The Winter 2023 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online. Click here to check it out.
It’s far harder than it used to be to fudge a December retrospective about the “year in beer” or “best beer of 2023.”
In a larger sense, these exercises no longer can pretend to be comprehensive in the way they might have succeeded in being two decades ago. Amid thousands of breweries, tens of thousands of beers and 1,000,001 hot takes, we can only hope to skim the surface of the genre with maximum subjectivity.
Moreover, I no longer bother much with compiling, amassing and aggregating my beer experiences. I don’t give a flying Faro about Untappd (or any other purposeful misspelled distraction), and simplicity is paramount.
I’m looking for a clean, well-lighted place that provides a solid beer for me to enjoy, and maybe two.
Most often I find myself thinking that it’d be really nice if licensed beverage establishments applied the same thought process to their beer lists as their food menus (and wine, bourbon and “craft” cocktail broadsheets), but even after thirty years of improvement, alarmingly few of them bother, hence the overriding “lesson” of 2023, as well as at least ten years preceding it: Better beer’s range of societal acceptance remains pleasingly wide, but society’s stock of knowledge about better beer becomes ever more shallow.
An unrelated thought: 2024 is a U.S. presidential election year, isn’t it?
Still, speaking only for myself, usually I can find a beer I like at local bars and restaurants, and most of the time it’s fresh enough. But make no mistake: the struggle is real, and it is ongoing.
My advice for readers who desire a reliable, daily, Louisville-centric source of beer information in 2023 is to tune into Louisville Ale Trail, a prolific and dependable source of news as well as Christmas gifts (no kickbacks for moi; the team at Ale Trail works hard and deserves your support).
The text:
People love gifts of experience. Consider challenging a friend, family member, or yourself to visit as many Louisville breweries as you can with a Louisville Ale Trail passport. Ask your taproom bartender for one or visit Brewgrass Homebrew Supply. Want it mailed? Order one at www.louisvillealetrail.com.
Among the highlights of my personal year in beer:
- Driving up to Madison, Wisconsin with my wife Diana and spending an afternoon at the nearby New Glarus Brewing Company.
- Enjoying lovely European classic lagers and ales with great friends while in Netherlands and Denmark.
- Dropping into Bluegrass Brewing Company’s last remaining location at Main and 3rd for a Dark Star Porter, APA (American Pale Ale) and plate of wings, and finding the flavor of each one mighty close to how I remember it from glorious days of yore.
- Enjoying my high school reunion so much that I drank Yuengling and actually liked it.
Conversely, any truly honest survey of my year in beer requires a brief recitation of the reversals.
One long-term friend of mine died, and another severed relations. Both were unexpected.
I lost one beer director’s job when Common Haus Hall closed in February, and the other in November when I was dismissed by Pints&union, presumably for cost-cutting reasons—and if you believe I’m happy about the Oakland A’s moving to Las Vegas, think again.
And keep right on thinking, because here’s the flip side.
Whether it was a rewarding 45th high school class reunion, an impromptu wake for Mark at the Public House or a few wonderful autumn days checking in with European best buddies, I’ll remember the year 2023 as an extended reminder that life goes on.
As Warren Zevon reminded us, “enjoy every sandwich.” My adaptation isn’t unexpected: Enjoy every beer.
Hold your friends close, and to hell with your enemies. All we have is each other, and much to my surprise, Heineken tastes pretty damn good when it’s served fresh on draft in the Netherlands.
2024 is just around the corner, and I can promise almost nothing except this: I won’t dumb down.
For as long as I’ve been working in the beer business or writing about it, I’ve held the view that smartening up is preferable to dumbing down.
Concurrently, I realize that being serious-minded about my life’s work in beer has often been detrimental to my prospects. There is a long, lamentable and apparently inextinguishable tradition in America of lowering common denominators as opposed to raising them. It’s probably all about the money, like everything else in America, but to me dumb fun simply isn’t fun at all. I’ll hoe my row; you can plant what you please.
Dumbing down is easier, but overall, I’ve won more games than I’ve lost during the course of a journey spent thinking about beer as a means of cultural instruction quite apart from its more familiar role as an otherwise forgettable, intoxicating liquid.
Granted, as most coaches or managers would attest, winning more often than losing is no guarantee of retention, and examples of owners firing themselves are extremely rare. Life’s a bitch; then you dye (your beer green).
At this juncture it isn’t clear if I’ll be able to find another position in the beer biz. Aging exacts its toll, and ageism rams it home. I hope to continue (the writing certainly will), but whether I’m inside or outside the tent, my thinking about beer won’t change—because I support THINKING, and always will.
In closing, here are the top five Hop Hops posts at Food & Dining Magazine in 2023, as measured by page views.
#5 (February 8): Hip Hops: “Last of the Summer Wine” is better with beer
The trio’s day invariably brought them to Sid’s Café for tea and sticky buns, and often included extended sessions in various Holmfirth pubs, including the White Horse Inn, Butcher’s Arms and Elephant and Castle. In these intimate bricks and mortar monuments to Real Ale when it really was real, they enjoy leisurely pints from the hand-pull while hatching the next scheme.
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#4 (June 14): Hip Hops: Pride Month, Craft Bash, beer style calcification, and more
This brings me to Jeff Alworth; if anyone is a masterful beer advocate, it’s him. In my view, Alworth is a great beer writer because he always makes the reader think, and no single piece of beer writing of late has compelled me to ponder quite as deeply as Alworth’s essay, “Did the pursuit of beer ‘styles’ lead us down a blind alley?”
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#3 (April 5): Hip Hops: A stellar imported beer list at Louisville Hotel
But imagine debarking from the steamboat in Louisville during the Buchanan administration, stowing your trunks in the Daniel Boone Suite at Louisville Hotel, and bounding downstairs to the restaurant to choose one (or maybe all) from this list of five highly rated imports, each of them differing from the other stylistically, and not a single low-calorie abomination to be found.
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#2 (March 14): Hip Hops: Louisville area brewery news; also “Three years later, an altered world”
Louisville area brewery news items have been coming so fast the past two weeks that my vintage pair of Crane brand scissors, little tub of drawer-conditioned Elmer’s and increasingly arthritic fingers can barely keep up with the ol’ cut and paste routine. Here are ten local brewing news snippets with links, listed alphabetically.
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#1 (May 31): Hip Hops: “We’re all HERE because we’re not all THERE”
The way I felt about the beer revolution in America in 1989, when there’d been only tiny inklings of it in Louisville and environs, helped to shape my consciousness about better beer. After all, the Marxists always said that class consciousness must come first, as it leads to readiness for class revolution.
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 41 years of beer business experience in metropolitan Louisville as a bartender, package store clerk, brewery owner, restaurateur, writer, traveler, polemicist, homebrewing club founder, tour operator and all-purpose contrarian.
