Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 75: My shoes are filled with Volga mud (1999).
This installment was terribly hard to write. Kindly forgive any errors, which I’ll do my best to correct. Let me know.
When Greg Fischer was campaigning for mayor of Louisville in 2009, subsequently winning the first of his three seemingly endless terms in office, he coined the term “bourbonism” as a new civic doctrine, in the process defining “bourbon tourism” as the sum total of bourbon, hospitality, distillery experiences and local food.
Similarly, a long time ago in a beer-soaked life far, far away, I may or may not have coined the term “beercycling.”
(Admittedly this usage strikes me as far too obvious to have much hope of being truly original. I must have stolen it from somewhere, so please let me know if I did, and proper attribution will be added.)
In any event, beercycling is the sum total of beer, bicycles, travel and camaraderie. Beercycling is knowing that at the end of the day, a beercyclist’s beers and meals were fully earned, something important was learned, and we’d all sleep well that night, far from our homes but content, enriched and sated.
Whatever the status of bicycles, bicycling or beercycling might be for me now in present day 2025, it remains that my attraction to this self-propelled form of transportation began around the time Richard Nixon was in the Oval Office (yes, the beer came a bit later).
My early introduction to bicycles was followed by a long hiatus, belated and mutually reinforcing resumptions, repetitive daily increments (1), a Trek to the Deck, glorious European beercycling jaunts, the premature death of a dear friend, and another lengthy period of dusty inactivity.
Right here, right now, the story continues with an unexpected twist last year, suggesting that beercycling might yet be return, reformatted and revived — if not to entice a whole new younger generation otherwise intent on mothballing beer, then to appease the same old(er) farts as before.
Since I fall into the latter category, future marketing (if any) will be sent their way. One mustn’t underestimate the possession of discretionary income and available time, although beercyclists of all ages are welcomed.
For me, 2024 brought to a conclusion a frustrating five-year odyssey. Steadily escalating pain in my left hip finally drove me to seek relief in a medical intervention, culminating in the minimally invasive option of anterior hip replacement surgery in early December, followed by a textbook recovery.
I feel like a new man, and am grateful on a daily basis that such a procedure is available in this day and age, because verily, for thousands of years there’d have been no relief whatever apart from treating the symptoms with alcohol and drugs.
The reclamation afforded by surgery was preceded by a development that honestly surprised me. With my mobility steadily contracting, regular exercise became a challenge. Walking having become my primary form of recreation since setting aside the bicycle in 2012, I found twelve years later that it was getting difficult to amble around the block without the assistance of a cane.
Counterintuitively, and perhaps owing to a measure of simple desperation, when the weather warmed in late spring of 2024 there came a sudden urge to take my bike out for a spin.
Would this activity hurt? But could the hip pain riding be any worse than walking?
Ironically, my hip’s ongoing deterioration coincided with the faint pulse of a bicycling uptick. During the COVID summer, Diana and I hauled our long-past-their-prime, decades-old bicycles to the shop for tune-ups. We’d gotten out riding that summer, just enough to grasp that we’d be better off with entirely new bikes, which were duly purchased in 2023.
In short, our bicycling infrastructure had been upgraded, but would my condition allow participation? Surprisingly, the hip unhesitatingly cooperated. In fact, as I awaited surgery, riding a bicycle was the single most pain-free movement I could undertake.
This was simultaneously flabbergasting and gratifying. For the first time in a long while, I found myself looking forward to daily time alone on two wheels, abetting the preservation of my sanity amid the pain, and expending sufficient calories to help shed a few pounds prior to surgery.
The happy resumption of a long-deferred relationship between boy and bicycle prompted a few revised boundaries. Most importantly, there’d be no odometers, speedometers or bike computers to demarcate mileage, because in the past I’d become a slave to them. These days if I ride for 30 minutes, fine. If it’s an hour, even better. When I’m tired, I rest.
I’d also avoid excessive expenditures on the type of snazzy and fashionable apparel donned by local bicycling enthusiasts of the ilk who formerly annoyed me on those rare occasions when I’d join an organized bike club ride, listening as they cruised down country lanes loudly discussing how much money they’d spent on their bikes, accessories and clothing, and in the process treading my spirituality underfoot just as surely as if they’d been slugging green-dyed beer from their water bottles.
