Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 52: “Anheuser-Busch, Gone Home,” our classic 1997 victory lap.
I’m devoting a great many words to 1993 and 1994. There is a reason for the focus, because quite a lot was happening during these years.
Had Rich O’s been a rock and roll band, our very first chart-topping hit was about to come. On July 29, 1995, Susan Reigler’s highly favorable restaurant review (“A Beer Lover’s Dream”) hit the Louisville’s Courier-Journal newspaper’s Saturday Scene supplement.
The review opened a market across the river that we’d never counted on reaching in the first place. Business promptly doubled, remaining at this volume for a long while before settling into a sales range far higher than we’d ever known. The review boosted us to that elusive “next” level, which is a testament to the newspaper’s influence prior to print media’s decapitation at the hands of the internet.
Mirroring the usual reaction when a previously little-known entity becomes a “thing,” some people asked me about the Rich O’s “overnight” success story. There wasn’t one, and in fact, “overnight” is almost always a myth.
The rock band had been rehearsing, recording demos, playing juke joints and bar mitzvahs, and surviving on doses of instant ramen noodles, for many years before breaking through. Similarly, the O’Connell family members and certain long-term staffers had recorded eight years of pizzeria service when the 1995 review dropped; my beer-related contributions may have tipped the balance insofar as the review’s timing was concerned, but they’re the ones who did the heavy lifting.
Clearly 1993 and 1994 were years of frenetic activity preceding the breakthrough, setting the tone for an expansion of the beer selection, remodeling projects and various other innovations to follow.
As always, travel was the single greatest incubator of new ideas. Accordingly, our summer trip to Europe in ’94 would be an impetus for the forthcoming quantum leap in terms of the pub’s ambitions. It also was a very different type of European itinerary for me, involving planes and automobiles; trains for this journey were found mainly in Spain.
Having stumbled across a listing for Kutrubes Travel in Boston, a family-owned Balkan specialist dating to the early 1900s (and still in existence in 2024), my overarching preference was to visit the obscure nation of Albania. Swiss Air was the only reliable carrier servicing Tirana, and because Zürich was the point of embarkation, it meant we could tour Brauerei Hürlimann, creator...Read more
