I fly to America every other month on average. I have been doing this for more than 20 years, and have visited every state. I come here for the beer … and interviewers still don’t believe me.
— Michael Jackson, 2001
We return to Michael Jackson (1942-2007), a bewhiskered, professorial Yorkshireman in spectacles, wearing a succession of loud beer-themed neckties. He was equally proud of his working class English roots and a grandfather’s Lithuanian Jewish heritage, the latter periodically referenced by nods to Baltic Porter’s exotic hinterlands.
He introduced Belgian ale to the world, and Belgian brewers to each other. Most importantly, he popularized a taxonomy of beer styles, and while this is a subject for augmentation, revision and seemingly endless current debate, it’s hard to imagine contemporary beer and brewing without such a conceptual framework.
Lest there be any confusion (really, could there be?), I’m speaking here of Jackson the accomplished journalist and pioneering beer writer, who wasn’t at all perturbed by the existence of a far better known American musical namesake.
An episode of The Beer Hunter, his essential 1989 television series, began with the host wearing a white glove to inform viewers that while his name might be Michael Jackson, he neither sang nor drank Pepsi, but wrote about beer.
In autumn of 1994, it was revealed that Michael Jackson would be making a day-long stopover in Louisville during the course of an ongoing journey through the United States. He was examining beers and breweries emerging from the burgeoning American “microbrewing” movement, then numbering just over 500 breweries nationwide, the bulk of them concentrated in New England, the upper Midwest, Colorado and the West Coast.
Two breweries existed in Louisville in 1994: The Silo Microbrewery, founded in 1992 at 630 Barret Avenue (permanently closed in 1997), and Bluegrass Brewing Company’s original flagship location at 3929 Shelbyville Road, which opened in 1993 and shuttered in 2017, although at present, BBC still brews at its Third & Main restaurant downtown.
As we’ve seen, Louisville’s two popular homebrew clubs were Louisville Grain and Extract Research Society (L.A.G.E.R.S., founded in 1989), and Fermenters of Special...Read more
