Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II, Part 42): Barr built the bar, and the Guinness began pouring.
Music?
That’s right, music.
After all, this series is meant to be autobiographical.
At the risk of pretentiousness, what I’m doing here is writing a book about me, a little at a time, and you are reading the essays that eventually will revert to being rough drafts, then rewritten, and hopefully combined into something bigger.
Beer certainly provides a unifying theme to the exercise, and undeniably beer has been the focus of my life for a good long while. It might still be, albeit not as pervasively as before. Knowledge itself never really goes out of fashion, although receptivity to certain bits of knowledge surely does, which has the lamentable effect of marginalizing the knowledgeable (in short, welcome to the decrepit condition of “beer knowledge” in 2024).
The part that matters most to me is that throughout a beer-themed adult life, I’ve never consumed, sold or marketed beer in a simplistic vacuum, to the exclusion of my other interests, like history, travel, books, walks, geography, food, bike rides – and music.
Rather, my aim has always been to unify these interests. I find them better together.
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In the beginning at Rich O’s BBQ, soon to be refashioned into Rich O’s Public House (and later adopting the New Albanian Brewing Company moniker), it became my goal to weave these obsessions into a tapestry – a demonstrable style, both personally and as a component of the overall pub experience.
Obviously it was a pub, not a classroom, although there could always be little reminders here and there, perhaps most noticeably in a plethora of pictures, photos and wall hangings, each of them capable of becoming its own “teaching moment.”
Travel, apart from our own household journeys, eventually was facilitated in the form of beer trips to Europe that I organized for pub patrons and FOSSILS club members (1995 through 2004), which by the year 2000 had evolved into “beercycling” expeditions, with the finale coming in 2008.
In this vein, in 1992 I sensed an evolving inner awareness (read: sheer terror) that the development of a personal style – a part, a role, a persona – was part and parcel of the Rich O’s job description, inducing an urgency to develop my personal face to the public as...Read more