Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book III), Part 88: From Tokaj to Żywiec, and Achouffe to Poperinge (Travel 2002).
From 2000 through 2002/2003, a “third wave” of breweries landed in metropolitan Louisville.
For this installment the usual sources for fact-checking are at hand, including the invaluable www.newspapers.com (thanks, MR); Louisville Business First; Kevin Gibson’s book, Louisville Beer: Derby City History on Draft; and partial “Not Dog” electronic FOSSILS newsletter archives. Alas, my primary email accounts from this period were lost long ago when domains expired.
Of course, I have my own extensive memories, except that it becomes painfully clear in retrospect that these years marked the beginning of the end pertaining to my ability to personally experience the local beer scene in depth, and for a simple reason: as options proliferated, my available time contracted.
I could hang out in my own pub, and be a periodic visitor at two or maybe three other places. My favorites were Bluegrass Brewing Co. in St. Matthews, Cumberland Brews and maybe the Irish Rover.
After that … how, exactly?
Biscuit always said his autobiography would be titled, “What I Remember.” That’s insightful, and in like fashion, the following passages include a great many gaps amid personal recollections (and judgments) that may, or may not, survive further scrutiny.
Kindly forgive the omissions and hazy memories. They can, and will, be corrected as merited. Feel free to set me straight.
—
To review, when the Silo Brew Pub & Restaurant launched in 1992, to be followed by Bluegrass Brewing Company the following year, it seemed that Louisville’s new-fangled brewing possibilities truly were limitless. However, they proved static, and a three-year lull ensued before the second wave arrived from 1996 through 1999.
- Tucker Brewing Co. (Salem; production; 1996 – 1999)
- Oldenberg Grill (Louisville; brewpub; 1997 – 2001)
- Pipkin Brewing Company (Louisville; production; 1997 – 2001; yielding to BBC)
- HOPS Restaurant Bar and Brewery (Louisville; brewpub; 1998 – 2001)
- Silver Creek Brewing Corporation (Sellersburg; production; 1999 – 2001; from Tucker)
An average duration of three years indicates these were more than mere flashes in the pan. Still, for varying reasons, failure was uniform.
Granted, evolution was at play; Tucker transmuted into Silver Creek, and Pipkin was absorbed by Bluegrass Brewing Co., although the less said about the bandwagon-hopping, chain-link mediocrity of Oldenberg Grill and HOPS, the better.
In retrospect, while those who participated in these projects spent plenty of someone’s money and were generally well-intentioned (not so fast, David Heidrich), it all seems scattershot and indeterminate looking back; the money men weren’t true believers, and the true believers were forever undercapitalized.
(In the case of Silver Creek, which grew from an internet business, the dot.com bubble’s ignominious bursting didn’t help, and SCBC’s acquisition of the foundering Oldenberg mother ship came at the worst time. More about this in Chap. #90).
But then, abruptly and happily, Louisville pole-vaulted forward as the Louisville metro area welcomed four new independent “craft” breweries, as I reckon we started calling them at this juncture.
- August 2000: Cumberland Brews (brewpub) opened at 1576 Bardstown Rd. in remodeled retail space.
- July 2001: BBC Brewing Co. (production facility, taproom) opened at 636 E. Main St., supplanting Pipkin. The completed taproom came a bit later.
- April 2002: Browning’s (brewpub) opened at Louisville Slugger Field (100% new construction).
- October 2002: New Albanian Brewing Co. opened in a purpose-built annex at 3312 Plaza Dr. in New Albany, using Silver Creek’s abandoned small brewing system, itself purchased from Tucker.
The most interesting thing about these millennial start-ups is that once brewing was established in their respective buildings, better beer remained preeminent in those spaces for a considerable time, albeit with a few altered concepts and different ownership groups along the way.
Cumberland Brews closed in 2019, just shy of 20 years of age, to be immediately replaced by Against the Grain’s spinoff Public House. It ran for five years, including a period when the tiny pub brewing system was used to make Japanese-style sake. As of 2026, the building houses Murray’s Creole Pub, successor to the brief, foredoomed, carpet-bagging Pints&union.
