Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part 80: Running Gravity Head’s daunting gauntlet (Act I: 1999 – 2009).
“I tell ya, my whole life is pressure, nothing but pressure. This pressure’s like a heaviness, always on top of me this heaviness, since I’m a kid. Other people wake up in the morning, ‘Ah, a new day, up and at ’em!’ I wake up, the heaviness is right there waiting for me. Sometimes I even talk to it and I say, ‘Hi, heaviness.’ And the heaviness looks back at me. ‘Today you’re gonna get it good. You’ll be drinking early today.’” — Rodney Dangerfield (1921 – 2004)
You’re reading a long-winded tale about 40 years (actually almost 44) spent in the business of better beer.
This narrative has been parked in 1999 for months with the engine idling, and as I write, the old-fashioned wall calendar is showing the year 2025. It has been a time destined to be remembered as “The Heaviness,” which I’ll explain in due course.
First, a vignette from a simpler time that predated my career in beer.
I began coursework at Indiana University Southeast in the fall semester of 1978, having absolutely no idea what I intended to do with my life. This state of puzzlement, which perists to the present day, cannot be blamed on IUS. I received an excellent education there, and eventually majored in philosophy, along with enough history classes to have declared a minor had the thought ever dawned on me.
At IUS it was my good fortune to befriend the late, great Bob Lane, who served as assistant basketball coach, director of intramural athletics and all-purpose mentor. I found myself in Bob’s office one afternoon at the tender age of about 20, spilling my guts to him about my ongoing difficulties with the dating scene, which is to say there was no dating scene for me at the time.
Bob counseled patience, offering a prescient observation that I’ve never forgotten, and one that might well adorn my tombstone. I’m paraphrasing his words, although they’re quite close to what he said.
“Roger, you’re a slow learner and a late bloomer. It might take you a few years, like it did with me. When they’ve all gone around the circuit a few times, sampled the wares and gotten wiser, you’ll start looking a whole lot better. Trust me. In the meantime, try to be a nice guy if you can manage it, and hang in there. Things will get better.”
Alas, I wasn’t always a nice guy, and this is a matter of regret. Will the planet accept a tardy, blanket apology?
But things did get better, over time. Bartending and all-purpose carnival barking gradually helped me to overcome my crippling shyness and learn to speak well enough for my unanticipated eloquence to periodically get me in deep trouble, which prompts another adage worth repeating: “Be careful what you wish for.”
Nowadays I’m not bothered very much by learning slowly and blooming belatedly ― which also sounds like decent advice for barbecuing. Seriously, why would I be any different now, at 65 years of age, than I was at 20? I merely accept myself for who and what I am, warts and all, while making incremental tweaks whenever practicable.
So, do you need something fast?
Do you want someone to make a quick decision on the razor’s edge?
You’d best look elsewhere, because I’ve never been the guy for speed or gray-matter agility. Rather, I tend to plod forward in a cloud of dust, two or three yards at a time, until ideas and concepts fall into place. Hopefully I jot them down when they appear, or else they evaporate like the morning dew.
Every time I author a piece for the quarterly print edition of Food & Dining Magazine, it is guaranteed to require far more perspiration than inspiration. I almost dread starting, because I know how much it’s going to hurt my brain to finish. But I hammer away, word by word, and usually things fall into place.
Maybe Bob hoped that my being a slow learner and a late bloomer would provide reinforcement for his recommendation of forbearance, and if so, he was right. Patience duly became a demonstrable strength as the years passed. Verily, I can wait with the best of them.
I’m an American Civil War buff of sorts, heavily influenced by the Confederate general James Longstreet, a deadly counter-puncher. Longstreet preferred the defensive as a platform for aggressive counter strokes, waiting for the perfect opportunity to savagely exploit the enemy’s weakest link when the vulnerability was exposed.
(Longstreet also was one of the few prominent Southern leaders to immediately swear renewed loyalty to the United States and accept the war’s verdict. MAGA-ites, pay heed.)
In 2025, it transpired that qualities like patience, forbearance and principled composure proved awfully elusive, and small wonder; it’s been a uniformly awful year, and as it draws to a merciful close, I’m yearning for new beginnings, exciting renewals and unexpected pleasures.
