40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 45: The Silo and Oertels, as well as a pivotal newspaper article (1992)

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Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 44: Life becoming a landslide (1992-93).

Author’s note: I’ve chosen to keep this installment as a single post rather than splitting it into two parts. Accordingly, it isn’t short. It might be a good idea to accompany your read with a beer.

Off the top of my head, I’d be inclined to say that in 1992, it would have been a gross exaggeration to suggest the metropolitan Louisville area possessed an identifiable “beer scene” (we were trying, mind you), but if it did, for devotees the year’s single most important news item assuredly wasn’t Rich O’s BBQ. Rather, it was the Silo Brew Pub & Restaurant’s launch in October.

The advent of the Silo (located at 630 Barret Ave. above what most recently is Mile Wide Beer Co.) came alongside a concurrent and ultimately abortive project to reimagine the defunct old-school Oertels as a restaurant/brewery project in Butchertown, prompting the Louisville Courier-Journal to explore the progress of area beer-making by means of a wonderfully lengthy October 3, 1992 piece by staffer James “Chip” Nold, Jr.: “Derby City Suds: Louisville’s going back into the beer business.”

This was epochal. Nold’s thorough reporting actually countered my assertion above; Louisville did have a beer scene. It was embryonic, small and scattered, but it existed, and seemed poised for a quantum leap.

The C-J article was posted on the wall at Rich O’s well into 1993. In other news, frequent consumer Lee Cotner enjoys a pint.

Nold began by proposing that ever since the shuttering of Falls City Brewing Co. in 1978, the absence of a working brewery in Louisville created a vacuum he dubbed the “dimwitted cousin to Prohibition.” However, this fallow period was about to end.

On the same evening that Nold’s article appeared in the morning newspaper of record, Germantown’s annual Oktoberfest celebration was slated to begin, and draft Oertel’s ’92 – as contract-brewed by Huber in Wisconsin – would return to Louisville after 24 years, along with an Oktoberfest seasonal. Two weeks later, the Silo’s official opening was scheduled.

(As an aside, the ’92 appended to Oertels apparently dated from the year 1892, when John F. Oertel bought an existing brewery on Story Avenue, which was incorporated as Oertels in 1906. The brewery survived Prohibition, closing in 1968.)

Noting that a change in fashion – “beer culture” – was seeping into Louisville from the coasts, Nold added this: “There is more difference between the label designs of the major American beers than there is in their contents.”

He was nothing if not prescient about the implications of brewing’s return, writing that “(these) occasions mark the same sort of rare opportunity Americans experienced on the night Prohibition was repealed: the chance to see an era begin.”

Topics included in Nold’s survey:

  • The background of Oldenburg’s 1988 birth in Northern Kentucky, and its performance in the Louisville market
  • Introducing David Pierce, president of LAGERS, veteran homebrewer-turned-pro as the Silo’s brewer
  • Real estate agent (!) David Barhorst’s plans for Oertels, which included reanimating the former brands and enabling a level of production sufficient for regional distribution
  • Chatting with Friedrich Wolfgang “Fritz” Finger, former master brewer at Oertels, now coaxed from retirement at 79 to lend his expertise to the project
  • A view of American (as well as local) beer and brewing history from 30,000 feet
  • The state of local homebrewing, featuring the Louisville Grain and Extract Research Society (L.A.G.E.R.S., founded in 1989), and Fermenters of Special Southern Indiana Libations Society (F.O.S.S.I.L.S., in 1990).
  • A visit to Bob Capshew’s Southern Indiana home for a L.A.G.E.R.S. club brew-in

I, too, spoke with Nold by phone and was quoted in a sidebar bearing the header “Sure, it’s only beer, but it can be a heady brew.” The column inches were scant, but he beautifully captured my radicalism, for which I was grateful. As it turned out, Nold borrowed “beer culture” from me, and even today, I’m always delighted to denounce mass-market wet air like High Life and PBR.

“Why do you have a culture where people demand something that doesn’t taste like what it’s supposed to be – what does that say about where we are? We inherit this beer culture from the preceding generations the same way you inherit architecture or literature or anything else.”