In 2015 BBC Brewing Co. was reshuffled and rebranded as Goodwood Brewing Co., which continued until June of 2026, when it declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy, ending 29 years of brewing at the Beer Corner.
Browning’s persevered through two ownership iterations (and a year’s pause) before collapsing in 2011, to be quickly resuscitated as Against the Grain’s original, epochal brewpub location.
In December, 2025 AtG shifted all operations to its production brewery, and a month later, the renowned tower brewery was dismantled, having been purchased by White Squirrel in Bowling Green KY (photo credit: Jason Smith).
NABC still brews today at its original Grant Line Road location. As of 1 July 2026, following the unexpected shuttering of BBC’s remaining 3rd Street brewpub unit (leaving the historic downtown business district denuded of breweries), NABC now is the oldest continually operational brewery in the Louisville metro area, and the 8th-oldest in the state of Indiana.
Not so much buildings as sanctuaries, these spots remained better-beer-friendly for most of two decades (or more). That’s genuinely astounding. Conversely, within a relatively short period of time, all but one is gone.
As the band Kansas once opined, “all we are is grain dust in the wind.”
Cumberland Brews (2000 – 2019)
Kindly indulge me in a prequel to the advent of Cumberland Brews, a brewpub I patronized frequently.
The story begins in 2016, when Diana and I were visiting wonderful Madison, Wisconsin. For the first and only time in my life, I strolled into Rockhound Brewing Co. (closed as of 2020) and noticed a new smoked beer release on the board called Campfire Stories. Sans research, the exploratory sipping duly commenced.
I love smoked beer, and this one raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t ordinary, and sent the mental data base spinning. Hoppy and smoky in equal measure, there was something more about the vaguely phenolic smokiness that both puzzled and intrigued me. Flummoxed, I asked the bartender, who helpfully explained that Campfire Stories was an American-style Pale Ale with the hops smoked, not the barley malt.
Immediately déjà vu smacked me violently upside the head.
On January 30, 2000, a date verifiable only because it was Super Bowl Sunday (Rams vs. Titans), Matt “Brew Boy” Gould and Kevin “Moose” Richards came to my residence to home-garage-brew an idea we’d long discussed: smoked hop pale ale.
It owed to a joyful accident. One fine evening at the Public House, I drained a pint of Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Märzen. Without rinsing the glass (but I always rinsed the glass), I poured a bottle of BBC American Pale Ale into it. Now I was tasting a delicious hoppy ale and also smelling residual smoke, hence the ensuing “eureka!” moment, one comparable to the old-time advertisements depicting the clash of peanut butter and chocolate, thus impelling Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
My theory: while smoked malt made the entire beer smokier, smoked hops would dance around the edges and accent the hoppiness. Matt purchased whole leaf hops, and Kevin joined him in smoking them over wood that wasn’t beech; it was hickory or mesquite, maybe both.
We brewed during the game, in the process absorbing gallons of “guest” beer stowed as sustenance, all the while ducking in and out of the house to watch the game, which famously came down to the final play. A few weeks later, we tried the beer. It was pleasingly rough, in need of polishing, but far better than I expected. There was a slightly phenolic character…
Bingo. My flavor memory tends to be reliable, and I tasted it again at Rockhound. Smoked hop pale ale is etched into my brain, 26 years later, as though we brewed it yesterday.
By the time the 2001 Super Bowl rolled around, Cumberland Brews was slaying it, with Matt the toast of the beer community. He brewed the first commercial batch of smoked hop pale ale at Cumberland as a seasonal specialty, and might have done it again in 2002. By 2003, NABC’s brewing system was on-line, and at some point brewers Michael Borchers and Joey Burns created a house version called ConeSmoker.
