Fill with mingled cream and amber,
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain
Quaintest thoughts—queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away;
What care I how time advances?
I am drinking ale today.
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)
A long while back at the Louisville Restaurants Forum, the eternally helpful electronic institution created and curated by Robin Garr (the inimitable dean of Louisville food and drink writers), a user posted a photo of a Louisville hotel restaurant menu from 1857.
For once, we witness a literally antebellum phenomenon.
Recently I found the apparent source of this photo at Duke University, and what still strikes me about this menu—technically a broadside, defined as “a sheet of paper printed on one side only, forming one large page”—is the sheer novelty of viewing a pre-Civil War imported beer list offered by a top eatery right here in River City.
166 years later, such amenities cannot always be assumed.
I still recall an outing to a high dollar Louisville steakhouse on an evening long after better beer had become an established fact, where we observed numerous patrons quaffing Miller Lite alongside their $60 slabs of beef. It took my breath away; if you’re prepared to drop a couple hundred on a meal, wouldn’t you drink decent wine?
If not, maybe a nice Chimay as substitute for the vino?
When I asked for the steak house’s beer list, a familiar litany was recited by the server: “We have all the beers: Bud, Bud Light, Silver Bullet,” etcetera, etcetera (and assuredly ad nauseam).
But imagine debarking from the steamboat in Louisville during the Buchanan administration, stowing your trunks in the Daniel Boone Suite at Louisville Hotel, and bounding downstairs to the restaurant to choose one (or maybe all) from this list of five highly rated imports, each of them differing from the other stylistically, and not a single low-calorie abomination to be found.
Guinness XXX Dublin Stout $0.37
In 1857 the world famous St. James Gate Brewery in Dublin was a mere two years away from celebrating its centennial, and was vastly experienced as an exporter.
It seems reasonable to assume that Guinness XXX Dublin Stout was not a lower-gravity, present use ale, but equivalent to the formulation we know today as Foreign Extra Stout, with a higher alcohol content and added hopping rates to withstand the rigors of shipping.
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