Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Fifteen: A clash of titans (with Elephant Beer) in Copenhagen, 1987.
Returning briefly to our contemporary era from distant 1988, we find a calendar page has turned. It is 2023, and as oft times before, my reach has exceeded my grasp. Specifically, this ongoing account of one man’s career in beer is nowhere close to completion.
That’s on me. Documenting my past has been slow going, primarily because the present—including jobs at Pints&union, Common Haus Hall and Food & Dining Magazine—is keeping me busy. This is good, and I’m very grateful to be working when so many of my friends are nearing retirement.
Just as importantly, a few months back it finally occurred to me that what I’m doing with these sporadic “career in beer” essays is writing a book, albeit a little at a time. I’m a realist, and it’s a book unlikely to be published, and yet this realization hasn’t discouraged me from trying.
I’ve always wanted to write a book, and in order to do so, thousands of words are needed. I’m compiling them. Have I the discipline to finish the task? We’ll see, I suppose.
Those unexamined archives awaiting loving scrutiny in their dusty basement banker’s boxes, which begin collecting in earnest around 1990, have grown in importance concurrent with my heightened autobiographical ambitions. If I’m to conjure an actual book, I want to get it right, which suggests a strategy of “vague outline + concrete evidence = coherent narrative.”
Henceforth strictly speaking it’s “41 Years in Beer,” although for the sake of continuity the title will remain the same. I’ll continue to sketch the outline as I prepare for an exploratory descent into the subterranean depths. As such, the tale resumes.
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Jim Koch’s Samuel Adams Boston Lager, for decades the only decent beer to be found in the nation’s swill-choked airports, dates to 1984. I can’t remember exactly when this beer first became available in Indiana, or when Scoreboard Liquors started stocking it.
However, for a brief time we could get New Amsterdam from New York, maybe a couple of cases in all. I probably drank all the bottles myself.
And what of Sierra Nevada?
It was a brewery somewhere in California, and as far as I knew in 1988 it would remain there, forever out of reach, just like Anchor Steam (from...Read more
