Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book III), Part 85: Belgian beercycling concludes with the Delirium Tremens escapade, and more (2).
When Joe Strummer, leader of the Clash, approached the Ramones after seeing them play in England in 1976, he was worried that his band’s musicianship was still too rough for them to begin performing. “Are you kidding?” guitarist Johnny Ramone answered him. “We’re lousy, we can’t play. If you wait until you can play, you’ll be too old to get up there.”
― from The Economist’s obituary of Ramone (Sept. 23, 2004)
There are times aplenty when inexperience suggests a cautiously pragmatic approach, but for whatever reason, one chooses to ignore present realities and blunder ahead, into the fray, rather than wait until the situation seems less daunting.
But not me, at least not very often.
During my life, I have tended not to be a what the hell; let’s just do it type of person. For me, discretion generally has comprised the better part of valor, and in broad terms I’ve completely ignored Ramone’s solid advice, permitting lousiness to keep me on the sidelines, riding the pines.
All I can do about it now, at this late date, is to own my ambition-deficient lapses, while still hoping to shed my skin and rally to heedless risk-taking during my fast-approaching dotage. And why not? Is anything really a risk when you’re approaching terminal gravity?
Yet in my defense, it must be acknowledged that on two occasions, arguably times when action mattered the most, I pulled myself together and leaped, clueless and blindfolded, into the chasm. Ignoring my insecurities and unworldliness, I nevertheless took to the stage like the Ramones in 1985 (i.e., the first trip to Europe) and again in 1992 (the inception of the Public House).
It’s a good thing I did, because these events defined the remainder of my life. Both times, I learned to perform by muddling through the various learning curves that came my way, emerging with a minimum level of competence (dare I so much as posit confidence?).
Even then, I didn’t actually “jump” into the Publican’s role, for which I’m arguably best remembered, until circumstances made it all but inevitable.
40 Years in Beer, Part Forty: Here’s why my tenure at Rich O’s BBQ began in 1992
The period between 1989 and 2002, from my initial involvement with the pizza and beer business that came to be known as New Albanian Brewing Company (NABC) through the 2002 christening of NABC’s original Grant Line brewery, was indeed transformative, and unmatched before or since. In numerous small, daily ways, I heeded the guitarist Ramone’s wisdom, usually with a few yards and a cloud of dust.
Obviously I came into it as a complete unknown, not unlike an aspiring actor hired to play a role on a network television series back in analog times, when a TV show given little chance of renewal by the higher-ups stayed barely alive, then displayed unexpected promise, and with the ratings gradually improving, the program survived to become a mainstay, symbolizing the zeitgeist.
Accordingly, the actor’s marketability would hit critical mass. It’d be grit, guts and glory, fame and magazine covers, right up until he became too drunk to (act), with his back nine comprised of flying coach to gigs on the provincial dinner theater circuit.
I can relate, but that’s a story for later installments. For the moment, we return to the year 2000.
—
The year 2000 marked the 10th anniversary of Fermenters of Special Southern Indiana Libations Society (F.O.S.S.I.L.S.), the homebrewing and beer appreciation club. It also revealed the beginning of a palpable change in my relationship with F.O.S.S.I.L.S., at first primarily concerning my involvement with the club’s newsletter, Walking the Dog.
First, a brief recap.
The revelation that directly led to the founding in 1990 of F.O.S.S.I.L.S. was surprisingly modest, given that I’d been aware of it all along, or at least since beginning my job at Scoreboard Liquors in 1982.
To wit, the best imported beers, like the ones Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson wrote about in his transformative books, didn’t come cheaply, if they came to SoIN at all (recalling that the American “microbrewing” revolution still hadn’t come our way).
Consequently, if four of us pooled our resources to split a 12-count case of Orval (to cite one important example), our wallets wouldn’t bark quite as loudly, while our base of knowledge about better beer stood to become joyfully expanded.
A key element to this emerging strategy of sharing was somehow managing to acquire the beer as close as humanly possible to its wholesale price, something I always had been able to do at Scoreboard Liquors, where I was allowed to pay wholesale cost rounded up ten percent, so long as I did the bird-dogging, hauling, and swept up afterward.
But it was illegal to openly sample these beers on the package store’s premises, and those of us interested in Orval preferred sitting together in a pub-like venue to sample these beers, talk about them, and enjoy food afterward.
Hence the utility of a licensed on-premises establishment very much resembling Rich O’s BBQ, where the proprietor in 1990 was my then-girlfriend (and future wife, and future ex-wife) Amy. At Sportstime and Rich O’s, I’d already started ordering and stocking many of the beers that I knew, from eight years of experience, sold well at Scoreboard Liquors.