(However, padded bike shorts are functional and utilitarian, seeing as I’m as yet utterly lacking a butt. A few pairs of those I’ll gladly soon acquire.)
Overall in 2024, I elected to turn back the clock to my first bicycling era during childhood, and simply go for a ride, not getting all gussied up for a photo shoot, or electronically plotting my destination down to the inch, or taking any aspect of a bike ride too seriously, but merely following the first butterfly I saw flutter past and stopping to smell the petunias along the way.
If this latest instance of redemption was shaping up to be the beginning of a third bicycling era, it was going to be a slower and more reflective experience.
—
In case you’re wondering, my second bicycling era marks the period between 1997 through 2012, when my own civic doctrine of beercycling first evolved.
The flip side of Biking Era 2.0 was that by the time it finally wound down, several of my latent obsessive-compulsive tendencies (likely inherited from my hyper-organized schoolteacher of a mother) had combined to render joy into sorrow, which is to say that bicycling became just another job, something to be remorselessly pursued, meticulously documented, minutely charted and over-analyzed, to the point that it was no longer fun.
The conversion of happiness into misery can be explained with a modicum of context. In late 2011, I slipped on “black” ice and badly tore a quadriceps muscle, leaving me gimpy for a long while and interrupting a year-round regimen. And, the perpetual struggles of NABC’s Bank Street Brewhouse during this period were overwhelming me, precluding European travel of any sort for three long years and inviting the black dog to “come right in.”
And, my best bicycling buddy of all, the late Kevin Richards, had numerous problems of his own during the financial crisis of 2008-2009, taking him out of circulation at the same time that BSB swallowed me whole. For several years to follow, I rarely even saw Kevin (2), much less conspired with him to go for bicycle rides, as so often before.
By 2012, I decided that a brief pause from biking was merited to clear my head, imagining it would be only temporary. It never dawned on me the estrangement would last eight years. With plenty of down time to reflect during COVID, my thoughts again turned to bicycles.
In bikes, as in life itself, in order for one to stage a comeback, he must first go away. As far as beercycling is concerned, as of 2025 I’ve certainly disappeared for long enough.
But is it too late to start all over again?
—
For those of us who grew up in sparsely populated Southern Indiana, holy gospel ordained that our ultimate deliverance would arrive step by step. When one’s birth certificate allowed, there’d be a learner’s permit and the requisite high school driver’s education course, followed by earning a full-fledged driver’s license, then eventually an automobile of one’s own.
Freedom, American-style. That’s just the way it was, presumably outlined somewhere in the Constitution, or the Bible.
Niggling financial details the co-signing of car loans, insurance and the installation of a tape deck might require further considerations, usually in cooperation with parental units and a low-paying part-time job to generate gas money until real life began following graduation. Soon adulthood would follow, with a family and home in the suburbs, and for the remainder of one’s life an automobile would remain absolutely necessary.
(At this juncture the Battle Hymn of the Republic, performed by the Yazoo Kazoo Ensemble, begins playing, and we all hold hands over hearts to recite the Pledge of Allegiance).
Children occasionally were able to enjoy a brief exception to the automotive transit requirement. When in elementary school I had a kiddie bicycle of the sort we now see being navigated through alleyways by adult vagrants twice the size of their conveyance, clad in short pants even in winter, their bony knees bouncing off unshaven chins (yes, I realize they’re BMX bikes, but my level of contempt for the riders runs deep and feverish).
My bike may have been a Schwinn, and it had coaster brakes. During the late 1960s and into the early 70s, Interstate 64 was being built a quarter-mile away from my house. During the summer months later in the afternoon, when the construction equipment went silent, some of us took our bikes down the slope by the overpass, and out onto the future roadway’s earthen contours.
Back home we’d be scolded for ignoring the danger of stray blasting caps, but I was undeterred. Wouldn’t the heavy earthmoving equipment already have found them? And anyway, what good would blasting caps do without attaching them to dynamite?
At any rate, none of us were ever detonated, and I was well on my way to clubhouse lawyerdom.
