In My Room.

According to the death cult curated by the Right, these people who insist on staying home are behaving unpatriotically.

They should have all gone to Sturgis to experience the world's toughest guys drinking the lightest beer available.

But maybe, just maybe, tending to one's health when he's skint, anyway, is another variation on the pursuit of happiness.

Because, as the philosopher reminds us, pleasure is the absence of pain.

Americans Stayed Inside Even as Cities and States Reopened, by Alexandre Tanzi and Olivia Rockeman (Bloomberg)

Well after U.S. economies began reopening this year, Americans continued to stay home.

By the latter half of August, 130 million Americans said they avoided eating at restaurants, a new U.S. Census Bureau survey analyzed by Bloomberg News shows. Only about 21 million of the nearly 250 million people had resumed dining out, according to the data gathered in collaboration with multiple federal agencies.

Asked if they were still making fewer trips to stores in late August than before the pandemic, 70% said “yes.” Even among the youngest adults aged 18 to 24, 68% said they were shopping less.

In some cases, the ability to stay home was tied to income. More than 70% of households earning more than $100,000 said they were able to substitute telecommuting for some in-person work. By comparison, only 27% of households with annual incomes under $75,000 said someone in their home was able to telecommute ...

This Blue World.

My posts are being titled after songs. There may or may not be any connection with the content. After 14,988 blog posts, a little freshening up might help.

The Blue Green Mouse says that in response to the news of American Queen Steamboat Company's layoffs, City Hall has authorized a $50,000 HWC Engineering study to explain what the hell American Queen Steamboat Company even is to being with.

Narrator: A foundation of the downtown economy, that's all.

A New Albany, Indiana-based steamboat company is laying off more than 200 workers on two of its vessels as the Covid-19 pandemic has taken much of the company’s business.

The American Queen Steamboat Company said in a Kentucky WARN notice that it will permanently lay off approximately 250 workers for two of its vessels, American Queen and American Empress. The first layoffs are slated to start by or near Sept. 24, according to the WARN notice.

WARN is short for the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988, which requires this sort of notice.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Social distancing and the single drinker.

A very timely reminder: For the past 40 years I've always tried my best, at all times and twice on Sunday, to keep at least 6 feet away from the nearest Miller Lite.

The pandemic has strengthened my resolve.

---

Let's begin with some bad news.

Farewell for now to a golden age of drinking, by Schumpeter (The Economist)

The pandemic has hurt the booze business

... Lockdown and its aftermath leaves craft firms most exposed. Some have been bought by industry giants; abi now owns Goose Island and Camden Town Brewery. But many still sell from their own small premises, making it harder to attract social-distancing customers. Even in good times many barely covered their costs. Being small, they have less leverage to force their wares onto supermarket shelves. Some will either be sold or sluiced down the drain. Inevitably, the industry will lose some of its creative fizz.

In addition, two longer-term threats loom on the horizon: demography and drugs. Studies show that Generation z, the eldest of whom have recently reached drinking age, are far less likely to consume alcohol than their elders, says Javier Gonzalez Lastra of Berenberg, a bank. That will affect the drinks industry for years to come, because peak alcohol consumption has traditionally been between the ages of 18 and 34. Partly as a result, in America, historically the world’s biggest drinks market, total alcohol sales volumes have declined for three years in a row. Overlapping with youthful sobriety is cannabis use. A report co-written by iwsr last year found that this was an emerging alternative to booze among the young. Millennials in America accounted for almost half of “dualists”, who both smoke pot and imbibe. Covid-19 could benefit cannabis further. In Schumpeter’s limited experience, pot-smoking has always been something of a furtive activity. That may make it better suited to social distancing than clinking glasses in a pub.

The good news is that a great awakening of regulatory experimentation allowed to survive pandemic states of emergency would help keep us in the game.

Hip Hops: Public drinking -- and changing “stupid American liquor laws”

Rules and regulations are inevitable in any business or profession, but the ones pertaining to beverage alcohol often are a more impenetrable thicket than most, multiplied 50 times for each state in the union, compounded by additional layers of local blue laws, and seemingly imposed for the very purpose of denying that the repeal of Prohibition ever took place.

In the same article there's a list of Louisville area breweries and their current opening status.

Food & Dining Magazine’s "Hip Hops" column is devoted to the beer beat, and an essential component for the health and well being of any city’s beer scene is its core of local breweries. In the broadest of terms, the pandemic has been kind to Louisville’s breweries. Many of ours never closed entirely during the pandemic, and others have reopened.

Here’s a status list with the (incomplete) lowdown, as assembled Sunday afternoon in the company of a tankard of Falls City Bock — and then another, after the first.

Count me in, emphatically: "Like it or not, a second Age of Revolution is dawning."

I endorse the following remarks.

Covid-19 has changed everything. Now we need a revolution for a born-again world, by Simon Tisdall (The Guardian)

As global demands for justice and equality gather force, only a truly radical agenda can make it happen

... Many countries have seen small-scale Covid-related protests. Yet by and large, insurrection has not gone viral – yet.

That’s despite a consensus among business leaders, scientists and pundits that the world will never be the same again. A watershed has been reached, they say. Mostly older people are suffering now, but millions among the younger generations may have their lives forcibly upended for years to come. Like it or not, a second Age of Revolution is dawning.

So the real question is not whether but what manner of revolution is coming ...

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 ...

"The coronavirus crisis has revealed the fragility of a system built on decades of financialisation and globalisation."

Photo credit: The Independent.

Excellent magazine, equally fine article.

Tribune is a democratic socialist political journalism founded in 1937 and published in London. While it is independent, it has usually supported the Labour Party from the left. From 2009 to 2018, it faced serious financial difficulties until it was purchased by Jacobin in late 2018, shifting to a quarterly publication model.

Tear it down.

