Disclaimer: There aren’t any surviving photos from this period that seem even remotely appropriate to the subject matter, and BREW Magazine has left nary a trace of its existence on the World Wide Web. At the same time, while Counting Crows isn’t everyone’s cup of civet cat coffee stout, the songs on Recovering the Satellites (1996) still cut through me like uric acid crystals —those million tiny gout knives in your big toe — 28 years later.
BUT let’s begin with the good news.
In midsummer of 2024, as I sorted through widely strewn detritus in an effort to recall the world of beer and brewing as it so entertainingly unspooled in the rare old times, word came over the interwebz that the American Craft Beer Hall of Fame (ACBHOF) had been launched.
As a grizzled beer biz veteran and inveterate history buff, this was music to my ears.
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.
Shortly thereafter I was gratified to be asked to serve on the ACBHOF’s Board of Advisors, “a committee consisting of more than 50 professionals from across the spectrum of craft beer industry-affiliated people.”
The ACBHOF’s selection process takes the form of elections, with the nominations for these elections taken from recommendations submitted by the advisors. The first election has since been held, and the results will be known in early 2025.
I am immensely honored, flattered, and enthused to be involved with the ACBHOF in any fashion. These tasks, properly aimed at honoring the people who took beer back from the swillocrats, are solemn obligations and should be taken seriously.
And I do.
Viewing the final ballot that emerged, it was clear that even without precedent to guide the participants, a remarkable uniformity of purpose reigned among them. Given a likely sharing of generational and cultural affinities among ACBHOF confederates, sports and music may have been a common point of reference for others, as they were for me, and this merits a digression.
I’m somewhat familiar with the Baseball and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame, although we visited the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts a few years back, where I was flabbergasted by the enormousness of the late star Bob Lanier’s feet; his shoes (18 & 1/2? 22?) absolutely dwarf my size 16s.
Also consider my old friend Keith Baird, neither a rhythm guitarist nor a shortstop, yet he’s a hall of famer — selected in 2021 to enter the Security Sales & Integration Industry Hall of Fame. This is no joke! Just imagine being recognized nationally for achievements in your chosen profession, whether it’s a well-known pursuit or not. That’s an incredible affirmation.
At a more localized plane of existence, both Floyd Central High School (my alma mater) and New Albany High School have halls of fame, and I know (or knew; some are no longer with us) several of the inductees, enshrined for having succeeded in a great many fields covering the wider range of human aspiration.
In pondering who merited inclusion in the ACBHOF’s first class, my criteria were chronological; akin to a notion of walking before running. In terms of laying a foundation, who got the genre rolling, making it possible for this “craft beer thing” to explode during the 1990s, the time when I got into it? Who were the pioneers we looked up to, without whom our opportunities might have been fewer or frankly non-existent?
As the real estate agents say, here are some “comps.”
In baseball’s first Hall of Fame class of 1936, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, and Babe Ruth were inducted as five of the finest players of the era preceding FDR’s presidency. As of today, around 20,500 men (no women, yet) have played major league baseball, of which 350 are in the hall of fame (0.017%).
The first group of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, inducted on January 23, 1986, included Elvis Presley, James Brown, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, and Jimmy Yancey were inducted as Early Influences, John Hammond received the Lifetime Achievement Award and Alan Freed and Sam Phillips were inducted as Non-Performers.
Following is the list of 19 nominees for the ACBHOF’s first class. We voted for 10 of them.
