lew’s approach to writing about beer and whiskey.
– Dealing with Pennsylvania liquor laws.
– Comparing to the late 2010’s craft beer boom to the 90’s.
– Well made alcohol is well made alcohol.
– Gut reactions to new styles.

And to close this session, a look at how craft pioneer Anchor Brewing is doing under a(nother) new owner.

The unanchoring of Anchor Brewing, by Esther Mobley (SF Chronicle)

Our original craft brewery has changed radically since Fritz Maytag sold it in 2010. So who is it today?

A lot has changed at Anchor Brewing Co. in the last few years, but one thing hasn’t: how it makes steam beer.

On the second floor of the Potrero Hill brewery, built as a coffee roastery in the 1930s, workers still hand-crank the valve on the copper mash cooker, half a century old and shaped like an onion dome. In an adjacent room, steam beer, Anchor’s signature product, still undergoes fermentation in big, open-top steel bins. Almost all the time, the only temperature control is that chilly San Francisco Bay breeze, on which the original Anchor brewers wisely capitalized in 1896. The process is practically anachronistic.

Anachronism has always been part of Anchor Brewing’s appeal. It was the brewery oblivious to the beer zeitgeist, known for old-fashioned styles like barleywine, porter and, quaintest of all, steam. Steam is balanced, clean, refreshing; it’s timeless, and it’s never been cool. When craft beer exploded in the nineties and early aughts with its insatiably hoppy IPAs, Anchor stayed true to its old ways. It felt like home.

Which is why, to those who grew up on the local institution, these can feel like bewildering times. Anchor was Fritz Maytag’s, it was San Francisco’s. Now, as of 2017, California’s oldest brewery is owned by Japanese beer corporation Sapporo. Anchor was always touted as the nation’s first craft brewery. Now the Brewers Association says it can’t be called “craft” at all. In lieu of having a brew pub, Anchor always just offered a free tour, with beer samples. Now it charges for tours, and it has a trendy taproom, Public Taps, complete with a Skee-Ball machine and limited-edition beers like Boys ‘N’ Blood, a fruited kettle sour.

Suddenly it looks as if Anchor has jumped on every possible bandwagon, making beer styles you could never imagine Maytag endorsing. Meyer lemon lager? Blackberry IPA? Brut IPA? In the 45 years that Maytag owned Anchor, the brewery released just 10 beer styles. In the nine years since he sold it, it’s put 30 new styles into distribution — and that’s not counting the 60-plus beers that have shown up on the taproom menu since launching a pilot brewery in 2017.

Has Anchor lost touch with its own identity?

By modernizing, does it risk alienating the people who love it most?

And, in an era when this city worries about these things, what part of San Francisco’s identity hangs in the balance?

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Three closely related and completely unrelated news items about craft beer growth -- or not.

The first sentence in a Brewbound report from the recent Craft Brewers Conference strikes me as accurate. At some point, "slower growth and increased competition" simply had to become new norms. With 7,000 American breweries in existence and 2,500 more in the planning stages, it would seem the time is now. Obviously, preconceived notions on the part of beer sales strategists are the first to be mangled.

CBC: Slowing Growth in 2018 was ‘Not a Blip’, by Justin Kendall (Brewbound)

Slower growth and increased competition are the “new normal,” Brewers Association (BA) leaders hammered home on the second day of the trade group’s annual Craft Brewers Conference (CBC).

“This is not a blip,” BA chief economist Bart Watson said during Wednesday’s State of the Industry presentation. “This is the new normal.”

Watson and senior vice president of the professional brewing division Paul Gatza took a deeper dive into craft beer growth numbers released earlier this month. According to Watson, craft’s 4 percent volume growth — about 1 million barrels — last year was the lowest per brewer growth rate since the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“This is where the pain point really is,” he said. “That’s not a lot of growth and many companies built brands and business models that built in the idea that there would be more growth than this.”

Watson suggested that brewery owners look beyond craft’s existing 13 percent share of the market to capture the other 87 percent of non-craft consumers. If they don’t, the per brewer growth rate will continue to decline, he added.

“If we can get 1 million new craft drinkers to drink one pint a week, that’s 200,000 incremental barrels,” he added. “Five million new drinkers drinking just one pint a week of small and independent brewed beer is a million barrels.”

Future growth is likely to be sliced up even more thinly as an increasing number of breweries open up shop. Last year, 1,049 breweries opened and an estimated 2,500 breweries are in planning, Watson said.

“This is a trend that’s not going away,” he said. “It’s a reality that everyone should be prepared for.”

Nevertheless, the 219 brewery closures in 2018 were an all-time high, Watson said. However, the three percent closure rate is still “shockingly low,” even if the number of closures are expected to rise as the industry becomes more competitive and new breweries open.

Over the last three years, 3,194 new breweries have opened. Much of craft’s growth is coming from those breweries that opened between 2015 and 2018. Last year, those companies grew by a collective 872,000 barrels.

As for breweries that opened in 2014 or earlier, those companies grew by just 105,000 barrels, Watson said.

Microbreweries (breweries making fewer than 15,000 barrels) continued to be the fastest growing set of breweries, Watson said. Those companies increased production 16 percent last year, to more than 5.8 million barrels. Meanwhile, brewpubs have maintained steady growth, increasing production 13 percent, to 1.6 million barrels.

The BA’s newly created taproom brewery class (companies that sell more than 25 percent of their volume on-site and do not offer significant food service) grew 40.2 percent — to 809,000 barrels in 2018 — and represented 24 percent of total craft growth.

