Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 69: Spring Break in 1997 with the classic Central European brewers.
Apparently 1997 was a stable year at Rich O’s Public House and Sportstime Pizza, for had there not been sufficient cash flow and staffing, my travel schedule would have been considerably less expansive.
As it stood, after five years I finally was able to settle into a getaway routine.
- March: Czech Republic and Bavaria for “spring break” (link)
- August: Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania
- October: Denver, Colorado for the 1997 Great American Beer Festival (G.A.B.F.)
- Whenever humanly possible: Louisville, by car, to patronize Bluegrass Brewing Company (B.B.C.)
I refer somewhat hazily to 1997, 1998 and 2000 as the “G.A.B.F. Years,” providing an opportunity to emerge from the Southern Indiana backwoods, jet off to Denver, and become acquainted with a wider world of better American beer in a city where the downtown breweries alone outnumbered the entire “Kentuckiana” region.
These brief but frenetic stays in downtown Denver also were less complicated to arrange than my typically labyrinthine itineraries in Europe, just Louisville to Denver with a change in Dallas; book a hotel room; and acquire G.A.B.F. tickets via BBC’s bountiful hospitality — except in 2000, when I had press credentials thanks to the alternative newspaper Louisville Eccentric Observer, to which I contributed a column.
My G.A.B.F. visits were certainly enjoyable, but three of them proved to be enough, and I haven’t been tempted to return in all the years since.
“Craft” beer’s largest annual soiree had few logistical complications, and yet I’ve never met an instance of relative simplicity that didn’t seem appropriate for root-and-branch redefining into something far more doctrinal, and the G.A.B.F. was no exception to this rule.
The G.A.B.F. incubated a fair share of revolutionary ideology — and don’t you dare lift an eyebrow at this revelation. Attendance rendered me contentious, and in 1997 the contentiousness I was harboring at any given moment tended to be sublimated (successfully or not) in the pages of Walking the Dog, the official newsletter of F.O.S.S.I.L.S.
I’ve already mentioned G.A.B.F. 2000 in the context of my chat with Michael Jackson.
As such, there’ll be three “G.A.B.F. Era” installments of this narrative, dealing primarily with the 1997 and 1998 events, and comprised in large measure of my newsletter commentaries from the period.
- Why were the dastardly megabrewers allowed to win medals in a competition tailored to their own bland and flavorless specifications?
- Who was Mitch Steele, and why did he choose to labor for Anheuser-Busch, and not the side of the angels?
- What happened when Steele attended a F.O.S.S.I.L.S. meeting in 1998?
- How did Anheuser-Busch’s American Originals product line, the development of which involved Steele, play out at Sportstime Pizza?
These questions and others will be addressed, but first, a brief exploration of why my August, 1997 excursion to Europe isn’t getting a chapter of its own.
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Euro XII in August 1997 was to be a “family” trip with my wife and business partner, not another of the evolving group trip efforts. It included visits to Vienna, Budapest, Bratislava and Prague (for the U2 “Pop Mart” show at Strahov stadium). The rail mileage involved was staggering, and for most of the trip, so was I.
The trip’s centerpiece was my first (and to this day, only) sojourn in Romania, which comprised a few days in Bucharest and a week in Transylvania as guests of a Unitarian minister and his family. They resided in a scenic uplands village called Corund, which was a 3.5-hour backroads drive from the city of Cluj-Napoca.
The opportunity for a Transylvanian home stay came to us via Michael, a New Albany native, longtime acquaintance and Public House regular (no beer, just hot tea). A devout Unitarian who taught English in Transylvania at the same time I was in Slovakia (he stayed three years), Michael was committed to assisting the state of the faith in Transylvania, where most adherents were ethnic Hungarians who’d been rigorously oppressed during the Ceausescu dictatorship. He arranged for us to donate a sum for the upkeep of the village church, in return for which we’d stay with the pastor and his family.
It was an incredible and moving experience, and I’ve always been grateful to Michael for his intervention. Unfortunately we haven’t discussed it lately because I have not seen him in well more than a decade. During the Bank Street Brewhouse period Michael became an NABC employee, serving as webmaster and archivist. We parted ways professionally circa 2010, and the end wasn’t pretty, which I regret.