In junior high school I moved up to a 10-speed bicycle, which I can recall using on a few occasions to ride the seven hilly miles to summer school and back, and once (maybe twice) to a high school baseball game in Lanesville. In retrospect, the area’s prevailing car centrism was so strong that my early interest in bicycle wasn’t destined to last long.
Peer pressure was unrelenting, and other desired attractions exerted far greater a pull; after all, there’d simply be no way around the unquestioned requirement of owning, begging, borrowing or stealing a vehicle if one intended to go out on dates.
Although I seldom dated.
Might I have dared marketing myself as stylishly independent by sticking with the torque afforded by two legs as opposed to four wheels (honestly, while I may not have been handsome, I definitely had the legs for it), except creativity of this magnitude never occurred to someone who’s always been a slow learner and late bloomer, for whom almost nothing positive came early or easy. Only once in my life did I successfully manage to spot a trend before the others, and that came later with better beer.
Skipping ahead to 2000, the historical record shows that I’d traveled to Europe 16 times, moving around my favorite continent by plane, train, funicular, bus, boat, taxi, and my own two feet, but never once using a bicycle. Europe changed my life in oh-so-many ways, and yet pairing travel with bicycle simply didn’t occur to me.
A huge change was in the offing, though. For Christmas in 1997 I was given a simple, inexpensive “mountain” bike with fat, knobby tires. The timing of this gift was exquisite, and the existence of new horizons was about to be revealed.
—
At first I was content to pedal around our residential neighborhood, located just a few hundred yards away from the Public House. Gradually the range widened to include downtown New Albany. Having been 20 or more years since I’d last been in the saddle, it took a while to get comfortable. Still, from the beginning, I liked it a lot.
It felt as if I was getting back to basics. There was something about riding a bicycle that implied good karma. The physical aspect of bicycling spoke to whatever of urgency that remained of the athlete in me, and I enjoyed the workouts; it probably was too late for basketball, although not bicycling. Mentally, riding was a welcomed break from multiplying stressors, offering solitary time by myself to think life through.
In spite of the obstacles, as in a complete absence of local bicycling infrastructure, the Public House had attracted bike aficionados from the beginning. How they got to us in one piece wasn’t clear, and I paid little attention, but once I started tooling around on the mountain bike it quickly became apparent that among the pub’s two-wheeled coterie were many people I knew, among them Kevin Richards.
At this time Kevin was becoming a very good friend. Name a practical skill, machine or power tool, and Kevin was adept at doing, playing or using it. He’d already been named semi-official NABC physical plant builder, fixer and advisor, swapping his labor for beer and food in the time-honored way, because every bar has its Kevin, particularly those watering holes with owners as spectacularly maladroit at nuts and bolts as we’d proven to be.
My rediscovery of bicycling in 1998 probably would not have progressed any further without Kevin’s presence. He’d been bicycling for a very long time, and subsequently was instrumental in the development of beercycling, which wouldn’t have been the same without him, and likely would not have happened at all.
Kevin died in 2016, and a year later I wrote this appreciation, amended in places. Forgive me for skipping ahead in the “40 Years” narrative, and yet 1998 and 1999 are the same years that bicycling became a big part of my life, and Kevin was central to it. Since then I’ve generally preferred to be a lone wolf (platypus?), preferring to ride my bike alone, but Kevin always was an exception (with a handful of others, who know who they are).
—
Oct. 23, 2017: I’d like nothing more than to go for another ride with Moose.
It has been a whole year since Kevin Richards died. I’d like to say my period of mourning is over, but this wouldn’t be entirely honest, as I’m not sure it ever began.
In turn, this is because in a great many ways, I’ve simply refused to acknowledge that Kevin is gone forever. Maybe flown down to Dallas on a whim for bar-hopping and a Cowboys game? Gotten into one of those busy times at the machine shop? Slipped out to go for a cycling century before supper?
Yes, these might explain Kevin’s absence. He’ll be back soon, standing in his very same reserved spot by the bar. We’ll have a beer (or five, maybe eight) and share all the stories, and the world will make sense again. Of course, I know it isn’t to be, although one thing is perfectly clear: While I have no issues whatever with the fine people up the hill at the Silvercrest facility (3), I’m a bit spooked, and in no hurry to return there any time soon.