Growth was flat for regional breweries (companies producing more than 15,000 barrels) last year, as those companies produced more than 18.1 million barrels. Watson called 2018 the “slowest growth for distribution of craft in a long time,” which he attributed to retailers not expanding shelf space and bars and restaurants not adding tap handles.

According to Watson, established brewers need to think about building “flagships of today and tomorrow, not of yesterday” in an effort to meet consumer desires ...

The more breweries there are, the less sensible for them to try selling beer via the clogged three-tier distribution system, itself a concept mutating rapidly amid brewery self-distribution and tap room sales models.

In short, it quickly gets weird, because previously absent regulatory pushback begins emanating from the lobbies representing other alcohol sales venues.

In this article, a "craft beer store" franchise is beset with charges and countercharges. Is it a faulty franchise setup? Inept franchisee performance? Backlash against lesbian corporate ownership?

Maybe its the ongoing three-tier mutation itself. Recall that a century ago, blacksmithing no longer was a growth industry.

First, the introduction.

For some Craft Beer Cellar franchisees, it’s a bitter taste after jumping in, by Janelle Nanos (Boston Globe)

For nearly a decade, the Craft Beer Cellar in Belmont has been a beer lover’s paradise. Its founders, Suzanne Schalow and Kate Baker, placed a shrewd bet on craft beer just as it hit the mainstream and set about creating the country’s first national chain of specialty beer stores. They now boast 30 locations across the country.

“Our trinity,” Schalow said, is “amazing beer, hospitality, and education.”

But that early business acumen hasn’t translated into success for many of the franchise owners who were persuaded to buy into their brand. A number of franchisees say they raised money from friends and family, gave up a job, or sold a house to cover the costs of opening their own stores — only to now find themselves facing mounting financial pressures that may cause them to fail.

Aggravated relationships between the founders and some of their franchisees have boiled over into sharply worded e-mails and online screeds. The aggrieved franchisees accuse the owners of providing them with overly rosy financial projections, and of belittling them instead of offering guidance when the numbers didn’t pan out.

Last spring, the owners went so far as to sue 20 unnamed franchisees in US District Court for defamation for posting anonymous complaints on the website Glassdoor.

“The best advice I can give prospective franchise owners is to run,” said one of the postings, according to the federal court filing. “Most franchises are not profitable, and the majority wish they had never signed on.”

The Glassdoor lawsuit was dismissed, and in December, after a second attempt in court to stop franchisees from criticizing them online, Schalow and Baker, who are married, asked members of the Massachusetts Brewers Guild to contribute to a GoFundMe campaign to raise a $125,000 legal fund. Their request implied that some of their detractors were motivated by homophobia ...

Then the passage that strikes me as most relevant.

“Bottle shops may be somewhat a victim of craft’s broader success,” said Bart Watson, chief economist of the Brewers Association.

Grocery stores now carry pallets of craft brews, and brewery taprooms are siphoning off bottle sales.

“Taprooms are changing the beer industry in an enormous way right now,” Schalow said. “Between breweries and taprooms, how does a store survive?”

At times it gets even weirder.

I'd missed the following controversy at Schlafly (thanks, J), but as usual Bryan Roth has it covered. It seems that the guy from the venture capital company that bought controlling interest in Schlafly melted down, went rogue and began distributing a paper newsletter maligning fellow brewers.

Old school paper, but new school slimy.

I'm told that original owner Tom Schlafly is putting together a package of investment to regain control of the brewery. He's a classy man and I wish him well.

In keeping with the theme of preceding thoughts, perhaps the major factor in the Schlafly episode is stress: more expense, less volume.

So, why is this happening now? Things have not been good for Schlalfy, which had declines in barrel production of 13% in both 2016 and 2017, according to estimates by the Brewers Association. After reaching a high of 60,000 barrels three years ago, it was down to 45,000 last year. In fact, 2018 will be a third straight year of declines in IRI-tracked off-premise sales for the brewery. Through Nov. 25, Schlalfy had sold only 73% of the volume it moved in all of 2017.

Brewing always was a business. For a few years, we pretended it wasn't. This column wouldn't be called BEER WITH A SOCIALIST if not for the author's classic disclaimer: "I'm a reluctant capitalist at best."

It's not a bad thing to wake up one morning and find yourself older, with something approximating perspective, and harboring far less pure adrenalin. More power and good luck to those of you still in the trenches, but I've no regrets for pole-vaulting out of them.

Schlafly’s Parent Company Apologizes After Executive Attempts to Sabotage 4 Hands, by Bryan Roth (Good Beer Hunting; December 9, 2018)

THE GIST

In a surprise announcement late Friday, The Saint Louis Brewery—the parent company that produces the Schlafly line of beers—issued a public apology to fellow St. Louis business 4 Hands Brewing. The apology was released in a press release that also revealed a former Schlafly executive made secretive attempts to sabotage the reputation of 4 Hands.

While not confirmed as the specific source of a print newsletter called Brew IQ in the Lou, James Pendegraft resigned as CEO on Wednesday, two days before the apology was issued. In a statement to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the company confirmed Pendegraft’s departure, but offered no additional information. In its public apology, Saint Louis Brewery wrote that the executive responsible had resigned, but didn’t name the person.

The anonymous newsletter was mailed to an unknown number of bars and restaurants and also included “deceptive online postings and a phone survey to local bars and restaurants in the first half of the year,” according to the statement.