Ironically, it all came back to me in 2023-2024 following my own cashiering at Pints&union. Perhaps in an alternate universe, a strange compensatory quid pro quo of belatedly shared understanding might have emerged from all this, but at any rate the delayed-reaction unpleasantness of severed relations with Michael is only the second ranking reason for me to skip describing the otherwise amazing 1997 summer journey into previously neglected nooks and crannies of my cherished East-Central Europe.
As should be glaringly obvious to readers who were part of my world at the time, the first and bigger impulse to self-censor owes to this memoirist’s continuing reluctance to consider the ongoing deterioration of his first marriage during the mid-1990s. This hesitation is purely intentional.
The “40 Years” narrative is intended to revolve around my life in beer, as opposed to an exhaustive tell-all recitation of successes and failures in various other private matters. Surely not a single reader signed up for any of those, least of all me.
But wait, did I use the word exhaustive?
It’s more like exhausting in a retrospective sense. To reiterate, the marriage ended long before a 2003 divorce decree, and I accept my share of the responsibility for the dissolution with as little further comment as possible. My involvement with the New Albanian Brewing Company as a business entity long outlived the marriage, definitively ending only with a legal settlement in February of 2018, one that took more than two years to finalize and netted me almost nothing in return for my years of sweat equity.
So be it; it was a settlement I willingly accepted, and my eyes were wide open. Speaking from a 2025 perspective, I’ve long since been written out of NABC’s revised “official” history, at least from the company’s vantage point. I find this slightly dishonest, and yet completely understandable given the people and pasts involved.
Fair enough. Little by little I’m telling my side of the story, restoring balance for posterity’s sake, hopefully with a degree of artfulness. However, I somehow cannot muster the necessary equilibrium to delve deeply into August of 1997, which involves one person to whom I’m no longer married, and another with whom I’m no longer friends.
Of course the facts themselves haven’t changed: Attending the U2 show in Prague, gazing upon Ceausescu’s monstrous Palace of the Republic (Bucharest), crawling the Viennese brewpubs, standing amid Franz Ferdinand’s gardens at Konopiště castle, experiencing the breathtaking rural scenery in Transylvania, drinking a dark lager in the same house in Sighișoara where Vlad Tepes (the inspiration for Dracula) was born – they’re all indelible memories, if colored by a vague unease that only accumulated with passing time.
Scroll to the end for a short collection of August, 1997 photos. They’ll have to be enough for now, and off we go to Denver.
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For those residents of metro Louisville who were paying attention to better beer during the early years, it should be remembered that the G.A.B.F. beer competitions in both 1997 and 1998 yielded gold medals for BBC Bearded Pat’s Barley Wine.
Brewer David Pierce might even have submitted the same batch for judging both years (insert smiley face; nowhere did it say he couldn’t).
Medals or not, I was delighted to be reposing atop our finest local brewpub’s bandwagon alongside various other hangers-on and employees. I dimly recall my tickets as being advantageous because they included access to certain areas not available to general admission ticket holders, a situation that predated my raging antipathy to V.I.P.-ism in America.
It transpired that one of these opportunities was a tasting of “vintage” beers, including a vertical Alaskan Smoked Porter selection. Imagine my surprise when I was seated at a table with the late, great beer writer Fred Eckhardt. He seemed to be a perfectly regular guy, but then again, almost everyone was. It was the primeval, pre-rock-star-brewer phase of the revolution. Very quaint, indeed.
Eventually I had the chance to ask Eckhardt a question: What did he consider the best beer he’d ever beer sampled at the G.A.B.F.?
After mulling for a moment, his answer was Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout, and in hindsight, it seems surprising to learn that G.I.B.C.S. was brewed for the first time in 1994, a scant three years before my chat with Eckhardt. Originally it was Goose Island’s 1,000th batch, and as schoolchildren in Siberia know by now, it came about by aging Imperial Stout in used bourbon barrels brought to Chicago … from Kentucky, of course.
