Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 56: Michael Jackson’s 1994 visit to Louisville — BBC, the Silo, Rich O’s.
“When one thirsts for a glass of wine or a pint of beer, the brain gradually registers the order as a half-heard whisper. The volume is slowly turned up, creating a gentle, purring, reverberation throughout the nervous system. It seems a pleasurable massage at first, then becoming tenacious. You are in the hands of a higher authority that brooks no argument. It is desire, and the streetcar cannot leave its lines. Your destination is a rendezvous with a drink.”
— Michael Jackson, circa 2006
Pioneering British beer writer Michael Jackson (1942-2007) spent a busy day in Louisville on November 19, 1994, making stops at Bluegrass Brewing Company, the Silo Microbrewery and Rich O’s Public House. Jackson was conducting a research tour of American microbreweries for a book he never published, although his findings later appeared as part of other writing projects.
While the Beer Hunter came and went in just a day’s time, for months afterward our burgeoning “better beer” community was euphoric about his visit. Back at work on Monday morning, I felt a tremendous sense of vindication, and my morale was through the roof.
It’s important to remember that in 1994 it was ludicrous — verily, banana cream pie imperial stout in the sky — to imagine there’d ever be 20-30 operational breweries in the Louisville metropolitan area, as actually do exist here three decades later.
However, we were quite sure there was room for more than only two. Jackson’s decision to include Louisville on his itinerary seemed like a harbinger of great things to come and they have. Had you informed me 27 years ago that one day there’d be five breweries in New Albany alone, I’d have judged you crazier than people always assumed I was, given my delusional certainty as early as 1982 that New Albanians would in fact drink Märzen, India Pale Ale and beers soured on purpose.
For the three co-owners of the embryonic Rich O’s Public House, later to become the New Albanian Brewing Company, the obvious highlight of Jackson’s late autumn day in Louisville came when he walked through the doors of our establishment, drank an Imperial pint of Sierra Nevada Porter, and seemed to enjoy himself amid an adoring public.
Upon his departure from the Public House ninety minutes later, Jackson issued a wry observation, one that inspired me to further efforts, and continues to prompt a big smile to this very day.
“I’ve been to many pubs in America, and I’ve never seen one quite like this.”
Just before speaking these words, I’d observed Jackson looking at one particularly eccentric corner of our barroom, an area completed just a few months before his arrival. His body language would have passed into history without further comment if not for a serendipitous reunion six years later.
40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 46: Expansion culminating in espresso and the Red Room in 1993
“Beer-drinking in the Soviet Union still has its folksy moments. Two Englishmen reported to the British beer-buffs’ newspaper What’s Brewing that they found a ‘well-hopped strong bitter ale, dispensed by water pump from wooden barrels’ at a café on the military road connecting Ordzhonikidze with Tbilisi.”
— from Jackson’s The New Word Guide to Beer (1977)
In 2000 I joined my friend Joey Burns in Denver for the Great American Beer Festival under the benevolent auspices of LEO Weekly, for whom I’d be writing an account of the yearly gathering. I’d never before been awarded a press pass, rigging it into a plastic-clad rectangle, and imagining this dandy lanyard would generate all sorts of freebies.
Not so much, alas, but we made it inside the huge downtown convention center for one of the afternoon sessions, and with a few beer samples already under our belts, eventually we found ourselves somewhere up on the mezzanine. Spotting beer writer Stan Hieronymus, a man I knew better than most other hop-stained wretches thereabouts, I leaned on a vacant table as we chatted.
Suddenly Stan asked me if I had brought a book to be signed.
With my face registering abject cluelessness, he motioned behind me — and right there close enough to touch was Michael Jackson himself, settling in for another afternoon of beer talk with his then-current Great Beer Book.
Completely by accident, I’d managed to be at the front of a steadily lengthening line, and without a book to be autographed. It never occurred to me to simply buy one, although dozens were stacked nearby. However, I had a GABF program tucked under one arm, and duly proffered it to Jackson as I reintroduced myself and asked if he remembered the Public House.
He smiled in affirmation, adding that the monthly FOSSILS homebrewing club newsletters sent to him in London since his Indiana visit were entertaining.
“You’re quite the polemicist,” said Jackson, pushing back the program as I blushed. “Have I told you why your Red Room made such an impression on me?”
Abruptly Jackson’s faraway gaze back in 1994 came back to me. It had been fixed on the Red Room. Now it made sense; there was a back story.
To reiterate: The Red Room was, and remains, a small seating area by the bar in the Public House carved out of the drywall and drop ceiling, with one wall painted red and a massive three-part Soviet-era poster of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the wall, subsequently augmented with other examples of “red” paraphernalia.*
“No,” I replied. “What about the Red Room?” Jackson leaned forward and got to the story.
It began in 1945 with Jackson’s earliest childhood memory at the age of three: The post-war British election campaign was underway. It would end with Labour’s sweeping victory, toppling Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for whom winning a war wasn’t enough to keep his job.