Charlie Bamforth (born 1952) … English scientist specializing in malting and brewing
Larry Bell (born 1958) … homebrewer and founder of Bell’s Brewery
Sam Calagione (born 1969) … founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
Fred Eckhardt (1926-2015) … homebrewer, writer; the dean of American beer writing
Teri Fahrendorf (born 1960) … brewer and founder of the Pink Boots Society
Charles Finkel (born 1943) founder of Bon-Vin, Merchant du Vin, and The Pike Brewing Company
Bert Grant (1928–2001) … expert on the hop plant; founder of Yakima Malting and Brewing Co. (brewer of Grant’s Real Ales)
Ken Grossman (born 1954) … co-founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company
Julia Herz (born 1968) … beer judge homebrewer, longtime “face” of the Brewers Association, now the director of the American Homebrewers Association
Michael Jackson (1942-2007) … English journalist and writer whose 1977 book The World Guide To Beer kickstarted a revolution
Kim Jordan (born 1958) … co-founder, chair of the board, former CEO of New Belgium Brewing
Jim Koch (born 1949) … fifth-generation brewer and co-founder of the Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams)
Fritz Maytag (born 1937) … former owner of Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco
Jack McAuliffe (born 1945) … founder of the New Albion Brewing Company in Sonoma, California, the first American microbrewery of the modern era (1976)
Garrett Oliver (born 1962) … brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery and writer (The Brewmaster’s Table)
Charlie Papazian (born 1949) … homebrewer, writer (The Complete Joy of Home Brewing), educator and founder of Association of Brewers (later the Brewers Association) and the Great American Beer Festival
Pete Slosberg (born 1950) … founder and namesake of Pete’s Wicked Ale
Carol Stoudt (born 1950) … founder and brewmaster of Stoudt’s Brewing Company
Don Younger (1941-2011) … Portland OR publican who founded the legendary Horse Brass Pub in 1976
As an aside, does the late biochemist Joseph Owades merit inclusion? He helped develop the recipes for Samuel Adams Boston Lager and New Amsterdam Amber, pioneering craft beers. Owades also formulated Miller Lite. I suspect Owades will make the hall someday, even if I’ve detested Lite for a long, long time. I resolve to be fair-minded about it.
Speaking of ideology, it should be noted that everyone involved with the ACBHOF is aware that the word “craft” remains an 800-lb gorilla posing various difficulties in terms of self-definition. In fact, it has been such ever since Michael Jackson, Vince Cottone or Paul Gatza (or a dude propped up on a bar stool in Bend) first paired the word with “beer” and expected the rest of us to connect the necessary dots.
“We may not have seen the last of the craft beer definitions, but rest assured, there is room in the American Craft Beer Hall of Fame for everyone who deserves to be there.”
The ensuing “craft beer” arguments have often reminded me of medieval theological debates over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. At the present juncture, most fans of the genre probably have resolved their ambiguities, if any, by subconsciously recasting the Supreme Court justice’s famous comment about pornography: “I know it when I drink it.”
In fairness, the other halls of fame have had issues with criteria. Baseball is defined by certain rules that differentiate it from football and tiddlywinks, possessing reams of statistics that, while imperfect, enable a certain degree of objectivity in the abstract.
However, those rules have not always been the same, nor have the stats been collected in the same way. Years of archival research have gone into the effort to quantify Negro League stats and thus legitimize the selection of these players apart from myth and legend. Their inclusion took too long; at least now the record is being updated.
Rock and roll music shares craft beer’s foundational amorphousness but at least does its best to embrace diversity inclusively; reggae, soul, jazz and country have their places, although classical doesn’t even if I’m keen to make a case for Beethoven because his massed Ninth Symphony rocks as hard as any amplified combo I’ve ever heard.
My personal definition of craft beer is just as imperfect as the all the others, but it gets to the heart of the matter by addressing what brought me to the table more than 40 years ago, at a time when there were fewer than 100 breweries in the entirety of the United States:
Craft beer is an amalgam of ideas, persons, groups, movements, breweries and beer drinkers who offer a principled alternative to mass-market brewing monoculture — the swillocracy — and act accordingly, seeking to make the oft-heard bar server’s comment (“Hon, we carry ALL the beers: Bud, Miller and Coors”) as permanently redundant as “hey, ya got a quarter for the pay phone?”
—
My connection to the ACBHOF initially came from Marty Nachel, its founder, president and prime mover; there are numerous others to thank who are working with Marty, although for reasons that are about to become clear I’m restricting my observations to my relationship with him.
Marty has been homebrewing, judging beer and writing about beer since the 1980s. Upon receiving Marty’s correspondence about the newborn project, I immediately thought back to 1996, expressing silent thanks that my past excesses didn’t disqualify me.