Barrel-aging was a suitably exotic notion in 1997, although back in Louisville there’d already been an instance of like-minded experimentation. In 1994 at BBC’s original St. Matthews brewpub, Pierce filled a used bourbon barrel with Doppelbock and allowed it to sit outside during a wintry snap. Water freezes before alcohol, so voila! BBC barrel-aged Eisbock was the result.
I’m not sure any of it ever passed my lips, but that’s okay. The G.A.B.F. tickets more than made up for it. With a wee bit of touching up, the following commentary from Walking the Dog appears in its entirety.
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(BEGIN 1997 COMMENTARY)
Stylish Megabrewing at the Great American Beer Festival
“Everyone has won, and all must have prizes.”
— Dodo (Alice in Wonderland)
At the 1997 Great American Beer Festival (G.A.B.F.) in Denver, renowned Bluegrass Brewing Company bartender Pat Allgeier (1) was approached by a roaming Coors representative carrying two garish party balls on his back, and offering to pour shots of his brewery’s carbonated urine into the small souvenir sampling glasses that festival goers receive.
Pat smiled and held out his recently emptied glass, which the rep promptly filled with pale, sickly liquid. The bearded bartender eyed the substance, swished it around, and lifted it…to an adjacent slop bucket, where he dumped it, all the while beaming at the unamused rep.
“Thanks, dude, I needed a rinse.”
This is all you really need to know about the presence at the G.A.B.F. of America’s bloated corporate megabreweries, whose long and sordid history of bastardizing the essence of beer is the very reason for the craft brewing revolution’s existence, and by extension, for this annual beer festival.
Recently the pages of California’s Celebrator Beer News carried a miniature debate over the phenomenon of megabrewed swill at the G.A.B.F. and the medal categories that seem, to some, to exist solely as a form of appeasement for the aesthetically clueless big boys of brewing.
Here’s the letter that began the debate.
If your readers feel as I do that the consumer is the ultimate customer, then a tidal wave of voices crying “Foul!” will wash up on the shores of the Great American Beer Festival and the leadership that makes important decisions on how the judging is to be conducted.
High standards must be established for all brewers, not just the craft brewers. I’m not talking about dictating taste. That is the marketing dance between the manufacturer and its customer.
I’m talking about setting reasonable and realistic benchmarks for all the American brewers to strive for ‑‑ mass market brewers as well as craft brewers. Creating separate categories for the big guys just so that they can win awards cheats the customers, cheats all the breweries and cheats the GABF.
It cheats the customers because, while they are striving to learn about standards and qualities of great beers, they are misled into believing that a Red Dog or Red Wolf is in the same class as a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
It cheats the breweries, both big and small. The big breweries continue to set their standards to the lowest common denominator by “winning awards,” and this allows them to put off their responsibilities of providing the consumer with real quality choices. The small breweries are cheated because their awards, dearly earned, are diluted in meaning.
It cheats the G.A.B.F. and the Institute by cheapening the value of winning an award at the G.A.B.F., making other festivals and judgings that maintain high standards and discipline that much more reputable.
I am a great fan of the Institute and the G.A.B.F. Without them, I would not be here today, nor would hundreds of other craft brewers. It is because I am a fan that I, along with hundreds of other brewers, need to voice passionately our concerns to the Institute and the judging committee to establish the standards that constitute great beer for all brewers, not a confusing spin of class distinction and grading on the curve between the mass‑market brewers and the craft brewers.
Scott Griffiths
Founder, William & Scott Brewing Co. / Rhino Chasers Beers
Several responses to Griffiths’s letter appeared in the February/March edition of Celebrator. Excerpts follow, with John Michaelsen of Sacramento, California leading off with an appropriate note of sarcasm as he puts himself into the shoes of the judges who make up the Professional Panel Blind Tasting.
I recall in 1992 being quite surprised that Miller, Coors and Anheuser‑Busch were even in attendance…I couldn’t see why any of the mass market breweries would bother wasting their time trying to compete with the infinitely more interesting, flavorful, rich, craft‑brewed beers.
When I discovered that there were specific categories apparently created just for the major breweries to compete against each other, I became suspicious. After all, I reasoned, what exactly does a G.A.B.F. judge look for when attempting to find outstanding examples of a particular style in the American Dry Lager or the American Premium Lager category? “Ah, yes. Let’s see. Hmmm. No aroma, no finish, light, watery, bland and insipid. Clearly, a positively outstanding example of this style.”