Coronavirus Has Exposed Capitalism’s Weaknesses, by Costas Lapavitsas

The coronavirus crisis has revealed the fragility of a system built on decades of financialisation and globalisation – but the task for the Left is to offer a real alternative, argues Costas Lapavitsas.

The coronavirus crisis represents a critical moment in the development of contemporary capitalism. To be sure, the crisis has longer to run — and its full impact on the USA, the EU, China, Japan and developing countries remains to be seen. But there is no doubt that it has posed the threat of a massive depression across the world economy. The systemic failures of financialisation and globalisation were starkly revealed by the public health emergency, and the state has become ever more implicated in sustaining this failing system. However, the character of its interventions give no reason to think that there will be a transformation at the top of the political and social hierarchy resulting in policies that favour the interests of working people.

The US government’s decision massively to augment its deficit — and thus its borrowing — while simultaneously expanding the supply of money and driving interest rates to zero, is essentially the same as after 2007–9. Even if a depression is avoided, the medium-term results are also likely to be the same, since the underlying weakness of capitalist accumulation is not confronted. But there will certainly be political contradictions arising from defending the neoliberal order, not least given the demonstration of nation states’ power to intervene in the economy. These will be particularly important in the EU, where the fiscal and health emergency response to the crisis has so far come from individual nation-states rather than the collective institutions.

Casting a harsh light on the inadequacies of neoliberal capitalism, this crisis has directly posed the issue of democratic reorganisation of both economy and society in the interests of workers. There is an urgent need to confront the chaos of globalisation and financialisation by putting forth concrete radical proposals. That also requires forms of organisation capable of altering the social and political balance in favor of working people.

The pandemic has brought to the fore vital issues of social transformation. It has vividly illustrated the imperative of having a public health system that is rationally organised and capable of dealing with epidemic shocks. It has also posed the urgent need for solidarity, communal action, and public policies to support workers and the poorest faced with lockdowns, unemployment, and economic collapse.

More broadly, it has reasserted the historic need to confront a declining system that is locked in its own absurdities. Unable rationally to transform itself, globalised and financialised capitalism instead keeps resorting to ever-greater doses of the same, disastrous, palliatives. The first requirement, in this respect, is to defend democratic rights from a threatening state and insist that working people have a powerful say in all decision making. Only on this basis could radical alternatives be proposed, including large-scale measures such as designing industrial policy to address the weakness of production, facilitating a green transition, dealing with income and wealth inequalities, and confronting financialisation by creating public financial institutions.

The coronavirus crisis has already transformed the terms of political struggle — and socialists must urgently respond.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW BONUS THANKSGIVING WORDS: America is an oligarchy, with decorative flourishes of plutocracy. Democracy? What's that?

(I'm on vacation, and this is a repeat from November 23, 2017)

Before partaking of today's holidazed extravaganza, wherein engorged American agribusiness output and brain-damaging sportsball games divert our collective attention span, let's consider a very important distinction.

It's the difference between oligarchy and plutocracy.

What is Oligarchy?

As mentioned above, an Oligarchy is a type of political system or government. It is defined as a form of government controlled or ruled by a small and elite group of people. Thus, this small group of people has control of the government and, of course, the entire state. A nation that has this form of government or political system is also called an Oligarchy. The sovereign power of the state is vested in this small group of people comprising of landowners, wealthy people, royalty, noblemen, high-ranking military officers, renowned academics, or philosophers.

What is Plutocracy?

The term Plutocracy derives from the Greek word ‘Ploutokratia.’ ‘Ploutos’ means “wealth” while ‘kratia’ means “rule or power.” Thus, the full translation of this word is the rule or command by the wealthy. Plutocracy is, therefore, defined as a state, society or government controlled and ruled by the wealthy or a wealthy class.

People that exercise control:

• In Oligarchy, the group that controls the system is not limited to wealthy people alone but includes other privileged individuals or groups of people such as royalty, noblemen, landowners, academics or philosophers, and military officers.

• In Plutocracy, the group exercising control derives their authority or power from their wealth.

Oligarchy and plutocracy are not interchangeable, and yet there might come a point when every last oligarch is wealthy. Then what?

As it stands, while wealth is the chief culprit, there may be a handful of fundamentalist preachers who actually aren't rich, and as such, oligarchy remains the best choice to describe our United States of Capital Accumulation.

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

This is not news, you say.

Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here's how they explain it:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

Although "Pitchforks for Plutocrats" has an engaging tone to my ears.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Moving ahead (or in this instance, to a post earlier this year): "Reaganomics killed America's middle class."

Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Save this one for your leftover turkey sandwiches. How's that upward mobility working for you?

Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top, by Jonathan Rothwell (New York Times)

Dispelling misconceptions about what’s driving income inequality in the U.S.

 ... The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians; executives, managers, sales supervisors, and analysts working in the financial sectors; and professional and legal service industry executives, managers, lawyers, consultants and sales representatives.

Without changes in these largely domestic services industries — finance, health care, the law — the United States would look like Canada or Germany in terms of its top income shares.

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark, the ratio is about 2 to 1.

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries.

Finally, for my younger readers.

Wealth check: The rich get richer, and millennials miss out (The Economist)

More than half of global wealth is owned by the top 1%

The report underlines the sharp divide between the wealthy and the rest. If the world’s wealth were divided equally, each household would have $56,540. Instead, the top 1% own more than half of all global wealth. The median wealth per household is just $3,582; if you own more than that, you are in the richest 50% of the world’s population.

Feeling better? I hope so.

Enjoy your pumpkin pie, folks.

Eastern Europe's 30-year revival: Has the transition from communism to capitalism been a "remarkable" success?

Czechoslovakia, 1989.

We'll be vacationing in Croatia (briefly) and Slovenia, both components of ex-Yugoslavia, and thus to American minds like mine that were formed during the Cold War, both belonging to "Eastern Europe."

