THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever. Localism is the salve for your cognitive dissonance.

It's been roughly a week since Wicked Weed Brewery sold out to AB InBev, qualifying the story as ancient news in an era of attention spans measured by the length of a gnat's middle finger.

I've used the occasion to play a set of best-loved ditties (below), but today, a new song.

Or, you might choose to return to your swapping, ratings, selfies and narcissism; however, if anyone is interested in learning something, let the Pour Fool provide a brief lecture, prefaced by a few comments of my own.

THE BEER BEAT: The Pour Fool nails it yet again, as "Budweiser Finds Another Sell-Out" -- this time, Wicked Weed.

Like others before it, Wicked Weed Brewing has died. That's unfortunate, indeed, but from the moment the ownership of Wicked Weed passed to AB InBev, this previously independent brewery was transformed into something else. Now it's Wicked Trojan Zombie Afterlife Weed. We'll always have our memories. Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't drink a WTZAW beer with Donald Trump's lips. There are hundreds of other choices, and no commensurate need to deposit money in the coffers of the enemy. It was nice while it lasted, but it's all over now.

At Indiana On Tap, Mark Lasbury makes a laudable effort to grope forward and explain the cognitive dissonance, which might be defined as the nagging fear that something's not quite right.

How To Kill The Wicked Weed Growing In The Garden Of Craft Beer, by Mark E. Lasbury (Indiana On Tap)

AB-InBev is acquiring Wicked Weed. That bit of information almost broke the craft beer channels of the internet Wednesday, but the trend started long before then and will continue long into the future, unless there is a concerted effort on the part of craft beer brewers and drinkers. I don’t know much about business, but here is an opinion, a fact, and a question that keeps hurting my brain.

Beer isn't the only topic to suffer from historical amnesia. Given current events, it is by no means the most important topic we might be discussing in this context, and yet it remains (in the words of the philosopher) that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Whatever else might be said about AB InBev and the multinationals, we can be sure they remember the past -- and are determined to repeat it.

The "craft" brewing revolution broke out because it was necessary to fight on behalf of change, both within and against prevailing capitalist and regulatory orthodoxies. Still, the revolution did not seek to abandon capitalism, or to deny the veracity of regulation. Rather, it sought necessary modifications, and in the main, these have been achieved.

But there is no action without an opposite and equal reaction, and that's why the AB InBev empire strikes back against threats to its hegemony, and in the only way it can: with lots and lots of money ... and scorched earth. Monolithic corporations attain their clout with cash and brass knuckles -- now, always, forever.

There are plenty of laws that might be enacted to put AB InBev in its place, but these are unlikely to be written, because who benefits the most from robber baron multinationals if not the politicians accepting their campaign contributions?

Accordingly, if vile politicians give money to AB InBev with the aim of preserving monopolies and suppressing choice, why would you even consider doing the same -- even if it's your precious Bourbon County Stout?

As I write these words, there are thousands of local breweries in America pursuing a business model of brewing solid local beer for local consumption. They're selling beer by the pint, growler, cans and bottles. Most of what they sell goes out the door in their own buildings. Their beer won't be on a package store shelf two thousand miles away.

Accordingly, I can think of three very effective ways to reinvigorate the beer and brewing revolution. Dispense with the self-absorbed narcissism that diverts attention from the obvious, and think about concepts like ...

Personal value systems
Individual consciousness
Acts of conscience

In various other areas of the human experience, progress is about every day, not every now and then. It's about the fundamental undertow that prefaces civilization, a bedrock foundation from which creative expression arises. Evolution is to be encouraged, but change for the sake of change is the ideology of a hamster on his wheel.

Speaking for myself, it's all about thinking globally and drinking beer locally. It's about interacting with local breweries, giving them honest feedback, and watching them move forward. It's about this bar, that room, and the patio over there -- or the front porch of my house with a growler and a cigar.

It's also about shift. The way we spend our money plays a large role in determining the sort of world in which we live. There's no evading this fact, although there isn't always an effective way to avoid playing the robber baron capitalist game.

That's why the concept of "shifting" spending is so crucial. Whenever possible, I try to spend locally, within the community. It's not all or nothing. It's a conscientious individual act of consciousness reflecting a personal value system that needn't be broadcast to a wider world in order to retain its validity.

Beer is communal to me. It's not narcissism at all, and it isn't hoarding via black markets. It isn't necessary to calculate my purchases based on what I want you to see me drinking. Rather, it's the intensely mystical nature of the liquid in the glass, a quality that is enhanced when I'm around good people, at good places, in the act of conversing, eating and enjoying life.

