Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 61: The Silo Microbrewery’s fatal travails, 1994 – 1997.
Hang on tight, dear reader. This installment’s tilt-a-whirl chronology goes something like this: 2002 to 1993/94 to 1994/95; then from 2024 to 2006.
The first batch of New Albanian Brewing Company’s flagship Community Dark, an English-style Dark Mild, was brewed at 3312 Plaza Drive in 2002. The brewer was Michael Borchers, and the low-mileage brewhouse was well-traveled: it worked at Tucker Brewing Co. in Salem for three years, then came to Sellersburg at Silver Creek Brewing Corporation, before joining NABC.
To house the first brewery in New Albany since 1935 we built an annex onto our building adjacent to the pizzeria dining area. It’s a story I’ll tell later in greater detail, but for now, something often forgotten from the Public House’s earlier days is that we first discussed brewing on site almost a decade earlier.
In retrospect, the conversation never went beyond mere speculation, and there isn’t very much to say about something that didn’t happen until much later. There were estimates and mockups, but clearly we weren’t close to being ready for prime time, and most of the “planning” was wishful (read: usually drunken) thinking. As owners, we weren’t sufficiently experienced. There was nothing resembling start-up capital (alas, GoFundMe didn’t exist), and we were in no position to borrow conventionally.
I’ve always been very happy we waited, because unbeknownst to me when the brewing discussions commenced, there was a malignancy in the company, which was exposed and excised during the winter of 1993-94.
When the smoke cleared, Rich O’Connell had lost it all. As it stands today, I haven’t seen him for 30-plus years. I believe he relocated and remarried. Subsequently when asked, I’d reply only that he ingloriously divorced himself out of the family right after I married into it, which is true insofar as it goes. His unaddressed psychological problems tore his family unit apart, with his wife and children suffering the brunt.
As previously mentioned, Rich’s departure necessitated the reorganization of our corporate structure in the context of the subsequent divorce settlement. Given the stress and strain of his collapse and flight, to have been simultaneously launching a brewery project might well have proven catastrophic.
And so brewing came along later, which was best for all concerned. However, from the perspective of 1994/1995, the abandoned brewery speculation produced two tangible outcomes: an official identity for our new incorporation as the New Albanian Brewing Company, and a reallocation of floor space for the building.
In 1994, two tenants shared the southern wing of our building: Beauty World (a salon and boutique) as situated to be visible from the street, and Paul Rutherford Public Accountant, filling the suite to the rear.
Beauty World’s lease was approaching its end, and because we considered the salon’s floor space to be the best location for brewing equipment, we informed the three sisters/owners in advance that their lease would not be renewed.
When it became obvious that brewing was a dead issue, they’d already bought their own building elsewhere and were busy remodeling it. The newly dubbed Strandz & Threadz on Vincennes Street is still going strong 30 years later; happily, it all worked out quite well for them.
However, we had ineptly maneuvered ourselves into vacant space and lost income. Welcome to one of many teaching moments about hatched eggs, or some such.
Regrouping, it was likely the rent wouldn’t be missed owing to a consistent upturn in revenue; concurrently, we very much needed more square footage for offices and storage. But given its physical location, the obvious use for Beauty World was for additional seating or event space (this ultimately occurred in the early 2000s). However, the central pizzeria kitchen remained tiny. We couldn’t keep adding customers and not expanding the kitchen, right?
Which is to say that no one (including me) was willing or able to look far enough ahead to consider a broader examination of the building’s proportions, and how we might reorient and remodel our space in order to rationalize it for more efficient future use. Our method of management was piecemeal and reactive, and we were sticking to it.
Fortunately Paul Rutherford was older, wiser and more experienced, and he offered a viable solution. He’d shift his quarters to the vacated Beauty World suite and absorb the up-front expense of remodeling it, which we’d reimburse via reduced rent over the life of the lease.