Never mind that Yugoslavia was non-aligned and abstained from the Warsaw Pact. It remains that "central" always was a better modifier, and "Eastern" no longer is monolithic, now mandating the use of the lower case, eastern.

Is the present era the best and worst of times for these formerly communist countries? Here are three perspectives.

First, a rosier-than-not overview.

'This is the golden age': eastern Europe's extraordinary 30-year revival, by Shaun Walker (The Guardian)

Not everything is perfect – as reflected in political flux – but the region is wealthier and healthier than ever before

Maciej Grabski looks out over a panoramic view of the Baltic Sea, from the 32nd floor of the Olivia Star tower in Gdańsk, Poland.

“My children never saw the dark, devastated atmosphere that I remember from the 1980s,” he says. “Many people take things for granted now.”

The tower, built by Grabski’s construction company, is the centrepiece of a new business development on the outskirts of Gdańsk, and filled with the offices of multinational companies. It is next door to the squat, concrete Olivia sports hall, where the Solidarity trade union movement held its first congress in 1981, heralding the beginning of the end for communism in the region.

The economic demands of Solidarity, which had sprung up at the huge Gdańsk shipyard and was led by Lech Wałęsa, rippled through Poland and then the rest of central and eastern Europe during the 1980s. By the end of the decade, borders were open, regimes collapsed and the Berlin Wall, concrete symbol of 45 years of European division, was being pulled down.

What happened next was extraordinary, painful and unpredictable, as an entire region lurched into uncharted territory. Progress was fitful, messy and often unevenly distributed, sowing the seeds in some countries for the recent rise of populism.

But 30 years on from the heady days of autumn 1989, a range of metrics demonstrate that the transition from communism to capitalism has been a remarkable success.

Next, a more cautious take in economic terms.

Can the good run of central Europe’s economies last? at The Economist

The extremely open economies are vulnerable to external shocks

Fifteen years after they joined the EU, the four “Visegrad” states of central Europe (the v4) can be prouder of their economic achievements than of their patchy record on political reform. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia have increased their levels of gdp per head dramatically, and are converging with their mighty neighbour Germany. The Czechs are the richest, with a gdp per head that is 73% of Germany’s, followed by Slovakia with 63% and Hungary and Poland with around 57% each—and the gap continues to close, as their growth outpaces that of the behemoth.

Four main external forces have driven the remarkable successes of the four extremely open v4 economies. The first is their access to generous subsidies from the EU, which make up a sizeable chunk of their respective national incomes. Second is the munificent flow of remittances from millions of expat v4 citizens who now live and work in the EU, especially in Germany, Austria or Britain. A benevolent recent economic environment has also helped, especially the success of the German economy, by far their most important trading partner and the biggest or second-biggest investor in each country. And lastly, the four all started from a low base, enabling them to serve as cheap workshops for more developed economies. The danger is that all four of these factors are now petering out.

And, to recall, East Germany always was a special case.

Germans still don’t agree on what reunification meant at The Economist

Discontent may even be growing

On November 9th 1989, as the Berlin Wall tumbled, Hans-Joachim Binder was on night shift at the potash mine in Bischofferode, a village in the communist-ruled German Democratic Republic. Mr Binder, a maintenance worker who had toiled in the mine for 17 years, had no idea of the momentous events unfolding 240km (150 miles) to the east. The first sign something was up was when most of his colleagues disappeared to investigate what was happening at the border with West Germany, just ten minutes’ drive away. Only three returned to complete their shift.

Less than a year later Germany was reunited, capping one of the most extraordinary stories in modern history. Not only had a communist dictatorship collapsed, releasing 16m people from the fear of the Stasi (secret police) and the stultification of censorship. Unlike any other country ever freed from tyranny, the entire population of East Germany was given citizenship of a big, rich democracy. As a grand, if ill-fated, gesture of welcome the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, converted some of their worthless savings into hard currency at the preposterously generous exchange rate of one Deutschmark to one Ostmark.

More than 1m Ossies took advantage of their new freedom by moving to the West, where most thrived. Official statistics no longer counted this group—who were disproportionally young, clever, female and ambitious—as East Germans. For those who stayed behind, however, the 30 years since the fall of the Wall have been a mix of impressive progress, often taken for granted, and sour disappointment.

Yep: "The American System of Tipping Makes No Sense."

In Europe, the birthplace of Western aristocracy, countries have moved away from a practice that once denoted class differences. Today, servers across that continent are paid living wages and don’t rely on crowdfunded generosity.

The United States, founded as a rebuke to the old world, has allowed a de facto aristocracy to bloom in our country, where low taxes on the rich, combined with meager welfare for the poor, lead to income inequality reminiscent of a feudal state. Tips are a tiny part of that big picture. But they’re a perfect representation of the philosophy that underlies it: Tipping survives because of the notion that industriousness must be coaxed from individuals through constant threat of their immiseration.

Here's the link.

The American System of Tipping Makes No Sense, by Derek Thompson (The Atlantic)

If you want to understand how meritocracy acts as a cover for inequality, look no further than our broken understanding of gratuity.

Here’s a simple question. It’s Sunday. You order coffee and a simple breakfast—eggs, bacon, toast—at a local diner. The service is efficient, but not memorable. The bill comes, and it’s $10. What’s the tip?

$1.50, according to typical online guides for foreign travelers in America
$2.00 at least, according to The Washington Post
$3.00 for sure, according to The New York Times
Whatever the hell you want, according to some guys on Twitter

I have no confidence that anything I write here will persuade readers to increase or decrease their average tip. To me, the range of answers raises a larger question: Why are we still crowdfunding worker salaries when tippers so clearly do not know what the hell they’re doing?

There won't be any new restaurants in New Albany this week.