I was managing quite nicely to do without Wicked Weed. Now Wicked Weed has died, and it's even easier for me not to care. But I do care about the locals in Asheville who believed in Wicked Weed.

They're the ones who have the best reason to mourn. I'm sorry for their loss. May they feel peace, and start patronizing other breweries that live right.

You?

Numerous other choices await. You're invited to join me in making the revolution as locally based as is humanly possible.

And by the way: Fuck off, AB InBev.

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Earlier this week:

Thursday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Localism + Beer" (2012).

Wednesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Let's explore anti-local craft beer unconsciousness" (2013).

Tuesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Monday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

Also: Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Localism + Beer" (2012).

It makes no sense to labor over writing a fresh new essay when we've all been here before, and whether or not the "keep politics out of my narcissism" caste
realizes it, we've been here ever since Goose Island died.

My excruciatingly personalized essays from five whole years ago continue today, but first, a reminder of why you should consider the nature of the threat AB InBev poses to our nice little panacea of highly rated white whales.

Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew

Previously this week:

Wednesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Let's explore anti-local craft beer unconsciousness" (2013).

Tuesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Monday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

Yesterday afternoon I joined friends on the patio of Buckhead's in Jeffersonville. The bar was pouring Falls City's Calliope Pils. I drank it from a plastic cup while enjoying fellowship and a fine view of the Louisville skyline. You see, the revolutionary idea in the beginning was to build local beer and brewing culture. Let's nurture them, and leave those obsessive white whales to Captain Ahab.

The following first appeared here on November 9, 2012. First the 2012 preface, then the main text.

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HIP HOPS: LOCALISM + BEER

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
--Henry David Thoreau

It always has been my aim to accurately describe various aspects of my beer-infused everyday world, but even as I’ve done so, my everyday world persists in evolving. Apart from necessarily using the word “beer,” I’m increasingly unsure how to view any of the rest of it.

Long ago, good beer was about imports exclusively, because there wasn’t very much good beer in America. Several thousand domestic brewery start-ups later, there’s plenty of good beer here, and these days, we refer to it collectively as “craft” beer. This term is fine by me, except that the definition of craft beer starts on a tiny end with the scant barrels produced by a nano-brewery, and ends voluminously with the nationwide airport lounge availability of Samuel Adams.

Semantics aside, the real point of this digression is to acknowledge that I’m changing, too. Back in 1982, St. Pauli Girl probably was the best beer we had during my first-ever gig as a liquor store clerk. Thirty years later, there are dozens – nay, hundreds – of far better beers available hereabouts, and while I’m entirely comfortable in making a “good, better, best” value judgment, it isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Amid the giddy, exploding exuberance, which I’ve long professed and will continue to advocate, it seems that something important is lost. There exists an understandable zeal to embrace the unprecedented availability of international craft beer, but I find myself thinking back to points of origin, and what has made so many of my beer travels memorable: Localism.

It’s drinking great beer at or near its birthplace, primarily because it never tastes fresher than by doing so, but also because the place itself matters. Beer and community reflect each other, and although we must continue to think globally, I’m sensing a new imperative to drink locally.

Home, Not Away

My professional reputation as a beer purveyor was established owing to a stubborn determination to stock the best legally obtainable (well, most of the time) beer, as brewed in locales across the planet. Nowadays, I’m far less inclined to look past my own geographical proximity. The Louisville metropolitan area has its own great beer, with plenty more quality beer being produced within a hundred mile radius.

I’ll never entirely dismiss Belgian Lambics, German Maibocks and Irish Stouts. There’ll forever be a spot for India Pale Ales from San Diego and New York-brewed Saisons, and yet they’re no longer essential to me; rather, they’re for special sampling occasions, as they were years ago when availability was limited. Inexorably, my beer drinking is shifting to local and regional sources, and for the best of all reasons: Drinking local makes me happy.

Places, Not Prizes

Shift happens. It is perhaps the single, fundamental tenet of emerging economic localism, and when it comes time to have a beer, the concept of shift means putting this principle into liquid practice.

Having acknowledged the efficacy of buying local, as measured by factual indices consistently recognizing that localism keeps more money in one’s community, my household is incrementally shifting toward local sources of goods and services, whenever practical. Shift is a process, not an all-or-nothing crusade. If my shift to locally brewed beer implied being compelled to drink an inferior product, obviously I would think differently. Fortunately, it does not.