This freed the secluded rear office suite for NABC’s use, which was a better fit. The sole public lobby entrance to Rutherford’s former office would be removed, and instead we’d access the new NABC area by cutting a new door to the connecting corridor in the rear of the bar. This is depicted in the featured photo, taken in September of 1995.
In turn, this required enlarging the existing back bar at Rich O’s to expose the wall section in need of being removed. This enlargement would create room for a second keg box, and a doubling of our draft beers from three to six.
Rutherford’s spacious former office space would make redundant the little rectangular nook we’d built adjacent to the Red Room, where my computer and accessories were located with a window to the bar. In 1999 this area was adapted to install a walk-in cooler with 12 draft lines and the small stand-up drinking spot called the Cozy Rut.
By January of 1995, these changes were moving forward. The biggest immediate benefit was the addition of those three draft lines, because with each passing day, a greater number of quality draft beers were becoming available for tapping — and shockingly, not a single one of them was called Miller, Bud or Coors.
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Conversely, some of them were called Rogue (not Rouge!), arguably my second favorite American brewery during the 1990s, with first place going to Bluegrass Brewing Company in St. Matthews.
It so happens that as the “40 Years” narrative hovers around the mid-1990s, in real time it is September of 2024, and last week I received a Facebook message from CS; she’s a casual acquaintance, although we used to frequent like-minded “revitalize New Albany” circles.
CS: Hey! I’m currently sitting in Government Camp, OR at a pizzeria/brewing place talking to the bartender & come to find out he thinks he knows you, or at least use to talk to you over the phone! He used to work for Rogue Brewing, his name is Russ…isn’t that crazy?!?!? He said it was probably 30 years ago?
RB: Wow. Yes, back then I used to call Rogue to put together keg orders for shipping to Indiana, so we could have draft at Rich O’s. 30 years ago, and I do remember someone named Russ. I also talked to Jim Cline often. Memories are vague but yes indeed. Thanks for messaging!
CS: He knows Jim, said he was the beer manager! Small world!
RB: This made my night. Those were great times before things got corporate, as they do.
CS’s messages put a huge smile on my face. When we acquired that second keg box early in 1995, it serendipitously coincided with a heightened Indiana presence for Rogue Ales, now known as Rogue Ales & Spirits. Accordingly, one of the new draft lines was soon declared to be reserved for rotating Rogue Ales.
Rogue began life in 1988 in Ashland, Oregon, an inland town near the namesake Rogue River and Pacific Crest hiking trail. The second “Rogue Public House” location in Newport came the following year. With an eye toward expansion, in 1991 Rogue purchased a cavernous building in Newport across the Yaquina Bay from the Public House, originally a boat storage and repair facility. The brewing system was upgraded and moved from the pub to the larger building.
A catastrophic flood destroyed the original Ashland brewpub in 1997, permanently shifting the emphasis to Newport. By 2006 Rogue was the 36th largest brewery in America. Of course, much has changed since then, and as of 2023 Rogue had fallen — all the way to 41st. Earlier in 2024 at Beervana, the great Jeff Alworth posted an article about Rogue’s recent evolution: Rogue’s Slow, Deliberate Reinvention.
Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, Rogue was a very forward-looking company that anticipated most of the trends that would pass through craft beer. It was early to embrace strong and flavored beers, and Rogue was one of the first to recognize that novelty drove sales. The company gamified the drinking experience and introduced a very early membership program. Finally, Rogue saw that pubs were important for the bottom line and branding, and started planting them around the Northwest. The brewery is 36 years old, however, and time eventually changes everything. Rogue has become a legacy brand with a flagship older (32 years) than many of the drinkers it wants to attract. Inevitably, Rogue’s heritage became more central to the company than looking around the next corner with a new batch of experimental beers.
Beginning around 1993 or 1994, Rogue Ales became available in Indiana via the Best Beers wholesaler in Bloomington. We started seeing bottles here and there, and I was impressed. Rogue was one of the pioneers of the American beer renaissance (resistance?) and an exemplar of the attitude we at Rich O’s keenly felt and gradually were learning to articulate.