Thanks for indulging this test of NA Confidential's theory that any post explicitly mentioning restaurants or food in the title can be relied upon to quintuple the views of the ones that don't.

A savory food porn image doesn't hurt. Consequently you might be interested in this link.

Agree or disagree?

Those of us in the biz know the struggle is real, and has been for quite a while.

We’ve just lived through the greatest period of restaurant growth in U.S. history. Here’s why it’s ending, by Laura Reiley (Washington Post)

A new book explains the sudden death of the golden age of dining out in America

We’ve just been through America’s belle epoque of restaurants.

What’s more, the party is over and most of us are blithely unaware. The restaurant industry is frequently the precursor for a market correction, an early harbinger of a bear market or even a recession to come. And some experts are saying that an unfortunate confluence of factors — oversaturated restaurant markets, rising labor and food costs, weak sales, changing consumer tastes and loyalties, a shrinking middle class, declines in mall traffic, bank and investor skittishness about returns on investments — means the near future looks bleak.

This is the thesis of “Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End,” a new book by James Beard Award-winning food journalist Kevin Alexander ...

80 years after Lou Gehrig's famous goodbye, Dave Zirin examines baseball's declining popularity.

Photo credit.

It's been 80 years since Lou Gehrig made his famous closing remarks, and the contemporary game seems so far removed from Gehrig's era that we might be speaking of different planets.

I've changed, too. Sporting endeavors mean far less to me now than before, and these days I seldom allot time to watch games of any sort. They all take too damn long; there are books to absorb and words to write, and whatever little contribution I can make toward refusing to view advertisements, it's an easy call to opt out. I can always read about the games.

Thus noted, the ongoing NBA free agent sweepstakes have been fascinating. The Clippers, contenders?

Of course I'm monitoring the major league baseball results, and with the season half finished, Oakland remains in contention. At the same time I'm not enthused enough to actually devote three and a half hours to watching a game. We saw one in April in Cincinnati, and that's enough for now.

Dave Zirin is one of the few sportswriters who genuinely matter, and he's pretty much on target here, noting that the human element seems to be disappearing from baseball.

Analytic approaches to hitting have now become conventional wisdom, with players trying to extend pitch counts, draw walks and swing for the fences, going for a home run or a strike out. The first-ball hitter or the sacrifice bunt are considered antiquated. This slows the game down. It also decreases the number of fielding possibilities, which not only grinds the game down, but makes it more—and here is that word—boring.

There'll be a counterrevolution. There always is. I'll just curl up in the corner with a good book and wait for the pendulum to swing back.

Why No One Watches Baseball Anymore, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

The sport is experiencing its lowest levels of support since 1937. The reasons are obvious, but owners and executives have no incentive to look for answers.

The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox just played a historic series in London, bringing the national pastime across the pond. Two of the greatest rivals in the history of sports competed in two games over the weekend, and it felt like much of the sports world barely noticed. There has been far more buzz about the US women’s national soccer team, currently advancing to the semi-finals of the World Cup in France, and the wild and wacky NBA free-agency period. People—particularly young people—appear to be more interested in where NBA players are going than what Major League Baseball players are doing.

As someone who grew up loving baseball (tragically, as a diehard Mets fan) and whose own kids would sooner make their beds than go to a game, I feel like I have an answer to the question of why young people want no part of this. The games are too damn long. On Saturday, the Red Sox-Yankees contest, for example, lasted four hours and 42 minutes. The Sunday game was a brisk four hours and 24 minutes. Though a typical game falls more in the three-hour range, this is too damn long. Last year Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Kenley Jansen scoffed at this notion, saying, “The Super Bowl is four and a half hours.” That is undoubtedly true. The Super Bowl is also once a year. It is not part of a 162-game dirge, many of the games played outdoors in a summer heat that—thanks to climate change—isn’t getting any cooler ...

It isn't so much that we don't have baseball players like Gehrig nowadays. We don't make people like this.

Eighty Years On, Lou Gehrig’s Words Reverberate, by Richard Sandomir (New York Times)

There is little record of the speech known as baseball’s Gettysburg Address, but there is that movie.

Lou Gehrig had finally made it to the Yankees’ clubhouse that afternoon, drained and drenched with perspiration, having delivered a speech of such simple eloquence that it would one day be called baseball’s Gettysburg Address.

Lou had wept as he spoke — as did many of the nearly 62,000 other people in Yankee Stadium on that Fourth of July 80 years ago.

Back in the comfort of the clubhouse with teammates and friendly reporters around him, he asked, “Did my speech sound silly?” It was a humble man’s question with an easy answer: it did not.

Much of the speech no longer exists as an intact recording; poor preservation of newsreels has left only four known surviving lines ...

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?

Here's a scrap for the AdamBot: "The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs."

"For the past few decades, policymakers have embraced neoliberalism, a broadly open-market political philosophy whose effects have been to redirect more power toward the economically powerful and marginalize the economic majority. Things may be changing."

I don't make it a habit to read Politico, but this one's sensible.

The One Thing Trump Gets Right About Tariffs, by Jennifer M. Harris and Todd Tucker (Politico)

 ... Much as it pains their colleagues—and as hard as it is for Washington to process this—Trump and his backers have a real point. Not about his immigration policies, which are part of a harmful cultural war and stand a real chance of inflicting long-term damage on the American economy. But the administration’s use of tariffs to push its foreign policy goals is not as irrational as Trump’s enemies make it seem. It shouldn’t be this way, but in 2019, if the United States wants to fix some of the big policy arguments it has with its trading partners, it has left little leverage besides the blunt tool of tariffs.

For that, the blame lies with Democratic and Republican administrations alike, including Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, who collectively have let U.S. economic policy shrink in ambition—a battle fought on a narrower and narrower field, leaving us with so few weapons that tariffs have become the most useful last resort.

