One thousand times this: "American liquor laws are pretty stupid. And the COVID-19 pandemic gives us a once in a century chance to change them."

Photo credit: The Atlantic.

A pandemic is awful, and it's also an awfully good time to make common-sense reforms.

As a preface, frequent readers will recall that I'm a hardcore atheist. This said, thank God for Andy Crouch. For a very long time he's been one of my favorite beer writers. Right now, I'd vote for him over Trump or Biden.

Quite literally I've been saying this for DECADES.

The Case for Public Drinking, by Andy Crouch (Beer Edge)

America has long relegated the consumption of alcohol to bars and restaurants. In doing so, localities have further sought to control the public’s ability to consume alcohol under stringent liquor laws. Many states and cities limit the number of alcohol sale licenses, causing an artificial and inflated market for their value. Each year, the bar, restaurant, or brewery pays a few hundred or thousands of dollars in these markets to renew their licenses, paying the fees directly to the city or state. If you want to open a new establishment in an area that has hit its limit on licenses, you either have to contemplate not serving booze—something that is rarely tenable in major markets—or you have to buy someone else’s license.

This governmental created scarcity causes the value of liquor licenses to skyrocket, often going for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the open market. And none of this profit goes to the city or state, only into the pockets of private companies and owners.

And:

As much as I would like to sit arm to arm with a complete stranger at a local bar, casually discussing local events or the weather, it’s going to be a long time before most people feel comfortable doing that.

Until we’re able to return to that kind of normalcy, assuming it can return, local and state governments should continue the creative thinking they’ve developed during the pandemic response and contemplate allowing breweries or bars to operate beer gardens in large, outdoor public settings and to relax local laws governing open containers.

With the weather improving, people want to get together while still being able to maintain proper physical distancing. Beer gardens satisfy a long suppressed hunger for open-air forums of public fun. The public should be allowed to enjoy some communality and conviviality, fresh air, and a beer or two all in the company of good friends and their restorative laughter.

The restaurant industry press has noticed, too (thanks, W) ...

Restaurants profit from looser alcohol regulations during coronavirus pandemic, by Bret Thorn (Nation's Restaurant News)

With to-go beer, wine and cocktail sales thriving, will states revise rules on booze delivery, takeout and curbside pickup permanently?

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the country, many state liquor authorities displayed uncharacteristic flexibility in loosening their regulations, allowing many restaurants to sell beer, wine, spirits and cocktails for takeout and delivery for the first time in an attempt to help those businesses survive.

Restaurateurs responded with alacrity, developing bottled cocktails and cocktail kits, launching wine discounts or even reducing their inventory of premium spirits in order to manage cash flow better.

And even as state restrictions are being lifted and restaurants gradually reopen for dine-in, many operators are hoping the added revenue stream of to-go alcohol will remain in place permanently — or at least longer into what is expected to be a slow recovery.

... as has journalists covering food and drink from the consumer's end of them.

Liquor Laws Loosen Up in the Face of Delivery-Only Dining, by Caleb Pershan (Eater)

Some states are letting restaurants turn to takeout booze to make up for lost profits

If all goes well with temporarily relaxed liquor laws, waivers could very well be extended, and conceivably made permanent. “The best case is people figure out how to do this well, and realize they could have done it lawfully this whole time... A lot of [restaurants] who might just never have thought of it might find that the condo across the street will buy $20 or $30 bottles of wine with carryout.”

There's got to be a morning after.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was a cheesy disaster flick about a capsized luxury liner and the efforts of survivors to escape hell, upside down.

In 1973, Maureen McGovern's performance of "The Morning After" (also known as The Song from the Poseidon Adventure) was a hit and spent two weeks at number one.



This morning's lesson: When disaster strikes, escape is the first priority. Only after safety is assured can one look back and suffer the hangover's full effect.

My personal hero and favored dissident Václav Havel understood this dynamic. Two full decades elapsed from the thwarted hopes of the Prague Spring through the Velvet Revolution's ultimate dismantling of a failed regime.

Havel wrote, “There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.”

In the throes of my hangover, I return to Havel for solace.

He was the most infuriating of politicians, yet the most beguiling. It was hard to get a straight answer from a man who in the middle of a sentence about the evils of communism would change the subject to the lyrics of John Lennon or ask about the meaning of life — and seem genuinely interested in an answer. And how many in the political world could admit simply that (in the act of) exercising power ‘I appear more and more like an asshole.’ Unlike most others, Havel could fall back on his original career to explain the futility of many political lives.

How wonderful by comparison to be a writer. You write something in a couple of weeks and it is here for the ages. What will remain when the presidents and prime ministers are gone? Some references to them in textbooks, most likely inaccurate.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Notes from the underground.