For our periodic samplings at Rich O’s, the markup could again be gently rounded-up-from-wholesale, seeing as we’d usually be buying meals, too. I suppose you might call it a “sweetheart” deal, one that was mutually beneficial for all involved parties.
This plan started easing together early in 1990, and it was received favorably enough that more ambitious goals also seemed plausible. Slipshod posters went up for an organizational meeting in September, and seven persons (including me) answered the call. F.O.S.S.I.L.S. duly was born, although our homebrewing and beer appreciation club didn’t get its catchy name until later that year.
40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-Eight: The founding of F.O.S.S.I.L.S. in 1990
Drinkers of the World Unite!
BEER of the MONTH CLUB
Sunday, Sept. 30, 1990
5:00 PM
The Cozy Rut at Richo’s, next to Sportstime
Agenda
-
- Sample a few beers (type to be determined).
- Discuss the club and what we’ll do.
- Decide on next month’s beer.
- Discuss home brewing.
- Patronize Amy’s place by eating dinner there.
It remained that my day-to-day life in 1990 was frenetic. In May, 1989 I’d quit the best-paying job I ever had so as to travel, and when those eventful months in Europe concluded, it was back to picking up regular shifts at Scoreboard Liquors and (for the first time) Rich O’s and Sportstime (it’s why I reckon my employment there as dating to 1989). I also returned to substitute teaching during the school year.
That same summer, a plan began coming together to teach English in Czechoslovakia, which came to fruition in 1991.
The rapid growth of F.O.S.S.I.L.S. was an unexpected ancillary development, happily justifying my vague feeling that if the beer selection at 3312 Plaza Drive improved, it would boost the establishment toward becoming more like the influential Fat Cat’s in Louisville, while also making my own beer drinking exploits more pleasurable.
40 Years in Beer, Part Eleven: The Fat Cats Deli & Pub was short-lived but inspirational
Recalling Johnny’s advice to Joe, and having already discovered Guinness and Pilsner Urquell, I came to the crossroads, leaping into the abyss without waiting to consolidate my beer knowledge. Life as a full-blown beer snob commenced. It soon became evident that my confrontational attitude about beer annoyed Lite and Bud drinkers, and to me, this validated my choice. It was the very definition of “mission accomplished.”
I thoroughly enjoyed being a polemics-driven iconoclast (read: “asshole”). In addition, I began to understand that being in charge of the program of outreach better facilitated playing my chosen role. In short, aggrieved swill-drinkers would have no other choice when complaining about me than to complain to me.
In retrospect, while it might seem preordained that I’d eventually become an official cog of Sportstime and Rich O’s, little about the ascension was planned in advance. I flipped an old Greek drachma coin and it came up Democritus, but the overarching point during those embryonic days of 1990 was that this thought of bringing like-minded beer drinkers together for monthly beer tastings handily scratched a pre-existing itch.
First and foremost, my experience at Scoreboard had taught me that good beers could be sourced in our neck of the woods, and overall, they were becoming predictably available here. Moreover, I knew from Scoreboard that a small and reliable base of local people wanted to drink them, expressing the desire to enjoy fewer, better beers.
Whatever the ultimate value of my beer insights as the 90s dawned, they weren’t entirely centered on fond personal memories of European travels. To reiterate, by the time my official tenure at Rich O’s began, I’d already been talking better beer to interested people in Southern Indiana for almost a decade, and selling better beer to them. The people who said it wouldn’t work kept ignoring the fact that it already had.
By 1990, the untested 1982 package store premise became elevated to the status of no-brainer. The next logical step was transcending Scoreboard by bringing people to the table, literally and figuratively, with on-premises beer samplings, conceding of course that boosting revenues at Rich O’s was my prime among my ulterior motives.
And: we’d all learn about beer, together, In this context, I took beer education far more seriously than the majority of my credit hours at IU Southeast. As for being the teacher, I was just far enough ahead of my students to lead the class while absorbing the information alongside them, and I found this prospect appealing as well.
There was obvious interest in something like F.O.S.S.I.L.S., and once the plan came together, it remained the same throughout the 1990s, encouraging an amazing, ongoing cross-pollination of ideas, and with the club finding a life all its own. I’ll always be extremely proud of this evolution.
F.O.S.S.I.L.S. enjoyed a home base at our establishment, which in turn provided us with regulars throughout the week. However, the entities always remained separate, and not only in theory. If the business were to have failed, which remained a distinct possibility for a long while, the homebrewing and beer appreciation club might have shifted elsewhere, or existed quite effectively without a physical “home” if circumstances dictated.