Another contemporary societal trend to consider is the notion of placemaking, generally described as “a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces.” Placemaking is a grassroots, community-based phenomenon, in which those ordinary people using a public space help to determine how that space is used. Placemaking may help in part to explain my re-emerging interest in community-based beer consumption -- keeping the beer drinking venues local, listening to the local beer drinkers, and knowing who supplies the beer.

Eyes and Palates, Wide Open

Not so long ago, Goose Island Brewing Company was a proud independent, but now it is 100% owned by the multinational monolith called AB-Inbev, meaning that in cold, hard fact, Goose Island is no more independent than an Ignatius J. Reilly-themed weenie wagon on the streets of Pyongyang, North Korea. Honkers Ale remains certifiably better than Budweiser, but to me, it really matters where the money goes … and dollars paid for Honkers ultimately travel to corporate headquarters in Leuven, Belgium, not Chicago, Illinois.

Sorry, but Goose Island sold out. Craft beer drinkers need to examine their consciences lest they sell out, too.

Session, Not Sledgehammer

I’m in my sixth decade, and my body reacts differently these days to the excesses of my profession. American craft brewing has excelled in the creation of highly alcoholic genre classics, including Imperial India Pale Ale, Barley Wine and Quadrupel, and while I still adore these styles, increasingly my palate turns to an evening’s reasonable sustainability, in the form of session beers.

The Pennsylvania-based beer writer Lew Bryson is the founder of the Session Beer Project, and he provides these helpful parameters.

Session beers are:

► under 4.5% alcohol by volume
► flavorful enough to be interesting -- no light beers, please
► balanced enough for multiple pints
► conducive to conversation
► reasonably priced

In brief, low-alcohol, but not low-taste. It's deliberately vague. The great thing about session beers, especially the ones that come in under 3.5%, is that you can enjoy several beers, and still have a BAC of under 0.04.

Craft Beer Is A Journey

Maybe some day I’ll come full circle, and find myself craving bottles of Bud Light iced in a pickle bucket. Doubtful, but entirely possible, because beer is less a destination than a journey, and you make the road signs yourself. All I’m asking is that craft beer drinkers resolve to be unafraid of where thinking can lead drinking, especially when thoughts turn to local options.

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Let's explore anti-local craft beer unconsciousness" (2013).

This week I'm reprising excruciatingly personalized variations on a theme of "Who Cares About Wicked Weed and All the Other Zombie Trojan Non-Craft Casualties of AB InBev and Its Brethren."

Of course, not that you shouldn't care about the nature of the threat AB InBev poses. This article goes deep in explaining why.

Watch the Hands, Not the Cards — The Magic of Megabrew

It's just that there is an unmistakable element of individual value systems in all these discussions. As Uriah Heep advised so many years ago, take a look at yourself.

Tuesday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "This week in solipsistic beer narcissism" (2014).

Monday: THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

We don't need Bourbon County Stout when other versions of wood-aged stouts (and other styles) produced by genuine indies are in the same league.

We don't need whatever sour specialty used to be brewed by Wicked Weed before its untimely demise.

Instead, we need to log off Untappd, hide the phone, find a local brewery and enjoy a fresh beer with living, breathing humans.

There are at least four Louisville area breweries I've yet to visit. Numerous other regional breweries beckon, too. You see, the revolutionary idea in the beginning was to build local beer and brewing culture. Let's nurture it, and leave the white whales to Captain Ahab.

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The PC: Anti-local craft beer unconsciousness, revisited.

“Art can never take the place of social action … but its task remains forever the same: to change consciousness.”
-- Amos Vogel, from “Film as a Subversive Art”

When will craft beer finally change the consciousness of the American beer-drinking mainstream?”

I’m tempted to answer one question with another: Should mainstream consciousness ever be the desired outcome for craft beer?

But let’s play it straight. Some might say that craft beer consciousness already has arrived. Craft beer’s availability is wider than ever before, and statistically, most Americans live within close proximity to a craft brewer, even if the average measurement is skewed by Michigan as compared to the Deep South.

Slowly, even this imbalance is changing, and craft beer consciousness is penetrating all geographical areas of the country.

More tellingly, America’s copycat megabrewers are quite conscious of craft’s escalating impact. Through imitation and outright, unrepentant piracy – the only recourses for corporate regimes cruelly deprived of the creative gene – mass-market mockrobrews, from Blue Moon and Shock Top to zombie craft beers like those from the late, lamented Goose Island, now are routinely positioned to distract truth seekers. As always, bucket loads of marketing cash are wielded to pull soothing layers of mistruth and gloss over the eyes of the undiscerning.