But one might innocently ask: Roger, why exactly has 2025 been so challenging?
Are you daft?
Seriously, I could write a book about it, and in fact, I already tried doing just that. Consequently, I’ll begin there.
—
The year actually began promisingly. I recovered quickly from my hip replacement surgery last December, then received an entirely unexpected honor by being proclaimed a Sagamore of the Wabash by outgoing Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb.
Think of it as the lesser-known and slightly more meaningful Hoosier equivalent of the Kentucky Colonel honorific.
Then in late February, after we returned from an amazing, transcendent and deeply impactful swing through the Balkans (Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro)…
Edibles & Potables: Traditional Albanian fare at Tak-Fak in Tirana
…it was time to commence a new project, as announced at my web site.
It is my pleasure to announce that a contract is impending with Bloomsbury Academic Inc. to write a book bearing the working title of A Craft Brewed to Perfection: A Cultural History of Beer.
Writing will begin immediately, with my deadline coming in 18 months. The book is slated to be an overview of beer as an artistic, scientific, geographical and cultural marker in society; some new, some old, some borrowed, some blue; and in short, indicative of the directions I’ve been headed in life since that first clerking gig at Scoreboard Liquors in 1982.
The beer book’s chapter outline was nearly complete before we left for Skopje, Tirana and Kotor.
Profuse thanks to my friend and former IU Southeast history professor Frank Thackeray for his encouragement of this project, and priceless accompanying words of recommendation. Without Frank I’d be nowhere, both as pertains to the forthcoming book itself and my knowledge of the world at large. I’m forever grateful that he saw something in me 45 years ago, and never hesitated to encourage it. At times, I even paid attention.
And bountiful and enormous bundles of love, kisses and esteem to Diana, who is my rock. None of this is possible without her, and I promise to continue my duties as house husband amid the forthcoming writing endeavor as she continues her career as a social worker assisting veterans for the VA. What Diana does is critically important to all of us, something worth remembering at this muddled juncture in the nation’s history.
The book was to be organized in two major sections, following an introduction and timeline: General Essays and Beer in Context. The general essays were to address broad introductory topics, among them beer through the ages, types of beer, beer and health, and the economics of beer.
“Beer in context” was designed as a potpourri of 25 – 30 “micro” topics of 2,000 words each. Following are three random examples of my capsule summaries for these, as drawn from the outline I prepared.
- Food, beer and “national” pairings: The medieval German custom of beer soup for breakfast survived into the early 1900s in some parts of the country, while in Belgian hop-growing areas, hop shoots remain a springtime treat (think asparagus). Modern brewpubs pioneered the baking of spent grain bread; in Italy, the slow food movement paralleled the growth of craft beer. Garrett Oliver’s book The Brewmaster’s Table is a classic, and the Moody Tongue brewery in Chicago has earned a Michelin star.
- Post-literate beer appreciation (selfie-driven beer): During the 1970s and 1980s, an emerging craft beer consciousness was primarily furthered by the written word (books, magazines, brewspapers). As internet accessibility proliferated (circa 2000 – 2007), the emphasis shifted to web fan hubs. The social media explosion of the early to mid-2000s brought beer appreciation to a post-literate juncture, in the sense that images and videos now overwhelm, placing a premium on appearances as opposed to content. But can we believe our own eyes?
- Belgian brewing and the UNESCO world heritage list: In 2016, “Beer Culture in Belgium” was inscribed on The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. From a multiplicity of stubbornly local brewing traditions to an appreciation for pairing beer with food, the Belgian beer and brewing scene has become a reference point for craft brewing around the world.
The word count was put at 120,000; by comparison, thus far the “40 Years in Beer” series, chapters 1 through 80, total 237,000 words.
By my thinking that’s two books, right there.
My contacts at Bloomsbury were uniformly delightful. I was made aware of my responsibilities, along with the accompanying deadlines. Reading, researching, taking notes and outlining filled my work days.
However, when the actual writing began, nothing much seemed to be happening. It kept not happening for so long that it finally dawned on me to stare into the mirror and be honest with myself. In early November, just after we returned from a brief excursion to Valencia and Palma, it came time for a sort of trip/book “ending” update.
