Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-Nine: The radicalization of F.O.S.S.I.L.S. (1990-91).
F.O.S.S.I.L.S. was founded in September, 1990, and now we pick up the club’s history in early 1991. Rich O’s BBQ was in existence, pre-Public House, with an evolving list of “better” beers available at the time; the homebrewing club met there, and it provided me with an occasional gig, food and beer. Scoreboard Liquors had moved to a new location across town in New Albany in 1988, and I still worked there, too, stocking imports as well as an occasional “microbrews.”
The words to follow actually were written in 1995 in the form of a cheeky “look ma, the club’s a whole years old now” retrospective. Editing has been very light; commentary, updates and notes are indicated by red italics.
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In Consideration of Events in Far-Off Places.
The April 13 meeting was immortalized by Rich McGuigan, who videotaped it. Like many meetings before and after, the affair digressed rapidly after a promising beginning and culminated with several increasingly inebriated renderings of Uncle Don Blues (1), an early FOSSILS anthem that was sung to no known tune and included frequent outbursts of “goddamn.” Two videos, one unedited (and lengthy) and the other edited (much shorter), are known to be in existence. They’ll be kept sealed for an unspecified amount of time (2).
The seventh issue of Walking the Dog marked a turning point. Previously, the themes had been homebrewing, the state of beer culture in America, and how we were defining ourselves according to these concepts. Certainly these have continued as themes to the present day, but #7 introduced an internationalist perspective to readers of the newsletter.
We were groping toward our own “think globally, act locally” philosophy. In the Spring 1991 zymurgy, it was noted that Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) had sent an open letter to President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia urging him to forbid Anheuser-Busch from buying an interest in the Budvar brewery in České Budějovice. It was the first we had heard of A-B’s intentions.
Other articles in the same issue included “The Search for Real Beer ‘Weltanschauung’ in America” (3) and a reprint of a Charlie Papazian editorial—probably his most lucid and consistent ever—in which he defended the consumption of beer against those who tar it as a drug. WTD #7 began with my first shot at Anheuser-Busch over the issue of Budvar. It was a harbinger of things to come.
Bud Out!
Here is the text of a letter I’ve sent to Anheuser-Busch in protest regarding its interest in buying the Budvar brewery:
“We are appalled to learn the Anheuser-Busch seeks to buy the Budvar brewery in Ceske Budejovice, Czechoslovakia, home of one of the world’s finest pilsner beers—a status to which the rice-choked American version can only long for from afar. That means you! For your bloated company to interfere in the internal affairs of the heartland of European brewing constitutes blasphemy to a degree unfathomable to lovers of real beer, for almost certainly you will tamper with Budvar, no doubt inspired by the marketing wizards and advertising sleazeballs without whom American brewers would be powerless. We demand that you cease and desist. Leave the brewing to the experts in Europe; you’ll still sell billions of gallons to our impotent countrymen while permitting the world’s best beer to remain such.
R.A. Baylor, FOSSILS P-F-L
(If they dare to respond, I’ll publish the answer in a future WTD)
Barrie Ottersbach followed with “Have Havel, Will Travel,” in which he prefaced a tribute to the Czech dissident-turned-politician with a consideration of his own role:
Holding an office of power and prestige is a two-edged sword. Certainly, pride and prestige rocket to breathtaking heights when you’re a leader of men—REAL men. Being an officer of FOSSILS makes my head swim (for more reasons than one!) Think of me, a welder’s son from New Albany, a member of the power elite!
The sword’s opposite side must be addressed: Like poets, professional athletes and rock stars, FOSSILS officers are givers. They give something of themselves at every meeting, things that shorten their effectiveness in this world—namely, brain cells …
… As Minister of Underground Exploration and Blasting Caps, I hereby empower the Minster of Czech Antiquities, Frank Thackeray, to open, maintain and nurture a relationship between himself and the Man of the Decade (as honored by the world-renowned publication “The Weekly Wad”), Vaclav Havel.
Barrie proposed flying all FOSSILS to Prague, room and board provided, where Havel would guide us through the great drinking spots of Prague, all at the expense of hard-working Czechs. In return, we would assure hard-working Czechs that their beer was better than ours, and exchange homebrewing anecdotes with them.
By the way, the Czech government never responded.