That’s because the circumstances of my opening acquaintance with Marty three decades ago do not rank among my proudest of moments.
We got off on the wrong foot, and while I cannot recall exactly when the two of us put it all behind us, I’m completely certain that the overwhelming burden of responsibility was mine, and mine alone, as I’d gone way over the top in contesting an article Marty wrote for the short-lived, long-forgotten print magazine BREW: Traveling America’s Brewpubs and Microbreweries.
Granted, the BREW kerfuffle was a tempest in a mash tun, and in large measure a simple misunderstanding. But the aggressive and unrelenting manner in which I transformed this speed bump into a quasi-revolutionary polemical tome says a lot more about my conflicted state of mind at the time than I’d have been willing to concede then, at the point of impact.
Even today, so many years later, I’m not entirely sure what to make about my year in 1996, and my resolve wavers on a daily basis as to whether any of the self-inflicted tumult merits an explanation.
For the moment, just know that everyone in proximity to me regarded it as completely in character — completely normal, just the way Rog is — for me to write a whopping 4,200 words in Walking the Dog (#65, Feb. 1996) detailing my pique with BREW Magazine: “The Potable Curmudgeon: Diminuendo in BREW,” to which was added another 1,093 words of follow-up text later that year.
WAIT … stay right here and keep reading.
I’ve no desire whatever to subject myself to all 5,293 of those dated words, much less my readers, because a far smaller excerpt should suffice. My “diminuendo” (named for the Duke Ellington song, though omitting the accompanying “crescendo” in the title) began like this.
—
Think back to spring, 1995.
Imagine the Louisville beer drinking scene as it was then, and consider how you would have described it to a friend from out of town who asked you to recommend a couple of good places to drink beer.
You may have mentioned the Irish Rover or O’Shea’s, and maybe Rich O’s if your friend wanted to venture into Indiana, but had your friend added the proviso that the place had to be brewing its own beer, almost all of us would have responded by saying three words.
Bluegrass. Brewing. Company.
Nothing against anyone who has worked at the Silo, then or now – with the mighty exception of Fred Radcliffe, the former owner whose incompetence will forever serve as a yardstick to measure gross ineptitude – but it must be remembered that in the spring of 1995, the stench of impending death hung over the Silo. All of us in the Louisville area beer and brewing community knew it, and our collective wish was for a quick and merciful death, so as to allow the Silo’s resurrection under different ownership, a wish that has now come true.
At this moment, in early May, 1995, the May/June issue of a magazine called BREW: Traveling America’s Brewpubs and Microbreweries arrived in the FOSSILS post office box. As indicated by the title, the magazine’s objective is to provide stories that give practical travel information along with descriptions on brewpubs and microbreweries in a city or area. It is a glossy magazine with many photos, published by Don and Bev Walsmith in Des Moines, Iowa.
I am certain that any objective appraisal of Brew by an independent observer would lead to the conclusion that the magazine is rather relentlessly upbeat, echoing the words of the World War II-era pop song “Accentuate the Positive”: “You have to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative – don’t mess with mister in-between.”
The Potable Curmudgeon has declined to renew the club’s subscription to Brew for the coming year, primarily because he prefers to consume his optimism in small doses, well-seasoned with reality. Here’s the whole story.
The May/June issue of Brew included an article about Louisville, written by Chicago-based beer writer Marty Nachel, who is a certified beer judge, author of two books on microbrewing and editor of Beer Across America’s (the beer-of-the-month club) monthly newsletter. The entire article dealt with the moribund Silo, mentioning Bluegrass only in passing, and included four photos, one showing the Silo’s Barret Street entrance with a Barley’s neon (the Barley’s restaurant concept already was dead in May, 1995)* and a garish Miller Lite neon in the window above the Silo canopy. Another photo clearly showed a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft on the bar, surrounded by worshipful, palate-impaired yuppies.
I was appalled.
How could any knowledgeable beer writer come to Louisville and not be able to discern the vast chasm separating the Silo from Bluegrass Brewing, particularly last spring, when Eileen Martin had resigned and the buzzards in the air above Radcliffe’s Folly were thicker than the cigar smoke in Rich O’s on Friday evening?
