Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 69: Spring Break in 1997 with the classic Central European brewers.
Apparently 1997 was a stable year at Rich O’s Public House and Sportstime Pizza, for had there not been sufficient cash flow and staffing, my travel schedule would have been considerably less expansive.
As it stood, after five years I finally was able to settle into a getaway routine.
- March: Czech Republic and Bavaria for “spring break” (link)
- August: Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania
- October: Denver, Colorado for the 1997 Great American Beer Festival (G.A.B.F.)
- Whenever humanly possible: Louisville, by car, to patronize Bluegrass Brewing Company (B.B.C.)
I refer somewhat hazily to 1997, 1998 and 2000 as the “G.A.B.F. Years,” providing an opportunity to emerge from the Southern Indiana backwoods, jet off to Denver, and become acquainted with a wider world of better American beer in a city where the downtown breweries alone outnumbered the entire “Kentuckiana” region.
These brief but frenetic stays in downtown Denver also were less complicated to arrange than my typically labyrinthine itineraries in Europe, just Louisville to Denver with a change in Dallas; book a hotel room; and acquire G.A.B.F. tickets via BBC’s bountiful hospitality — except in 2000, when I had press credentials thanks to the alternative newspaper Louisville Eccentric Observer, to which I contributed a column.
My G.A.B.F. visits were certainly enjoyable, but three of them proved to be enough, and I haven’t been tempted to return in all the years since.
“Craft” beer’s largest annual soiree had few logistical complications, and yet I’ve never met an instance of relative simplicity that didn’t seem appropriate for root-and-branch redefining into something far more doctrinal, and the G.A.B.F. was no exception to this rule.
The G.A.B.F. incubated a fair share of revolutionary ideology — and don’t you dare lift an eyebrow at this revelation. Attendance rendered me contentious, and in 1997 the contentiousness I was harboring at any given moment tended to be sublimated (successfully or not) in the pages of Walking the Dog, the official newsletter of F.O.S.S.I.L.S.
I’ve already mentioned G.A.B.F. 2000 in the context of my chat with Michael Jackson.
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 57: Beer writer Michael Jackson’s reaction to the Red Room at the Public House (1994)