Overall, my personal view about craft beer’s consciousness is that for all our obvious gains, we’re not quite “there,” at least yet.

Rather, when sociologists and psychologists at last begin studying craft beer drinkers close up and personal, we’ll know that mainstream consciousness has drawn to within a whisker, because there is no more reliable indicator of mass-market impact than the urgent need to understand the behavior of those consumers inhabiting segments poised for profit. That’s how the real money gets made.

While the analysts and shrinks are cogitating, perhaps they can help me with persistent examples of what might be termed cognitive dissonance in craft consciousness.

A prime example includes the inability (read: unwillingness) on the part of credentialed craft beer enthusiasts to tell the difference between craft and crafty as they avert their eyes from the Goose Gambit’s shelf-space-seeking drones, which are intended primarily to shift money to faraway corporate shareholders. It’s the most patently obvious bait-and-switch tactic since door-to-door driveway resealing, and yet it is ignored by many who plainly know better.

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While we’re at it, these battered and blotted Rorschach findings also may help explain the most disquieting aspect of craft beer consumer behavior, at least to me: Anti-local craft beer unconsciousness.

It is my aim to re-situate the burgeoning craft beer movement within a context of economic localization, to revert the revolution to its point of origin, and to describe how the very consciousness of buying local is important both in non-beer terms, and in the specific way it impacts the craft beer ethos. Recently I wrote:

Shift happens. It is perhaps the single, fundamental tenet of emerging economic localism, and when it comes time to have a beer, the concept of shift means putting this principle into liquid practice.

Having acknowledged the efficacy of buying local, as measured by factual indices consistently recognizing that localism keeps more money in one’s community, my household is incrementally shifting toward local sources of goods and services, whenever practical.

Shift is a process, not an all-or-nothing crusade. If my shift to locally brewed beer implied being compelled to drink an inferior product, obviously I would think differently. Fortunately, it does not.

And yet for some otherwise knowledgeable practitioners of the craft beer ethos, “local” and “inferior” remain synonymous terms.

Why?

It is interesting to consider the contrasting reaction to “buying local” that exists, quite apart from the merits of local beer, when we speak of the retail sector: Hardware, groceries, clothing, floral arrangements and the like. I hear it often:

"But wait: You cannot compel me to spend more money than I wish to spend."

The perception is that buying local always entails higher expense to the consumer. Actually, numerous studies have addressed this perception, and the price differences therein typically are not as profound as imagined, if they even exist at all. Probably what doubters mean to say is that they cannot be compelled to surrender the big box, exurban shopping ease of finding all consumables under one roof – and that’s a different topic, one falling outside my parameters today.

But when it comes to craft beer, independent small brewers seldom hear objections about price, because craft beer enthusiasts understand that handcrafted products using higher quality ingredients within smaller economies of scale cost more than mass produced ones do. Consequently, a different and less readily explicable form of pushback occurs in the context of local beer and brewing.

How about some locally brewed beer, guys?

“No, because you cannot compel me to drink poorer quality beer. Only the best for me, you know."

This reply never fails to utterly befuddle me.

I’m a trained BJCP beer judge, and after thirty years in the beer business, obviously I’ve been around the block a few times – just ask my liver.

When I attend beer festivals these days, my samples invariably are drawn from “everyday” beers as made by small, local breweries, if only to remind me that seldom are these beers in any way unsuitable. On those rare occasion when there’s a quality problem, I’m constructively honest in identifying it, and if I can do so, in proposing a solution. Without dialogue, there cannot be a community. Without community, very little about craft beer interests me, anyway. Craft beer consciousness isn’t me against the world.

It’s us against the world.

Unfortunately, there exists a minority of self-identified craft beer opinion shapers for whom it’s never quite enough for local beer to be good, solid or sessionable.

What’s more, for them, local beer by definition simply cannot ever be “sexy” enough to justify a variant of beer enthusiasm sated only through insularity, exclusivity and narcissism, and before readers take me to task for erecting a straw man, permit me to add that I’m well aware of what such snobbery entails, because I’ve spent years now slowly recovering from its debilitating influence.

You’re damned right I’ve sinned, but consciousness is subject to evolution, and so is conscience. When I look back at my career in beer, I’m not always happy with my modes of expression, but know this: Narcissism’s not my gig, and never was. Expertise isn’t about keeping; with me, it’s all about teaching, and my record should speak for itself in that regard.