A nation as powerful as the United States would traditionally be expected to have a fully developed economic and industrial policy, one that integrates incentives and priorities on the domestic front with carrots and sticks for foreign partners. In that universe, Mexico’s own immigration enforcement might be part of a much wider package of goals negotiated between the two nations, one that creates strong incentives for Mexico to comply, without hurting American consumers and companies the way tariffs would.

This fuller agenda, which some experts call economic statecraft, has been the norm for much of the country’s history. But unlike America's competitors, the United States has largely shelved this kind of economic thinking. President Obama, for instance, pitched the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as a way to ensure that America, rather than China, would write the rules of the global economy. But under the hood, it was never a very compelling economic argument for the United States: The rules that China negotiates in its own trade deals overlapped considerably with the American proposal, meaning that the TPP was more a matter of diplomatic gamesmanship than a real plan to advance workers here at home

To politicians like Obama, raised in the heyday of global free-market consensus, government industrial policy is a thing of the past, and trade relationships are really just a matter of opening as many markets as possible—regardless of whether the benefits actually outweigh the losses for a given country. The evidence now strongly suggests that consensus has been wrong. To take just one problem, the magnitude of corporate tax evasion made possible by modern trade agreements should make all of us question whether the traditional lifting-all-boats assumptions of trade efficiency still hold up.

With Trump's election, it's now acceptable to at least name the problems the U.S. has confronted on the world stage, ranging from coercive Chinese requirements over our manufacturers to corporations invoking their global supply-chain decisions as a reason we can’t fundamentally rethink U.S. trading rules. But Trump’s solutions to those problems suffer just as much from an absence of creative ambition ...

In the UK, it's not Brexit: "It’s a much deeper crisis. An existential crisis.”

"What Brexit has shown again is our inability to think anew about what the state and the economy are for, to sketch out what a different future might look like."

It's no great stretch to suggest that Americans resemble these remarks, and best not be chortling with more of the same tired exceptionalism. I'm reminded of the recent quip to the effect that the Democratic National Committee is 100% in favor of reform, so long as nothing changes.

Britain is in the grip of an existential crisis that reaches far beyond Brexit, by Aditya Chakrabortty (The Guardian)

Nearly three years after the referendum, Westminster has still not come to terms with the grievances that drove the result

The person who is best qualified to hold up a mirror to British politics today is neither a minister nor an academic. He is not even British. No: he is, of course, Michel Barnier, the French-born servant of Brussels. In his 1,036 days as the EU’s chief negotiator, he has sat for numbing hours opposite Theresa May, haggled with David Davis and Dominic Raab and their junior ministers and faced down countless Whitehall officials. He is the outsider who knows our system inside out. So when he popped up right at the end of the BBC’s fly on the wall Storyville documentaries on the Brexit negotiations, I leaned in to listen.

Filmed in March, as it became clear that Britain would not be leaving Europe any time soon, Barnier is shown briefing senior European parliamentarians. This latest breakdown is “more than weariness”, he tells them. “There is a very serious crisis in the UK which … isn’t linked to the text of Brexit and even less to the Irish backstop. It’s a much deeper crisis. An existential crisis.”

Barnier doesn’t do florid, so his words leapt out. After almost three years with his eye pressed to a microscope trained on the British elite, here was one of the EU’s finest declaring that the real failure wasn’t this clause or that loophole. It wasn’t even Brexit at all. The UK is in a crisis as big as the country itself.

There are times when some politicians and pundits remember this, when they jerk awake to the reality that the country stands at a moment of reckoning more profound than Suez – one in which our institutions, our economy and our system of representation are all being shown up as simply not up to the job. This week is plainly not one of those times. I watched Barnier’s remarks on Sunday night, as the first UK results from the European elections began to roll in, showing a far-right party as the clear winner. I woke up to a righteous hailstorm of commentary about What Jeremy Must Say Now and Who Replaces Theresa. Such debates can satisfactorily steam up the sash windows of central London, but set in any context they seem almost recklessly marginal ...

ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

Last week Cox’s Hot Chicken in downtown New Albany disappeared overnight. A few days later, NABC’s Bank Street Brewhouse wound down after ten years, just as its owners had announced earlier.

Six months versus ten years; a self-described sports bar that never jelled, as opposed to an eatery/brewery/taproom unable to solve the daunting mathematics of an oversized brewing system.

In slightly differing ways both these stories were viral for NA Confidential, which is highly appreciated by the editor (that’s me). Lots of new readers came to the page, and I hope they remain.

Concurrently a bizarrely detached News and Tribune didn’t help much in clarifying these events, with most staffers apparently diverted to serve as hucksters for Abbey Road on the River occurring right behind their office in Jeffersonville (it was a fine event, by the way).

I felt bad for one of the newspaper’s newest reporters, who was forced to cite Facebook posts as sources because the business owners involved weren’t answering calls. However, at Insider Louisville old pro Kevin Gibson went deeper on the Cox’s situation.

The building is owned by Bertrand Properties LLC, and the lease is held by Matt McMahan, who opened the now-defunct Big Four Burgers restaurants. Cox’s Hot Chicken is owned by Andrew Cox.

McMahan confirmed there is another restaurant working on opening in the building, but declined to say who they are or what the concept will be.

Asked why Cox’s closed so suddenly, McMahan said only, “partnership issues.”

Or, purely typical.

The heavy metal commentator Eddie Trunk is fond of saying that somewhere around 95% of music-related disputes are about money, and this percentage probably reflects reality in the food and drink sector.

Not enough money = not much of a future.

At the same time, each of these cases is entirely unique. It’s all about location -- except when it isn’t. Prices were too high, or not high enough. Bad service and noisy ambiance, too-hard barstools, unclean bathrooms, filthy smoking areas, awful on-line ratings; the list goes on and on, with enough variables to prompt doctoral dissertations.