My polemic was contrasted with appeasement from neutered and flailing Philistines like David Heidrich, Oldenberg Brewing’s vice president and general manager, who tearfully regretted the stridency of beer zealots like the one pictured in the sidebar, because nut cases like me stood in the way of devoted public servants not unlike David Heidrich himself, who were keen on dumbing down beer before it had a snowball’s chance in Qatar of wising up.

In fairness, it was no coincidence that Heidrich played the role of frequent and often plaintively aggrieved target of mine via Walking the Dog, the official newsletter of FOSSILS. It is highly likely that I explained all this to Nold in advance.

Bill Klapper: L.A.G.E.R.S. member and German heritage aficionado.

In retrospect, Nold’s newspaper article about a sea change in attitudes toward beer was explosive, and highly newsworthy in and of itself. The C-J’s pre-internet influence was incalculable, and a positive restaurant review alone in the Saturday “Scene” could make a start-up, or conversely, break it (the Rich O’s review by Susan Reigler came along in 1995 and was huge, certifiably boosting us to a far higher level of visibility).

In both instances, the Silo and Oertels, the investors’ plan was to operate a brewpub, a brewery and restaurant, although it soon became apparent that the Oertels brain trust was both skint and prone to playacting. It fizzled quickly despite the brief presence of a restaurant (Pegasus) without a brewery.

Fritz Finger died in 1994, having been given little opportunity to lend a hand by the eternally flatulent wheeler-dealer Barhorst. It’s too bad the brewmaster wasn’t able to exit the stage on a higher note.

As far as most of the folks populating Rich O’s and the F.O.S.S.I.L.S. club were concerned, our primary interest was the Silo, owing to David Pierce, who graduated from Floyd Central High School a couple of years ahead of me.

At the Silo’s inception David and I were getting to know each other again after more than a decade out of touch, and as should be evident given the subsequent rise of a “beer scene” in Louisville, anyone who knew David was extremely excited about his involvement in the Silo.

What many of us didn’t know was that the Silo stood to be his second venture into commercial brewing.

While Nold’s comments about Louisville’s brewery-deficient years were welcomed, it isn’t clear whether he realized that the Wisconsin-brewed Oertels could not fit his own hometown paradigm. After all, it hadn’t been brewed in Louisville. However Nold did mention that in 1989, David brewed small batches of cream ale in the kitchen at Charlie’s on Main Street at the behest of a man with the Dickensesque name of Martin Twist.

It matters far less to me whether Charlie’s or Silo ended the Louisville brewery drought, and much more that David opened both, then proceeded to do the same at Bluegrass Brewing Company in 1993, making him the founding brewer at the first three post-Falls City breweries of the contemporary era. Ale at Charlie’s was only a flicker, to be sure, but since the Silo started brewing in 1992, local beer in Louisville has been continuously available.

Unfortunately, the Silo’s existence proved extremely rocky, and David’s experience there was turbulent. When he decamped for BBC, Eileen Martin took over at the Silo – and now we had a brewster in the (brew) house – yet she also fell afoul of ownership’s prevailing dysfunction. The precise details of the sad Silo tale are theirs to relay, not mine, but no one will be surprised to learn that I reacted to it viscerally.

The rough summary: An ownership group with precious little beer savvy, which had earned its purely relative wealth remediating asbestos and yet remained firmly under-capitalized, electing to invest in a newfangled brewery on the basis of its perceived shiny gimmickry, without ever really grasping what it meant or how it might be used, all the while preferring to run a “bar,” not a “brewery,” and also learning while suspended in mid-air just how much of the money they didn’t have was being swallowed in gargantuan gulps by a spanking new, full-service kitchen.

In order to give my readers the flavor of this period, let’s fast-forward three years to 1995. The original Silo had closed, and a new ownership group was in the process of reopening it. I took to Walking the Dog to offer a preview, which appears here verbatim (subject to light editing).

These many years later, I’d ask only one question: Can an article like this one even be imagined in 2024?

Granted, childish verbal abuse and the internet go together like brats and kraut, but the notion of someone who knows their stuff undertaking to honestly critique food and drink seemingly has been lost. Nowadays we crowd-source unending praise, and have little idea what constructive criticism is (it comes from haters, right?), or how it can be helpful.