The club’s and pub’s dual existences were not contradictory. We all won. Once I made the decision to dive into pizzeria, pub and beer bar on a full-time basis in 1992, our collective winnings tangibly escalated.
Meetings were held on Sunday, when the pub was closed. There’d be a monthly program or event, and for $12 per year, F.O.S.S.I.L.S. members tasted beers and met guest speakers from the emerging beer and brewing sector; the speakers were motivated to accept their invitations because I pushed their product lines at the pub.
There was no payola, just a mutual scratching of backs that led to a stronger foundation for better beer, and I absolutely, positively wanted F.O.S.S.I.L.S. members to be beer ambassadors, and the vanguard of better beer in our area.
In the early days e-mail barely existed, and social media was a decade more away. Word-of-mouth still served as the gold standard. I tailored the beer selection at Rich O’s in hope of radicalizing customers, but radicalizing club members once a month on Sunday arguably represented a greater level of efficiency.
Club members carried their learning and sheer excitement out into the community, preparing new waves of customers, not only for our growing business, but in a way that assisted those other area establishments timidly dipping their toes into selling better beer.
And, F.O.S.S.I.L.S. members were treated to an unexpected bonus: Walking the Dog, a newsletter unlike any other. Soon after the first organizational meeting came to an end, the newsletter started knitting together the threads. Anyone could attend a F.O.S.S.I.L.S. meeting once, maybe twice; then it would be time to divvy up dues, which included the newsletter, which quickly became the club’s administrative glue.
I saw to it that WTD alone was a game worth the flame. The curious part about this is that while I had little idea how to publish an old-school, tactile newsletter, there were lingering memories of The Weekly Wad, my short-lived “underground newspaper” in high school.
The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents everywhere
Ramone to Strummer, redux: don’t wait, just do it.
I didn’t realize The Dog would so effectively channel my creative ambitions as a writer, because nothing apart from the beginner’s Weekly Wad had helped me understand what my writing ambitions actually were. I simply built WTD into the sort of publication I wanted to read. It was unique, straight from the chute, and few other beer-related publications I saw during this period approached the pursuit of better beer from a polemical angle quite as obtuse as mine.
—
A decade passed.
In September of 2000 F.O.S.S.I.L.S. staged a birthday bash “off-campus” at a local events venue. Ample supplies of homebrew and a catered meal awaited attendees, with a brief program followed by live music by the Prince Brothers. That particular evening we put on the dog, but the Dog itself already was in the process of passing into history.
Walking the Dog #111 appeared according to schedule in January of 2000, albeit with a surprising (to some) cover commentary filed under my rubric of “The Potable Curmudgeon.” The title was “Out of Time,” as purloined from the 1991 R.E.M. album, which launched the hit song “Losing My Religion,” this being a southern expression explained by Michael Stipe as what happens when something pushes you so far that you lose your faith over it.
These were the precise coordinates of my head space at the time.
As I explained in the Dog’s cover commentary, it was to be the last newsletter published in the traditional paper ‘n’ staples format ― at least until “a hiatus of six months” had elapsed, when it was hoped WTD would return “bigger and better than ever.” But no such comeback ever occurred, and the print publication ended there.
I was annoyed and saddened to let go of Walking the Dog, and yet my own words told the tale of a guy who was “in the weeds and in desperate need of a break from the routine of producing a newsletter that lives up to the standards I’ve set for it, and to do so each month.” No Easter eggs or hidden meanings existed. The truth sufficed, because I’d run out of time.
I’d been writing, editing, producing and mailing WTD from the beginning. The late Barry Sears steadfastly undertook these duties while I was away teaching in Slovakia, and excelled at them. Others helped here and there, and I remain appreciative to them.
Happily all of The Dog’s words didn’t come from me alone, as my inner mission statement included the cultivation of a strong group of regular contributors. Still, whatever the F.O.S.S.I.L.S. newsletter meant in a larger sense, or didn’t mean, I was the one severely afflicted with the “vision thing,” and charged with making sure the newsletter appeared regularly for a whole decade.
And it damn well did appear. I could be a metronome when I put my mind to it.
Apart from periodic, theatrical grousing (“why are you asking me this, when it was RIGHT THERE IN YOUR NEWSLETTER? RTFA!”), I didn’t complain, because retaining control of the message was exactly the reason why I worked so diligently at it. The Dog was my baby, reflecting a quasi-pathological need (as I slowly came to grasp it) to be the chronicler, information officer, columnist, propagandist, and all-purpose explainer.