Smoked malt was used, as smoking the hops proved to be too time-consuming and variable a process for a brewing capacity three times larger than Cumberland’s. I loved ConeSmoker, but it sold slowly in spite of my best efforts, and was brewed again only once.
Sadly, Matt and Kevin are no longer with us. Neither is Cumberland Brews.
But when it opened in 2000 a few months after our smoked hop experiment, Cumberland Brews seemed to augur marvelous things for Louisville’s better beer community, slotting perfectly with the Bardstown Road/Highlands “corridor” at its peak as Louisville’s indie-friendly, eclectic, food-dining-shopping area.
To be sure, Frankfort Avenue’s star was rising, but Bardstown Road and its many neighborhoods (Highlands, Bonnycastle, Cherokee Triangle, Tyler Park, Deer Park, et al) were the places to go for non-chain, anti-franchise merriment. Later, when the Louisville Independent Business Alliance (LIBA) adapted the slogan “Keep Louisville Weird,” most people just assumed they meant Bardstown Rd.
(“Weird” cannot conceivably refer to Hurstbourne or Anchorage, which reminds me: Why isn’t there a brewery in weird, international, multicultural Buechel?)
Cumberland Brews had been an ice cream dispensary, and it was tiny (capacity: 40 downstairs). Primary owner Mark Allgeier involved his whole family. He spent several years sourcing equipment, and finally came up with a 2-barrel (four conventional keg) system; twice the size of a “nano,” but minuscule compared with 7- or 15-barrel fermenters in use at other local breweries.
It meant that Matt would be brewing often, and busting his butt. There wouldn’t be much beer left over, if any, to distribute. To keep flagships consistent, he’d have to be on his game in terms of practices and procedures.
A vast majority of the time he was, crafting Cream Ale, Red Ale, Nitro Porter, Pale Ale, and numerous seasonals and one-offs. The kitchen garnered consistently great reviews (I personally consumed hundreds of jerk wings), and the intimate atmosphere was suitably convivial.
By 2007, Matt was piecing together the next Cumberland acquisition, a 7-barrel production-sized unit accompanied by pallets of 13.2-gallon poly-clad kegs, all housed in an industrial park unit on Poplar Level Rd.
Cumberland promptly took the next step and began distributing beer, except Matt wasn’t there, Mark having dismissed him in 2008. Cameron Finnes took the helm and stewarded Cumberland with vigor and panache for another decade before moving to Falls City, where he remains in 2026, now one of Louisville’s longest-tenured brewers.
Just now, all these years later, I pulled up Matt’s Facebook page, where he identified himself as “Dumb Old Brewer” at BBC Brewing Co. (his last job). Supposedly he’s been at BBC Brewing for 17 years, except the company vanished in 2015, after Matt left us in 2012, claimed by cancer at only 42.
He was a talented better beer advocate, a die-hard Cubs fan and a feisty curmudgeon after my own heart, yet like all outward cynics, he concealed a thoughtful, gentle soul beset by occasional demons.
Life goes on.
By 2018, Mark Allgeier was actively considering exit strategies. Conversely, his former high school classmate Tom Brown wanted to pair his growing Craft House Pizza business with house-brewed beer. In a flash, Cumberland’s production-sized brewing system was sold and reanimated as Hometown Brewing Co.
Cumberland’s outside sales had never truly solidified; everyone wanted Cumberland’s beers on tap, right up until there was enough available for purchase, then (almost axiomatically) they became unfashionable. But Brown’s plan was different. He’d have ready-made pizzeria outlets for his beer precisely because he already owned them, and would be adding others. Finding that many handles in the wild would be next to impossible.
Consequently, Matt Gould made the beer headlines again in 2022, and to set the scene, Sam Cruz (co-founder of Against the Grain) relates how he was introduced to Louisville craft beer, shortly after Cumberland Brews opened.
I walked into Harry’s House of Brews on Bardstown Road (long gone now) and ordered my first local Louisville beer. It was Cumberland Brews Matt’s Red and the bartender told me it was from a new brewery just up the road. It was fantastic and certainly piqued my interest in the fantastic local beer scene here in Louisville.