So, love me or hate me, and right or wrong, but damn, I had a polemical edge back then. Even Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson himself noticed it. And, chillingly, observe the number of instances in which my words from 1995 at the dawn of brewing’s Louisville revival have been repeated in columns I’ve written during the past couple of years – or, in fact, last week.

It seems the Radcliffes, Barhorsts and other wretched actors never went away, did they? Each new generation produces a new crop of cluelessness, and that’s colossally depressing, isn’t it?

David at the Silo, autumn 1992.

Silo’s Return: Wishing Them Well, But Asking a Few Tough Questions (1995)

As I am putting the final touches on this issue of Walking the Dog, a remodeled Silo brewpub is opening for business. As Yogi Berra is reputed to have said, it’s deja vu all over again.

When the Silo first opened in 1992, it symbolized the arrival of the beer and brewing revolution to Louisville. Closed less than three years later, the brewpub had come to illustrate the many ways that this revolution — our revolution — can be perverted, vandalized, gutted and defiled by those who have no understanding of the fundamental aesthetic principles that lie at its heart.

In short, and as outlined below, the Fred Radcliffe era at the Silo has mercifully and permanently come to a close, with the Scentless Brewpub Apprentice returning to the obscurity that his relentless mediocrity so richly ensures – back to asbestos, bourbon and other long-rumored (although admittedly unverifiable) expensive personal habits, and far away as humanly possible from the world of craft brewing, where his legacy might best be summarized as “How Not to Do It”.

Brian Kolb, who succeeded Eileen Martin following her resignation last spring, has returned as the Silo’s brewmaster (or maybe not; there seems to be some confusion over his exact role), and although Brian is doing his best to get the boil rolling in the brew house, it isn’t certain when the brewpub’s own beers will be ready for sale.

And while we’re on the topic of brewmasters, has Eileen even been considered for the job? The smart money says no, because of her candor in the pages of this newsletter (#55, April 1995), when her letter of resignation from the Silo was published and had the effect of exposing Radcliffe’s incompetence for all Louisville-area beer lovers to see.

If so, that’s a shame. It took guts for Eileen to publicly tell the truth, and in a society where honesty and integrity are as elusive as hop character in mainstream swill, she should be applauded, not blackballed.

Until the Silo’s beers come on line, Oldenberg will be sold at the Silo. We can only pray that the former McOldenberg Brewmall’s presence will be short, and that its legacy of underachievement won’t infect the revamped Silo.

At this point, a correction is in order.

In Walking the Dog #61 & 62 (October/November, 1995), the new ownership and management of the Silo were misidentified. The correct names are Jack Sedivy and Maria Ladd, managing partners and part owners; Dottie Heady, Tom Bond and Jack Sharpe, part owners/investors; and one unidentified silent partner.

According to Business First (October 23, 1995), Sedivy’s and Ladd’s food-service experience includes stints as managers at the now-defunct Grisanti Catering, and operators of a restaurant near New York City. More recently, Sedivy was the chairman of Sullivan College’s Restaurant and Hospitality program, and Ladd ran a food service temporary-work agency called Service with Ease. The other investors and their occupations: Heady, director of Sullivan’s Center for Business and Corporate Training; Bond, retired pharmacist; and Sharpe, franchisee of a My Favorite Muffin shop in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Based on two telephone conversations with Sedivy, a recent news report on WDRB-41 and the testimony of a few Louisville-area restaurant people, it would appear that the Silo will be in far better hands this time, at least in terms of its kitchen and its overall management.

Sedivy and Ladd, who are chief among the investors and will be managing the establishment, have extensive food service experience and this bodes well for the Silo’s eatery, which will be known as Louisiana Jack’s. According to Sedivy, the menu will be “Louisiana-style without the ‘C’ word,” which on the surface would seem to suggest a good fit with whatever beer is eventually brewed at the Silo. All this is very positive, considering the cuisine-of-the-minute record of Radcliffe’s Follies.

However, most Walking the Dog readers know of many good restaurants in the Louisville area, and they know that only two of these restaurants have a brewery, and so they want to know what the new management’s philosophy will be with regard to beer.