Or in the Malt Liquor category: “Why, yes! The flavor profile smacks of old socks and rotten turnips. Quite an alcoholic wallop, too. I tell you, malt liquor just doesn’t get much better than this.”
Michaelsen concludes with a strong endorsement of the G.A.B.F. in spite of its “ridiculous ‘American’ style categories,” a sentiment echoed by Marc Rikmenspoel of Fort Collins, Colorado.
The G.A.B.F. is for all American breweries. It is not the American Craft Brewery Fest. Micro beer enthusiasts take the American Light Lager medals with a grain of salt. All fans aren’t concerned with medals, and so the system works fine now.
Beer writer Jim Dorsch of Alexandria, Virginia overtly takes issue with Griffiths’s complaints, noting the megabrewers’ recent mockrobrew lines (Anheuser‑Busch’s American Originals and Coors’ Blue Moon beers, to name two) as evidence that “the big brewing companies are intent on providing choices.” As for their regular beers…
I would ask Mr. Griffiths how one could compile a list of beer styles that did not include the predominant styles of the United States.
Dorsch’s most pointed criticism is aimed directly at Griffiths.
Mr. Griffiths claims the G.A.B.F. creates categories for the benefit of the big brewers. No one is barring his company, Rhino Chasers, from entering beers in these categories. Even if they did, they probably wouldn’t win. Budweiser is not an easy beer to make. Mr. Griffiths, who has an interest in a beer company, is the co‑author of a book that rates the beers of other companies as well as his own. I cannot imagine a more clear‑cut conflict of interest. I suggest Mr. Griffiths clean his own house before commenting on the ethical practices of others.
Brewmaster Teri Fahrendorf of the Steelhead Brewing Company in Eugene, Oregon takes the position of “devil’s advocate,” beginning with a discussion of the G.A.B.F.’s categories.
According to Fahrendorf, who has judged at the festival for five years, brewers should play a larger role in asking for categories that reflect what is being brewed, and the G.A.B.F. should be more diligent in “taking the pulse of the industry” in order to provide categories that correspond with reality.
As for Griffiths’ mention of “high standards” for all brewers, Fahrendorf writes:
I must remind you that, although you may not care for the products the national brewers make, it is some of the most technically correct beer in the world. (On the other hand, it has no soul). It is rare to have a quality control problem with a national beer brand because of their technical expertise in this area…if your idea of “high standards” is to require all brewers to use 100% barley malt without adjuncts, then you are missing the point. The “big guys” have defined certain styles of beer just as much as British, German, or Belgian brewers have defined other styles used by the G.A.B.F. If the Reinheitsgebot were to become part of the G.A.B.F. entry requirements, then where would that leave all us microbrewers who love to make Wheat, Rye, Honey, Fruit or Spice beers?
Don’t pick a fight with the “big guys” or the G.A.B.F., Scott. Remember, we are all brewers brewing beer. We have a lot more in common than you could imagine.
Perhaps appropriately, the final word goes to Marcia Schirmer, Director of the Great American Beer Festival. Schirmer begins by noting that the determination of categories and subcategories “is based on input from the brewing community and from the marketplace,” and that these have been adjusted frequently over the years. The categories and subcategories are derived from Association of Brewers guidelines, the philosophy of which is quoted directly by Schirmer:
The Association of Brewers’ beer style guidelines have, as much as possible, historical significance or a high profile in the current commercial beer market. Our decision to include a particular historical beer style takes into consideration the style’s brewing traditions and the need to preserve those traditions in today’s market. The more a beer style has withstood the test of time, marketplace and consumer acceptance, the more likely it is to be included in the Association of Brewers’ style guidelines. The availability of commercial examples plays a large role in a beer style making the list of styles.
As for the importance of the medals awarded, Schirmer makes no further mention of the veracity of the categories themselves, but strongly defends the integrity of the current system of judging. Within the context of the established categories and subcategories, the judges on the Professional Panel Blind Tasting are experienced and qualified, and winning a medal is “meaningful and valuable to participating breweries, small and large.”