In my opinion, the breezy and frankly disdainful attitude that local beer cannot be good is a form of misplaced elitism and condescending snobbery ultimately injurious to craft beer’s larger interests. Attack mass-market swill at will; it deserves censure, but craft beer cannibalism is another matter entirely.

Beer as we know and love it does not exist in a societal, historical or ethical vacuum. Rather, craft beer consciousness exists within a community, and if we wish our community to grow sustainably, we must share our expertise broadly, not narrowly.

Consequently, I challenge the shadowy sect of narcissistic beer enthusiasts to help spread wisdom, not hoard it; to enhance local brewing and not detract from it; and in summary, to be part of the solution, not a collection of snarky Wonkas in the making. We have enough of that, already.

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Nevertheless, at the end of the day, I remain a realist. Nothing I write or say in this column can substantively change attitudes that derive from a wide variety of wants, needs and experiences. Life’s too complicated for simplicity and we’re all different as people, but what I can make absolutely clear is this:

I’ve got the backs of local, independent brewers in this region, and when the smack starts getting talked, I’ll be there to answer it. It’s a matter of deeply held principle.

Consider joining me by waving potential craft beer converts into the tent, not erecting barriers to their enlightenment. In such a fashion, consciousness changes – and grows.

Can political hacks ever allow citizen expertise to outweigh the influence of institutional professionals?

When everything must flow from the brilliance of the Great Leader, there isn't much room for initiatives coming from outside the inner circle, jerk.

Why Citizen Experts Are The New Paradigm, by Dylan Meert (Citizen Lab)

We have the means to build a strong digital environment where citizens can connect with each other. This opens up the possibility of calling upon their collective expertise. So, why do we still put forward an institutional class of professionals as our go-to solution to solve today’s challenges?

 ... Granting the exclusive rights of dealing with everyday problems to an institutional class of professionals wasn’t the best way, it was the only way. But not anymore.

Citizen expertise expertise on a governmental level not only raises its legitimacy, but also its efficiency. It holds the promise of a future of co-creation, of a government who is in direct contact with its citizens, of the possibility to real participation. All this to your individual preferences and efforts.

Economic localism: "The $80 Billion Shift We Need Now for Economic Democracy."

We talked about these issues throughout the mayoral campaign.

All too often, community tax dollars benefit the few at the great expense of the many. Our economic development decisions are maintaining a system of inequality.

In a "new economy" how would economic development create real community prosperity?

The executive director of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) provides an overview with selected curatives.

Doing Better: The $80 Billion Shift We Need Now for Economic Democracy, by Michelle Long (via Huffington Post)

Local independent business owners simply must cease performing the ritualistic Kool-Aid communion with municipal officials who are unable (read: unwilling) to understand these points.

You're simply not being helped by their glib assurances.

You're being hurt.

Here are five ways to kick start the necessary shift, but please, click through and read the entire article.

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Shifting up to $80 billion (the money spent annually on economic development incentives) presents a massive, ready-made opportunity. Doing better would mean new eligibility rules for community economic development incentives. A community's dollars should be used to support its own people, with particular focus on the areas with the greatest need. If we want the majority of people to receive the maximum return on their community's investment then small businesses must be strengthened at every turn. Minority and women ownership should be prioritized to level the playing field. Bigger businesses should be supported in their efforts to transition to employee ownership.

Here are five ways to start the shift tomorrow:

1. Use incentive dollars to instead back local business hubs and networks that are focused on place, health and equity. These systems of support for locally owned businesses nurture local supply chains, enable peers to support each other, and foster the kind of collaboration necessary to make local food distribution viable or renewable energy locally affordable.

2. Re-direct corporate subsidies to organizations that provide technical assistance to micro enterprises. Groups like Rising Tide Capital are adept at strengthening these businesses to create jobs, and they generate nearly $4 in economic impact for every $1 invested. The Association for Enterprise Opportunity has shown that if just one in three microenterprises was strengthened to hire a single employee, the US would be at full employment.

3. Invest in shared infrastructure for local "economies of scale." For example, a foundation in Maine invested in a local grain mill, providing needed processing that made the resurgence of regional grain farmers viable.

4. Purchase land for the community. Agricultural and community land trusts preserve affordability for residents, farmers, and local business owners in contrast to speculative gentrification. Use land banks to bring vacant and blighted lots under the control of a public authority to redevelop the land for productive uses.