In a column that has been identified by media outlets as specifically meant to call out 4 Hands, an anonymous Brew IQ writer tries to connect the brewery to the Me Too movement in a derogatory way, claiming with no evidence that “a certain large brewery’s dilemma of how to reposition itself continues to grow” because “[n]aming your brewery after a sex act provided at a massage parlor no longer feels as good.” It also claims that a beer made by the then-mystery company, now recognized as 4 Hands, was named “after the lube needed for such a service.”

“Leave glamorizing a pimp's wad of dollars to The Deuce,” the column reads, referencing the hit HBO series. “Maybe it was all that gin? The ladies are becoming woke and are starting to ask questions. We'd like to give them a hand, but think the four are proving to be too many.”

These kinds of innuendos are not new to the beer industry, but still present an unfortunate side that is continuously being addressed by the Brewers Association and private companies alike.

“We were embarrassed to learn of these actions and sincerely apologize to 4 Hands Brewing Company,” Tom Schlafly, chairman of Saint Louis Brewery, said in a statement. “Such actions are inconsistent with the core values on which we were founded and which have defined Schlafly for 27 years. The craft brewing industry in St. Louis was built by a closely-knit group of breweries that mutually respect one another. There’s no question that 4 Hands has earned its reputation for community involvement, civic pride, corporate responsibility, and inclusiveness” ...

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Craft beer burnout? I told you so (at least) a year ago.

This one's been getting lots of social media play, and justifiably so. Much discussion has followed.

IS CRAFT BEER BURNING OUT? by Darren (The Burnt Out Beer Guy)

There was a time, not all that long ago, when a group of US brewers got together and vowed to reclaim beer from big business by making them with integrity and passion once again.

Thanks in large part to those early pioneers we are now able to sit around in craft beer bars App-drinking a seemingly endless deluge of quirky brews from around the world.

And that’s the problem. Because of their relentless drive to recreate beer craft brewers have inadvertently spawned a consumer culture where beer doesn’t necessarily need to be great anymore.

It just needs to be new.

Pints&union opened on August 1, and six months later I feel the beer program finally is getting dialed in.

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

Here's something I wrote on February 8, 2018. The roots of my contrarian rumblings go back even further, to the winter of 2014-15 if not before. My goal has remained consistent: maintain an island of stability amid a sea of churning kaleidoscopes. So far, it's working -- thanks, Joe Phillips.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Golden oldie classic comfort beers at an old school pub? Sounds like Pints & Union to me.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I’ve peddled this Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) anecdote for years. It’s my very favorite USSR-era Russian joke, and reflects the state of my consciousness as the year 2014 drew to a close.

It's the stagnant Brezhnev era, circa 1970s, but Soviet scientists finally have solved the riddle of death, immediately applying the potion to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's embalmed corpse.

Lenin springs back to life, dusts off, and looks around the room. Asked by the scientists if they can get him anything, Lenin requests access to his office in the Kremlin and all the back issues of Pravda since he died. Fawningly the scientists comply, and Lenin shuts himself in the office.

Day after day passes by, and while the scientists are terrified to bother Lenin, they eventually begin to worry. Finally they decide to break down the door. Inside Lenin's office they find issues of the newspaper strewn everywhere, but no Lenin.

On the desk he has left a note:

"Comrades, everything’s gone to hell in a hand basket, so I'm off to start the revolution all over again."

In the spirit of reincarnation, I say to you: If Sour Passion Fruit Bock IPA is your idea of beer-drinking progress, by all means deplete the inventory at your friendly neighborhood package store.

I’ll even help you carry the boxes to your car. With luck, there’ll be more space on the shelf for a relaxing Best Bitter.

Or maybe a White Pastry Stout is more to your taste – one brewed with spices used by the Inuit to cure whale blubber jerky, then pushed through a Randall filled with salty pebbles from the Yucatan?

Go for it … but you can count me out.

It isn’t that I won’t ever again experience the pleasure of drinking beers from an ever-widening selection of “craft” brewing’s avant-garde, the genre’s cutting, leading and bleeding edge. I surely will, periodically, in a defined context. I’ll find it very enjoyable, now and then.

The simple fact of the matter is that I’m no longer interested in daily games of chance. Roulette belongs in a casino. I’d rather sit peacefully, take my time, and get to know a few wonderful beers better from the inside out.

Verily, I accept my share of the credit, blame or responsibility for the spasmodic new beer world we inhabit, which is many miles wide and depressingly scant millimeters deep. If you’re collecting beer pelts on Untappd, that’s just fine by me. Carry on, please. I’m genuinely happy that you’re happy.

Your white whales are waiting. I’ll be over here in the corner, sipping a Pilsner.

---

I’ve always been a history buff, and what interests me these days are the world’s greatest beer styles, from the 1300s through the 1900s. The 2000s were choppy waters for me, and so I’m electing to backshift into antiquity.

During my first year away from NABC, my consciousness was as far removed from the beer world as it has been since high school. In truth, I was exhausted, disgusted and burned out. Being chewed up and spit out can be bruising to both body and ego. The only thing I knew for sure was that it would take time. I had to wait and see if beer still gripped me.

By 2016, simpler beer pleasures began to creep back into view, and it started to occur to me that if frenetic bi-polar beer-ticity was the new normal, the only conceivable possibility for sense and sensibility was counter-revolution – a throwback, a rediscovery, and a fresh appreciation for what brought me to beer in the first place.

