Roger Baylor
(Web Editor / Columnist / Feature Writer) An entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with more than a quarter-century of hands-on experience and expertise as a brewer, restaurateur, and commentator. As the leader of New Albany’s Sportstime Pizza/Rich O’s Public House (which later became New Albanian Brewing Company), Baylor played a seminal role in Louisville’s craft beer renaissance. Currently, he is the beer director at Pints&union in New Albany. Baylor’s “Hip Hops” columns on beer-related subjects have been a fixture in F&D since 2005, and he was named the magazine's digital editor in 2019.
You’ll hear one sort of pitch at a sales meeting, and see another thrown during a baseball game, but brewer’s pitch is completely different. Brewer’s pitch is a resinous substance used to line wooden barrels so liquid doesn’t come...
It is a deceptively simple notion to modify the flavor of beer by aging it in Bourbon barrels. Just as char and time transform simpler corn-based spirits into a sipper’s elixir, so a barrel’s second use with beer can...
People who know me won’t be surprised by the analogy that came to mind as I sat down to sample Ballotin Chocolate Whiskey, a new product from a veteran of the local distilling industry. What jumped into my head was the rabbit-duck illusion, an ambiguous 19th-century German drawing depicting a rabbit that, if you look again, looks like a duck, or a duck, if you blink, that resembles a rabbit. Which creature is it? Read more...
In 1906, thirsty residents of New Albany had the choice of three local breweries to visit when it came time to refill pails gone dry.
Paul Reising’s plant was the granddaddy of them all, taking up a whole West End...
Originally published in the Winter 2015 issue of Food & Dining Magazine.
When Food & Dining Magazine published its inaugural edition in 2003, there hadn’t yet been an American Craft Beer Week. It came along three years later.
As for the descriptive term itself, “craft” first...
Märzen, known as Oktoberfest in its autumnal guise, is an Old World style of lager beer originating in the German state of Bavaria.
Talk is cheap, so let’s have a sip — strictly for research purposes.
This Märzen is orange-tinged amber,...
It remains a golden age for craft beer in America, but while artisanal brewing continues to grow and prosper on Kentucky soil, another satisfying libation retains the bulk of bragging rights in the Commonwealth.
It’s Bourbon, and Bourbon is ascendant.
With...
In 1976, the birth of New Albion Brewing Company in California presaged a revolution in beer. Four decades later, under the nom de plume of “craft beer,” the revolution seems permanently embedded in American culture, although the attendant hysteria...
“Anyone who has groped among the dark beer dungeons which lie for a number of deep streets under Phoenix Hill, would scarcely imagine while in those dark, chilly caves, that far above him the place would grow into such...
Buckhead’s tablets help make your beer choice better .
Human nature often displays a yearning for simpler times — a slower pace of life, fewer worries, and a return to the good old days.
Consider how easy it used to be...