In 2022, Hometown Brewing revived Cumberland Red Ale, always “Matt’s Red” to me. It had been his first solo formula while assisting David Pierce at BBC (as Matt’s Amber). It was a lovely tribute by Hometown.
—
Browning’s Restaurant & Brewery (2002 – 2008; 2009 – 2011)
By the time I wrote the following words about Browning’s in 2005 at my spanking new online “beer blog” The Potable Curmudgeon, the enterprise’s seemingly inherent shakiness was the subject of consternation.
Fine dining (Park Place on Main; formerly Wellinghurst’s) and a brewpub (Browning’s Restaurant & Brewery), both under the same management, lie side by side within Louisville Slugger Field, home of the city’s Triple-A Bats. The showpiece tower brewing system that serves as the central design feature of Browning’s has often been mistaken for a spittoon by a series of “me no speak beer” owners and decision makers, but the brewpub remains the only hope for a decent pint of beer within the confines of the notoriously beer-unfriendly Slugger Field.
In 1998, ground was broken downtown for Louisville Slugger Field, home of the Triple-A Louisville Bats. Taking their cues from the newer generation of major league ballparks like Baltimore’s Camden Yards, architects artfully incorporated an historic block-long, red-brick Victorian-era train shed into the design, seamlessly melding it into new construction as a portal, including retail and service space with a Main Street frontage.
The new ballpark was ready for the first pitch of the 2000 season, and excited fans entering from the eastern portal gazed upon … thousands of square feet of unoccupied gravel. It wasn’t until late spring of 2002 that construction was completed on Slugger Field’s primary hospitality tenants: Browning’s, a brewery and restaurant, and Wellinghurst’s, an upscale steakhouse.
The two eateries shared common ownership, a state-of-the-art kitchen, fresh beers crafted in the city’s most visually arresting brew house ― and sadly, troubles ahead, perhaps an inevitable consequence of irrational exuberance trumping cold calculation. As a parallel example, readers will recall the lessons of BrewWorks.
Start-up costs crippled BrewWorks. I remember my friend Keith’s fascination with the cost alone of renovating the grand, historic, 19th-century Bavarian Brewery complex in Covington.
“Roger, it cost Ken Lewis $11 million just to renovate the building. That’s before he spent another dime on the necessities. Do you know how many $5 beers you have to sell to retire a debt like that?”
What Lewis spent in the early 90s translates into about $22 million in today’s money ― and that’s a great many $10 beers.
Louisville Slugger Field was an undisputed triumph of adaptive reuse (modifying older structures for purposes differing from their original function), and turning all that gravelly emptiness into two restaurants and an elevated brewery required constructing a new building from scratch inside the confines of the old one, fully equipped with every last light socket, soup spoon, shot glass and coat of paint.
The ownership consortium paid for it all.
About the group, I knew only that Neil Wellinghurst ran Judge Roy Bean’s, a quasi-southwestern eatery on Bardstown Road that occasionally mustered a decent beer (predictably, it soon closed). However, I understood quite well that the consortium would be absorbing enormous expenses prior to grilling the first burger, and that in previous situations where ownership didn’t have appreciable experience with better beer, it was predictable that better beer would get short shrift.
So it transpired at Browning’s, although not without the best efforts of Eileen Martin to keep the dream alive. She succeeded in maintaining high brewing standards even though the most logical strategic plan for a brewpub ― emphasizing the house-brewed beer ― apparently was never seriously considered.
To cite a minor but revealing example, we turn back to a “Ruthless Interrogation” (i.e., six weekly questions) by Courier-Journal staffer Jim Lenahan (6 July 2022), who quizzed Eileen.
Q: Our restaurant critic, Susan Reigler, dissed your use of chilled glasses. What is your response?
