Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II, Part 43): Facing the music at Rich O’s in 1992.
By the late summer of 1992, a routine had settled into place at Rich O’s BBQ, shortly to become a Public House, and the predecessor of today’s New Albanian Brewing Company.
Amy worked mostly from the kitchen, concentrating on solidifying her BBQ menu, while Sportstime’s pizza remained available on both “sides” (dining areas) of the business. I mostly waited tables at Rich O’s and poured beers, although there was no bartender in the familiar sense, and perhaps this requires an explanation.
The haphazard evolution of our pub business resulted in the scattershot addition of keg boxes, walk-ins, serving tanks and (for a while) even a hand-pull for cask-conditioned ale, resulting in a complete organizational anomaly by prevailing restaurant design and management standards, because servers poured their own beers and conveyed them to guests; three decades later, they still do.
Obviously the two of us had support and assistance from the pizzeria’s employees, and yet at the beginning of my tenure we did the bulk of the daily work ourselves. Meals and beers came straight off the company teat with little attempt to keep track of the profits we were consuming. As owners, we accepted our share of tips for the work we did, although as time passed and we could afford to pay ourselves and others, this changed.
In the interim, there were various creative ways of alchemizing cash to pay our living expenses, including stealing from ourselves. I’m struck by nostalgia, as those were the last days when cash was king, and credit cards accounted for far less than 50% of payments rendered. Good times, indeed.
My objective was to gradually bulk up the beer list, beginning with those brands and their wholesalers with whom I was already familiar from Scoreboard Liquors. As we’ve seen, Guinness was the first draft beer, joined later in 1992 by Carlsberg (which soon went out of circulation and yielded to the newly available Pilsner Urquell in 1993), followed by the “middle tap” (rotating), also in early 1993. Cans were almost unknown for the beers I chose to sell, and so a bottle list slowly evolved.
For so long as I was the part-owner of a pub, my preferred job title of “publican” made perfect sense. Later, when my tenure at NABC concluded and I was working at the Pints&union pub in New Albany (2018-23),...Read more