Concurrently an overview of social media comments, taken in aggregate, suggest that very few of us know how the restaurant business actually works or understand the multi-dimensional dynamic of a (presumably) free market.

But let’s not blame the Internet for this one. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Richard Nixon resigned at roughly the same time Burger King started saying this?

Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders, don't upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way.

Seriously?

Their way?

You want these people, barely capable of matching their own socks and who can’t bear the thought of using Arabic numerals, to believe they deserve to have “it” their way?

Egads. The decline of civilization began in 1974. The arrival of Yelp only made it worse.

---

What I’ve enjoyed most these past few days are the on-line experts debating what these two recent business closings say about downtown New Albany.

They say quite a lot, although not in the way many observers intend. While not absolving our City Hall from culpability (more about that in a moment), let’s survey the food, drink and dining scene over the past year and a half.

Spoiler alert: a free-fall it ain't.

Match Cigar Bar's branch on Main Street closed, and quickly was replaced by Double Barrel. Roadrunner Kitchen came to life adjacent to Double Barrel, where Urban Bread and others used to be, then moved to Underground Station near the estimable Aladdin. Mirin subsequently replaced Roadrunner Kitchen.

Feast BBQ closed and the space was purchased by The Exchange. Comfy Cow on Market ceased to exist and was remodeled as a bar called The Earl.

Following a fire, Hitching Post underwent a complete (and notably shrewd) rebuild. Nearby, Dragon King’s Daughter’s occupied another renovated former supermarket building. La Tiendita got bigger, sank, and was replaced by El Sinaloa.

Pints&union and Longboard’s Taco & Tiki both came into being, and Quill’s vacated one space for occupancy of another. La Catrina occupied the former DKD slot facing Elm Street. Gospel Bird perished, but NA Standard will be opening there soon.

The Elks Lodge and the Red Men both continue to serve food and drink. Meanwhile no establishment downtown is using its indoor and outdoor square footage more wisely than Floyd County Brewing Company, which has come into its own as a beer and brewing destination.

The huge old department store building where La Rosita once lived, which everyone (including me) thought would be impossible to repurpose, soon will become RecBar, an entertainment venue with a kitchen of its own. At the Breakwater, Bliss Artisan recently began serving pizza and ice cream.

Then there’s Toast, Café 157, 410 Bakery and Adrienne’s; Daisy's, Lady Tron, Hugh Bir's and Brooklyn & the Butcher; Seeds & Greens, Brownie’s, Habana Blues, Hull & High Water and Bella Roma. Pride and Pastime. All of them keep regular business hours sans palpable drama.

Yes, Cox’s Hot Chicken and Bank Street Brewhouse are gone. As Gibson informs us, the former will become something else soon enough, all but assured by McMahan’s continued involvement.

Bank Street Brewhouse is available for purchase as a turnkey operation, admittedly complicated by the brewing system’s size. Judging from the calls I’ve rerouted as an ex-owner, interest definitely is there. Be reminded that Steve Resch still owns the building, and it should be obvious that he gets things done. There’ll be a new occupant.

River City Winery is a special case. Successful for nine years, it hit the skids in late 2018 – neither for lack of patronage nor the quality of the food and wine, which were excellent, but because of an ownership dispute. This one's murky.

Lastly, the Green Mouse says there may soon be a tenant for the kitchen incubator space in the rear of Destinations Booksellers -- and the long moribund Vincennes Street corridor is showing signs of revival.

Does any of this sound like a death knell?

---

Agreed: there are reasons to be concerned ... but downtown is not in catastrophic retreat. Independent food service operators, whose job it is to do the math, keep filling the spaces left when a previous operator departs. Would they be doing this in the expectation of failure?

Turnover isn’t the sign of a ghost town. It’s indication of relative health in the grassroots, where capitalism occasionally remains capitalistic. Why must a socialist like me be the one to inform you that market corrections are constant and ongoing. They're happening all the time. It helps to remember that grassroots entrepreneurial capitalism tends to lack a net. It’s unforgiving, and casualties are a constant.

For local independent business owners and managers, life stays complicated. Decision-making involves numerous moving parts, deriving from the input of hundreds of key players, including workers, farmers, bankers, media, middle men, lawmakers, and of course, customers.

As such, pertaining to lifting all the downtown food and dining boats, together and as a unified growth sector of the economy, previously I’ve reiterated the need for greater cooperation between these entities in the form of a completed restaurant association.

Rather than repeat these arguments, you can read the post here: ON THE AVENUES: Necessity was the mother of NARBA, a food and drink invention in need of re-animation.

Wait – what was that?

"NEVER MIND, DOWNTOWN IS IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE OMIGOD THE PARKING IS HORRIBLE."

That’s plain stupid, but obviously certain preconditions have quantifiable influence, including wharehousing one's car, the economic climate as a whole, today’s snow storm, tomorrow’s heat wave, who we are as a city, and where we want to be.

By the way, we’re having an election in November.

Of course, the state of infrastructure matters much: sewers, the power grid, water, garbage, policing and ordinance enforcement. Transportation concerns exist beyond coddling your ride: shall we remain 100% car-centric, or are there multi-modal mobility options?

Jeff Speck thought so, but Jeff Gahan apparently doesn’t. Consequently a huge opportunity was squandered in 2017.

To me, job one is encouraging density in downtown residency, not by bribing huge developers to pursue one or two showpiece projects, but by providing fair incentives for two-dozen smaller ones.

The more people living within walking and biking distance of historic downtown business district, the better the business climate, and the speedier the shift to balanced offerings; as Bluegill has been asking forever, how far must one walk from his or her home NOT to drink craft-brewed pastry stouts or eat Peruvian street food, but just buy a damn roll of toilet paper?

