“One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary… The enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.”
— John Jay Chapman, American author (1862-1933)
When I began the present position as F & D’s digital editor in 2019, among my first coherent decisions was to try to post food and drink news on a daily basis, weekends included.
After all, fundamental consistency matters when it comes to news, and previously we’d been a tad scattershot in our delivery. The key word in this instance is “try,” as I also resolved to borrow the title of my quarterly print column about beer and transfer it to digital slot, henceforth a weekly dose of “Hip Hops.”
In truth, I’d have preferred reverting to one of my previous identities: “The Potable Curmudgeon,” or maybe “Beers with a Socialist,” but in truth it didn’t matter all that much to me. Five years later, what I’ve learned is that even with sufficient time on my hands (there’s another story), it hasn’t always been easy to manage 52 yearly columns about beer — at least the way I’d like to structure them.
Granted, there was a time when the novelty of local brewing merited commentary about the majority of local brewery events, tastings, releases and tappings; however, hereabouts Louisville Ale Trail performs this function, and moreover, grassroots craft beer seems to have arrived at a perilous juncture wherein fewer brewery events than ever before actually have to do with beer.
In turn, this is because the contemporary taproom model of brewery operation means that breweries must sell as much beer as possible from their own premises in the absence of distribution amid an impossibly overcrowded marketplace. Not only this, but their square footage must generate revenue of any sort; witness the sad advent of pitiable abominations like “handcrafted: hard seltzer.
In short, craft brewing used to be about being different from everyone else, and now it requires being pretty much the same as every other bar in town, and if the reasons to visit Brewery X and spend money there have nothing whatever to do with Brewery X’s beers, so be it.
This makes me want to scream, but alas, I digress. Shall we pop the top on a few PBRs and commiserate?
No. Not ever. PBR is...Read more