To repeat, this isn’t to construe that I’ve become an advocate of creative repression. There are 6,000 American breweries producing tens of thousands of beers, and I wish all of them the very best. When traveling, I’ll look up some of them. When I read articles like this one, it restores my faith in the scene we all helped conjure.

No, it isn't that I'm sick of beer diversity.

What appalls me is beer ignorance, beer selfie narcissism and beer management practices. They’ve become an artery-hardening orthodoxy, and as such, orthodoxy mired in mud up to the axles deserves questions, answers, revision and outright rebellion, if necessary.

I’ve had enough of venues with 20 beers on tap, the inevitable majority of them IPAs, with the remainder Imperial-this, barrel-aged-that, most of universally high gravity. I’m driven to utter distraction when returning to the same venue two weeks later, only to find that 18 of them have changed, with a whole new crop of “what do you have that’s new,” which might actually mean something if there was an outside chance that the best of the new beers would reappear in less than a year.

But wading through the chaos, I seldom can find much of interest at 4.5% abv save for the occasional Session IPA … and don’t even get me started on those.

This wonderful new kaleidoscopic-tap-swap-list-orthodoxy purports to please millennials, and maybe it actually does (even if I have my doubts), but the bucking-and-gyrating-attention-deficit-hamster-wheel approach sure as hell isn’t pleasing to all of us, judging by the comments I read and hear.

And this constitutes the opening of a market niche for comfort beer, one I personally support, and a gap primed for filling. Hence the advent of Pints & Union, later this year. Joe Phillips and I are seeking to recapture the old school with our pub, with a few progressive twists.

The beer program is my rebellious idea, and that's why I'm here today to explain. 

---

Way back during the evolution of the Public House, there were four basic rules governing my beer advancement program.

• Knowing the stories and history behind the labels. 
• Understanding styles and being able to explain them to customers in simple terms.
• Trying as hard as humanly possible to keep printed lists and information up to date.
• Insisting that when it came to purchasing, ultimate direction – the synthesis of knowledge and understanding – comes not from a wholesaler or even a brewery rep, but from behind the bar.

Let’s begin with the latter.

As we’ve seen, there are hundreds of beers available to fill limited taps and occupy scant shelf space. Consumer demand plays its role, but the ultimate filter still must be wielded by the bar manager or beer buyer.

It’s all about actively teaching customers what they want even if they don't realize it yet, and as for knowing stories and styles, an aptitude for entertainment and education is what separates professionals from novices. You simply cannot teach without first mastering the syllabus.

To be honest, I don’t care how much a customer thinks he or she knows following a quick electronic glance at the empty mental calories on Thrillist. Remember: miles wide, millimeters deep. The customer might yet be right, though not until I’m finished framing the options. No single person can know everything, but it is the obligation of all involved in the sale of better beer to possess an ability to explain and conceptualize.

Knowledge remains the bare minimum requirement. It’s a value-added proposition. The more one knows, and can impart with clarity, the greater the chance of a satisfied return customer who tips well – and learns something.

Those are the basics, although at times I fear the art has been lost. Consequently, I sandbag quite a lot nowadays. Before ordering, I ask questions about beer to servers and bartenders. Sometimes their answers are coherent, other times not.

I’ve been known to cringe when listening to the panoply of “beer facts” as dispersed by staffers. I try to stay quiet and groan out of earshot, because I’m not the one signing their checks.

At least yet.

---

Food and drink lend themselves to constant reinvention, and yet it cannot be denied that there are eternal, renewable “classics” amid the bedlam. Clichés become such precisely because they contain an element of truth, and certain aspects of the human experience stand the test of time, whether an umbrella, mouse trap or a lovely, satisfying De Koninck.

In summary, for several years my troublesome contrarian instincts have been telling me that the beer climate is ripe for a principled, thoughtful return to founding values, emblemized by a relatively small, mostly fixed list of classic beers on draft, and in bottles and cans, to be accompanied by some hearty old-fashioned beer education, which seems to have been tossed aside in the era of cyber “craft” fandom.

Now I understand that "presenting" and interpreting beers brewed by others always was my main skill. This is especially true as it pertains to beers from Europe. I’ve been a Europhile since college, and European styles from the British Isles, Belgium and Germany have been neglected for a long time.

So have the original standards from America’s first wave of “micros” – from Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to Rogue Shakespeare Stout, and so many others. They’ve been pushed aside amid a heated rush to win badges and amass ratings, but I think there's far more to it than this, something that might even be spiritual.

As the beer writer Andy Crouch recently stated:

“There are two kinds of beer drinkers today: those looking to drink a beer only once and those looking to drink round after round. Order me another.”

I’m with him, and this is how Pints & Union is going to be as it pertains to beer. Now we just have to finish building the damn pub.

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.

---

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.

THE BEER BEAT: "Busting Up the Brotherhood of Beer: Time to confront sexism & harassment in the industry."

Sexism in "craft" beer is a topic that keeps bobbing to the surface, as when beer writer Bryan Roth described the problem as a grassroots industry struggling to find leadership on social issues: THE BEER BEAT: How "Ambitious Brew" prefaced "I Know What Boyz Like" -- and "The Misogynist Within."

Beer writer Lew Bryson also read Michael Agnew's pointed article (below).

I know a lot of great people in the beer biz (whiskey, too). A lot of them are women, which means they sometimes have to put up with a bunch of bullshit from guys. Read the article, and see if you don't recognize some of that crap. I'm tired of my friends having to deal with it. If you hear some guy say something that's over the line, don't just look away. Tell him he's over the line. Make beer a better place. Wheaton's Law: Don't be a dick.

