The Fall 2022 issue of Food & Dining Magazine (#75) is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online. Go here for a preview of the features, profiles and columns, with links to the new edition at issuu.
Ostracism was a particularly delightful aspect of democracy as practiced in ancient Athens. Bruce Clark, author of the wonderful book “Athens, City of Wisdom,” explains the premise:
At the start of each year, the electorate would vote on whether the atmosphere would be improved by throwing out one dislikeable character.
Now that’s progressive thinking. Had we been practicing ostracism in New Albany, I might be living in Bamberg by now. Sometimes a guy just needs a loving shove.
It’s easy to imagine crowds of Athenians in their tunics and cloaks, carefully inscribing their choices for expulsion on shards of pottery, tossing the ballots into a basket, and returning to a seat in the shade of an olive tree overlooking the Agora to share a wineskin or three with their closest aristocrats (alas, the plebeians couldn’t vote and were destined to sweep up afterwards).
However, it’s never dawned on me to think of ancient Athenians drinking beer as the inspiration to exclude their fellow citizens, even if it has been proven that fermented malt beverages existed in ancient Greece.
The archaeological finds indicating the presence of prehistoric beer in Greece were dated back to the end of the 3rd – early 2nd millennium B.C. These are ancient remains of herbs, sprouted cereal grains and fragments of ground cereal grains along with small masses, which are interpreted as brewing residues and found in the interior of the houses of two Bronze Age settlements.
Plainly wine has enjoyed better press coverage through the many epochs of Greek history, even retsina, the utterly delightful marriage of Greek vino and pine resin, a fusion perpetually scorned by oenophiles but joyfully embraced by corn fed Hoosier farm boys venturing abroad for the first time—just like me.
I recall falling in with a gang of thirsty Aussie and German backpackers on a ferry bound for Italy, and enjoying sunbaked hours together cross-legged in the ocean’s breeze on the boat’s peanut gallery of a deck.
What did I have to offer my worldly contemporaries when it came to advanced cultural knowledge? Very little, so instead I taught them how to play a familiar Hoosier collegiate drinking game, adapted on the spot as Drachma Bounce, using a metal camp cup and alternating portions of Retsina and Ouzo—either as penalty for winning, or reward for losing.
Naturally I’d rather have been drinking Greek beer in 1985, and might actually be doing so in 2022 as you read these words, because we’re in Athens right now, and these days there are many Greek beers, both craft and macro, from which to choose.
Modern brewing in Greece dates to the period just after Greece became independent of the Ottoman Empire in 1832 following a decade-long war of liberation. The new Mediterranean nation acquiesced to the persuasiveness of Europe’s empires, which paraphrased Frank Zappa by insisting that all real countries need a king in addition to beer and a football team.
So it was that a member of the Bavarian royal family set up court in Athens, soon to be followed by brewers and sausage makers. After all, all kings were not Bavarian, but all Bavarians (including their kings) needed beer and brats. Some things never change.
A Bavarian miner named Fix was among the early arrivals in Athens, intent on serving royalty by making money. He began dabbling in brewing, but it was his son Johann Karl Fix who founded the eponymous brewery in Athens in 1864.
By this point the Greek Royal Court had become Danish on grounds of Bavarian kingly ineptitude, but as we know Danes are beery to the core, and Fix the younger, being a well-read capitalist, began his pursuit of the new monarch’s favor. This quest resulted in the Fix brand becoming “official” purveyor to the royals, and subsequently a quasi-monopoly in Greek brewing for decades to come.
By the time of my 1985 visit to Greece, Fix was acknowledged as the must-drink Greek beer by all those who had preceded me on the backpacker’s circuit. But as I soon discovered, Fix no longer existed, having passed from the scene two years earlier following a multitude of setbacks.
The reasons for the decline of Fix in Greece were quite similar to those afflicting post-Prohibition family breweries in America. For one, bigger breweries (in Greece’s case, European multinationals) wanted a piece of the action and expended their resources to achieve it by hook or crook.
Also, the Fix family’s younger generations proved far less adept at brewery management than their elders had been. The Fix brewery also came to be seen as aligned with the right-wing military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 through 1974, and when the junta fell, paybacks were hell.
And so in 1985, international golden lager beers ruled the Greek market. Carlsberg, Amstel, Lowenbrau and Henninger are the ones I remember best, presumably all brewed under license at one or two industrially-scaled plants on the outskirts of Athens. I was young and budget-conscious at the time, and unchallenging golden-colored beers like these did what needed to be done at a very reasonable price point.
Still, it was disappointing to me that the much heralded Fix was gone. The beer itself may have been similar to every other golden lager on the market, but the imagery was uniquely Greek.
Happily, since 2010 the Fix brand has been revived in Greece. By the time you read this, I will have sampled one or more of them, albeit having long since dispensed with the romantic notions I’d have packed along with a few pairs of underwear 37 years ago. To carelessly mix metaphors, one might well come full circle, but he can never dip his toes in the same beer twice.
As an aside, one of our planned destinations in 2022 is the Athens Museum of Contemporary Art on Syngrou Avenue. The museum occupies a building belonging to the “new” Fix brewery, which went into service in 1965, and when I delved into Google Maps, I was surprised to learn that the Marble House Pension, where I stayed in 1985, is situated just a few short blocks away from the brewery-cum-museum. It’s testament yet again to the sheer ephemeral force of today’s internet.
As for Greek beer in the here and now, craft brewing has proven to be a growth industry during the half-dozen years following the country’s economic crisis. The prolific Greek-American travel writer Matt Barrett likes beer, and approaches the topic from a perspective that would fit like a glove with Louisville’s better beer community.
Beer in Athens
Where can you go for a large choice of Greek microbrews and imported beers and maybe some food to go with it? In Psiri there is Beer Time which is right on the corner at Iroon Square, right at the hub of the nighttime activity in the neighborhood. They have a large number of Greek microbrews and some Belgians and these individual beer kegs that sit on your table so you don’t have to ask the waiter every time you finish your beer. You just pour it yourself.
As it turns out, Beer Time is located just down the street from where we’re staying. I’ll let you know how it goes, but for now, a reading recommendation for those interested in learning more about Greece, with beer purely optional: The Colossus of Maroussi, by the iconic American writer Henry Miller (1891-1980). I read this book for the first time almost 40 years ago, and wouldn’t have enjoyed Greece as much without it.
For Miller, a writer renowned for bawdiness, to pen an entire book with nary an explicit mention of the horizontal arts will come as a surprise to any, and yet The Colossus of Maroussi is just that volume, written and published as World War II made ready to welcome the United States as a participating belligerent, and recounting Miller’s months-long holiday in Greece in 1939.
Miller offers some of his best pure writing in this book, describing Greek pastoral scenes and the country’s colorful people joyfully, without guile, his trademark glee in sensuousness and eroticism deployed not to titillate readers with sex, but to provide them with the imagined means to smell the flowers, taste the moussaka and feel the sea’s presence. Miller thought it was his best book, and in the sense of descriptive imagery, he may have been right.
Miller gets the coda:
There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human.
Roger Baylor is an educator, entrepreneur and innovator with 40 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 and Common Haus Hall in Jeffersonville. 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.