When Kevin was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer last August, he spent his final weeks under hospice care at Silvercrest. A few months after he died, so did my mother. I’m reasonably sure she was in the same room where Kevin spent his last days. Silvercrest’s staff members were universally kind and compassionate, but this convergence will always be difficult.
Regular readers know that Diana and I recently traveled to Europe, spending the bulk of our time in Poperinge (Belgium) and Haarlem (Netherlands). Kevin was a huge fan of both these fascinating locales, and when we returned to them a month ago, each bicyclist who came past — hundreds in all — reminded me of the epic beercycling times I had enjoyed with Kevin and the gang.
It will surprise absolutely no one to learn that when my acquaintance with Kevin began in the late 1980s, a bond was forged over beer. Bicycles would come later. Kevin began patronizing Scoreboard Liquors, the package store where I worked, and after a brief lull (I believe he lived in Indianapolis for a short time) we met up again when the Public House came into existence in 1992.
To say that Kevin was a fixture there is to be guilty of criminal understatement, and it bears repeating, now and always: If the pub had its own Mt. Rushmore, Kevin would be one of the four faces. In those early days, he worked at a machine shop close to Bluegrass Brewing Company in Louisville, and we had BBC in common, too.
I helped get Kevin into better beer, and he helped get me into a bike saddle. He also loved motorcycles, although I’ll always contend that human-powered transport was a better match for his innate, personalized Zen. Going for bicycle rides – and refueling with beers afterward – was a role written with him in mind.
A group of pub-going cyclists gradually came together as the millennium neared, and one summer’s day in 1999, Kevin and I rode to the top of the Knobs via Corydon Pike’s gentle switchback grade. You’ll notice the engineering savvy of this grade when riding a bike, not driving a car. It’s by far the least painful way to leave the flood plain behind.
We stopped to sag at Polly’s Freeze, the venerable ice cream haven on State Road 62. An earnest discussion began, because finally the obvious was dawning on me: might we venture a biking trip to Europe? And, heaven forbid, drink a few fine ales in the process?
Face palms followed. But of course we could! Planning began almost immediately. We booked hotels at three beer-oriented urban venues in Belgium (Tournai, Poperinge and Brugge), along with rental bikes for day trips radiating from each stop. Faxes and e-mails were sent, and the itinerary came into shape. As the calendar turned to June, 2000, there were five of us ready to make the journey, and it proved to be a stone classic.
The beercycling group was born, a modular grouping that harbored as many as 15 of us in various configurations, taking part in a total of seven European trips in nine years, with the finale occurring in 2008 (4).
Kevin was along for four of the seven, and without his guidance, I’d have lacked the confidence to “lead” the other ones, although in fact all of these trips, save for my largely solo “divorce” epic in 2003, were genuinely collaborative group efforts.
When Kevin was involved, he and I conceived, orchestrated and performed those beercycling trips together, and while the cast may have revolved, each time out we functioned as a band of brothers (and on a couple of occasions, sisters). We got wet often, and worked through mechanical issues, but for the most part beercycling was trouble-free.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that Kevin’s bicycling advocacy changed my life. My European travel instincts were joyfully reborn. During previous journeys to the continent, I’d dodged bicyclists while walking between train stations, never stopping to consider how much fun it might be to ride myself.
Wait; a correction: Actually, I never stopped to consider that I could do it. Kevin patiently tutored me about the art of the possible on two wheels, with or without panniers. By 2003, I was able to take my bike apart, pack it in a hard shell case, reassemble it, ride it all the way from Frankfurt to Vienna (meeting friends along the way, although unfortunately not Kevin), and get the bike and me back home without incident after more than a month pedaling.
As a humanities major with almost no technical aptitude, I’ve never been prouder of myself, and I’ll always be grateful to Kevin for teaching me how to do it right.
Ours was a mutually reinforcing partnership. We’d pause by a river, and I’d prattle on about a Jacobite revolt in a neighboring town. Then Kevin would explain the hydraulics of the locks and dam we were observing. I’d score a brewery visit, and he’d calmly repair a spoke. I explained World War I strategy and tactics. He understood gear ratios. Kevin had his life, and I had mine. Not all our interests intersected.