Here comes the learnin'.

I'd suggest diverting your gaze from Untappd, if only for a few seconds, and partaking in something real.

Busting Up the Brotherhood of Beer: Time to confront sexism & harassment in the industry, by Michael Agnew (The Growler Magazine)

... Ask women working in beer and it becomes obvious that the beer industry faces the very same problems of sexism, harassment, and even assault, that the rest of the country is facing. While the ranks of women are growing, the industry is still dominated by men. The majority of breweries are founded by men. The people who make the beer are overwhelmingly male. It is mostly men who distribute and sell it. If bathroom lines at festivals are any indication, it is mostly men who drink it.

I listened to the experiences of four female industry members, all who expressed their love for the industry and the people in it, but whose stories reveal that discrimination and harassment are a reality in craft beer ...

ON THE AVENUES: Golden oldie classic comfort beers at an old school pub? Sounds like Pints & Union to me.

ON THE AVENUES: Golden oldie classic comfort beers at an old school pub? Sounds like Pints & Union to me.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I’ve peddled this Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) anecdote for years. It’s my very favorite USSR-era Russian joke, and reflects the state of my consciousness as the year 2014 drew to a close.

It's the stagnant Brezhnev era, circa 1970s, but Soviet scientists finally have solved the riddle of death, immediately applying the potion to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's embalmed corpse.

Lenin springs back to life, dusts off, and looks around the room. Asked by the scientists if they can get him anything, Lenin requests access to his office in the Kremlin and all the back issues of Pravda since he died. Fawningly, the scientists comply, and Lenin shuts himself in the office.

Day after day passes by, and while the scientists are terrified to bother Lenin, they eventually begin to worry. Finally they decide to break down the door. Inside Lenin's office they find issues of the newspaper strewn everywhere, but no Lenin.

On the desk he has left a note:

"Comrades, everything’s gone to hell in a hand basket, so I'm off to start the revolution all over again."

In the spirit of reincarnation, I say to you: If Sour Passion Fruit Bock IPA is your idea of beer-drinking progress, by all means deplete the inventory at your friendly neighborhood package store.

I’ll even help you carry the boxes to your car. With luck, there’ll be more space on the shelf for a relaxing Best Bitter.

Or maybe a White Pastry Stout is more to your taste – one brewed with spices used by the Inuit to cure whale blubber jerky, then pushed through a Randall filled with salty pebbles from the Yucatan?

Go for it … but you can count me out.

It isn’t that I won’t ever again experience the pleasure of drinking beers from an ever-widening selection of “craft” brewing’s avant-garde, the genre’s cutting, leading and bleeding edge. I surely will, periodically, in a defined context. I’ll find it very enjoyable, now and then.

The simple fact of the matter is that I’m no longer interested in daily games of chance. Roulette belongs in a casino. I’d rather sit peacefully, take my time, and get to know a few wonderful beers better from the inside out.

Verily, I accept my share of the credit, blame or responsibility for the spasmodic new beer world we inhabit, which is many miles wide and depressingly scant millimeters deep. If you’re collecting pelts on Untappd, that’s just fine by me. Carry on, please. I’m genuinely happy that you’re happy.

Your white whales are waiting. I’ll be over here in the corner, sipping a Pilsner.

---

I’ve always been a history buff, and what interests me these days are the world’s greatest beer styles, from the 1300s through the 1900s. The 2000s were choppy waters for me, and so I’m electing to backshift into antiquity.

During my first year away from NABC, my consciousness was as far removed from the beer world as it has been since high school. In truth, I was exhausted, disgusted and burned out. Being chewed up and spit out can be bruising to both body and ego. The only thing I knew for sure was that it would take time. I had to wait and see if beer still gripped me.

By 2016, simpler beer pleasures began to creep back into view, and it started to occur to me that if frenetic bi-polar beer-ticity was the new normal, the only conceivable possibility for sense and sensibility was counter-revolution – a throwback, a rediscovery, and a fresh appreciation for what brought me to beer in the first place.

To repeat, this isn’t to construe that I’ve become an advocate of creative repression. There are 6,000 American breweries producing tens of thousands of beers, and I wish all of them the very best. When traveling, I’ll look up some of them. When I read articles like this one, it restores my faith in the scene we all helped conjure.

No, it isn't that I'm sick of beer diversity.

What appalls me is beer ignorance, beer selfie narcissism and beer management practices. They’ve become an artery-hardening orthodoxy, and as such, orthodoxy mired in mud up to the axles deserves questions, answers, revision and outright rebellion, if necessary.

I’ve had enough of venues with 20 beers on tap, the inevitable majority of them IPAs, with the remainder Imperial-this, barrel-aged-that, most of universally high gravity. I’m driven to utter distraction when returning to the same venue two weeks later, only to find that 18 of them have changed, with a whole new crop of “what do you have that’s new,” which might actually mean something if there was an outside chance that the best of the new beers would reappear in less than a year.

But wading through the chaos, I seldom can find much of interest at 4.5% abv save for the occasional Session IPA … and don’t even get me started on those.

This wonderful new kaleidoscopic-tap-swap-list-orthodoxy purports to please millennials, and maybe it actually does (even if I have my doubts), but the bucking-and-gyrating-attention-deficit-hamster-wheel approach sure as hell isn’t pleasing to all of us, judging by the comments I read and hear.