One day I received a call from an employee of North Vernon Beverage, the upshot of which was that I’d soon be contacted by Rogue about purchasing kegs. Best Beers and North Vernon had some sort of partner wholesaler arrangement (we ordered from the latter), and someone had told Rogue that I might be interested in upping the game with the brewery’s drafts. Soon I found myself on the phone with Jim Cline (and later, with Russ).
North Vernon was willing to warehouse any kegs I ordered, Jim became my contact for building periodic keg orders of mix-and-match pallets (14 kegs a throw, if I recall), usually including selections from the core of draft Rogues, and supplementing these with new, different or experimental brands drawn from Rogue’s huge portfolio of styles.
Later in the early 2000s we enrolled in the brewery’s John’s Locker Stock program, named for the since-retired head brewer John Maier, in which a limited number of pubs nationwide received monthly allotments of small batch, revival and one-off Rogue beers.
In 2006 I took a stab at listing all the beers the Public House had sold on draft during the previous dozen years, and came up with a total of 600-700 (how many thousand is this number today?) Following are the 45 – 50 different Rogues. Asterisks mark those mid-1990 kegs that we seem to have purchased most often, and which I remember with particular fondness.
Rogue American Amber
Rogue Artisan Lager
Rogue Brew 5000 OBF 2001 Belgian Dubbel
*Rogue Brutal Bitter
Rogue Buckwheat Ale
*Rogue Chocolate Stout
*Rogue Dead Guy Ale
*Rogue Dry-Hopped Red
Rogue Festive Ale
Rogue Half-a-Weizen (formerly Mo Ale)
*Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar
*Rogue Honey Cream Ale
Rogue Imperial Pilsner
Rogue Incinerator (smoked doppelbock)
Rogue John’s Locker Stock (JLS) Alt Bier
Rogue JLS Brewer (15th Anniversary)
Rogue JLS Frosty Frog
Rogue JLS Glen
Rogue JLS Hop Heaven
Rogue JLS Imperial Porter
Rogue JLS Integrity IPA
Rogue JLS Love & Hoppiness
Rogue JLS Monk Madness
Rogue JLS SchwartzBier
Rogue JLS Skull Splitter
Rogue Jubilee Ale (Horse Brass Pub’s 25th anniversary Ale)
*Rogue McRogue Scotch Ale
Rogue Mexicali Ale (later Rogue Chipotle)
*Rogue Mocha Porter
*Rogue Mogul Madness
Rogue Morimoto Black Obi Soba Ale
Rogue Morimoto Imperial Pilsner
Rogue Morimoto Soba Ale
Rogue Oregon Brewers Festival 2002 “Charlie” (IPA)
Rogue Oregon Golden Ale
Rogue Roguetoberfest
Rogue Rose Festival Ale
*Rogue Santa’s Private Reserve
*Rogue Shakespeare Stout
*Rogue Smoke
Rogue Uber-Pils
*Rogue XS I2PA
*Rogue XS Imperial Stout
*Rogue XS Old Crustacean Barley Wine Vintage 1996, etc.
Rogue Yellow Snow (later Juniper Ale)
Rogue Younger’s Special Bitter
I haven’t consumed some of these beers for 25 years or longer, but the ones I favored during the 1990s still register in my flavor memory. Some of those XS series Old Crusty and Imperial Stout kegs came to us in multiple vintages over time. As an example, we purchased three or four of the 1996 barley wines at once and released them at multiple Gravity Head fests in the early 2000s.
I finally met Jim at the mothership in Newport in April of 2006. It was the highlight of a Great American Road Trip, with my pal Graham and I driving from New Albany all the way to the Left Coast.
Along with a few changes of clothing, we packed the trunk of his late model Crown Vic with barter ballast: Two pony kegs of naturally chilled NABC beer (high gravity Hoptimus and ThunderFoot) along with a 5-lb CO2 tank and “keg thief” faucet, and two cases of empty growlers.