I might characterize these elements of my personality as late-blooming, insisting that during the course of our lives we invariably discover aspects of our existence as humans that weren’t previously apparent, with maybe just a little push needed to loosen them upon the world.
However, I’d be fooling no one. These needs existed inside me all along. By the 1990s, I had a smudgy yet discernible previous record in the Wad, with my attempted educational program at Scoreboard, by those dozens of letters to the editor, as well as my travel itineraries and subsequent slide show commentaries (I did my best to script them).
Famed journalist David Brinkley described me perfectly with the title of one of his books: Everyone is entitled to my opinion.
Walking the Dog’s uniqueness proved to be the whole point. I couldn’t have stayed on task without the freedom to allow the newsletter to be about more than just homebrewing recipes and beer style descriptions. Rather, it approximated the tone of conversations in the pub, which included beer, except when they didn’t.
I created The Dog in 1990, and then in turn, The Dog taught me that such an undertaking in expository improvisation was my métier all along. Whether paid or pro bono, I’m a writer first and foremost. Writing is an ability; it’s also a disposition and an aptitude, representing a key quality that utterly defines me: I cannot make sense of my surroundings without writing my thoughts about them. Putting reality into words on a page is how I contextualize life.
Writing hasn’t necessarily been a remunerative position, although in one way or another, I’ve been paid something to write something, and for a very long time. “Writer, reader, traveler, beer biz lifer” remains my most suitable epitaph, because each of these words describes positive outcomes that stem from choosing pathways to escape the maddening frustration of being a shy extrovert.
I’ve discussed previously how, as an only child, my stifling shyness manifested itself as a preference for being left alone with books, and a corresponding fascination in imitating my reading with writing of my own. It has been a lifelong refuge. I learned early that when the spoken words just wouldn’t come out, I could still express myself on paper.
40 Years in Beer (Book II, Part 41): Just a singer in a rock and roll band (1992)
By 2000, when Walking the Dog’s existence as a printed publication ended, the F.O.S.S.I.L.S. yearly calendar had long since become set, as previously covered here:
For a long while, it went something like this (years cited indicate the point of origin):
- January: Pungent & Funky Appetizer Competition (1995), a “flavorful” cooking contest.
- February and March: Meetings; guest speakers and activities. The annual women-only brew-in generally took place in March or April.
- April: Magical Mystery Brew, an improvisational homebrewing competition (1998), and liquid companion piece to Pungent & Funky.
- May: Meeting; guest speaker or activity.
- June: Annual FOSSILS LAGERS picnic and campout at Big Indian Bluff, a wooded property near Georgetown (mid-1990s).
- July: No meeting, though extracurricular activities often materialized (see below).
- August: No meeting; many events: Beer & Sweat (Bloatarian Brewing League keg-only homebrewing competition) in Cincy; Kentucky State Fair Home Brew competition judging; staffing for the L.A.G.E.R.S. booth during the state fair.
- September: Meeting; guest speaker or activity.
- October: Oktoberfest party and Brew-In (1993); brewing for the Christmas bash. Also, officer elections.
- November: Homebrewed Porter Competition (1993).
- December: Christmas Bash, usually at a member’s home (1990).
Extracurricular one-off activities included the aforementioned Trek to the Deck.
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 76: A boy can dream – about beercycling (and a Requiem for Moose)
There was a yard sale in 1998…
…and a pub crawl by bus to Indianapolis in 1999, including Broad Ripple Brewing, Chalkie’s and Oaken Barrel Brewing Co.
Walking the Dog’s print demise in 2000 did not put to an end my efforts at communicating (and educating) the club’s members in my self-appointed ― and yes, tongue-in-cheek ― role as Minister of Propaganda.
Was there a way to perform my duties without paper, toner, photocopying, staples, stamps and carpal tunnel syndrome?
Indeed, it belatedly dawned on me that almost everyone I knew had an e-mail address. It was one of those “duh” decisions to convert Walking the Dog, a.k.a. The Dog, into an electronic version called The Not Dog, so named because of the supermarket brand of vegetarian hot dogs favored by Phil “Biscuit” Timperman.
Regrettably, few Not Dogs have survived owing to the many changes in e-mail that followed; it seemed I always was changing from one soon-to-be-defunct mom ‘n’ pop web server to the next, with a new e-mail address and files I didn’t know how to archive short of printing them, until I became bored and “filed” them…but where, exactly?
Granted, my longer-form beer polemics became less of a factor with the advent of The Not Dog, which I continued to create on behalf of F.O.S.S.I.L.S. until around 2005; then, after 15 years, I finally decided to shift my focus entirely from club news to the beer business narrative. This particular shift had almost nothing to do with e-mail, because in October of 2004, late as ever to modernity, I discovered blogging, offered free of charge on an internet portals.