A: I agree 100 percent. I’ve been arguing with the owners, and when the glass chiller showed up, I was kind of surprised. You really can’t get the full flavor of the beer until it warms up a bit.
Why cherry-pick glass chilling? Two reasons.
First, it illustrates the cluelessness of restaurant management about better beer, specific to Browning’s here, yet generalized in the area then as now. Eileen was an experienced brewer who worked in all phases of the movement toward better beer. But for Browning’s management (read: ownership), better beer was a little more than a grudging gimmick, to be indulged visually (the tower brewing system), and never promoted at the expense of holy Miller Lite, which never should have been offered in the first place.
To me, if swill demands frosty mugs, forget glass chillers. Just eliminate swill, and the problem is resolved.
The second reason is the way that issues like this one (frozen beer glasses) came to shape my own world view. A quarter-century later, it’s my standard default: Either you make the planet a better place by selling better beer the right way, or not, and if not, I have absolutely no time for you.
It’s haughty, overbearing, arrogant and unrealistic. It’s me, unapologetically. But counter-productive?
Not in my experience.
I always trusted better beer when done the right way, and the results almost always reflected the effort. People actually can be moved up to better beer with commitment and education, although ya gotta wanna do it.
In retrospect, I’d have reminded Browning’s perpetually tin-eared ownership that since the profit margins on house-brewed beer are better, the more units of Eileen’s Oatmeal Stout they vended, the faster their ruinous debt would be reduced.
Six Lites added up to a single ESB when it came to the take. Do the damned math, okay?
All these reasons combine to explain constant struggles at Browning’s. Over the years, changes came. Around April of 2004, Anoosh Shariat was engaged as executive chef, and Wellinghurst’s Steakhouse switched identities, becoming Park Place.
Shariat, a brilliant restaurateur, succeeded in revitalizing the kitchen, and ironically, as a teetotaler, he seemed to display a firmer grasp of better beer’s bigger picture than most. However, I doubt the chronic under-capitalization at Browning’s ever once allowed a proper level of investment in the brewing program.
The tower brewery’s suitability as a workspace didn’t approach its grandiloquent appearance. Gravity is a powerful force in brewing, but only if the raw materials can be easily conveyed to the uppermost point, and climate control?
Take a memo: “Hmm, I knew we forgot something.”
Eileen’s beers are fondly remembered: Blonde Ale, Red Ale, Nut Brown, Oatmeal Stout and ESB. Her seasonals included Steam, Doppelbock, Rye and Cream Ale; there may have been a Bourbon Barrel Stout, too. Amid ownership’s penury and ambivalence, she managed all this in a little over two years.
In February, 2005 the Courier-Journal’s dining columnist Susan Reigler reported Eileen’s departure as the Browning’s brewster, and the elevation of assistant Bill Dinkins to the top job. Two months later, Dinkins was out and a battlefield promotion was given to an employee with very little brewing background, who evidently managed to stick it out for almost a year until the experienced Brian Reymiller was hired.
By May of 2006, Eileen not only had moved on, but plain moved, accepting a cellarman’s position at Upland Brewing Co. in Bloomington, IN. Eileen’s brewing resume continued to grow during the years to come, although today she’s out of the beer business.
Park Place and Browning’s wheezed to a halt in October, 2008. Browning’s alone reopened the following spring, minus Park Place, which Shariat (now assuming principal ownership) used for catering and as an event space. Brian knew what he was doing, and did what he could, while he was able. His She-Devil IPA was a particular favorite; he’d been employed at Victory Brewing, and modeled She-Devil on Hop Devil. Browning’s permanently collapsed in 2011, to be absorbed by Against the Grain.
Unfairly forgotten in the Browning’s saga is the source of the name itself. Whatever the Wellinghurst consortium did or didn’t do, it certainly got the brewpub’s identity right.
The original American Association in baseball was a major league formed in 1882, and lasting a decade before folding. During its brief time, AA was not to be confused with alcoholic anonymity; rather, it was widely known as the Beer and Whiskey League, in part because its founders numbered more than a few brewing and distilling magnates eager to move product, but more so owing to their brilliant marketing plan.