When they did, life was grand.
It’s been a spell, but I’ll ride in Europe again someday, even if it’s two miles on flat ground with a rental bike. Except it won’t be the same. It can’t be the same.
Back in the spring of 2016, Kevin was as hale and hearty as ever. It wasn’t for nothing that people called him Moose. I ran into him one day at the pub. He was in his usual standing nook spot, jovial, with a pint of ridiculously strong ale in his hand (only he was allowed to evade the 8% abv half-pint rule).
Kevin began prodding me in his customarily mischievous but always purposeful manner.
Have you been riding? Why not? Really? Just walking? That’s @#$%&! weak, so when are you going to start riding again? What’s your problem, anyway?
Kevin promptly took the needling up a notch. He’d been thinking, and we should get the band of beercycling brothers together again. Another Euro beercycling trip needed to happen soon, before advancing age gave us too ready an excuse to quit (he was 58 in 2016, and I was 56).
Our chat lasted an hour, and I emerged from it buzzed and excited. Later that same evening I told Diana a reunion was inevitable. Moose was ready to roll again. There’d certainly be one more ride somewhere on the continent in 2016 or 2017. I suppose I’d been waiting on him, all along.
Alas, the cosmos had a different sort of journey planned for Kevin. We made the 2017 trip without him or the bikes. Numerous toasts were made, one with a providentially foraged bottle of Westvleteren 12 (thanks, Luc), borrowing the immortal beercycling mantra of Bob Reed’s.
Here’s to us.
May we never quarrel or fuss.
But if by chance we should disagree
Fuck you – and here’s to me.
Here’s to Kevin. I miss him. A whole lot.
—
And I still miss him.
My 65th birthday is coming, and in 2026 it will be ten years since Kevin was taken away from us far too soon — and 2008 (our last Euro beercycling ride together) has been so long ago that it is taking on sepia tones.
It’s not that I’m too old for a “comeback” European beercycling run.
Not yet, anyway, and just as Kevin said a decade ago, it needs to happen sooner rather than later, except whenever I start thinking about planning one, or even renting a bike to ride on my own somewhere like Brugge or Bamberg, I find it impossible to visualize riding without him there, talking Michael Jordan-level trash and drinking the strongest beer(s) available for lunch, with or without actual food.
Although recently, it finally occurs to me that I may have been looking at this equation the wrong way. While it’s true that I’m a rationalistic, faith-free non-believer, I definitely knew Kevin long enough and well enough during our shared time on earth to be assured that he has always been with me since 2016, one way or another, even if I can no longer turn to him for hands-on help fixing a puncture.
My cranium has always been chock full of ghosts, so why not Moose, too? I can hear his voice, and feel him laughing. Consequently, it looks like I’ve no choice.
It’s time to man up, hit the pavement, ride the kilometers necessary for toning my legs and butt, get a grip, and help to plan a trip. Don’t ask me when; merely know that my resistance to the idea is abating so long as it’s cooperative.
Just think how much easier beercycling might be with smart phones and internet access, neither of which we ever utilized during the preceding imperial period.
But there’ll be no 2 x Rochefort 10 sags for me. No, nay, never. Sags like those were Kevin’s trademark, and for any of us to try duplicating his herculean feats would be tantamount to an effete wastrel like Donald Trump imagining he can fill the shoes of a legitimate American President.
But what about the Trek to the Deck in 1999, Roger?
Naturally, Kevin was instrumental in setting up “Trek to the Deck,” a 1999 event that served as another key inspiration for the ultimate configuration of beercycling.
The Public House and Bluegrass Brewing Company were roughly 16 miles apart for bicycling purposes, implying the avoidance of as much vehicular traffic as possible. The route snaked through the back streets of New Albany and Clarksville to the Clark Memorial (2nd Street) Bridge, at the time the only path across the Ohio River to Louisville, where judicious use of the bridge’s sidewalks enabled cyclists to avoid the useless “sharrows” symbols painted on the surface of a notoriously uncontrolled invitation to mayhem on the part of drivers. Other comparatively lesser-traveled streets led to the St. Matthews neighborhood, home to BBC.