Blogger is an American online content management system founded in 1999 that enables its users to write blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com.
Content management, eh? In short, more unfortunate readers than ever before soon found themselves entitled to my opinion.
2004: NA Confidential … New Albany civic affairs- 2005: The Potable Curmudgeon … beer in general, and our beer business in particular
- 2005: Publicanista! … The first-ever NABC newsletter
Both club and business had web sites, but hating to throw good money after bad, and flailing ineffectually at any semblance of tech savviness, I found it far easier to use Blogger.
I can’t begin to recall and rehash the number of people and companies we engaged to help with the internet, some paid as official contractors, others working for beer and pizza. Similarly, I despair at listing the many different types of web site software I bought and tried (always unsuccessfully) to learn. Like so much of the world, free blogging eventually merged into social media, with the cheapening of discourse that followed.
It seemed like a good option at the time.
Given that a portion of my written output has evaporated from the rusting, beached hulks of abandoned cyber-sites, and I’ve been electronically confused by most of it for the better part of three decades, it may come as no surprise that nowadays, the act of picking up a paper copy of Walking the Dog from 1999, and sitting down to read through it, strikes me as a consummately civilized, lasting act of human progress.
I’d ask for some of them to be buried with me, except I’ve opted for cremation. Until then, here’s the 1999 membership directory issue in its entirety.
—
Occam’s razor is a principle often attributed to 14th–century friar William of Ockham, saying that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one.
— from New Scientist
At some point around 2006, I came to the realization that something fundamental had changed about my relationship with F.O.S.S.I.L.S. It struck me that I’d been moving away from even so much as part-time involvement with the club.
Later, during the pandemic, smoking a cigar on my porch, it dawned on me that I’d been to only one or two meetings in 15 years. What the hell happened? I believe Occam’s Razor answers this question: I wanted to be elsewhere on Sunday, not hosting meetings.
Walking the Dog didn’t return after six months of R&R in 2000, as optimistically suggested in “Out of Time,” because there never came any lessening of the demands of a growing restaurant and pub business, which included a working brewery from late 2002 ― New Albany’s first since 1937. In fact, it only got crazier after the brewery was functional.
As of March, 2026, the Fermenters of Special Southern Indiana Libations Society lives on as a homebrewing and beer appreciation club at the ripe age of 36. I continue to receive e-mails detailing forthcoming meetings and events, and several times a year it seems I might attend ― and then I don’t. This pattern has repeated itself so often that I can only shrug. It isn’t clear why two of those decades have passed without me. Even Occam gets stumped on occasion.
But I know this much: I’ll be forever fond of the “F.O.S.S.I.L.S. Era,” and I can’t imagine my life without it.
Perhaps the single most difficult judgment for any of us is an acceptance of endings, which can be deceptive in nature. Often aspects of our lives simply run their course, and chapters come to a close. There might be 1,001 reasons why this happens, or none at all.
In the vast majority of cases, my fondness for the individuals who comprise(d) F.O.S.S.I.L.S., and by extension, our customers at New Albanian Brewing Co., has never lessened. However, along the way, I definitely did reprioritize. Many of them did, too, altering the circumstances of our previous engagement.
There’s nothing bad or wrong about any of it. There is no blame to be apportioned, or responsibility claimed. It’s nothing more than the way life tends to work. Changes are inevitable. It’s best to adapt to them, and embrace as many of them as possible, resolving to keep moving forward.
Unsurprisingly, a great many of us have experienced this dynamic in its most fundamentally challenging form, as it pertains to our most personal relationships.
The record shows that in 2003, my marriage to Amy ended. We had separated, then divorced shortly thereafter. However, the three of us, including Amy’s sister Kate, continued working together as business partners for 15 more years, until 2018, when the buyout became final (I sold my shares to them).
In the summer of 2004, Diana and I were married. We had already bought a downtown New Albany Queen Anne home built in 1910, a commitment signaling a headlong dive into a fresh new obsession destined to take as much or more of my time than F.O.S.S.I.L.S. ever did: the redemption of New Albany’s degraded historic center, which I somewhat fatefully concluded should have its own brewery to properly lead the way toward reclamation.
Someone should have staged an intervention.
Given the eventual cost of this quixotic pursuit of civic revitalization, primarily in the form of NABC Bank Street Brewhouse, it would have been more cost-effective for me to stick with homebrewing and beer appreciation engagement.
Next: European travel in 2001, 2001, 2002, and 2002.
