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 proved to be my own professional Waterloo).
But the fact that my Thanksgiving thoughts on beer and food 17 years ago were overwhelmingly Euro-centric (and non-IPA-ish) points to an essential truth about my proclivities. They’re my first love in beer, and remain such today. I’m a traditionalist. It’s who I am as a beer-loving individual, and what I’ve always been best at doing as it pertains to business and teaching.
And, needless to say, I still detest Miller Lite from the very depths of my soul. Here’s the column from Thursday, November 24, 2005. Not a word has been changed, although I added a link.
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Beer to go with your Thanksgiving meal.
At noon today, my wife, my mother, two aunts, one uncle, a cousin and the Curmudgeon gathered for a holiday buffet meal of turkey and the familiar fixings, served within the venerable confines of Tommy Lancaster’s Restaurant, a downtown New Albany institution that might have been considered a trendsetter during the Kennedy administration and hasn’t done much to alter this time-tested winning formula ever since.
But that’s all well and good, and not to be construed as criticism. Tommy’s does what it does, just like downtown New Albany’s other hoary survivor, the South...Read more