The May meeting was held at the home of Dennis Barry, where a keg of Oldenberg was consumed and grilling members commenced the soon-to-be-sacred practice of offering burnt weenie sandwiches to the assembled drinkers. The highlight of this gathering occurred rather early in the morning, and involved an unfenced pool on adjacent property. As Dennis Barry described it:
… Among the festivities witnessed were Mark on the guitar, Roger’s first batch of homebrew (Toad Spit Stout), Lawson’s Lager (Barry Sears), Irish folk music and the outdoor lavatory (-ies), plus an excellent raffle.
In a memo, the direction of the club was discussed. Our progress during the first eight months of the club’s existence was noted: AHA membership, an enriching informal alliance with LAGERS, ample opportunities to drink beer, and almost 50 names on the mailing list.
Because I would be leaving soon for Czechoslovakia to teach English until early 1992, it was deemed appropriate to chart the succession (Barrie would become President-for-a-While), our organizational structure (dues-paying membership would be phased in through the remainder of 1991), the continued growth of the newsletter (to be edited by Barry “T.R.” Sears in my absence) and, most importantly, whether there was any real reason to remain independent at all.
Would it be better to merge with LAGERS? At the meeting of June 16, 1991, it was concluded that FOSSILS would remain independent. The two clubs have remained separate entities to the present day, but they have become somewhat intertwined owing to a large number of dual memberships and the joint activities (picnic, Kentucky State Fair Homebrew judging) that take place during the year.
At the same time, FOSSILS and LAGERS retain distinct identities, with the latter being popularly viewed as the more proficient overall representative of homebrewing traditions, as opposed to the FOSSILS emphasis on literary beer appreciation and sociopolitical advocacy. Exceptions are many on the part of both groups, but these characterizations remain useful, at least in the introductory sense.
WTD #8 (May, 1991) included the first of Dennis Barry’s series of Toronto beer-drinking travelogues, Mark Rodriguez’s thoughts on Mexican beers, and McGuigan’s winning essay in the “Why I Hate Miller Lite and All it Represents in America” contest.
June, 1991: A Measure of Formality Is Grudgingly Adopted.
At the meeting of June 16 in the vacated former Indiana State Teachers Association office adjacent to Rich O’s, it became official: FOSSILS adopted a dues structure. Barrie Ottersbach was chosen to serve as President-for-a-While until I returned from Czechoslovakia. Fr. Bob Gunn’s “Monastic Musings” column (4) made its debut with the bibulous cleric’s account of an encounter with an attack pigeon in an Austrian beer garden. It would be the first of many Gunn contributions to the newsletter, including tales of bootlegging, strange Irish evenings and road trips to nearby rural communities to drink bad beer with the natives.
Another road trip, this one to be taken in August 1991 to the Oldenberg Brewery for the Bloatarian Brewing League’s third Beer and Sweat gathering, was being planned as I prepared to leave the country. As a prelude to this, Barry Sears provided a highly favorable description of a recent visit to Oldenberg, which soon after would begin its headlong decline into insignificance—a collapse that has both repelled and fascinated us ever since.
Barry visited Oldenberg’s Great Hall, which originally was modeled on the beer halls of Europe and would be converted in 1993 into Coyote’s, a country-and-western music hall catering to notorious non-drinkers of Oldenberg’s beers. He surveyed the brewery’s collection of brewing memorabilia, which was grandiosely touted as a brewing museum, and which has since been dispersed among the long-necked, cowpoke patrons of the music hall. Barry and his dad dined at J.D. Brews, Oldenberg’s brew pub, which in 1995 is being eliminated to make way for a barbecue restaurant. They toured the brewhouse, where 12,500 barrels of beer were said to be brewed in 1989; the 1995 figures are closer to 8,000.
The visit described so vividly by Barry in June, 1991 appears in retrospect to have been a last, fleeting look at Oldenberg’s considerable early potential. It would be a topic that FOSSILS would return to again and again, particularly each year in August on the occasion of Beer and Sweat. Then Oldenberg symbolized what might be in our region, but as we grew and learned, it came to symbolize the single largest threat to the revolution apart from the existence of America’s megabreweries: selling out by those within the movement, who are unable or unwilling to grasp the philosophical implications of the beer and brewing revolution.