The mere thought that a reader of Brew would visit Louisville and trundle off to the euphemistically-styled Silo, only to find a declining, swill-bedecked mess presided over by a Jack-and-Coke guzzling fraud, made me sicker than if I’d consumed one of the Lites that were Radcliffe’s nauseating lifeblood.
Am I indulging in more curmudgeonly rhetoric? To an extent, but each of you reading this knows it’s true, and each person who viewed the article was disgusted by the image it conveyed.
I called Brew and voiced my complaints. If I remember correctly, I spoke first with Don, and then with Bev Walsmith. Both seemed utterly unable to grasp my point, which I repeated in a follow-up letter dated May 23.
—
My dialogue with the Walsmiths was short-lived, and proceeded just about as acrimoniously as anyone who knew me in 1996 might imagine it would.
The point I was endeavoring to make to the Walsmiths, which they dismissed repeatedly with escalating condescension (resembling a crescendo, come to think of it), was that there was no way someone of Nachel’s obvious beer credentials could miss Bluegrass Brewing’s primacy of place in the Louisville brewing scene.
I simply couldn’t fathom that this magazine was holding up the Radcliffe-era Silo as exemplifying anything apart from self-abnegation and a daily willingness to be pillaged, allowing gleeful swill-sales reps from Bud/Miller/Coors to festoon the room with tacky point-of-sales materials.
Love me or hate me, I was pledging substantive portions of my existence, working or otherwise, to daily beer instruction for all comers. To me this meant we must all agree on terms and be as accurate as humanly possible. We needed to advance better beer by getting it right, and if the Radcliffes of the world, in conjunction with confused outsiders like the Walsmiths, were getting it completely wrong, then the last thing we needed to do was praise them.
Then the rest of the story arrived.
Shortly thereafter, Marty Nachel called me and dropped the bombshell: He had dutifully written the original article to include information on both the Silo and Bluegrass Brewing, but the Walsmiths had made the decision to edit it and focus exclusively on the Silo. Nachel offered to prove it by sending me a copy of his piece on BBC, and he did, and it was obvious that I had no complaint whatever with him. Funny, isn’t it? All those calls and letters, and neither of the Walsmiths had said anything to me about their role in editing Nachel’s article. Not a word. Zilch. Nada. Now that’s editorial responsibility.
That’s right. The Walsmiths in far-off Iowa flipped their coin, watched as Marty’s BBC coverage fluttered down to the cutting room floor (perhaps the Silo neon-accented photos were prettier?) and never once thought it necessary to take responsibility for their editorial malpractice. They may have been utterly sincere, but sorry (not sorry): WTF?
What’s more, later in 1996 “Beer for Dummies” dropped, a book written by the very same Marty Nachel, who duly included Bluegrass Brewing on his list of Top Ten Brewpubs. We all loved the book.
Beer for Dummies has the stamp of approval of the Secretariat for the Dissemination of Information of the Congress of Beer Bolsheviks (not fascists!), of which I’m the chairman. It’s a good book that should help educate numerous future revolutionaries, who will come to learn that real beer is real beer, and new Miller Beer makes excellent pet shampoo.
Marty had done his job, and as it became clear, done it well. But given my preliminary tone, which didn’t delineate between writer and magazine (and definitely should have) my correspondence with him became a tad salty. It turned out he had a worldview, too, and was quite capable of articulating it, expressing a distaste for my scorched earth form of advocacy.
To which I bristled, except … I was wrong.
Only in retrospect did it occur to me that Marty knew exactly what it meant to be a free-lance writer, and I didn’t have the slightest idea; it was pro bono polemics or bust for me. Obviously, if he wanted the Walsmiths to pay him again, he couldn’t join me atop another in a series of defiant set piece ramparts I’d erected to defend the virtue of better beer against threats posed by the clueless (real and imagined) — and what’s more, he likely wouldn’t have done so in any event, because the two of us were coming to this issue from two separate directions.
Marty was describing the world as it was, like responsible journalists should, and by his own admission allowing people to digest the information and decide for themselves. Conversely, I’d designed a personalized soapbox applicable to a pub business and a homebrewing club, and used it to maximum polemical effect, come what may.