5. Support the creation of worker owned businesses, and support larger businesses, particularly those going through founder transitions, to become employee owned through ESOPs. Businesses from Dansko to Eileen Fisher to New Belgium Brewery have traveled this path in recent years. Said New Belgium CEO Kim Jordan, "One of the things that we think is a big societal issue is this widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. And we realized that we had an opportunity to support people owning something that was increasing in value. Shared equity has been an incredibly powerful engine for us."

Solar roads, shifts in thinking ... and paying attention.

Keeler, late of the at-large council race, sent me a link on Tuesday morning. A chat broke out. First, here's the story.

The World’s First Solar Road Is Producing More Energy Than Expected, by Katie Valentine (Think Progress)

In its first six months of existence, the world’s first solar road is performing even better than developers thought.

The road, which opened in the Netherlands in November of last year, has produced more than 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power a single small household for one year, according to Al-Jazeera America.

“If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70kwh per square meter per year,” Sten de Wit, a spokesman for the project — dubbed SolaRoad — told Al Jazeera America. “We predicted [this] as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year.”

De Wit said in a statement that he didn’t “expect a yield as high as this so quickly.”

The 230-foot stretch of road, which is embedded with solar cells that are protected by two layers of safety glass, is built for bike traffic, a use that reflects the road’s environmentally-friendly message and the cycling-heavy culture of the Netherlands. However, the road could withstand heavier traffic if needed, according to one of the project’s developers.

I replied, "I don't see that on the Board of Works agenda today -- great link."

Adam: "Additional incentive for bike lanes. Not only will it reduce emissions from cars but also renewable energy for lights, homes, etc."

Roger: "Agreed. It's important for us to discuss innovations like this even if it appears unlikely that we'd ever actively consider them -- unless, of course, there is a fundamental shift in thinking."

Adam: "Well, the fundamental shift in thinking needs to only happen at the local government level in New Albany. I think it's possible. If we elect people who are capable of critical thinking then our large projects will be analyzed better. Silver Street Park is a great example of a project that could have been ran by solar panels installed above the facility while only costing 2% of the total budget. Saving taxpayer dollars while completing city level projects should be a no-brainer. It's a shame a lot of the administration doesn't pay attention to things like this."

ON THE AVENUES: As a journalist and entrepreneur, I’m not tired of the “Buy Local” argument. Not at all.

ON THE AVENUES: As a journalist and entrepreneur, I’m not tired of the “Buy Local” argument. Not at all.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Back in 2010, one of my locally-written columns for the Alabama-owned newspaper, which these days is “local” primarily to Jeffersonville alone, asked the question, “Can ‘shift happen’ in New Albany, too?”

(Those scraping, clanking, stevedore sounds you hear are CNHI wagons being circled. It’s the one tip they never, ever miss.)

But have no fear; today’s essay has nothing whatever to do with newspapers, because it’s all about localism – and by virtue of its corporate ownership, the newspaper simply ain’t. With your indulgence, I’d like to revisit my 2010 piece, with a few relevant updates.

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In the better (craft) beer business, we have creatively adapted an old activist mantra to suit our specific circumstances: “Think globally, drink locally.”

American “craft” beer is a locally brewed adult beverage. It is not to be confused with mass-produced, conceptually derivative swill from multinational manufacturing corporations like AB InBev or MillerCoors, which currently seek to foist the word “craft” on unsuspecting drinkers via misleading marketing tactics that might make Moons appear Blue, and cause even Herr Goebbels to cringe.

Genuine American “craft” beer is best consumed locally, with folks who share the vision and dream the dream, and as a locally loyal revolutionary, I do my fair share of sampling. Indeed, quality control is a never-ending task. To my delight and edification, the ongoing revival of downtown New Albany allows me to drink local beer quite locally – when merited, copiously – and still walk home afterward in a physically beneficial and socially responsible manner.

In fact, my family’s decision in 2003 to buy the midtown house we currently occupy was consciously calibrated with drinking, dining, walking and bicycling in mind. Mind you, this was before there was much of anything downtown to walk or bike to. Local independent businesses have rectified the situation, largely without governmental subsidies of the sort generally fluffing Chain Land. It’s enough to gladden a tea partier’s heart -- if you can pull him away from the culinary glories of Chick-fil-A.

You see, it wasn’t “luck” that enables my strolling and biking. It was planning, stemming from solid, traditional, locally-based principles of life indigenous to urban areas originally built for precisely these same purposes. At one time such notions were the accepted norm. Now they are being rediscovered by New Albany’s residents old and new, and the city’s rising indie business community.