And this constitutes the opening of a market niche for comfort beer, one I personally support, and a gap primed for filling. Hence the advent of Pints & Union, later this year. Joe Phillips and I are seeking to recapture the old school with our pub, with a few progressive twists.

The beer program is my rebellious idea, and that's why I'm here today to explain. 

---

Way back during the evolution of the Public House, there were four basic rules governing my beer advancement program.

• Knowing the stories and history behind the labels. 
• Understanding styles and being able to explain them to customers in simple terms.
• Trying as hard as humanly possible to keep printed lists and information up to date.
• Insisting that when it came to purchasing, ultimate direction – the synthesis of knowledge and understanding – comes not from a wholesaler or even a brewery rep, but from behind the bar.

Let’s begin with the latter.

As we’ve seen, there are hundreds of beers available to fill limited taps and occupy scant shelf space. Consumer demand plays its role, but the ultimate filter still must be wielded by the bar manager or beer buyer.

It’s all about actively teaching customers what they want even if they don't realize it yet, and as for knowing stories and styles, an aptitude for entertainment and education is what separates professionals from novices. You simply cannot teach without first mastering the syllabus.

To be honest, I don’t care how much a customer thinks he or she knows following a quick electronic glance at the empty mental calories on Thrillist. Remember: miles wide, millimeters deep. The customer might yet be right, though not until I’m finished framing the options. No single person can know everything, but it is the obligation of all involved in the sale of better beer to possess an ability to explain and conceptualize.

Knowledge remains the bare minimum requirement. It’s a value-added proposition. The more one knows, and can impart with clarity, the greater the chance of a satisfied return customer who tips well – and learns something.

Those are the basics, although at times I fear the art has been lost. Consequently, I sandbag quite a lot nowadays. Before ordering, I ask questions about beer to servers and bartenders. Sometimes their answers are coherent, other times not.

I’ve been known to cringe when listening to the panoply of “beer facts” as dispersed by staffers. I try to stay quiet and groan out of earshot, because I’m not the one signing their checks.

At least yet.

---

Food and drink lend themselves to constant reinvention, and yet it cannot be denied that there are eternal, renewable “classics” amid the bedlam. Clichés become such precisely because they contain an element of truth, and certain aspects of the human experience stand the test of time, whether an umbrella, mouse trap or a lovely, satisfying De Koninck.

In summary, for several years my troublesome contrarian instincts have been telling me that the beer climate is ripe for a principled, thoughtful return to founding values, emblemized by a relatively small, mostly fixed list of classic beers on draft, and in bottles and cans, to be accompanied by some hearty old-fashioned beer education, which seems to have been tossed aside in the era of cyber “craft” fandom.

Now I understand that "presenting" and interpreting beers brewed by others always was my main skill. This is especially true as it pertains to beers from Europe. I’ve been a Europhile since college, and European styles from the British Isles, Belgium and Germany have been neglected for a long time.

So have the original standards from America’s first wave of “micros” – from Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to Rogue Shakespeare Stout, and so many others. They’ve been pushed aside amid a heated rush to win badges and amass ratings, but I think there's far more to it than this, something that might even be spiritual. 

As the beer writer Andy Crouch recently stated:

“There are two kinds of beer drinkers today: those looking to drink a beer only once and those looking to drink round after round. Order me another.”

I’m with him, and this is how Pints & Union is going to be as it pertains to beer. Now we just have to finish building the damn pub.

---

Recent columns:

February 1: ON THE AVENUES: Did you hear the one about Duggins' deep TASER regrets? I laughed until I cried -- and so did the folks in Keokuk.

January 25: ON THE AVENUES: David Duggins’ violent “jokes” will continue until the New Albany Housing Authority’s morale improves – or Duggins is fired. We advocate the latter.

January 18: ON THE AVENUES: During our State of the Gahanaissance Address for 2018, feel free to resort to hard liquor. I did, and will.

January 11: ON THE AVENUES: Return to sender; decency is such a lonely word ... the sounds of silence reign o'er me.

THE BEER BEAT: How "Ambitious Brew" prefaced "I Know What Boyz Like" -- and "The Misogynist Within."

From Bryan Roth's article at Good Beer Hunting.

Maureen Ogle's Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer was published in 2006, and I've finally gotten around to reading it.

When the Beer Was Bitter, and Its Future Cloudy, by William Grimes (New York Times; October 27, 2006)

In the annals of immigrant success stories, lager beer deserves its own chapter. Before 1840, Americans drank English ales and porter or, more commonly, whiskey and rum. But as Germans by the thousands poured into New York and moved onward to Midwestern towns like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago and Milwaukee, they presented a new beverage to the American palate, a different kind of beer that Americans took to with such, shall we say, gusto that it soon became the national drink.

The rise of lager beer, and the great names associated with it — names like Busch, Pabst, Blatz, Schlitz and Miller — is the subject of Maureen Ogle’s effervescent, occasionally frothy “Ambitious Brew,” a fairly standard history with a provocative thesis attached. Ms. Ogle, in telling the story of the great beer families, takes the air out of a few myths, chief among them the standard narrative used to explain beer’s sad decline in quality to the pale, tasteless, mass-market drink advertised these days on televised sports.

The twice-told tale of beer’s fall from grace goes something like this. In olden days, thousands of craft brewers turned out a pure, flavorful product made from nothing more than hops, barley, water and yeast. After Prohibition, however, the big beer companies started manufacturing beer with cheap ingredients like rice and corn, duped the public into buying it through lavish advertising campaigns and forced their smaller competitors out of business, making the world safe for Bud Light.