Schirmer reiterates the G.A.B.F.’s commitment to the festival as “America’s premier beer event,” and strongly rebuts Griffiths’ primary argument:
The G.A.B.F. does not deal with these issues lightly, nor does it create separate categories to ensure medals to any particular constituency of the brewing community, as Mr. Griffiths suggests. The G.A.B.F. is not in business to confuse, but rather to educate the consumer about the quality and diversity of beers brewed in this country. The G.A.B.F. is about honoring and celebrating America’s brewing excellence.
Nauseous Considerations Department: A Few Definitions.
What to make of all this?
It might help to consider a few of the style definitions being debated, courtesy of the Guide to the Great American Beer Festival XIV (1995). These were mailed to me by the American Homebrewers Association’s James Spence. In the interest of brevity, I’ll exclude the technical guidelines (original gravity, alcohol content, etc.) and the names of the breweries except in the two cases where they aren’t already well known.
Reach for your buckets and towels, campers.
Category: American Lager
1995 winners: Red Dog (gold); Old Style Lager (silver); Original Coors (bronze)
Very light in body and color, American lagers are very clean and crisp and aggressively carbonated. Malt sweetness is absent. Corn, rice, or other grain or sugar adjuncts are often used. Hop aroma is absent. Hop bitterness is slight and hop flavor is mild or negligible. Chill haze, fruity esters and diacetyl should be absent.
Category: American Light Lager
1995 winners: Pabst Genuine Draft Light (gold); Bud Light (silver); Lone Star Light (bronze)
According to the United States’s FDA regulations, when used in reference to caloric content, “light” beers must have at least 25% fewer calories than the “regular” version of that beer. Such beers must have certain analysis data printed on the package label. These beers are extremely light colored, light in body and high in carbonation. Flavor is mild and bitterness is very low. Chill haze, fruity esters and diacetyl should be absent.
Category: American Premium Lager
1995 winners: Budweiser (gold); Point Special (silver; Stevens Point Brewing, WI); Pearl Premium Lager (bronze)
Similar to the American Lager, this style is more flavorful, medium‑bodied beer and may contain few or no adjuncts at all. Color may be deeper than the American Lager, and alcohol content and bitterness may be greater. Hop aroma and flavor is low or negligible. Chill haze, fruity esters and diacetyl should be absent. NOTE: Some beers marketed as “premium” (based on price) may not fit this definition in this competition.
Category: American Specialty Lager
Subcategories: American Dry Lager; American Ice Lager (judged together)
1995 winners: Olympia Dry (gold); Rainier Ice (silver); Colt Ice (bronze)
American Dry Lager: This straw‑colored lager lacks sweetness and is reminiscent of an American‑style Light Lager. However, its starting gravity and alcoholic strength are greater. Hop rates are low, and carbonation is high. Chill haze, fruity esters and diacetyl should be absent.
American Ice Lager: Similar to the American Lager, this style is higher in alcohol, fuller‑bodied and has a residual malt sweetness. Typically, these beers are chilled before filtration so that ice crystals (which may or may not be removed) are formed. This can contribute some of the higher alcohol content (up to .5%), but, typically, the style is brewed to have a higher alcohol content. This style may contain few or no adjuncts. Color may be deeper and hop bitterness may be higher than in other American lagers. Ice Lagers have low hop aroma and flavor. Chill haze, fruity esters and diacetyl should be absent.
Category: American Malt Liquor
1995 winners: Olde English 800 (gold); Schlitz Malt Liquor (silver); Laser (bronze; Specialty Brewing, WI)
High in starting gravity and alcoholic strength, this style is somewhat diverse. Some American Malt Liquors are just slightly stronger than American Lagers, while others approach Bock strength. Some residual sweetness is perceived. Hop rates are very low, contributing little bitterness and virtually no hop aroma or flavor. Chill haze, diacetyl and fruity esters should not be perceived.
Now, In Fairness, the G.A.B.F.’s Case.
Using Schirmer’s response to Griffiths as a starting point, I think a strong case for the G.A.B.F.’s position can be constructed, and I’ll try to do so here. However, this case omits certain realities that ultimately contradict the fundamental principles of the beer and brewing revolution.
