Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Nine: The point of know return.
It has taken me a long while to understand that it usually takes me a long while.
To understand.
I’m a slow learner and a late bloomer. A few dollops of good luck have helped. Nowadays, looking back, it seems that those times when I found myself genuinely ahead of “the curve” were few and far between.
Thankfully beer was one of those rare occasions.
The “40 Years in Beer” series recalls how my inadvertent career in beer came to be. There were very few “eureka!” moments; rather, dozens of small, incremental insights accumulated to produce a pathway, beginning during the 1980s and continuing to the present day.
At the beginning in Louisville and Southern Indiana there weren’t very many of us playing the good beer game. We made up the rules as we went along, and after a while I became good at it. Consequently I’m proud to have been out in front of something, even if it didn’t happen all that often.
It’s August of 1985. I’ve returned from my first journey to Europe flat broke. Employment at Scoreboard Liquors as an aspiring peddler of imported beers resumed, and it was back to work evenings and Saturday. Soon the public schools were back in session, and substitute teaching began anew.
As yet I entertained no thoughts of a career, in beer or otherwise. Had I been asked about the prospects of drinking beer for a living, I’d have been unable to visualize any, apart from the eternal contrarian inside me slowly coming to grasp that if 95% of American beer drinkers preferred mass-market brands, they comprised a huge pool of potential converts waiting to be shown past the Lite, with remunerative odds far greater than opting to sell insurance.
Seriously, can you imagine me, trying to sell insurance?
Europe changed everything, just as I’d hoped it would. In terms of beer, almost everywhere I went there was beer I liked, usually at an affordable price (my stay in Scandinavia was brief for a reason).
I’d visited the Guinness (Ireland), Carlsberg (Denmark) and Hansa (Norway) breweries, reveled in real German beer halls, sniffed around the mysterious Belgian ale periphery, and enjoyed an inaugural exposure to continental beer and brewing culture.
It seemed that in Europe, everyday life and beer culture were mutually reinforcing. The more a Hoosier abroad understood them, the better it got, and for someone like me...Read more