Still, my conclusion is that one good way to assure a future for your favorite downtown eatery or watering hole is to encourage residential infill. Several acres of downtown real estate have been scraped clean of buildings and now sit, coated with rain-deflecting asphalt, to be used only on widely scattered occasions as special event parking lots.

Until people are living downtown in bricks and mortar rising from the current unproductive barrenness, we’ll continue chasing our tails.

I’ve also come to realize that in spite of the advantages of having a combined Clark and Floyd County tourism bureau, which include a fine staff and useful economies of scale, the city of New Albany needs to devote time and resources to itself, for itself – and by this I’m NOT talking about the blind man’s bluff approach of billboards and advertisements currently emitted by the city, which generally serve as mayoral campaign blurbs more than “Come to Squalidity City” enticements.

To put it bluntly, outsiders contemplating where to spend their money simply don’t give a flying fug who currently serves as mayor, whether it's Gahan, Real or the ghost of Erni. Rather, they’re looking for reasons to come check out the city.

Can we please begin providing them with these reasons, and not settling for North Korean-sized images of our own Dear Leader?

Our combined tourist bureau would be even more conducive to us with a visitor center presence in Floyd County, preferably downtown New Albany. I’m told this is something that has been considered by SoIn. Which candidate for mayor will work with them to make this happen?

Finally, we need to be doing whatever we can to promote local independent businesses.

When it comes to the city’s typical economic development expenditures and abatements, it cannot be denied that the bigger the subsidy, the more likely it is being deployed to support chains and far flung corporate empires that drain cash from the local economy every single day.

Summit Springs is the most purely grotesque current example, an inexcusable and atrocious 100% car-centric environmental blotch, set to be stacked with national franchises offering low-income jobs to workers who can’t find affordable housing amid Gahan’s mantra of luxury-first.

Will the people staying in those hotel rooms even know there’s a classic downtown setting less than a mile away, or will they hop back into their cars and head to Louisville -- or Veteran's Parkway?

Yes, we have issues like these, and they need to be addressed.

No, the sky’s not falling because two independent small businesses closed.

And: Death to Burger King and all the rest of the chains.

---

Recent columns:

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: "Pints&union, where the classic beer hits keep right on pouring."

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Where do we go from here?

May 6: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones (2018).

May 5: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Our great and noble leader soon will be going away, so let's break out the țuică and make a joyful noise.

Marohn: "The core cognitive dissonance in our affordable housing conversation."

A short and insightful piece follows, in which Charles Marohn doesn't pretend to have all the answers.

As with many housing issues, I don’t have a clear three-step plan to make everything work for everyone. Similar to the latest college admissions scandal, it seems that at least part of the conversation needs to acknowledge that even if we truly believe in some vision for an ideal society—whether that includes ample affordable housing or fair college admissions standards or something else entirely—when it comes down to it, our vision for our personal happiness is often at odds with our theoretical utopia. Put another way, individually, we have a vested interest in one approach (rising prices and growth), but collectively, we express an interest in the opposite (broader affordability and housing stability).

In conclusion ...

If we first make that acknowledgement, we can start to discuss a transition between a housing market dominated by our current distorted craziness and one that is more responsive to human needs.

Making this or any other acknowledgement as a preface to a genuine discussion?

Whether it's about affordable housing, streets and roads or virtually any other civic topic in New Albany, City Hall typically doesn't do public acknowedgements, and accordingly, real public discussions seldom occur. We're not having these discussions because they are at odds with the secretive goals of the city's administration.

Perhaps this explains the 800-lb gorilla perched on the dresser during recent chats about the future redevelopment of Colonial Manor.

Noting that I'm very much in favor of the grassroots effort to define a future for the property, and also that the organizers of this effort have done incredible work in standing against the usual Jeff Gahan "fix is in" approach to public "input," there has been some dissonance involved quite beyond City Hall's childish petulance at not having its way.

Specifically, neighborhood activists have openly dismissed any notion of the Colonial Manor acreage being used for housing. I believe this owes to a number of assumptions, some valid (the New Albany Housing Authority's recent spending spree) and others not so much (density fears).

However, Gahan himself surely triggered the backlash when he lofted a short-lived trial balloon about housing in a comment to the Jeffersonville newspaper on March 12.

"We will encourage residential and mixed use. We know the city of New Albany needs all types of housing," Gahan said.

The grassroots reaction to this statement was to read the word "affordable" as an adjective preceding "residential"; to assume "affordable" was code for "public housing," and to object not only to affordable/public housing, but also any housing at all on the site -- how many speakers at last week's listening event referred to there being "too much" density already?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day -- and, for once, Gahan wasn't full of flatulence when he mentioned the desirability of mixed use, including residential. Of course, the devil in those details center on the level of municipal subsidy to campaign donors, but still, it was not an outrageous statement to make.

Obviously Gahan said nothing about this potential residential use being "affordable," which would contradict his longstanding preference for "luxury" in all forms, but the spectre of NAHA scattered site housing was enough to produce pushback, and correspondingly, redevelopment director Josh Staten made sure everyone knew that NAHA wouldn't be a part of the Colonial Manor picture.

For the moment it's moot, with Gahan publicly pouting and his Democratic Party stooges whining on social media about their inability to cope in a world where city council takes its fiduciary responsibilities seriously and doesn't settle for the Phipps Rubber Stamp.

But I believe Marohn's piece adds depth to the Colonial Manor discussion -- and happily at least we're having a discussion, contrary to Gahan's pathological need to micro-manage any such process behind closed doors.

Who Benefits From Lower Housing Prices?, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... I’m being brutally honest (and a little vulnerable) here in order to make a difficult point about another public issue that can quickly become personal: affordable housing. Because here’s another brutal truth: in our cities today, nobody in a position to seriously impact the affordability of housing ever benefits from housing prices becoming affordable. In fact, the opposite holds true: most every individual or organization in a position to lower housing prices would be harmed by such a result.