Hell, you didn’t think I’d go to all this trouble and agree with Budweiser being associated with “Great–” anything?
Let’s make a case for Schirmer’s and the GABF’s position in response to Griffiths, whose basic argument centers on the festival’s reliance on previously‑established (and, presumably, irrefutable) definitions:
(a) G.A.B.F. style categories and subcategories are intended to correspond with the beer style guidelines of the Association of Brewers, and…
(b) By definition, A.O.B. beer style guidelines attach importance to (and derive a measure of justification from) a style’s “high profile in the current commercial beer market.” Therefore…
(c) G.A.B.F. style categories and subcategories must take into account the undisputed popularity of the “American styles” that Griffiths and others have questioned, and those who brew them must be included in the G.A.B.F. and its medals competition.
In other words, Schirmer is saying that given the means of establishing style categories and subcategories, as mandated by the Association of Brewers and followed by the G.A.B.F., “mega‑styles” must be included in the G.A.B.F. Naturally, there is no indication as to whether the means of establishment is proper, or if it reflects what should be the aims of the beer and brewing revolution. They are the rules, and they will be followed.
At the same time, we are given backhanded insight into what must surely be the real thoughts of anyone connected with the festival when Schirmer says “the G.A.B.F. is not in business to confuse, but rather to educate the consumer about the quality and diversity of beers brewed in this country. The G.A.B.F. is about honoring and celebrating America’s brewing excellence.”
Slyly, this echoes the point made by Michaelsen in his letter: “I have the impression most people attending the G.A.B.F. tend to just ignore the contestants and winners in the ‘American’ style categories.” Indeed, most probably do, and treat the roving Coors party ball peddler with the same amount of entirely justified disrespect as Happy Pat did at last year’s G.A.B.F.
Finally, we have to grudgingly acknowledge Dorsch’s rejoinder that it would be impossible to empirically catalogue the beer styles of the United States without including those that predominate.
In the larger sense, to begin the process of thinking in terms of style is certainly one of the first imperatives for any beer drinker who aspires to a higher level of appreciation than judging beer by its price and temperature. This includes style categories that loom over the lover of real beer like the bland, gray monolithic bureaucracies of the totalitarian state that stifled creativity and flavor in favor of dull, basic, unchanging certainty — surely this is the effect of something like an American Light Lager, which is defined entirely in terms of negations and what it cannot have, rather than by what it can.
These arguments are solid enough. Yet, they ignore the more profound, spiritual, symbolic, and deeply disturbing aspects of the presence of Bud, Miller and the rest of the big boys at the G.A.B.F.
Sleeping with the Enemy.
America’s industrial megabrewers, makers of lights and drys and malt liquors; those manipulative giants whose efforts helped to wipe out regional brewing in the years since Prohibition ended; cynically targeting minorities when selling high‑alcohol, cheaply made malt liquors; espousers of “cheaper‑by‑the‑case” mass consumption who leap on the responsible drinking bandwagon whenever their fiefdom is challenged…
In reality, aren’t they the enemy we have sworn to overthrow, and if so, why entertain the venomous serpents at the premier celebration of the beers that actually are worth the effort?
Most of you know the answer already. I found it on page 6 of the 1993 Great American Beer Festival Guide, where the event’s major sponsors are listed.
- Anheuser‑Busch, Host Distributor
- Coors Brewing Company, Environmental Sponsor
- Stroh Brewing Company, Currigan Hall Rental Sponsor
- Miller Brewing Company, Individual Responsibility Program Sponsor
- Pabst Brewing Company, Production Sponsor
There it is.
Follow the money and find that five of the six major sponsors of the GABF in 1993 (the other was The Beer Institute, Professional Panel Blind Tasting Sponsor) were the big five megabreweries.
These are the industrial breweries whose development of ever‑blander “American” styles led us down the dead‑end path of “light” and “dry” olfactory impotence.
These are the industrial breweries whose expenditures for saturation advertising to support their “technically correct,” lowest‑common‑denominator styles dwarfs the national incomes of most Third World nations, and whose marketing strategies have left us with the legacy of Spuds McKenzie, “It’s the rice!” and Miller Lite as a “Fine pilsner beer.”