“Thinking globally” provides wonderful insights into successful strategies pursued in differing environments. As an example, in 2010 my family reunion was held in Concord, Massachusetts, and during the course of rooming, dining and watering options in the Boston metropolitan area, we chose to stay in Somerville, a community just to the north of downtown Boston.

Apparently, such is the taste for Somerville self-identity (of course, the city’s residents still cheer for the Red Sox) that it has a “buy local first” movement: Somerville Local First. Consider the way that Somerville’s business community defines its mission.

Overview: There is a movement coming....a return to local and the emergence of sustainable economies. We're at the epicenter....Shift Happens

Mission: Somerville Local First, formed in March 2008, is a network of locally owned and independent businesses to build a robust Somerville economy and a vibrant community.

We accomplish this by:

-Organizing a Somerville Local First campaign that raises the awareness of customers, businesses, and government agencies regarding the benefits of purchasing from locally owned businesses.

-Implementing programs and discounts that reduce the cost of doing business for locally-owned businesses. Bringing together independent businesses for mutual benefit and networking opportunities.

-Supporting Somerville ordinances and regulations that promote locally owned businesses.

-Collaborating to deliver programs to help local businesses become greener in their business operations.

Products: Organizing, supporting, strengthening and promoting locally-owned, independent businesses in Somerville, MA. Educating customers about the benefits of shopping locally.

www.facebook.com/SomervilleLocalFirst

New Albany’s locally-minded group is called New Albany First, with goals mirroring Somerville’s. Across the river is the older, more established Louisville Independent Business Alliance (LIBA). LIBA’s goal of keeping Louisville “weird” in a sense of uniqueness and independent ownership is shared by many businesses on the Indiana side of the river.

Glancing to the east, beyond the Interstate-driven, exhaust-perfumed franchise purgatory of Clarksville, another “buy local first” model also exists. Jeffersonville Main Street actively seeks to organize its business community, and wastes no opportunity to espouse these core “buy local first” principles. On the other hand, New Albany’s main street organization, Develop New Albany, openly concedes that it would gaily promote Wal-Mart if Wally World coughed up the requisite membership fee. That’s horrid, if pathetically typical of a what happens in the absence of principle.

Why does any of this matter? The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (www.ilsr.org) offers these ten vital commandments. The sooner New Albany grasps them, the better, but slowly, the shift indeed is happening.

1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
New Albany is unlike any other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain New Albany’s diversity and distinctive flavor.

2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.

3. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at national chains. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.

6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

7. Public Benefits and Costs
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.

9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

10. Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

Who could ever tire of localism when localism makes so much sense?

The Potable Curmudgeon at LouisvilleBeer.com: "Getting Our Shift Together."

If you're just tuning in, I'm still writing beer columns: Twice monthly for LouisvilleBeer.com, and quarterly for Food and Dining Magazine.

When it comes to craft beer, the implications of economic localization and shift are increasingly obvious.

You needn’t digest them all at once. Little sips work just fine.

Getting Our Shift Together

Political stump speeches differ very little from religious sermons, and that’s probably why we call it a bully pulpit, not a milk crate.

However, a soapbox might be useful, or better yet, a couple cases of Bud Light in tall cans, because if the pet shampoo is too disgusting to drink, at least you can stand atop it and preach.

(By the way, President Theodore Roosevelt was the originator of the “bully pulpit” usage. Roosevelt was one of the last and best examples of a species now extinct, the progressive Republican)

During these past few years at the bully pulpit, I’ve endeavored to echo two important, recurring themes – economic localization and shift – because both notions should be of interest to the well-informed craft beer drinker, even if their foundations are rooted elsewhere.

ON THE AVENUES: We cannot let this window close.

ON THE AVENUES: We cannot let this window close.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

When it comes to presumed birthrights, absolute freedom of mobility ranks somewhere near the top of the bucket list, at least to American eyes.

In theoretical terms, this can be a positive trait. Even a hardened cynic like me must take note of the possibilities for personal development and realization inherent in greater mobility, as compared to the limitations of hidebound social castes and conventions in other sectors of the globe.

However, in this sense we’re speaking more of social mobility than physical transportation, which moves us from one place to the other.

Arguably, the intrinsically American solution to the problem of social mobility has been to strive toward an untrammeled state of purely physical movement. The earliest settlers may well have come here in search of social, religious and economic freedoms, but once landed, the first imperative for many was to race toward wherever the land stopped and the ocean resumed.