Barry ended his report thusly:
The brewery is located off of I-71/I-75 at the Buttermilk Parkway in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. The drive from Louisville is scenic and offers the traveler a history of household appliances prominently displayed on the front porches and lawns of mobile homes along the way.
With my departure date drawing near, I offered a parting shot of my own in an essay entitled “Life and Death in Liteland.”
… Despite the intrinsic sadness that derives from drinking life unlived—from huddling in the corner, clutching the familiar even as life’s incredible diversity parades past—the casual beer drinker who knows his or her place cannot be reviled, only pitied.
However, there are others who cannot be so easily dismissed.
The reeking onus of the bogus beer drinking culture that has formed around the consumption of products like Miller Lite falls most decisively upon those who willingly, proudly and boastfully enter into it.
Those who claim beer drinking stature and cite their fondness for Lite as proof of their love for beer are as indisputably mistaken as one who describes himself as a surgeon because he’s demonstrated the ability to slice a watermelon, for there is no better reason to believe the statement “Lite tastes great” than there is to accept the validity of “2 + 2 = 19 & 3/4″—yet an entire generation of Americans persist in doing so, leading one to speculate whether the Lite drinker also opts for soya burgers over ground beef or advocates the conversion of the NFL into a touch football league …
… when one considers the many qualities that make beer great, it becomes obvious that many of these are synonymous with the qualities that make life worth living. As such, the distinctly American ritual of Lite, and the worldview that prefaces it, combine to form a macabre dance of death and fear.
Patoka Retreat I: The Case of the Missing Keg. (5)
I am the third generation of home potation makers in my family. I have brewed several ales and stouts that have astounded me with their clarity and taste. My father is a maker of fine wines, and some have been compared favorably to various French ones. My grandfather, however, was a maker of many home libations, including a rather high-octane poteen—Fr. Bob Gunn, in “A Family Affair” (WTD #10, July 1991)
Their abilities at beer-, wine- and spirit-making aside, the Clan Gunn stages superb parties. Their first Patoka Retreat took place from June 28 through June 30, 1991 at the Gunn cabin in Orange County, Indiana. It was an extremely hot weekend, one that became infinitely hotter early Saturday afternoon, when the bulk of the participants arrived to find a spent keg of Bass Pale Ale bobbing buoyantly atop the melted ice water of the tub. In a rare case of massive understatement (his reminders having grown longer and louder as years have passed), Dennis Barry acidly referred to the missing keg as having been “devoured Friday evening,” which “all of the Saturday morning attendees remembered … all too well.”
How this unfortunate situation came to pass is the stuff of controversy and legend. I was there, but I could never tell the true story until now.
(I had joined) Barrie Ottersbach, Bob Gunn and Mark Francis in transporting the keg to the cabin on Friday afternoon. To test the tapping equipment, which was necessary owing to the long distance between us and a replacement tap, we drew several pints. Sonny Gunn took a wee nip, and Brent Mays dropped by with a champagne bottle of double-hopped elixir. Then, strangely, time seemed to stand still.
We had been paralyzed by laser-guided immobilization rays deployed by intergalactic keg-party crashers, who landed and repeatedly had their way with our innocent keg as we watched, helpless and mute. Eventually we collapsed into sweaty heaps, only to awake the next morning with a nearly-empty keg, many adjacent foul puddles and numerous abandoned cellophane-like wrappers with heaps of gray ash (obviously the remnants of alien rituals).
And to think that the four of us have always been forced to take the blame for the disappearance of the Bass. In point of fact, it was a traumatic experience for all concerned, especially the following day, when the only alternative for beer was to send Todd Fulkerson and Sears off to forage for beer in Crawford County.
We drank Busch that very hot afternoon.
I’d rather not even think about it.
The P-F-L’s Leave of Absence Begins.
On July 18, 1991, I departed the States for a rendezvous with my cousin Don in Vienna. It was the beginning of my most lengthy European interlude, which culminated in my arrival in Košice, Czechosovakia in early September to begin a six-month stint as an English teacher. It was something that I’d always wanted to do, and which was made possible by the need for English instruction in places where Communism had emphasized less useful languages, like Russian.
And FOSSILS? The club went on precisely as before.
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(1) Dr. Donald Barry H. Barry, Dennis Barry’s brother (they’re my cousins). Don’s influence on the direction of my European travels cannot be overstated.