The real story, as Ms. Ogle tells it, is a little more complicated.

Maybe it actually was a "little more complicated," but one of the author's own anecdotes confirms that the industrial beer barons of old weren't exactly exemplars of vision or social consciousness.

Ogle tells of the run-up to Prohibition, with the "Drys" an early example of a well-funded, highly-motivated single-issue lobby group. The teetotalers began putting points on the scoreboard in the late 1800s, but it took the brewers until 1913 to so much as begin organizing in response, and unity was elusive among them.

Perhaps the most effective argument coming from the prohibitionist camp pertained to the sinfulness of the average saloon. Most were tied to a brewery, and the breweries feared giving up this lucrative distribution arrangement even when the saloons were functioning as cesspools, gambling dens and whorehouses.

The ensuing xenophobia and patriotism (almost to a man, the beer barons were of German ancestry, albeit American-born) greeting America's inexorable march toward entry into WWI effectively did the rest. The brewers didn't know what hit them, primarily because they refused to pay attention until it was too late.

Ever since Leg Spreader first oozed to the surface three years ago (really -- it was January, 2015), much has been accomplished with respect to sexism in "craft" beer.

Quite a bit is left to be done, judging by another excellent piece by Bryan Roth, who is one of the most thoughtful beer writers around -- perhaps the Dave Zirin of good beer?

In the immediate aftermath of Roth's essay, just about every brewery mentioned belatedly recalled those long ago words of Phil Collins: "There must be some misunderstanding/There must be some kind of mistake."

Coming amid the overdue tsunami of #MeToo, I'm afraid to ask this question, but can the "craft" brewers of today really be as blind as those pre-Prohibition beer barons?

I Know What Boyz Like — A Grassroots Industry Struggles to Find Leadership on Social Issues, by Bryan Roth (Good Beer Hunting)

 ... “It’s a microcosm of the cultural zeitgeist right now,” says (Craig) Smith, the brewer and consultant from Florida. “We couldn’t be more divided in everything.”

In the macro sense, the sentiment feels true, especially for anyone who scrolls through news feeds or turns on the nightly news. But, as shown from a variety of viewpoints across many entries to the beer industry, there has also never been as much cohesiveness around this one topic. If anything, now may be the most ideal time to push the hardest toward change. The Brewers Association struck a decades-long victory recently when tax reform passed, lowering federal costs for selling beer. It’s making a significant investment in a public hop-breeding program. The organization even launched an initiative to address an ongoing problem of lost kegs, which can be a significant financial burden to breweries.

Battles have been won. If ever there was a time to jump into the fray for other causes, now would be it. In fact, others have already done so.

At the end of December, the UK's Campaign for Real Ale consumer advocacy group released its first executive statement on discrimination, condemning "any behaviour that discriminates against individuals because of their gender, race, ethnic origin, disability, age, nationality, national origin, sexuality, religion or belief, marital status and social class.” Any use of sexist images or slogans would bar placement at the group's festivals, competitions, and publications.

Currently, no state guild in the U.S. lists any similar language on its website. The Brewers Association has its marketing code, and won’t announce inappropriate names of award-winning beers at events, but nothing as definitive as what the UK organization issued.

“It's important that CAMRA's stance is as public as possible in order to ensure that all our members are aware of the organization's policy when it comes to discrimination, and that they understand the standards of behaviour and value that we expect any member of CAMRA to follow,” says Tom Stainer, the organization’s head of communications. “It's also important that we make it clear to the rest of the industry where we stand on issues of discrimination.”

Similarly, the UK’s Society of Independent Brewers followed suit, issuing a statement that “SIBA members who promote their beers with sexist, offensive advertising have no place in our membership of responsible, professional brewing businesses.” The group goes a step farther than its U.S. counterpart in regard to offensive names or labels, holding the right to disqualify competition entries out right instead of simply not saying a beer's name during award announcements.

Change is happening in many sectors of society, but across the U.S., an attempt at incremental steps continues to be led by those with the least at stake ...

This would be an excellent juncture to turn to a more palatable topic, like Maibock or NEIPA. But I'm not finished yet. I recommend reading the whole article, although only the conclusion is here.

The Misogynist Within, by Kai Wright (The Nation)

Sexual harassment expresses power dynamics from which all men benefit.

... And so now we face a reckoning. Let it be more than a coming to terms with sexual harassment. Yes, let’s bring the abusers to justice. But let us also consider the many ways in which we’ve organized ourselves around misogyny—in our workplaces, in our families, and as individuals. Maybe then we can mount a movement larger than Democrats and Republicans, and start talking seriously instead about things like peace, justice, and equity.

ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Getting in tune with the straight and narrow.

ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Getting in tune with the straight and narrow.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Really, has it been three years?

The following essay has not been published previously at NA Confidential, though it appeared on September 29, 2014 at The Potable Curmudgeon.

In the interim, time has a habit of marching on. Stone Brewing Company's location in Berlin has opened, bringing San Diego-style IPA to the German capital.

U2's 2014 album was received with indifference, and earlier in 2017, Daisy retired.

Last fall for our Sicilian excursion, I finally got around to taking my iPhone across the pond.

My attitude? It remains unchanged, thank you.

---

ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Getting in tune with the straight and narrow.