There will be no beer book, at least not the one for Bloomsbury Academic; not this one, in this format, at this time. This was entirely my decision, and I withdrew from the beer book project just after we returned from Spain.
The book that wasn’t, why it won’t be, and really, that’s all right with me
Did I embark on the book project with high hopes?
Of course I did, and as proof of the time I put into it, know that my wife was a tad annoyed with what she perceived the book’s demands were doing to my placid disposition. As always, her point was pretty much irrefutable.
Granted, I’ve never written a beer book before under proscribed circumstances of contracts and deadlines; nonetheless, I imagined that little chunks would add up to bigger ones. All it would take was time, just a few hours at the desk each day. For much of the year, that’s exactly how I approached it.
Unfortunately my results didn’t reflect the effort. It didn’t gel. I couldn’t find a voice to represent the book’s stated aim, which was not my usual sort of experiential polemic. It came down to being a bad fit for the kind of writer I am, at this time in my life, during the tumultuous period we’re living through at present.
Observant readers will note the similarity of two phrases, written eight months apart: “muddled juncture” and “tumultuous period.”
Which is to say, 2025 has been a year when death has never been very far away: the deaths of too many friends and acquaintances; the supposed death of craft beer (my attempted subject matter); and the death, or at the very least the attempted murder of the nation itself by assholes, oligarchs and fascists.
As with Rodney, “The Heaviness.”
By the time we returned from Majorca in October, events in 2025 increasingly reminded me of one of A Distant Mirror, one of the most influential books I’ve ever read. In it, Barbara Tuchman takes a deep dive into the Black Death (bubonic plague) during the late medieval period.
Accordingly, no discussion about the Black Death is complete without a survey of the “Danse Macabre,” a widespread medieval allegory about the inevitability of death.
In the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, skeletons escort living humans to their graves in a lively waltz. Kings, knights, and commoners alike join in, conveying that regardless of status, wealth, or accomplishments in life, death comes for everyone. At a time when outbreaks of the Black Death and seemingly endless battles between France and England in the Hundred Years’ War left thousands of people dead, macabre images like the Dance of Death were a way to confront the ever-present prospect of mortality.
Our contemporary world isn’t remotely comparable to that of medieval times, and while one might plausibly point to the COVID pandemic as a useful point of reference, it remains that Tuchman’s book barely occurred to me duing 2020, probably because mortality in COVID’s context barely touched us, even if numerous others weren’t as fortunate.
In 2025, my good fortune ran out. It began in earnest in May…
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 79: Stuck in a moment (and you can’t get out of it)
…and peaked in October, when my best friend since kindergarten died unexpectedly in his sleep. Barry Sears also was one helluva matchmaker who changed my life in 1987.
R.I.P. Barry Sears, a friend since kindergarten who changed my life over lunch
I’ve not attempted a precise accounting of the friends, acquaintances and former customers who were lost in 2025.
Apart from a few social media contacts with whom I regularly interacted in cyberspace, all of them were people I knew in “real” life: Jeff, Roz and Barry; Paul and Eric; Teresa, Melvin and Hugh; Bill and Tom, Jason and Monty; Robert and Frank. Every week or two in 2025, there’d seemingly be an obituary. But it went further than people who mattered to me.
Monthly, and usually more often, there’d come news of another craft beer business fatality (Rogue and Lafayette Brewing, for instance) or negative, soul-crushing trend: higher costs, increased labor shortages, unpredictable tariffs, reduction of disposable income, societal shifts in alcohol consumption, and the looming dry January movement.
And, blanketed over all of it like a shroud was the ongoing, attempted murder of the United States by the MAGA death cult, a narcissistic, vapid “Dense Macabre” of vandals, grifters and oligarch enablers.
I lost track of the number of times that an online numbskull (supposedly a “friend”) would be in full rant about lazy, useless government workers deserving of ritualistic sacking, and I’d reply with considerable heat: hey “friend,” why are you abusing my wife, who works at the Veterans Administration?
The labored backpedaling was entertaining in a brain-dead sort of way: “Oh no, Roger, not at all, nothing against your wife, it’s a misunderstanding, etc., etc.”