(2) The whereabouts of the video remain unknown to this very day.
(3) Here’s the complete text of “From One Beer Lover … The Search for A Real Beer ‘Weltanschauung’ in America.” 32 years have passed, and my antipathy towards Miller Lite has never abated. At my current job in 2023, I must order Lite and keep it stocked, but make no mistake: I hate it.
The best way to understand the differences between the beer cultures of Europe and America is to think of America as a large empty pot surrounded by cans of brightly colored paint. Each of the cans of paint symbolizes a continental brewing tradition, green for Irish, blue for Bavarian, and so forth. The pot represents America, point of relocation for the cultures of the world.
In their European homelands each of these traditions embraces a rich, diverse and hardy beer drinking worldview. The style of beer to drink, when to drink it, the ideal public forum for drinking, collective attitudes toward beer’s importance in the life of the well-rounded citizen and other aspects of cultural significance form this shared vision. This vision survives and prospers in Europe to this very day and can be witnessed and savored in Munich’s colossal beer halls, Prague’s intimate taverns, London’s ornate pubs and a thousand points in between.
The chief result of mixing together these bright colors in the Great American Melting Pot has been new hues: Beige, gray, brown. Despite fertile roots, the result is the fundamental sterility of American beer culture, both as it is defined by our mainstream brewers and as it is accepted by most of our drinkers.
I have become obsessed by this problem since my first trip to Europe in 1985. A native Bavarian is accustomed to a wide choice of everyday lagers, pilsners, darks, bocks, weiss biers, and others to suit the season and the occasion. They are consumed indoors and out, in gardens and halls, in the morning and at night, and oft times to the accompaniment of celebratory singing and communal madness. Certainly not every Bavarian drinks beer, but those who do are part of a diverse and rigorously authentic beer culture.
Meanwhile, the Bavarian’s long-lost stateside cousin opts for another six-pack of pale, adjunct-diluted and almost frozen lager; day in, day out, it’s his favorite because it swallows easily, contains alcohol and boasts the wittiest television advertising. On occasion, the American makes a truly bold change and tries the latest faddish light or dry, whichever one has a better gimmick or a new marketing strategy, and always the one that tastes less like beer. It is virtually axiomatic.
There are signs of a pulse in America, but it is quirky and varies by region. Small breweries are making a comeback and brewpubs are being founded; imported beers are widely available and homebrewers—the real heroes of contemporary American beer culture—spend weekends in pursuit of flavor and integrity. Nevertheless, these remain elements of insurgent subculture, for the dominant strain in American beer culture, one heavily influenced by the omnipresent twin pillars of American economic life, mass marketing and saturation advertising, remains the passive acceptance of mediocrity.
American beer culture measures itself by the lowest common denominator, pushing aside the palate to sell the pallet, and the result is Miller Lite. Lite is the most prominent symbol of the shortcomings of our beer culture: Inoffensive, watery, diminished, aluminum-clad and devoid of most of the qualities that any self-respecting Czech or Dane would demand of beer.
Lately, Lite’s advertising agency has made its bid for oxymoronic history with the slogan “Great Pilsener Taste,” a gem that surpasses “square circle,” and “living dead,” and one that is unflinchingly believed by millions, thus leaving us with all we need to know about the decadent state of beer culture in America.
I leave you this issue with a sad and instructive anecdote from 1985. In Salzburg, Austria, a city very much in the mainstream of the central European brewing tradition, I met a fellow America. He was a college-aged Texan who obviously wasn’t on the budget plan but who was friendly and wanted to talk. The conversation turned to beer, and I began to extol the local Augustinerbrau lager and the besutiful beer hall and adjoining garden where it was dispensed into tall, cool, ceramic masses. In short, real beer culture at its finest.
The Texan wouldn’t listen. He had tried the local brew the previous night and it just didn’t measure up to Miller Lite, which he wished was available in Salzburg.
It doesn’t get any more depraved than that.
(4) Bob quite emphatically was/is not a religious personage, and the origins of the friar joke mystify me these many years later. But here we are.
(5) Patoka Lake is an Indiana reservoir located roughly 60 miles west of New Albany. The dam was completed in 1979.
Next: 40 Years in Beer, Part Thirty-One: Euro beer travel 1991, as history ends and begins again.
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