“You can feel that there’s something coming,” said Johannes Heidenpeter, who opened one of Berlin’s newest craft breweries, Heidenpeters, in the gritty-but-hip central neighborhood of Kreuzberg last December. “I think the time is good to change the taste of beer.”

Mr. Heidenpeter may represent the most iconoclastic and cosmopolitan take on Berlin’s newly developing beer culture: instead of traditional German lager yeast, he praises the aromas from the Belgian and English ale yeasts, and he eschews his own country’s favorite pale lager style of pilsner, or pils. Instead, as he explained when we met up the next day, his brewery offers an American-style pale ale as its standard pint, which uses non-German hops such as Cascade and Amarillo.

Yeah, well – I missed it.

In fact, while visiting the German capital for two enlightening days in September, I missed all the rest of the varied outposts of the Berliner New Beer Wave, too.

However, to be perfectly honest, my neglectful attitude toward this rebellion-in-progress was not intended as an overt political statement of any sort. It’s just that there was no time, this time.

My last visit to Berlin came way back in 1999, and an alarming quarter-century has elapsed since I spent a whole month in the then-divided city, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. With only two days on the ground in 2014, what my soul (?) needed most of all was a refresher – a worldview booster, an agitprop enhancer, and perhaps a final contextual putting to rest of those ghosts inhabiting my beer cultures passed … except that some of them still flourish.

And so it was, quite successfully.

---

My 34th in a series of European vacations served both as reunion and greatest hits tour. Little new music was performed, apart from selective embellishments to arrangements tried and true – a new breakfast room at Brauerei Spezial, Schlenkerla’s youthful heir to the crown, and a Belgian-hopped beer and food pairing on the Grote Market in Poperinge.

The rich history of my connections with these beers, places and persons dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. In terms of impact on the course of my own beer business career, they were to me what the Ramones and the Clash were to U2 – and like the latter’s new album, it's all about these and other formative influences, invaluable and impossible to overstate:

Berliner Weisse … long before sour was cool, with the many choices of syrup entirely optional.

Those sublime smoked beers in Bamberg, the centuries of diligent craftsmanship they represent, and the local thirsts they slake.

Crisp, subtle Kölsch on a gorgeous autumn day, in the shadow of Cologne’s mountainous cathedral.

The amazing, unchanging Daisy Claeys and her life’s work of art, the seemingly eternal Brugs Beertje café in Brugge.

The stolid crossroads town of Poperinge, observing its hoppy heritage every third year with one of the most genuine and honest fests known to the world of beer.

Food and drink, too, in abundance: Escargot and beefsteak with De Dolle Oerbier; Leberkäse and Spezial Rauchbier; East Prussian meatballs with white caper sauce, beetroot and Berliner Pilsner … pork shoulder and mussels, Mahrs Ungespundet and Rochefort 10, espressos and currywurst, tartare and Hommel Bier, and a Doner Kebab for good measure.

---

It seems to me we’re all guilty at times of espousing a false dichotomy, in which there is mass-market corporate swill on one side and exuberant, innovative craft beer on the other, but the problem with hegemonic Cold Beer War dualism like this is that it utterly excludes a beer like Schlenkerla Märzen. Maybe it fits rather comfortably in the same metaphor with non-aligned nations of the 1970s.

Schlenkerla obviously isn’t swill, and it’s hardly innovative in the newspeakable sense of a hyacinth-infused, dry-meringued Triple India Pale Ale. Schlenkerla is as craft-based and traditional as tradition possibly can be, fully guaranteed to offend any oblivious beer drinker who believes that Bud Light represents brewing nobility (tell it to the AB-InBev global shareholders, dumbass), and yet is often ignored by today's hoarding narcissists precisely because excellence on purely traditional grounds isn’t sexy enough for selfies.

Yes, I’m slightly exaggerating, although I believe it to be the immutable case that both here in America and elsewhere, an informed grounding in certain eternal beer truths helps provide perspective when gauging flavors-of-the-moment in an understandably changing world. It’s what I’ve tended to forget, and what the September journey helped me to recall.

It was off the grid. I didn’t carry a phone, and there were no books available to consult. The object was to survey classic European beer styles, in their ancient, preferred public settings (with one exception, an amazing bottled Trois Monts from Northern France, supplied by my friend Jeff), and to go with my gut.

My gut turns out to have remarkably good taste, not that there were many doubts in my other mind.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Naturally, I support the continued innovative advance of “craft” beer. At the same time, it strikes me that the very last thing I want to see happen is every beer drinker in Bamberg waking one morning to the conclusion that India Pale Ale is the only beer for them. It’s a nightmare scenario.

Let there be an artisan working his or her side of the marketplace, providing alternatives for contrast and comparison, but don’t sacrifice those elements of tradition which still function as fundamental cultural markers, especially when they're doing as good or better a job of defining "craft" as the majority of "craft" brewers everywhere.

A damned fine Pilsner still is, and it pulls the Baltic right out of the Matjes herring. If I return to Berlin 25 years from now, I hope the pairing still works, and maybe I’ll have time to visit Heidenpeter’s newer tradition, too.

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Recent columns:

September 14: ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: Beef Steak and Porter always made good belly mortar, but did America’s “top” steakhouses get the memo?

September 7: ON THE AVENUES with THE BEER BEAT: We are dispirited in the post-factual beer world.

August 31: ON THE AVENUES: On a wig and a prayer, or where's the infidel gardening column?

August 26: ON THE AVENUES SATURDAY SPECIAL: One-ways on the way out, because with downtown at a crossroads, they simply had to be exterminated.