From dirt trails to plank roads, and from Conestogas to Chryslers, we’ve concluded that freedom of movement is synonymous with economic freedom, and the freedom to accumulate wealth is the sole key to upward social mobility.

The problem: As decades pass, it becomes increasingly hard to avoid the certainty that future generations will look back on what we Americans have accomplished in the cause of unshackling humanity from its roots, and judge it to have been wasteful, unsustainable and perhaps even tragicomic.

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Here in New Albany and Southern Indiana, at least for the moment, posterity is of far less concern than posteriors, or those appendages resting atop car seats stuck in traffic, slated for transfer to office chairs once newly sticky rush hours are transcended, and ultimately destined for plopping down in sofas later that evening, when television, radio and Internet pundits comprise our Greek chorus: “Woe is to us, and how will we survive this disastrous catastrophe!”

Pfui!

Now that we’ve lost the Sherman Minton Bridge for an indefinite period of time, until its steel cracks are repaired or the entire structure replaced with Minor Moves bucks, there seems to be a prevailing temptation to parlay annoyance and self-pity into the sort of hyperbole that has become the modern world’s substitute for reasonable thought.

It’s too bad, because if we as a community conclude that the absence of immediate mobility gratification dooms us to irrelevance and impoverishment, we’ve lost the fight before the first bell is even rung.

Disaster? Hardly. Tsunamis, wars, earthquakes, plagues and famines are examples of genuine disaster, as is the collapse of a bridge carrying traffic, and in our local instance, potential disaster has been averted. This is to be celebrated, not unfairly characterized out of shapeless pique.

While it may be the first time in the lifetime of many readers that a functioning Sherman Minton Bridge has not been something to be blithely taken for granted, it also is the case that with the bridge’s sudden closure, a window has opened, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities have arisen.

I may be guilty of over-simplification, but to me the concept of localism is, at root, the operational converse of sprawl, not in any sense of localism replacing all aspects of accepted civilization in the short term, but gradually swinging the pendulum back from the extreme unsustainability of the far-flung exurb to the greater utility of sacrificing a mere jot of absolute, unrestrained mobility to gain some of the economic and spiritual benefits of community rootedness.

We’ve not always been able to articulate the tenets of localism. Now, amid the inevitable snarl of transport in the opening stages of bridge deprivation, there is the chance to illustrate localism to Hoosiers by means of shared experience. Business owners in New Albany and environs will be grasping this brave new paradigm shift, and getting it fast, or else they’ll be swept away.

For a length of time yet to be determined, we’re no longer an afterthought. Rather, we’re the very best, most efficient option for Indiana residents accustomed to using the bridge(s) for purposes of discretionary spending. We may not be able to solve the perennial metropolitan Louisville employment quandary – yet. However, we can provide most of what one needs, and do so right here.

Think of it not as a captive market, but as a soon-to-be savvier market. The game board has been upended, and the pieces are scattered across the table. The beauty of this immense opportunity is that New Albany and Southern Indiana need not re-arrange the match under the rules previously handed us. We may now rewrite the rules, or play an entirely different game.

Perhaps, in the end, the greatest freedom of all stems from seemingly narrow options.

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One last thought.

New Albany’s municipal elections approach, and while Facebook is not the ultimate arbiter of such matters, a cursory review of the 24 candidates who have a Facebook campaign presence (roughly half of them) reveals that as this monumental paradigm shift explodes in all directions through their neighborhoods, they remain primarily concerned with endless recitations of yard sign plantings and fundraisers.

Really?

Democratic council candidates John Gonder and Doug England (our current mayor) stand out as major exceptions. Republican mayoral hopeful DM Bagshaw at least seems to have noticed. Of those candidates not on Facebook, Dan Coffey is displaying a deep interest in the situation (trust me). Readers and candidates, you may enlighten us as to anyone I’ve missed.

We’ve long lamented the absence of platform content on the part of mayoral and council aspirants, but it simply beggars belief that at this juncture, they’re still prattling on about 4-by-4 monster signs and golf scrambles.

I’m not suggesting candidates panic, or rush to conclusions that cannot yet be determined. At the same time, isn’t showing the slightest semblance of recognition that the Sherman Minton’s condition is (a) not a disaster, but (b) an enormous and probably unprecedented opportunity the barest of minimums we should expect from New Albany’s slate of leaders?

What would it look like?

From the globaloneness project:

What if the world embodied our highest potential? What would it look like? As the structures of modern society crumble, is it enough to respond with the same tired solutions?

Or are we being called to question a set of unexamined assumptions that form the very basis of our civilization?