What I understood only hazily at the time was that when I mounted that soapbox, whether in the barroom or in writing, I was also inhabiting a character dubbed The Potable Curmudgeon, riffing on an interview I’d seen with the talk show host Johnny Carson, who described himself as very shy in private life, and explained his longtime success in front of a live audience as coming from the conscious act of playing the character of Johnny Carson, in complete control of his surroundings.
As I’ve previously addressed in this series, the opening years at the pub were all about me finding ways of dealing with my own crippling shyness. However any philosopher worth their salt would tell you that the basic problem with creating a character before getting around to actually knowing yourself is the danger of being unable to tell the difference between the two. In other words, you become the character, and vice versa.
Consequently, performing in a pub setting helped a lot with conquering shyness. Yet it didn’t help at all when the ensuing laughter and applause spurred me to chew the scenery even harder, without a director (or anyone) available to tell me it might help to tone it down.
Concurrently, finding my voice was excruciatingly difficult, and being an adept writer didn’t always help the process of auditioning possible voices for the real me (whomever that was). Writing merely gave those voices a more strident script.
My writing role models were H. L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson and any jaundiced, acrid reviewer of music or films capable of using words to take a chunk out of their targets. My favorite guest of Carson’s was Don “Mr. Warmth” Rickles, and if I’m to be completely candid, my preferred revolutionary was Che Guevara ( a viewpoint subject to thorough subsequent modification). I also adored Groucho Marx and Alan Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H.
What would a self-respecting beer revolutionary do in a given situation, in consultation with idealized visions of heroes like these? That’s the question I was constantly addressing as I applied the metaphorical pancake makeup.
Educating the beer drinking public about the beer they were drinking never stopped being job one, and that’s how I rationalized the flights of fancy when operating in attack mode. However, my zeal was such that I didn’t always aim before firing, and this had a predictable way of minimizing the sort of alliances that might have been forged from greater introspection.
This was a mistake, and Marty, I’m sorry I was such an asshole.
Not that I didn’t grasp the stakes. I knew from the start that what I was doing in terms of the crusading, polemical writing tone would be controversial and divisive. I knew there’d be times when I got far over my skis, to be bested and battered in the ensuing debate, finding myself crumpled in a heap by the urinal, trying to remember where that answering rhetorical/retaliatory haymaker originated.
Or maybe I’d just had too many damn beers. Pick any day off the calendar in 1996, and the drinking probably started early and ended late.
I don’t entirely regret my piledriving tone in matters like the Brew imbroglio. It was honest in the context of my prevailing chaotic head space, and as such, the sheer intensity of the cases I made for the larger cause of better beer was influenced by the way I was behaving as a human being in 1996 — or not.
My personal life was a maelstrom, and often I took it out on the rest of the world. Understandably, the rest of the world resented it and swung right back. I’d shrug and think to myself that living and dying by the sword was normal. It wasn’t, and it isn’t.
Still, we all kept working, and speaking for myself alone, that’s how I made it through the year. It remains unclear whether I deserved to make it through 1996. The pub edifice remains, so I suppose it was worth the pain; the people dining and drinking there now have no idea, nor should they. As Pete Townshend once said, “that’s rock and roll,” and it just might be craft beer, too.
And yes, the BREW brouhaha mercifully blew over.
In 1996 I fully respected Marty for offering a checklist of self-help topics I needed to think about. They mattered. In 2024, I’m grateful to him for the “second” chance to be a hall-of-fame advisor.
Funny, isn’t it? Being happy, feeling contentment and security these past 20-odd years — it’s no guarantee that I haven’t been a boor at points during this time, or as savage and single-minded as before when it comes to rhetoric and polemics (just ask Mayor Jeff Gahan, or Dan “Copperhead” Coffey).
However, personal happiness certainly helps alleviate self-loathing.
Postscript: This edition’s cover photo depicts H. L. Mencken’s home in Baltimore, Maryland. In March of 1996, three of us flew to Baltimore for a brief drinking excursion.
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 68: Spring Break in 1997 with the classic Central European brewers.
