Hip Hops: Beer to go with your Thanksgiving meal … in 2005

Hip Hops: Beer to go with your Thanksgiving meal … in 2005

Revisiting one’s past scribblings can be enlightening or embarrassing. Puzzlement can ensue: what was I trying (and succeeding, or failing) to say?

This act of willful rereading can cross cosmic boundaries and produce the hangover-like effect of existential angst. How can it have been 17 years since these words were written? What was it like to be in my 40s? What’s the meaning of life, anyway?

The following column was written in 2005 and published at my NA Confidential and The Potable Curmudgeon blogs (my beer-dentity at the time was “Potable Curmudgeon”). Of the seven family members convening at Lancaster’s, three are gone. So is the restaurant itself, first rendered irrelevant by changing tastes, then demolished to make way for “luxury” housing.

The South Side Inn barely outlived the column; at the end, even the green beans were gray. Today the space functions as Boomtown Kitchen after a lengthy run as Big Four Burgers + Beer.

The word “microbrews” appears here, and not in an ironic sense. There would be a decade ahead of me as co-owner of the New Albanian Brewing Company; we’d started brewing in 2002, and later would expand prduction of our own “microbrews” to Bank Street Brewhouse (the subsequent contraction...Read more