And:

A policy approach that lowers home prices is going to run into a lot of structural resistance. And that’s the core cognitive dissonance in our affordable housing conversation: we want housing to somehow become more affordable without prices actually going down. Stated another way, we want people to somehow be able to afford housing while housing itself remains largely unaffordable.

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” ...

Among Democrats elsewhere, progressive economics are ascendant. Here, it's all about a Baked Sale.

The problem for local Democratic cadres as they approach the rapids (municipal elections in 2019) is that 2018 midterm results gave them nothing (ahem) worth dropping anchor.

Consider for a moment the devotion inspired by epic loser Joe "Slavishly Licking Donald Trump's Loafers" Donnelly among the older Democrats; meanwhile, big losses suffered by somewhat left-of-center female candidates Anna Murray and Liz Watson seemed to suggest the task ahead is hopeless.

After Jeff Gahan and four mediocre council "Democrats," the deluge. How will they compete in 2019?

To the left? They don't know how.

To the right? But as Donnelly proved conclusively, if a pretend-Democrat veers too far Falangist, voters will opt for an unalloyed GOP candidate and not the substitute.

Gahan's assets are a cult of personality and lots of money. Will any of it trickle down to the Democratic council candidates?

The obvious answer: Democratic Bake Sale!

My suggestion is to stockpile Rice Krispies Treats and enjoy the show.

Progressive Economics Are Ascendant—Among Democrats, and at the Ballot Box, by Chris Hughes (The Nation)

It’s good politics and good policy, and should be a winning formula in 2020.

With the results of the November midterm elections, we have officially witnessed the end of Rubinomics. Former Treasury secretary Bob Rubin was the ringleader of an incremental, neoliberal economics ascendant in the Democratic Party in the 1990s and through the Obama years. The Rubin school oversaw the deregulation of banking and finance, free-trade agreements with insufficient worker and environmental protections, and the dismantling of core parts of the safety net with Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform” of 1996. These economists, taking a page from Ronald Reagan, argued that markets self-regulate if we just leave them alone.

History has proven them wrong, and this month’s elections signaled the start of a fresh approach. A decade out from the Great Recession, wages are still stagnant, and the cost of living is spiraling out of control. Even though typical economic indicators, like the low unemployment rate, suggest we live in a strong economy, exit polls show that only a third of voters say their own financial situation has improved in the past two years.

A new cohort of candidates this year chose to run on a clear, unapologetic economic progressivism as good politics and good policy. A new analysis found that two-thirds of the incoming Democratic freshman class in Congress campaigned on some form of Medicare for All or the expansion of Social Security. Nearly 80 percent campaigned on tax credits that benefit working families or on rolling back Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy ...

How a "desire for the perfect Instagram snap" leads to over-tourism.

No one was here in 1985.

There are multiple issues impacting this topic, and below there's an excellent overview.

Interestingly, my own bucket list has long since shifted from the Parthenon and Hofbrauhaus to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's ancestral estate in the countryside and an artisan brewery somewhere out the back forty.

Part of this is because I covered the "biggies" long ago. More importantly, as experiences multiplied, so did epiphanies about what really matters to me.

From the start, I was a lone wolf traveler, perfectly content to muck around on my own rather than board the tour bus. Particularly for a naturally shy person like me (don't confuse my learned behavior with a default mindset), this sort of solo wandering can lead to a degree of voyeurism; you kick back and just watch life pass by.

Sometimes you can learn a lot this way.

Lately the missus and I have been choosing more lightly trod destinations like Tallin, Catania, Porto, Poperinge, Mechelen and even Haarlem; the latter is a few minutes from bursting-at-the-seams Amsterdam, and foreigners seem not to go there. There's something to do and to learn almost anywhere you go.

It helps to have food and alcohol readily available. 

Where does Gdansk, Poland fit into all this? We're about to find out.

Wish you weren’t here: The backlash against overtourism (The Economist)

More people are travelling, and many are visiting the same places

 ... The growing backlash against tourism has coincided with extraordinary growth in visitor numbers. According to the World Tourism Organisation, an agency of the United Nations, the number of international visitors making overnight stays grew to 1.3bn in 2017. That is twice the number in 2000, and more than four times the level in 1980. Even so, the rise in numbers is not the real problem, says Alex Dichter of McKinsey. “People in 99% of countries in the world are crying out for more, not fewer, tourists,” he explains. The problem is that these extra tourists are converging on the same places.

This has surprised many in the travel industry. The spread of the internet was meant to disperse tourists by making less well-known places easier to find. Why has the opposite happened? Analysts at Skift, a travel website, attribute it to the rise of “bucket lists”. Popularised by a film of the same name in 2007, which featured a “list of things to do before I kick the bucket”, these internet lists direct tourists to the same “must see” places. The desire for the perfect Instagram snap has a similar result.

Mr Dichter also points to several other reasons for the shift. When flag carriers ran air travel as a cartel, flights cost a fortune—over £200 ($230) for the 300-mile jaunt between London and Dublin in the mid-1980s, for instance. But low-cost carriers like Ryanair (whose average fare was €40, or $46, last year) have transformed the industry. The rise of services like Airbnb, that allow locals to rent their homes to visitors, means that a place’s capacity for overnight stays is no longer limited by the number of hotel rooms.

Partly as a result, the share of tourists who are making their first trips has soared. Newbies often want to visit famous landmarks. In Amsterdam almost all first-time visitors head for the Van Gogh museum and Anne Frank’s house, says Geerte Udo of its tourist authority. Meanwhile tourists from China and India often dislike tanning and therefore skip beach destinations, adding to the crowds in a handful of popular cities.

Such overcrowding brings costs, which are borne by local residents ...