Assuming he stays on to brew, Brian Kolb’s commitment to good beer is sincere and unquestioned, but recognizing that the experience of the Radcliffe years proves the ability of inept management to sabotage the best intentions of brewers, we must ask whether the Silo’s new management intends to steer its beer in the direction of Bluegrass Brewing (or Great Lakes, or Sierra Nevada), or if the approach will resemble the predictable “you can go only so far in this market” excuse that was repeatedly decried by beer writer Michael Jackson during his tour last spring of craft breweries in the Southeast.

Rather than attempt to answer this question at this time, which would be presumptuous given the fact that we don’t yet have Silo beer to sample, I’m choosing instead to offer a yardstick of sorts in the form of the opinions of two other commentators, and – surprise! – a few thoughts of my own.

First, an excerpt from the “Letter from the Editor,” by Sara Doersam (Southern Draft Brew News, Dec. ’95/Jan. ’96):

Almost all Southeastern brewers whose beers (Michael) Jackson sampled contend they are forced to brew light- flavored, light-colored, light-bodied beer because their customers demand it. Jackson responds that, while craft breweries may well brew fainthearted beers to satisfy their Joe Sixpack customers, they should brew the majority of their beers for the more sophisticated beer drinkers, those who prefer assertive beers, those who are the trend setters for the brewpubs and microbreweries.

Sara says a lot here, but considering the pathetic record of the Radcliffe team in aggressively promoting sales of Miller Lite at the expense of the Silo’s house beers, additional testimony by Jackson is merited.

It comes from an interview (“Michael Jackson Interview, Part 2”) that appeared in Celebrator Beer News in its June/July 1995 issue. In response to a rather odd question about whether or not the image of a brewpub can be damaged by it holding a liquor license (Jackson disagreed, advocating the rightful place of beer alongside other alcoholic beverages of quality, such as single malt scotch and fine wine), Jackson noted that:

I think the biggest threat to the purity of the brewpub image is the brewpub that stocks mainstream American beers. When I see a brewpub that’s full of neons that say “Coor’s Light” and “Miller Genuine Draft,” I see a place that doesn’t know what it’s there for. I think that, on the beer front, brewpubs should either stock only their own or perhaps have guests from other local small breweries. (Conversely) I don’t think beer is ever diluted by the presence of good wine and good spirits …

The interviewer then asked “Some brewpub operators might counter that, by not having a Bud handle or a Coors handle or a Miller handle, they are jeopardizing their opportunity to have a viable business by denying some of their clientele the beverage of their choice. So your position is that a brewpub really should offer only craft beers and deny an alternative beverage altogether?” Jackson’s answer must be quoted in its devastatingly accurate entirety.

I understand the thinking, but I think it’s misguided. If you have mainstream American beers there, what you’re saying to the consumer is that the stuff that we make is somehow not real or somehow a bit funny. You’re sending out the wrong message. Nobody is so deformed in their palate that when it really comes to it they can’t drink a lighter-end craft beer. You’ve only got to go into a place like Gordon Biersch (a west coast brewpub at several sites) to see all of these people, many of whom had never touched anything other than a mainstream American beer, quite cheerfully sitting there and drinking a Helles or Marzen beer or a Dunkles, to see that this transition is not as damned hard as people think.

I get bored insensible with brewpub owners telling me, “Ah, yes. We had to tone down our beers because, you see, our town is special. Our town is particularly conservative. It’s all to do with allocation in our part of the country.” I always wonder, when they’re saying that. First of all, I just get so bored with it, because you could say it about almost every town, with the possible exceptions of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and perhaps Denver. But all over the country you could make this comment. I think so often it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The brewer never had any real faith in his product in the first place. If he really believed in it, he would have sold it to those people.

Of course, you don’t expect people to come in and start off with an Anchor Liberty or Sam Adams Triple Bock, but you can sell them a lighter handcrafted beer. It’s not really that big a deal. Plenty of people are doing it and there are plenty of places in so-called conservative towns where you go to a microbrewery and you ask “What’s your biggest seller?” The biggest seller turns out not to be the gold, but to be maybe the Irish ale or the IPA or even, in some instances, a genuine Bavarian-style wheat beer. So give the consumer a chance, and don’t apologize to him before he’s even started.

That’s beautiful.