Monday is the day for ordering beer. Since the selection at Pints&union largely is fixed by design, only a few draft slots are open to periodic rotation, as well as three or four spaces on the shelf for changeable bottles and cans.

When you choose to approach the staging and vending of rotating drafts as I do, with fewer of them as intended to complement the majority of year-round offerings, lots of weird variables pop up.

Generally speaking I'm looking for established brands with a lineage, now undervalued owing to the predominance of the new and (occasionally) ephemeral. They can be ales and lagers, hoppy and malty, American and imported -- but my objective is that they fit together and provide balance with contrast. We have ten draft lines, and the one thing I don't want is for all of them to be examples of India Pale Ale.

I don't like to drink at places with 15 draft lines and 12 IPAs, and the reason I feel this way is equal parts personal and professional.

Personally, it's simply overkill. There are dozens of beer styles and sub-styles, calibrated to enhance one's life in myriad ways, although this isn't possible when hops outweigh everything. I don't eat burgers three meals a day, and it isn't my objective to drink the same style of beer each time.

Professionally, it makes no sense to me to cannibalize the sale of IPAs among multiple handles when it remains true that a majority of the beer drinking public does not support such a division. By all means, have some of them on tap; IPAs drive the market when it comes to noise, activism and perception, but you can't convince me that the biggest slice (IPA) of a minority product (craft beer) constitutes a majority.

Find a market for an undervalued beer that isn't IPA and brings people back for more, and you're nurturing the sort of loyalty that survives shifting trends.

The problem I didn't expect to experience in all this is the difficulty of sourcing neglected classic beers. Often I'll peruse the wholesaler books and see brewery listings with availability restricted to their IPAs. It's a tad frustrating at times. Then again, I knew going in that the counter-revolution would be as much of an uphill route as the original revolt.

Viva the restoration! Coming up soon on the rotating taps at Pints&union:

Monnik King George (English Brown)
Abbaye du Val-Dieu Tripel (Abbaye Tripel)
Central State Nephilim (Russian Imperial Stout w/coffee)

Don't worry, hopheads; there'll be IPAs rotating through as commensurate with scale and variety -- just not all at the same time. After all one of the very best is Bell's Two Hearted, and it's on tap every day of the year.

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

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

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Recently it occurred to me that "resistance" means something very different in my obtuse interior world.

Currently I'm involved with a gradually expanding effort to get back into the beer business, but first, there'll be a vacation lull at NAC.

For ON THE AVENUES today, next Thursday and September 21st, I'm combining the column with THE BEER BEAT and running essays previously published at Potable Curmudgeon (today's appeared on July 11, 2016).

My gut feeling about the avant garde in beer keeps coming out spelled o-l-d s-c-h-o-o-l, and the thought of occupying a comfortably educational niche amid the lessons of the not-so-distant past appeals to me. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then remember to read the next three ON THE AVENUES columns.

I'll be somewhere else, drinking beer.

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

If I’m to judge from the electronic bushel baskets filled to overflowing with social media-borne exclamation marks, the biggest news in Indiana “craft” beer last week was the arrival in Hoosierland of brews from Maui Brewing Company, courtesy of Cavalier Distributing, Inc.

Cursory due diligence reveals that Maui still brews in Hawaii and ships to the mainland, damn the expense. Good for them. This authenticity is commendable, given that I can still remember my befuddlement back in 2006 after being served relatively inexpensive Kona at an eatery in Orlando, yielding shortly to raging annoyance when I learned that it was contract-brewed at Widmer, or maybe Redhook – same thing.

Damned insufferable Craft Beer Alliance. How is it Hawaiian if it isn’t even brewed in Hawaii?

(curmudgeonly grumbling sounds and periodic gnashing of teeth)

Of course, conventional beer geek wisdom has long since overruled me. Sierra Nevada can be brewed in North Carolina, and Stone in Berlin, Germany. Appellations of origin mean almost nothing as “craft” beer crawls steadily forward, toward becoming exactly the same problem a revolution previously was required to rectify.

Note that I don’t exclude overruling myself, having purchased Sierra’s Nooner Pilsner on more than one occasion. In a time when beer appreciation is many miles wide and a scant millimeter deep, who am I to rant and rain on these multi-locational parades of profitability?

Besides, most of the beers I typically drink are locally produced in the metro Louisville area at comfortably small breweries.

I’ve got this localism fetish going for me, if little else.

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Anyway, let’s go back to Maui Brewing’s triumphant arrival into Indiana. It strikes me that I’ve seen dozens, maybe hundreds of similar press releases over the past five years, and on behalf of NABC, I’ve written my fair share of them.