BBC had expanded its overall seating capacity by adding an all-weather patio (the “deck”), and we let it be known that on a Sunday, when the Public House observed Ruhetag, there’d be a group ride to BBC for beers and wings.
The turnout was good: 13 or 14 embryonic beercyclists, along with other hangers-on to assist as support personnel and sag wagon drivers. Later some of the participants bicycled back home, while others (like me) knew they’d be drinking too much at BBC and arranged for family members or friends to meet them.
None of this seems particularly noteworthy today. Mileage like this, whether one-way or roundtrip, is perfectly ordinary for cyclists, and ever since bicycles were invented, people have been riding more strenuously and for longer duration just to enjoy a few beers somewhere. But what we don’t know must be learned, experience is the finest teacher, and baby steps are by no means shameful.
At the time of the ride to BBC, I’d never pedaled 16 miles all at once without stopping, even though I was starting to understand the notion of better conditioning as a cyclist, and having purchased a far better grade of conveyance (a Trek brand of bike) with Kevin’s input and assistance.
The whole way was riverside flat ground with a gentle closing uphill grade on Shelbyville Road, and once I was at rest at BBC with a Worthog Mug in hand, the implications of this modest journey at last began filling my head: Europe, beer, bicycles. The light bulb hovering above my head illuminated.
And that famous chat of ours at Polly’s Freeze came shortly thereafter.
Next: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 77: A “tight” 1998 European summer (San Fermin & the French Alps).
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FOOTNOTES
(1) In 2010, the year I turned 50, my resolution was to ride 5,000 kilometers. At the end of November, I was at 4,850, or 3014 miles, and this is when I tore my quadriceps falling on ice, necessitating a lengthy recuperation. My final mileage in 2010 worked out to roughly 10 miles a day, with no single ride ever topping 25 miles. 2010 was the pinnacle of my daily commitment – and it sowed the seeds of comprehensive burnout. Lesson learned.
(2) After many years working for others as an employee, Kevin founded a highly specialized, precision machine shop. He did much of the work himself, and had contracts with the same regional manufacturers that were hit worst by the recession. The business was ruined virtually overnight. There was a divorce, and a new job ended badly, although he successfully contested the botched termination. By then, having come out of the worst of it, Kevin was getting his feet back on the ground, only to receive a terminal medical diagnosis following a seizure.
(3) “The Villages at Historic Silvercrest offers a full continuum of senior living services from independent living and assisted living to short-term rehabilitation and long-term care.” My mother spent her last four years at Silvercrest, and died there.
(4) Capsules only; extended accounts of the following trips will appear as this series progresses.
2000 Belgium: Tournai, Poperinge, Casteel, Brugge. Rental bikes. Highlights included brewing day at Brasserie à Vapeur; a rendezvous over lobster with soccer-obsessed Danes; Bieres de Garde in France; the classic Delirium Tremens tour; and ‘t Brugs Beertje. With Kevin.
2001 Belgium and Germany: Rental bikes. Brussels and Poperinge, then a transfer to Bamberg by rail. These were the best (and worst) of beercycling times, but the rides still were stellar.
2003 Germany and Austria: From Frankfurt to Vienna with my own bike, along the Main, Tauber and Altmühl rivers, eventually joining the Danube bike trail and carrying on to Vienna along Europe’s oldest dedicated bicycling route. An undisputed high point of my entire European travel career.
2004 Tour de Trappiste: Beginning and ending in Haarlem, we rode a circle around Belgium in order to visit all the Trappist breweries, and appeared on a Belgian TV show about foreigners who do crazy things. Another travel milestone (with Kevin).
2005 Netherlands and Belgium: Haarlem, Amsterdam, Brugge, Poperinge (hop fest) and Brussels; in our only beercycling trip together, Diana and I rode down the Belgian coast, discovering that airlines don’t always have the promised cardboard boxes for bikes.
2006 Germany, Czech Republic and Austria: The Prague – Vienna Greenway was hilly and beautiful; we bit off far more than we could chew, but made up for it with rail-assisted improvisation, ending in Vienna. With Kevin.
2008 Netherlands and Belgium: Bikes were rented in Haarlem, then we traveled with them by train to Poperinge for the hop fest, followed by a cycling trip back up the coast to Netherlands. With Kevin.
