40 Years in Beer is a memoir of my life and times in the beer business. The first of these serialized installments came into being in 2022, the 40th anniversary of my inaugural shift in 1982 at Scoreboard Liquors in New Albany, Indiana.
Having sadly duped myself into thinking there’d be little to say (from me, really?), two years of writing have passed since then, and in mid-2024 I’ve just now made it to 1994 in the narrative.
Yep, this might take a while. Not only that, but apart from writing about beer, I’m not even directly involved in the beer biz at the present time, having lost my most recent beer programming gig at Pints&union in November, 2023.
But writing about beer counts, too. I’ve been doing it for a very long time.
I now have a page at my web site dedicated to a numerical listing of the installments (from the first to the most recent), preceded by the short-term schedule of what’s in the hopper. The current series word count as of 5 August is 139,351 — and that’s a book, folks.
The “40 Years in Beer Compendium”: links, previews, and coming attractions
Note that today’s featured photo is of the brewmaster at Birra Tirana (Albania) in 1994, which I wrote about last week.
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When beer writer Jeff Alworth recently dove into the Oregon brewing industry during the course of building a “Celebrate Oregon Beer” website, something funny happened. The number of Oregon breweries Alworth ended up with was 30% fewer than the official tally recorded by the Brewers Association.
There are many reasons why such discrepancies occur, ranging from confusion in the aftermath of COVID to questions of definition (do all of a brewery’s taprooms count? Do any?), but the overarching conclusion is two-fold; first, 30% is a lot, and second, if this error rate is applied to American breweries as a whole, we’re all likely repeating bad information.
The real issue is that a lot of the breweries on the Brewers Association’s list, at least in Oregon, don’t exist. So how many breweries does the US contain? Probably more than 7,000, but certainly not 10,000. We should quit using that figure.
Meanwhile, writing at his web site, Kevin Gibson documents the utterly novel concept of a local brewery promotion that actually pertains to local beer – as opposed to corn hole, karaoke, Star Wars trivia or the lingering idiocy of hard seltzer: It’s Kentucky Common service at Trellis Brewing.
Kevin explains that Kölsch service “is a tradition from Cologne (or Köln), Germany, in which customers are served a Kölsch beer and when the glass is empty, they are automatically served another and the empty glass cleared away.”
And, Kentucky Common is Louisville’s indigenous beer, an example of which I enjoyed at Versailles Brewing Co. last weekend. As a selection of lower gravity, Common is an ideal choice for the “service” treatment.
Hip Hops: May Day? No, just pre-Derby banners for Kentucky Commonism
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Poised at a slightly different quadrant of the creative spectrum is Nick Tehrani, founder of a company called Lode, and creator of a “THC Infused Craft NA Beer.” Staffer Stephen P. Schmidt covers this at Louisville Business First: Why a Louisville startup produces non-alcoholic beer, tonics infused with hemp oil.
Lode, and its products are non-alcoholic beers and tonics/cocktails infused with pure hemp oil … Lode’s line of products addresses multiple issues, Tehrani said, with the first being that non-alcoholic beer has been lacking the flavor components of traditional beer.
“Brewers don’t want to make it because they don’t understand why they would spend time making a product that doesn’t provide a functional benefit back to the user — and it can create an enormous amount of risk for their facility because non-alcoholic beer is very hard to produce,” said Tehrani.
Consumers can start to feel a buzz within around 15 minutes, with the effects starting to leave their system about 90 minutes later, which addresses the second issue. “They want the functional buzz that the alcohol provides, but they don’t want the negative benefits like hangovers or overconsumption,” Tehrani said.
For my purposes in satirizing beer’s modernity it matters far less that this product hasn’t much to do with “beer” in any accepted sense (can someone please brew papa a pleasant Ordinary Bitter that tastes like I’m somewhere in Derbyshire?) than the way it bizarrely reminds me of the onetime French “aphrodisiac beer” 36-15 Pecheur from Fischer. These words seem to have appeared in the New York Times in 1990.
The French brewing company Fischer recently introduced its latest product in New York: 36-15 Pecheur. It’s being marketed as “La Biere Amoureuse” (in France, 36-15 is the number you call for the equivalent of one of our boy-girl 900-lines), because it contains 16 ingredients with reputed aphrodisiac properties, including myrrh, ginseng, mango and six secret ingredients. As to the flavor, the Wall Street Journal has compared it to a beer cooler. We’ll see how many people will pay $6 for a three-pack, and how many will walk up to a bar and say, “Make mine a thirty-six hyphen fifteen.”
Is 36-15 still being “brewed”?
I neither know nor care; after all, this relic came long before the male miracle of Viagra made subtlety in coupling obsolete. I suppose nowadays one might simply dissolve a capsule of the Big Blue into a paper cup filled with Michelob Ultra or White Claw, and be hot to trot. But if you do, please use contraception.
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In closing, Stephen Beaumont is one of our planet’s finest beer (and all alcoholic drinks) writers, and when he came to Louisville in February for a bourbon stroll, Against the Grain was included as an “intermezzo.”
Against the Grain Public House is a street-level brewery nestled in a corner of Slugger Field and a great place to take a bourbon break. Try the Brown Note brown ale or anything smoked.
Anything smoked? A man after my own heart.
Previously at “Hip Hops”: Give me an effing break, will you? Do I look like I was born yesterday?
Hip Hops: Why are curated luxury beer lists so unremittingly mediocre?
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 
