Your friendly columnist regards Vienna as one of his favorite cities, an assessment verified by The Economist in its annual “world’s most livable cities” feature, wherein the Austrian capital can be relied upon to win, place or show.
In terms of beer and brewing, it cannot be said that Vienna was a top European destination in 1985, the first year I visited. It wasn’t Munich; then again, few locales are.
However, on that inaugural voyage, Vienna was my first real taste of Central European “Germannness.” Unbeknownst to me, I was about to embark on a travel career of lingering fascination with late-period Habsburgs, and Vienna 101 was just the ticket.
It’s been 20 years since my last Viennese idyll, an absence being rectified as you read. In celebration and commemoration, the following is an installment from my 40 Years in Beer series, repeated here verbatim.
It was 1991, and I was bumming around my favorite haunts prior to decamping for Slovakia, and a gig teaching English. The Brahaus Nussdorf is gone, along with my youth. But new memories are waiting.
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In early 1991, I deigned to meet with the publisher of the New Albany Tribune, my hometown newspaper, to pitch a transformative idea—at least for me.
It’s not entirely clear in retrospect whether inspiration, desperation or even perspiration compelled me to approach the figurehead of a moribund entity that I’d never before hesitated to criticize—on occasion somewhat savagely—for its parochially limited horizons and characteristically low common denominators (“but Roger, we have no choice except to write at a 3rd grade level, believe me”), but nonetheless, I plunged straight into the heart of darkness and proposed that I be engaged to write dispatches from Europe for publication as guest columns in the ‘Bune (it’s what my friend Joe K., an ex-employee, called it).
To my mild surprise, the publisher agreed.
To no one’s surprise, he didn’t offer to actually pay me.
Nonetheless convincing myself that the exposure might prove useful in inflicting my opinions on others, I allowed the functionary to accept my offer.
Since there was no guarantee that I’d have access to a typewriter while overseas, the dispatches were to be written in longhand—or more accurately, I’d print them, having rejected cursive since the 4th grade, when I staged a brief hunger strike on soya burger day to protest cursive’s innate tyranny. The...Read more