Their aim was to upend the staid, hidebound conservatism of organized professional baseball by making the experience of attending games affordable and fun for spectators. Propriety was downplayed, tickets were inexpensive, and alcohol was freely available. Recent European immigrants flocked to games, especially on Sunday.
Louisville’s existing team, the Eclipse, became a charter member of the Association, and changed its name to the Colonels. Its finest player was a native Louisvillian, Pete Browning, an outstanding hitter, famously incompetent at fielding, but a genuine larger-than-life personality.
Browning was afflicted with lifelong pain from mastoiditis (a bacterial infection of the bone behind the ear), which left him mostly deaf, and compelled constant self-medication through inebriation. He is reputed to have stated that he could not be expected to hit the ball without first hitting the bottle.
Browning later competed in the National League, and died at only 44 in 1905. As a player, his early patronage of a small, artisanal baseball bat maker led to the very name of Louisville Slugger, Hillerich & Bradsby’s iconic brand, which continues to adorn Louisville’s ballpark.
Whether the local name will survive the monopolistic avarice of Diamond Baseball Holdings, new owner of the team and park, is anyone’s guess. But shouldn’t we be doing something beer-related to honor Pete Browning?
BBC Brewing Company (2001 – 2015)
Pipkin’s founder Paul Hummer was the first to see potential for beer production at the “Beer Corner of Clay & Main” in downtown Louisville (), where a cavernous former foundry space held ample square footage to brew lots of beer. In the beginning, the single most memorable interior feature was an oversized knockoff of the Last Supper presumably borrowed from the Vatican (where it actually might have fit quite comfortably).
However, Pipkin never produced enough of its own beer to feel crowded. Bourbon Barrel Stout might have turned the trick; maybe it was too early in the game (BBC did not repeat this mistake).
Before Bluegrass Brewing Co. acquired Pipkin’s assets to establish its production arm, Hummer’s chief revenue stream had become contract-brewing BBC’s beers for distribution. The weak link in the equation was Pipkin, and BBC eliminated it.
A production-sized brewery was BBC’s next evolutionary step after refining flagship brands at its brewpub, where the smaller scale of production allowed for necessary tweaking and experimentation. Bottling and kegging became primary packaging options, seeing as micro-canning hadn’t yet to come into widespread existence.
In order to buy out Pipkin and add the production brewery, BBC’s owning Hagan family was obliged to make key financing decisions. Sensibly, a separate corporation was set up as a liability firewall. Included in the new corporation was a bloc of smaller investors from BBC’s core clientele of regulars, providing operating capital.
David Pierce was still brewing at BBC’s original pub brewery in St. Mathews; he also sold and installed brewing equipment for Diversified Metal Engineering (DME), a fabricator of stainless steel products (read: brewing systems) out of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. David shifted his base of operations downtown to Main & Clay to launch and operate the production brewery.
The smallish public taproom space, which opened in April of 2003, was tastefully arrayed with breweriana and various beer-related relics reflecting Louisville’s brewing heritage. It was billed as the BBC Brewing Taproom & Louisville Breweriana Museum. The only food was popcorn, but patrons could order pizza deliveries or bring a picnic.
It all seemed copacetic, and to this very day, I don’t know exactly how to explain what happened next.
From afar, BBC appeared as a cohesive unit, embracing the brewpub in St. Matthews and the downtown production brewery a short distance away, except soon it became evident that everyone wasn’t rowing in the same direction. There was bad blood, maybe an uncivil war. The lawyers smelled opportunity.
No one on the outside ever really knew what was happening, even me. I still don’t. After a couple of years, the smoke cleared, and the investors had assumed power. The entities now were separate conceptually, and anyone wondering past from Dubuque sensed two product lines that didn’t always taste alike.