At the same time, both Jackson and Doersam miss an important point that involves the attitudes of some restaurateurs who become involved in the brewing business, and the rationalizations they use to justify the presence of abominations like Miller Lite. Their flimsy argument goes something like this: “We’re not just a brewpub and a bar, we’re a restaurant, and there are certain expectations on the part of customers who will come to us – not for our own beer, but for our food. To please them, we must offer mainstream megabrews, even if these contradict our primary reason for being.”

Like Jackson, I find such ill-considered lines of thought boring beyond all patience.

Quite simply, the best way to refute the preceding is to ask the restaurant people whether they feel it necessary to pander to their customers by also offering reheated White Castle hamburgers alongside the burgers cooked in their own kitchen. Why not? After all, we’re here to please the customers, and certainly there will be patrons who prefer White Castles over brewpub burgers, and even if our expertise cooking hamburgers is the main thing that sets us apart from other restaurants … but of course this line of thinking is nonsense, and few if any self-respecting brewpub owners would tolerate such a strategy emanating from their kitchen. Yet they’ll sell Budweiser across the bar and utterly refuse to even try and see the contradiction, with the end result that their establishments are desecrated by hordes of palate-challenged Liteweights, and their credibility is severely compromised.

That’s because, in a general sense, an increasing number of brewpub owners and managers have no true, personal interest in beer, and, frustratingly for those of us who know better, they have little or no interest in learning about the product that they’re selling. The knowledge and resources are there, even in a place like Louisville, but these are not utilized. It’s a shame, and it is one of the reasons why, as Jackson illustrated, that brewpubs “apologize” to consumers before they’ve even taken a seat.

Once again, my thoughts turn back to poor ol’ Fred Radcliffe. When Radcliffe decked the Silo with Miller Genuine Draft paper shamrocks during St. Paddy’s day, and rolled out barrels of iced-down Lite longnecks, and gave his own beer away for a buck, he wasn’t just apologizing to his customers — he was groveling in abject and clueless humiliation, frightened and shaking, pale and chattering knees meeting hardwood, begging the palate-challenged to ignore the brewing equipment behind the glass and to do anything except come to the Silo for the only thing that separated it from every other Louisville bar/restaurant except one: ITS OWN HOUSE-BREWED BEER.

The Silo’s new management is stepping to the plate, and I urge all FOSSILS to carefully consider the words of Sara Doersam and Michael Jackson when they visit the Silo, and although you don’t need me to tell you why such a consideration is valid, I’ll do so anyway, if for no other reason than to get it off of my chest.

Good beer in general, and craft brewing in particular, is more than just the small-scale manufacturing of a commodity.

Good beer is an alcoholic beverage, a spiritual consolation, a passionate object of intellectual and sensual pleasure and the brave symbol of an intelligent lifestyle that has as its prime component an unquenchable desire to transcend the mundane. Those lovers of good beer who view it in the way I have described are unyielding in their high expectations and aren’t easily duped by the American tendency to obscure truth with euphemistic drivel in the name of marketing, packaging and any other consideration that detracts from the fundamental primacy of the beer itself.

It’s the beer. Period.

It’s the beer. Do it right, or get the hell out of the way and let someone do it, someone who lives it — not just as an opportune investment, or as an embellishment to cuisine that could be done just as well without it, but as one who gets out of bed before sunrise after a difficult evening and says “there’s nothing like the smell of hops in the morning.”

Am I “taking it personally”? Of course I am. If there’s any hope for the future of good beer in America, it has to involve taking it personally.

Without such a commitment, we’re right back where we started. Local brewpubs should be prime focal points for the consolidation of the beer revolution’s gains, and they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by refusing to acknowledge that what we’re doing is a revolution, one that seeks as its final objective the toppling of the existing order – in this case, the mainstream swillocracy.

Jack Sedivy and Maria Ladd have tentatively committed to attending the FOSSILS meeting of Sunday, January 14, when they will serve as judges of the pungent flavor competition and speak to us about their plans for the Silo. It is hoped that their visit will be the first of several from brewpub owners/brewers/managers in Indiana and Kentucky; we’re trying to fill next year’s spring meeting dates with these programs. Let’s have good questions ready for our visitors, enjoy a stimulating dialogue … and drink a few beers in the process.

Next: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 46: Expansion culminating in espresso and the Red Room (1993)

Here is a gallery of photos taken at the Silo in late 1992.