To the point: So there I was, trying to maintain a semblance of concentration long enough to produce a damn beer book, except that with each passing month, 2025 became a succession of eulogies, accompanied by Muskovian terrorism devolving to inept farce.
It’s hard to tune out the news when the news is unremittingly terrible, and I couldn’t. It turns out that I’m human, after all.
These past chaotic months have engendered feelings of powerlessness and loss that by turns annoy, enrage and humble me. They’re constant reminders of mortality in the sense of departed friends, as well as better beer’s present struggle to preserve a semblance of integrity amid the prevailing inanity, and the travesty of bloated oligarchs merrily dismantling democracy while bigots cheer.
Granted, contrarianism and stubbornness have tended to serve me well, and I tried to harness them in a spirit of disassociation, but in this instance completing the beer book would have required iron will and discipline. I simply couldn’t muster them, not now, maybe never.
I understood that the sooner I pulled the plug, the better for everyone involved. Because I’m a brutally honest and demanding judge of self, I quit. It was the rational thing to do.
Did I wait too long in life to try writing a book? I really don’t think so.
Seeing as how well Bob Lane had me pegged, I may not have waited long enough. After all, the painting career of Grandma Moses (1860 – 1961) didn’t begin until she was 78. Time remains, and I know I can write.
I’ve been writing my entire life. It is the essence of my being in fundamental terms. It’s who and what I am. I would continue to be a writer even if not one of my words was published in any format, ever again. As an example of what I can do, in November of 2025 I wrote approximately 8,000 words for the Winter 2025 edition of Food & Dining Magazine, and they were fine.
If writing is something I can do, then what’s next?
I propose to stick with compositional tasks tried and true, and to devote my future energies to the book I’ve already been writing, which presently you are reading, although with (another) apology.
It may be true that serializing a few (hundred thousand) words of an autobiographical nature in purportedly digestible chunks over an undefined expanse of time on an obscure website can be a reasonably effective way to educate and entertain readers. However, these installments must appear on a regular basis, because randomness squelches any semblance of momentum.
According to this stipulation, I concede to having failed my readers. Sorry about that.
For ease in catching up, here are the links to the five completed chapters I’ve published since March, 2025. The narrative time frame is a quarter-century ago, roughly 1998 – 2000.
- 76: A boy can dream – about beercycling (and a Requiem for Moose).
- 77: A “tight” 1998 European summer (San Fermin & the French Alps).
- 78: We just had to get to Merry Old England (1998).
- 79: Stuck in a moment (and you can’t get out of it)
- 80: Running Gravity Head’s daunting gauntlet (Act I: 1999 – 2009)
As a refresher, the opening installment of 40 Years in Beer was published on January 1, 2022. It has taken me a total of 48 months just to survey the first forty years of my beer life, and I’m painfully aware that by comparison, Odysseus’s decade-long trudge back to Ithaca following the Trojan War is starting to look like a jaunt to the neighborhood package store.
This said, the next five chapters are in varying stages of completion; each one is at least half-finished. I hope that I’m settling back into a productive and predictable routine, and a semblance of regularity for the sake of my readers.
- 82: Six local microbreweries and brewpubs that failed, and one that didn’t (1996 – 2001)
- 83: The 1999 F.O.S.S.I.L.S. motorcoach trip to Belgium, Germany and Czech Republic
- 84: Our intrepid Belgian beercyclists (this one might require two installments – 2000)
- 85: How NABC became a brewery (1999 – 2002)
- 86: Five in three (Euro travel, 2001 – 2003)
—
Sadly, what I’m continuing not to do at the present time is work directly for a beer business in performing the single function in life that I know best: making better beer make better sense.
This is frustrating, to say the least. Given how little in terms of remuneration would be required to engage my services, I’m forced to conclude that the service industry finally has aged me into forced obsolescence.
Local purveyors of better beer, kindly note that I’m carrying around a surfeit of beer knowledge. There are marketing strategies aplenty, but perhaps the very best one remaining (and currently rare) is to care about beer, become proficient at beer, and share this love of beer with your customers.
As authenticity in America wanes, and artificial “intelligence” inherits the job of dispensing opiates to perpetually unintelligent masses, it is axiomatic that authenticity becomes even more valuable via its scarcity. You can draw a higher share of customers who care about beer if you care about it, too.