“Finally, your chance to wrap your greedy Rate Advocate-stained fingers around (fill in blank), now coming to (fill in blank) for the very first time.”

I always omitted the exclamation marks, as there are plenty of them floating in the wort-laced ether, sadly homeless. They need loving shelter -- or to be mercilessly slaughtered.

What I’m wondering is how many of these latest, greatest beers remain in circulation two or three years after their arrival. Surely there is an attrition rate, because as endless as those rows of wholesaler SKUs seem already, they’d be even more voluminous if new breweries kept piling on, one atop the other, without a withdrawal now and then.

My suspicion is that when you get past the top tier of biggest sellers at a wholesaler, about as many breweries depart as arrive, which suggests that there’s an informational market niche in need of filling, namely the exit announcement.

“Finally, your chance to say goodbye to (fill in blank), now leaving (fill in second blank) following a period of brave hopefulness and bold optimism, only to be crowded off store shelves by AB-InBev’s pay-to-play mockrobrews – and 145 new “craft” brewery arrivals.”

By the way, any bottles of NABC's Elsa Von Horizon you might happen to see are to be regarded as collector’s items for label art, only.

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Recently while perusing social media, all the while imagining that it would be a better use of my time to be clubbed senseless with a slab of semi-frozen whale blubber, I noticed a blurb from a local eatery with a better-than-average bar program.

“Cheap” beer coming, it trumpeted.

It made me think of all those times I’ve seen breathless announcements for “cheap wine” -- except there haven't been any of those, ever. Half-price bottles, perhaps, but never the word “cheap.”

Come to think of it, contemporary cocktail-driven bar programs seldom advertise on the basis of “cheap” whiskey, do they?

Verily, it’s forever top shelf and upscale with wine and spirits, but when it comes to beer, the dumbing-down always lies waiting, just around the corner.

Noting that my observations here are confined primarily to restaurants, and I’m not speaking of specialty beer bars and any other establishment which is eligible for an exception because it evinces signs of willful design … so, disclaimers aside, why does good beer still get treated like bad beer used to?

A possible answer is the weird recurring cultural habit of otherwise intelligent food and drink people to excitedly exonerate the utilitarian adaptability of rank mass-market swill.

“Well, you know, there’s a time and place for Miller High Life.”

No there isn’t – not if you’re actually beer literate.

Ah, yes; literacy. Hence, the other possible answer: There is far less beer knowledge lurking behind the typical metro area bar than one might imagine.

As BJCP judge Gomer Pyle once said, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

Too many draft selections and bottle lists are the result of what happens when beer “education” is derived from rote readings of Thrillist at 3 a.m. while drinking purely wretched Pabst Blue Ribbon and pretending it’s for a purpose.

The only purpose I can see is not being driven to do better.

Pray tell, where the hell are all the Cicerones? Weren’t they supposed to be the beer sommeliers of the future, and the faces of a fresh, factual approach, brimming with stylistic nuggets, and both ready and able to transform beer programs into principled bastions mirroring the typical edgy eatery’s wine and bourbon lists?

The cicerones may be out there somewhere, but I’m wondering if they have any active input into many beer selections I see in metro Louisville. It makes no sense to me that restaurants eager to differentiate themselves in terms of cuisine during these hyper-competitive times seem utterly unable to sort through the beers available to them and to come up with something more distinctive that six IPAs, two wheats, a sour and Coors Banquet.

Silly me.

I thought the revolution was about enabling bar management to eschew passive interpretation of customer demand, the bias of wholesaler reps and the skewing effect of brain-dead swag.

I thought the revolution was about pro-actively creating and nurturing customer demand by offering well-chosen “craft” beers intended to enhance and showcase the talents of the kitchen.

To my way of thinking, it takes only a few “craft” beer fans to justify the more thoughtful approach, and to return the favor with word-of-mouth – still the most cost-efficient means of advertising, and very nearly better than selfies.

In the end, I suppose none of this is possible without a better knowledge base than currently exists, and the knowledge base isn’t likely to improve unless owner and upper management decide it’s a priority. It’s a shame, because lots of wonderful opportunities are being missed.

Then again, maybe I'm completely full of spent grain, in which case this column space is yours, to make the case in rebuttal.

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Recent columns:

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

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

August 24: ON THE AVENUES: PourGate (the Great Beer Pour War of 2013) and Dr. Tom's prescription: "Kneel and Kiss My Ring, You Degraded Alcoholic."

August 17: ON THE AVENUES: Love in the time of choleric Coffey, though it's nice of Deaf Gahan to support the K of C's political agenda.