There had been stumbles when David left the brewhouse in St. Matthews. That he’d be hard to replace wasn’t exactly a secret, but the Hagans initially seemed stunned, unable (unwilling?) to procure a new brewer of even minimal competence to follow the formulas.
Circa 2002/2003, the BBC brewpub’s beers became so inconsistent that none other than award-winning Ohio brewer Tim Rastetter was brought in temporarily as brewer and consultant. Rastetter’s tenure ended with a transition to the Jerry Gnagy Era, which lasted about eight years, until he left for Against the Grain until 2011.
As an example of how strange all this could be, David’s American Pale Ale (APA) from BBC Brewing Co. remained the gold standard even past his departure for NABC in 2009 (after which Joel Halbleib and the shift brewers kept it consistent). Jerry’s brewpub APA was quite good, too; it was consistent, and also consistently different from the distribution version.
I sometimes wonder how these incongruities ― two divergent and periodically warring BBCs ― would have fared during the social media era to come. Would greater daily scrutiny have led to better focus and a quicker resolution? The strife that erupted during those first few years made most of us profoundly uncomfortable. It felt like being pressured to take sides in a family dispute, when I only wanted to be friendly with everyone and work together to expand better beer’s perimeter of acceptance.
“Golden Era” arguments are prone to a sort of reverse-recency bias, and clearly this millennial wave of brewing startups had its share of inherent flaws. Nothing and no one is perfect. But I loved the intensely personal nature of these breweries, in that I knew so many of the people involved, and they knew each other. For a while, it felt like our better beer insurgency was succeeding ― slow and low, at the grassroots, then hopping onto everyone’s radar.
It was a band of brothers and sisters, right up until it wasn’t.
I’d always insisted that the Louisville metro area was capable of conquering its better beer timidity, and tried never to lose sight of how long this might take. Better beer advocates were few in number, yet capable of outsized influence, and as these dots were connected nationwide, it was something to behold. I dearly miss the far-flung family tree of movers and shakers, speaking a dialect that we’d take with us to places like Cleveland, Denver or Baltimore, and chat with the like-minded.
Naturally, there always was opposition.
Of the Third Wave startups, Browning’s probably stands as the best example of the sort of pushback we all faced, in more concentrated form. Paraphrasing a scene from the brilliant Warren Beatty movie Reds:
Better Beer Guy: We need Eileen’s ESB in the ballpark.
Centerplate Concessions Monopoly: Who the hell do you think YOU are?
Better Beer Guy: Me? I write about beer.
Centerplate Concessions Monopoly: You right? Uh uh. You wrong … (kegs of Bud Light wheeling past not unlike the Mongol hordes).
If the fix wasn’t in, it forever lurked around the corner, waiting.
As for Browning’s, consider that Wellinghurst’s consortium agreed to convert empty gravel into two complete restaurants with a stylish brewery, and to pay for it all, without any accompanying understanding that Eileen’s beer would be sold inside the ballpark, a few yards away from where it was brewed.
Sometimes it was. More often it wasn’t. In America, beer in a ballpark (or a concert venue, or an airport) has always been predicated on business deals between multinational brewing conglomerates, wholesalers, concessionaires and teams.
I won’t use an ugly word like “payola,” but only because payola is ingrained in “beer business as usual in the ballpark,” and I’ve been taught to refrain from redundancy when writing. Pay-to-pour is a game that locally-brewed beer (as well as most things locally produced by independent small businesses) can seldom win.
A space alien alighting from a distant galaxy would ask, well, shouldn’t beer brewed in the ballpark be a point-of-sales emphasis during games, because wasn’t the park built in part with local tax revenue tithed at a higher rate by indies, as opposed to the absentee monolith Anheuser-Busch (and later AB InBev)?
Yeah, you know the answer.
Corporate welfare always goes to the engorged multinationals first. Not that this killed off Browning’s, which bore its share of internal contradictions. We’re reminded us that when the Dim-pire chooses to strike back, it does so with stunning precision, and hits us in the solar plexus with its wallet.