Jackson’s father, whom he described as the left-leaning family’s main political agitator, was at work, and so it was his mother — normally apolitical — who took young Michael to a rally for their Yorkshire constituency’s Labour candidate, an erstwhile journalist who also was an unapologetic Socialist.
Jackson said he never forgot the rally’s uniformly red buntings and campaign banners. The candidate handily won the seat and began a long and distinguished career in Parliament, so long in fact that after the adult Jackson graduated from university in the mid-1960’s and began his own journalistic career, the same politician still held the seat he’d first won at the 1945 election.
The young reporter Jackson was assigned to interview the aging Member of Parliament. learning that he’d lived in America prior to the second war, where he had worked for …
“The leftist Louisville newspaper,” Jackson said to me. “He worked for it. What is the name of your leftist Louisville newspaper?”
(By now I was becoming uncomfortably cognizant of a lengthening horde queued behind me, wondering who the hell I was to hold up their festivities.)
But which newspaper in (usually dead, not red) Louisville might possibly fit Jackson’s description of “leftist”? He tried his best to jog my memory.
“The newspaper’s owners were wealthy liberals,” he said, “and they sold the paper to a huge media company.”
Finally I blurted out: “The Binghams? The Courier-Journal?” Jackson came up out of his chair.
“Yes! The Courier-Journal, the Binghams – that’s it!”
The MP — the man whose campaign rally had been burned into Jackson’s earliest memory by virtue of the color red — had worked for the Louisville Courier-Journal and had spoken of this connection when interviewed by Jackson those many years before, thus providing the cognitive impetus for Jackson’s reaction to the Red Room in 1994.
I was stupefied. What a bizarrely small world it was.
Not even one person waiting behind me cheered when I collected my autographed program and made for the stairs. I was left in a daze to ponder the amazing confluence of a red-colored room, geography, politics, journalism, history and beer, with all these dots connected for my benefit by the world’s greatest beer writer.
There’d be a final opportunity to renew my acquaintance with Michael Jackson, at Chalkies (I believe) in Indianapolis circa 2002, and he seemed to be doing fine during his appearance. Unfortunately, in December of 2006 Jackson revealed his long-term struggle with Parkinson’s Disease, which had been diagnosed a decade earlier. Sadly, the Beer Hunter died at 65 less than a year later, after suffering a heart attack.
At some point after Jackson was gone, it belatedly occurred to me that I’d neglected to record the MP’s name, which had escaped my memory. The Internet helpfully intervened, and for the record, he was Sir Joseph Percival William (J.P.W.) Mallalieu (1908 – 1980), known as “Curly” Mallalieu, profiled here, here and here.
The Courier-Journal isn’t mentioned specifically in any of these sources, but Sir Mallalieu’s tenure at the Lexington Leader is cited, with an addendum that he worked at other newspapers in the Kentucky region for a period during the 1930s. That’s proof enough for me.
This coda of Jackson’s reminds us of what, in the end, really matters about beer.
“To clink glasses of a freshly made, seasonal beer, preferably in a pub or garden, with friends and perhaps new acquaintances, is a ritual that makes every participant feel good. We may not rationalize this at the time, but it gives us a sense of place in our common community and our time in the tides of life on earth. This is a way to value beer and treat it with respect.”
POSTSCRIPT: AUGUST, 2024
As of summer, 2024, an effort has commenced to enable an American Craft Beer Hall of Fame. I’m honored to have been asked to contribute to this worthwhile endeavor as part of an advisory committee.
“The American Craft Beer Hall of Fame has been established to honor, celebrate, and commit to history those people who are responsible for initiating, sustaining, and promoting the American craft beer industry. This Hall is to ensure that the memories of their contributions and achievements will not fade with time.”
Obviously this project currently is functioning at a youthful, grassroots level, and will evolve as time passes, just like the baseball hall of fame, which began almost 90 years ago with the induction of a classe of “no doubt” legends, then evolved over time to include writers and various participants who were not actually players (writers, owners and the like).
Sporting halls of fame have always relied on stats as one means of quantifying membership. Baseball’s increasingly sophisticated tools of statistical analysis have led to numerous heated debates because traditional numbers (for instance, RBIs or ERA) are now viewed in a different light (WAR has become a thing).
Obviously craft beer doesn’t have these sorts of measurement. But baseball also traditionally included more arbitrary yardsticks in determining membership in its hall of fame, as phrased like “did the player in question dominate his position during his own era for an appreciable number of years?”
For those readers who’ve been sticking with this serialized memoir since 2022, it comes as no surprise that Michael Jackson as a beer writer was a major influence during the first two decades of my working career, if for no other reason than producing an accepted vocabulary of beer styles, which for better or worse has become so entrenched that there are counter-movements against it.
Jackson utterly dominated the 80s, and well into the 90s. Granted, he was British, not American. Perhaps we can turn to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for useful analogies involving post-WWII British musicians who in effect taught American audiences about their own native musical forms.
But for the purposes of the American Craft Beer Hall of Fame, it is my sincere hope that Jackson is made part of the first class of inductees. I firmly believe that for those who write about beer, he is the father of us all.
—