These are the industrial breweries whose core business for more than six decades has not been brewing as much as it has been anti‑brewing, or the utter demolition of any notion of beer and beer culture that might contradict their marketing efforts on behalf of the sale of billions of aluminum cans filled with alcoholic soda pop, which enable these bloated corporations to compete on the basis of market share and supermarket shelf space, and in the process to trample any notion of art beneath their massive, elephantine feet.
These are the industrial brewers whose very existence has presupposed (and continues to presuppose) the need for a beer and brewing revolution — a revolution that must be fought against them and against everything they stand for, and that gains another inch of ground each and every time a beer drinker is revolted by the sickly, pale, perfumed water mass‑produced like auto parts by one of these brewers, and instead opts for an I.P.A. or a Stout brewed by a micro or a brewpub.
These are the industrial brewers who are welcomed as major sponsors at the G.A.B.F., and whose money indirectly influences the style categories and subcategories even if the influence isn’t crass and direct, if for no other reason than the G.A.B.F.’s absolute reliance on Anheuser‑Busch to ship the nation’s microbrews to the festival.
But this insidious presence doesn’t begin or end with the G.A.B.F., does it?
Who among F.O.S.S.I.L.S. will ever forget Charlie Papazian’s eloquent response to our earnest plea in 1994 to take a public stand with the American Homebrewers Association against Anheuser‑Busch’s cultural imperialism in the Czech Republic — when Budvar stood alone in resisting the tentacles of the St. Louis‑based multinational Medusa, and Papazian threw out his chest and proclaimed “I don’t know about it, and I won’t do anything about it, and don’t you dare quote me on it.”
(This response was paraphrased; as you may remember, Papazian strictly forbade publication of his exact words).
The advocacy of good beer in America is inescapably intertwined with the rejection of this nation’s industrial megabrewers. Any organization that advocates good beer in America, and yet depends on the largesse of the industrial megabrewers to survive, might be able to temporarily rationalize that it is using the enemy’s resources to gain the objective of its struggle, but by doing so it is defiling the fundamental aims upon which it is based.
Empirically, American Light Lager exists. So did polio and whooping cough, but the fact that these diseases existed did not restrain us from aggressively seeking their complete elimination.
I detect an analogy. Is anyone at the G.A.B.F. listening?
(END 1997 COMMENTARY)
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Whoa. I was on quite a roll there, eh?
When the preceding was written, I was 37 years old. Unbeknown to me, the remaining years of my career at N.A.B.C., followed by five years at Pints&union, would be spent becoming intimately acquainted with the many ways that my prognosis was not so much mistaken as laughably irrelevant in the real world — the one in which we actually live and work.
In 1997 the megabrewers that I detested (and still very much do) were in the process of launching their own mockrobrews, like Anheuser Busch’s American Originals series and the Michelob spinoffs that followed. Blue Moon from Coors was about to become a major factor in blurring the distinctions between indies and megabrewers. Later the big brewers merely bought out some of the small ones, using these product lines to limit shelf space for everyone else.
All of this has “shaken out” again and again since my first taste of the G.A.B.F. The big boys have the big money, and don’t hesitate to use it. However, grassroots brewing survives, occasionally in spite of itself. What we insurgents were trying to do during the 1990s evolved into a trend, as opposed to a gimmick. Market adjustments are inevitable, yet we’ll survive them as a segment.
But don’t expect me to retract a single word of the venom I took such great pleasure in dispensing all those years ago. My dismay with Liteweight wet air and the industrialists who mass-produce it is still intact, albeit with advancing age calmed and contextualized.
“Hate the sin, love the sinner” sounds like excellent advice. When it comes to beer, I’ve just never been able to pull it off.
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A Few 1997 European Travel Photos
NOTES
(1) Rest in peace, Patrick Allgeier (1969 – 2020). However, the funeral home in Missoula wrote that Happy Pat was 47, which would place his date of birth in 1973. He is missed. I first met Pat at Bluegrass Brewing Co., where he bartended.
