Hip Hops: Louisville Beer Week approaches (Oct. 23 – 30)

Unless you care a jot for Carlos Brito (I don’t), then we can begin and end this week’s clipboard with the welcome news that there’ll be a Louisville Beer Week in 2020.

Friends! #LouisvilleBeerWeek has returned! It’s been a helluva year but we still want to celebrate our local beer and local breweries. Keep your eyes peeled and follow @LouisvilleBeerWeek on social for updates on special releases, happenings, and maybe a few surprises.

Note that Louisville Beer Week as configured today is not the same entity as the former Louisville Craft Beer Week. There are various reasons for the semantics of omission, among them the sheer pace of “better” beer’s local expansion, and an ongoing inability of anyone, anywhere to adequately define the word “craft.” It’s topic we obliquely considered in July.

Hip Hops: Two good beer guys on the edge, and their podcast

Call it as you will, and of course it takes more than locally-brewed beer alone to make a thriving beer scene, but just the same most non-mass market beer lovers probably agree that “breweries are the mark of a thriving community,” in the words of esteemed beer writer Jeff Alworth.

“Breweries aren’t like the average industrial plant,” Alworth wrote at All About Beer in 2016.

“They are people magnets, bringing folks in who are curious to try a pint of locally made beer. In fairly short order, breweries can create little pockets of prosperity in cities that can (and often do) radiate out into the neighborhood. Pretty soon, other businesses see the bustle and consider moving in, too. It doesn’t hurt that breweries often find run-down parts of towns that have great buildings. Once a brewery moves in and refurbishes an old building, it reveals the innate promise of adjacent buildings to prospective renters.”

The very notion of “beer week” offers the food and drink community with an intriguing opportunity to incorporating a powerful promotional tool. Many such beer-themed weeks are held across America. They vary in size and scope, and range amid districts, cities and states, but conceptually, there is relative uniformity.

The idea is to educate and disseminate information about beer, and to enhance beer consciousness, with an ulterior motive of letting consumers know more about the establishments and people who make it all possible, especially now, in 2020, amid the challenges posed to us all by COVID.

As might be expected, the pieces for Louisville Beer Week 2020 are falling into place. The best way to know what’s happening is to direct your devices to the source.

Louisville Beer Week event page at Facebook

Louisville Beer Week main Fb page

Louisville Ale Trail (LBW’s presenter) at Facebook

And if Carlos Brito’s very identity is a mystery to you, good. That’s step one toward our collective improvement.

Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with more than 35 years of hands-on experience and expertise as a beer seller, restaurateur, and commentator. As the co-founder of New Albany’s Sportstime Pizza/Rich O’s Public House (which later became New Albanian Brewing Company) in the 1990s and early 2000s, 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.