Illegal? Not at all, seeing as we kept that C02 tank bungeed very securely the entire way.
Charting a merry pathway across the country, parts of it paralleling Route 66, we passed through Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock and Oklahoma City, then Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Flagstaff and the Mojave Desert. When we met the Pacific Ocean at San Luis Obispo, the Crown Vic abruptly veered northward for three delightful days of coastal California sightseeing before crossing the Oregon state line. We split up in Portland; I met Diana for an excursion to Seattle, and Graham visited his grandchildren.
Whenever possible, our daily meals, evening watering sessions and overnight stopping points were carefully calibrated to coincide with the presence of locally brewed beer, and this is where the empty growlers proved their merit. As topped off with Thunderfoot or Hoptimus fresh from our secret trunk tap, we’d brandish growlers and negotiate in the brewpubs with wait staff or off-duty bottling line attendants, swapping comparable delicacies.
Just try managing artful deals like that at Outback or Applebee’s. The Bud Light would get boring, fast.
In due time we arrived in Newport at Rogue Ales Bayfront Public House, at the time still very much a spiritual epicenter of Rogue Nation. It had been arranged for us to inhabit one of the Airbnb-style suites on the second floor, known then as Rogue’s House of Bed & Beer.
Membership in Rogue Nation has its privileges, as Graham and I learned within an hour of taking our seats at the Rogue Public House bar. Early afternoon always seems best for visiting fine pubs, as the lunch crowds have abated and the regulars started to trickle through the portals for quiet libations and conversation. So it was as we sat and ordered a first round from the two-dozen house brews on tap (and a few more well-chosen guest selections).
Almost immediately we were engrossed in discussion with a handful of patrons, without exception locals who maintained a strong loyalty toward Rogue and a welcoming attitude toward strangers like us seeking their tastes of the grail.
One of them was Bruce, a former Rogue Public House chef, who was introduced to us as the go-to seafood guru in Newport, with an establishment called Local Ocean just down the street from our grateful barstools.
Local Ocean is still open, 18 years later.
We promised Bruce that we’d come see him on Thursday, and another beer lover seated nearby asked if we were card-carrying members of Rogue Nation, and as we were not, he told us with a laugh not to worry; President Ed would be there soon enough, and he’d take care of everything. Soon the chief executive came strolling through the door, was briefed about our presence, and later produced Rogue Nation membership cards.
The pints melted away; after all, we only needed to climb the stairs.
Graham and I had driven almost three thousand miles to savor the fruits of Rogue Nation, but as we learned, our story wasn’t at all unusual. It seems that a few years before, three young men on bicycles pulled up to Rogue’s Public House, dismounted, and began their tour of the taps. Asked by attentive regulars where they had come from, the three responded in unison, “Maryland.”
In fact, they’d cycled most of the way from America’s East Coast to Newport, a months-long trek undertaken for no other stated reason than to visit Rogue.
Apprised of the situation by the pub’s amazed customers, Rogue’s management swung immediately into gear and transferred the long-haul Rogue beer cyclists into the guest rooms for a stay with beer and food on the brewery’s tab. Sated after a couple of nights, the aficionados rented a van for the drive to Portland, where they bought airline tickets home — their mission accomplished and legend guaranteed.
Sitting there in 2006, I felt much the same way as the cyclists. Visiting Rogue was a bucket list item, and for a few years, I actually indulged fantasies about launching a Rogue Public House Southern Indiana somewhere by the Ohio River, instead of expanding NABC’s brewery. Given the eventual outcome of the latter, a Roguish venture might have been the better idea.
Today Rogue doesn’t as often appear on my radar. Probably the chief reason is that I drink considerably less beer than at any time since I was in high school. However, Rogue remains a cherished brewery for me. It was another piece of the puzzle, all those years ago.
Next: For the F.O.S.S.I.L.S. club, a 1990s routine settled into place: funky appetizers, brew-ins, sweaty road trips (or not), and more.