I can help with that. Just teach yourself not to unthinkingly preface the noun “beer” with the adjective “ice-cold,” and give me a holler.
At the present time I’m seated figuratively in the press box, much like an ex-athlete doing color commentary, writing about beer at a time when no one cares to read about anything, much less beer. My reaction is a weary yet immediate, unapologetic middle finger into the unresponsive void, accompanied by an ornery refusal to disappear.
But I’m the only traditional beer writer to be writing about beer for a traditional local publication (Food & Dining Magazine) in metropolitan Louisville. Having opted for social security in August, the monthly deposit helps pay the bills.
As such, how ‘bout I continue doing what pleases me, if only for myself? Of course, I know there are others out there who enjoy better beer, too. Take heart, everyone; life is cyclical, and so is commerce.
The beer fundamentals haven’t gone missing, and they’ll eventually rotate back into importance. I, too, will rotate back into relevance.
In the interim, if current levels of self-prohibitionistic, societal idiocy imply that we’re destined to return to the Dark Ages of Beer, I will interpret this to mean that it’s time for an earnest rededication to Porter, Stout and Rochefort 10, to be followed by a second middle finger lofted in the general direction of Michelob Ultra, Miller Lite, Bud Light and the many other fizzy pet shampoos like them.
Yes, I know: “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” Boy, these people make it difficult.
Only a few minutes ago I glimpsed a Facebook video of a barroom packed with people drinking Bud Light straight from aluminum bottles. In my world, it’s tantamount to the Star Wars cantina scene, and something I simply cannot imagine doing, in this or any other life, even if I grasp ruefully that “ice cold” wet air remains the ideal of so many of my misguided countrymen.
Henceforth, Brian Wilson’s and Tony Asher’s brilliant musical statement from 1966 is to be considered my theme song.
One last thing.
I’m well aware that I know more about beer and brewing than the average fellow out on the street. But at the same time, there has not been a single time during my adult life when I considered myself a beer “expert.”
I view my roles as akin to cheerleader, tour guide and storyteller. A teacher? Yes, albeit in Fun-day School and not credentialed, apart from once passing the Beer Judge Certification Course with the bar-none, bare minimum score. My overall position might best be described as a beer “personality” on a local and occasionally regional stage.
Insofar as I had a “dream” at any point during my life, it was to use beer as a means of finding my place in the world ― and, whatever this meant in a tangible sense, at the end of the day, I wanted it to happen here, in Southern Indiana, where I live, and with the people I know, in a positive way that fosters community.
I worked hard, and also got lucky. The dream seemed to have come to fruition at the Public House, albeit it at a cost, and in 2015 the process began of shedding that dream. A decade later, maybe my dream is gone, and maybe not.
Slow learner and late bloomer, remember?
Part of letting go had to do with an era I perceived as having run its course; another was the accumulated physical and mental exhaustion of being the front man, this fatigue being exacerbated by Bank Street Brewhouse’s financial vicissitudes and my accompanying belief, as crazy as it might seem, that someone needed to be accountable for these failures ― and that someone was me. In essence, I fired myself, and have not regretted the clear conscience this led to.
Letting go was the right thing to do at the time. Later I caught a glimpse yet again of my beery dream at Pints&union, enough to make it seem that chasing the dream was still worthwhile.
It was possible, and the beer program I designed succeeded both artistically and financially. Maybe I really could go home again, except we know what happened at P&u. Five years of success only ensured that Joe’s ensuing tragi-comic debacle would be far more painful to me than if the pub had imploded at the beginning, without getting my hopes up.
Now, amid the many closing chapters making 2025 so difficult, there is a sense of all-encompassing annoyance. The easiest course of action moving forward would be inaction: “Have it YOUR way, clueless poltroons, and I hope y’all choke on it.”
I’d slip into my cups, read books, listen to jazz and classical music, and recall the good ol’ days.
This doesn’t seem characteristic of me, does it? This venerable Japanese proverb is a better riposte to The Heaviness: “Fall seven times, stand up eight.”
—
Note: To be added to “40 Years of Sidebars,” this fully updated account of my first Euro excursion in 1985.
