BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: "My 10 wishes for beer in 2020," by Stephen Beaumont.

Stephen Beaumont is a Canadian beer, spirits and food writer. I like his style, and he has uncommonly sensible things to say about beer, as with this list appearing at his Twitter account on New Year's Eve. The list scores nine of ten with me in terms of symmetry (I abstain from #5, as I've had few Latin American beers of the sort he cites).

His web site

My 10 wishes for beer in 2020, a thread:

1) That breweries large and small begin focusing more on quality control so that we eliminate beers with massive chunks floating in them, swollen cans, beers that taste like butterscotch or balsamic vinegar, and so on. 1/11

2) That people stop screaming about market saturation and the falling sky. Yes, growth in what we call ‘craft beer’ is way down, but it is still growth in an overall declining market. That is a good thing. 2/11

3) That beer consumers start prizing flavour and character over rarity. And remember that while drinking local is a very good thing, it should not be pursued at the expense of experiencing all the greatness the beer world has to offer. 3/11

4) That beer festivals continue their nascent trend towards becoming smaller and more carefully organized, with fewer breweries and fewer brands per brewery and more emphasis on quality and excitement. 4/11

5) That more people, especially those in Mexico and South America, discover the amazing things brewing in Latin America, which for my money is probably the most exciting beer market in the world today. 5/11

6) That more breweries operating tap rooms realize that in so doing they are in the hospitality game, and start creating spaces in keeping with that understanding. Also, treating their customers with respect and appreciation. 6/11

7) That beer drinkers, young and old, discover or rediscover how wonderful many old school beers were and still are. And that sometimes forgotten styles like porter, brown ale, bock and others stage a comeback. 7/11

8) That fining and filtration stop being viewed as sins. Yes, hazy works, cloudy works, but there is also nothing wrong with a brilliantly clear beer. 8/11

9) That ‘Beer Twitter’ and other social media stops being so much “I’m right and you’re wrong’ and grows more ‘That’s an interesting view, here’s my take on it.’ 9/11

10) And finally, that everyone who is interested, regardless of age or gender or colour or language, feels comfortable entering a bar or restaurant or taproom or festival and ordering a beer without being in any way diminished for it. 10/11

Happy new year, everyone, and all the best for 2020. May your beer choices always meet your expectations and your glassware be forever ‘beer clean’! 11/11

The Spring 2019 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available at newsstands and online.

The Spring 2019 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available at newsstands and online. You also can read the current issue at issuu, and while you're there, do some catching up on past releases.

My "Hip Hops" column this time around is devoted to the beer at my own current place of employment. At first it seemed a tad awkward writing about myself, but given the origin of the beer program at Pints&union and the obvious personal fingerprints all over it, for once I could rationalize a wee bit of self-aggrandizement.

Cult of beer personality?

Did you hear the one about two buddies walking into a coffee shop to talk about building a brand new “old” bar?

One of them was Joe Phillips, and the other was me. We began philosophizing about life, adult beverages, curry and third spaces. This chat was the impetus for Pints&union, a pub in downtown New Albany that opened in August of 2018.

On that fateful morning at Quills, we drained a few bracing espressos and got wired – then excited. We’d both been planning an honest, traditional, no-gimmicks public house where everybody knows your name, and it seemed like a good idea to work together toward this shared goal.

Now Joe is the owner of Pints&union, and I work for him as manager of a purposefully archaic beer program, which I’ll get to in a moment. First, meet Joe Phillips and his dream pub ...

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: A great idea, this "Old School Beer Tasting" at The Keg Liquors (Clarksville) on February 7.

Yes indeed, I'm delighted to see this trend broaden. It's the same point we're trying to make with the beer list at Pints&union, and so far it's working. Specialties are even more special when they're actually ... special, and not the norm.

I'm planning on attending this tasting. The Keg Liquors is located at 617 E Lewis and Clark Parkway in Clarksville, and big thanks to Todd Antz for staging this tasting.

Old School Beer Tasting

Back in the dark ages of beerdom, choices for good beer were few and far between. If you were looking for something other than a cheap pale lager, you typically had to look for an imported beer that hopefully did not come in a green bottle, or find the few American microbreweries that were still in existence. Names such as Samuel Smith, Rochefort, Orval, Rogue, Weihenstephaner, Anchor, Dogfish Head, Unibroue and more were all we had to choose from, but the choices were always good.

Join us as we go back in time to celebrate the forefathers of the craft beer movement. There won't be anything barrel aged, no haze, no fruit bombs. What there will be is some fantastic beers that are still available today that get glanced at and passed by.

We will publish the list of beers as we get closer to the event.

This is a free tasting and open to the public (21 and older)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The watchwords remain: traditions, classics, old school.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.