Remember that clichéd caricature?
No, not the Facebook meme republished weekly by your conservative uncle – you know, that bloviating elderly fascist who blames President Obama for his inflamed hemorrhoid – but the familiar cartoon depicting a wide-eyed, energetic baby sauntering into a new year, while the grizzled old man shuffles shakily … perhaps even gratefully … off stage, and into oblivion.
The image bears a considerable ring of truth. Every year is the same, and I feel it again: Namely, overwhelming exhaustion. It’s all about arriving at another calendar’s end on the verge of total collapse, and then somehow managing to get up off the floor on January 1, brush off the crumbs, shards and debris, and jump back into the competitive scrum.
This tiresome analogy applies to me personally, and to New Albanian Brewing Company as an entity. Year in, year out; nothing ever seems to change, and there’s something both enriching and abjectly delusional about the sheer consistency of it all.
Since the advent of NABC’s brewing operation in 2002, and especially since our 2009 system upgrade at Bank Street Brewhouse, my years in beer seldom have varied. January is all about recovering from the previous year, and then Gravity Head sucks all the air from the room. By April, outdoor beer event season is underway, and it doesn’t even begin to wane until late October. There’ll be a breather for a month or so before Thanksgiving, followed by a pell-mell rush through the Christmas season of über materialism.
Rinse … and repeat.
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Once upon a time, I’d consider the high points of my year in beer in terms of a mighty fine beer dinner, an especially memorable pint or a thought-provoking beer journey. These still occur, but I’ve long since refrained from keeping score; been there, done that, and lists are better compiled as a grocery visit aide than wielded like a tire iron to garner street cred. In 2013, I had uniformly great beers at home, work and on the road; at session strength or extreme lunacy; and from local breweries as well as local breweries, since I can’t see the merit of coveting Trojan Geese at this advanced point.
The reality is that my working life has changed drastically in recent years, and making sense of it is my newest, most baffling daily hobby. If you think swapping your left nut to hoard Pliny the Welder is hard, then try being a brewery owner using a scratched plastic Cracker Jack magnifying glass to dispel the pea soup fog of confusion as it shrouds the American craft beer landscape.
Learning the Cyrillic alphabet is easy; insane clown marketplaces, not so much.
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It wasn’t always like this.
From 1992 through 2002, my duties as Publican were entirely devoted to identifying, sourcing, purchasing and serving beer – good, better, imported, microbrewed and finally “craft “beer, always brewed by someone else, somewhere else. We were fairly good at it, yet there was a palpable glass ceiling, and it made me crazy.
Stray collaborations aside (precious few actually are collaborative, anyway), the 1,500 guest beers poured at the Public House since its inception were, and remain, the fruition in liquid form of ideas and concepts conceived by others. Being a middle man is only half the game. We bought and resold great beers; however, they were not ours.
When NABC finally began brewing in 2002, I only tenuously grasped the implications and immensity of the reinvention lying ahead. It involved drastic re-education, both in the company and of our customer base. The brewing system was small, we were inexperienced, and progress was modest. Our beers first had to become good enough to stand alongside the guests; eventually, they were, and so we came to the point of deciding to go all-in, and make NABC beer the focal point of NABC as a food and drinks company.
In 2012, draft NABC beers outsold guest drafts at the Pizzeria & Public House for the very first time. Given that guest drafts are not served at all at Bank Street Brewhouse, the fact of our beers becoming good enough to act as drawing cards and carry their weight meant we’d come a very long way, indeed. The warm glow lasted for about as long as it takes to pound back a session ale, before realizing we had just as far to go, in a never-ending cycle.
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But what really changed me during the past decade were systems of thought outside the insular world of beer. Belatedly, I began to grasp the tenets of economic localism, and their implications for any independent small business struggling to survive in a rigged economic system of oligarchs, chain-think, franchise-fluff and mass-market envy. It required foundational thinking on a grassroots level, disassembling myths that die awfully hard, and doing oodles of homework on the fundamentals of a topic that my business generally had tended to espouse, even if we had no idea why.
The push-back wasn’t long in coming. As a friend noted recently on Facebook:
There is a segment of society that sees local as lesser quality, and always will.
In 2013, my year in beer was all about coming to grips with this notion, confronting my incredulity, and observing how it was being manifested in the cohort I’d always assumed would be NABC’s target audience. It constituted a sobering lesson. While I’d heard similar sentiments directed at localism apart from beer, hearing them applied to local beer stopped me in my tracks.
Thus, the conundrum: Is this the world we – no, I – created?
Inescapably, the answer is yes. Guilty as self-charged. For many years, I joyfully marketed local beer-making ideals from other localities, whether Michigan, Belgium or Katmandu, on the basis of their being obviously superior to ours in metro Louisville; at the time, all we had at home was mass-market beer brewed in factories that might have been used to fabricate pet shampoo if the profit margins were higher.
Once small breweries began appearing in Louisville during the 1990s, I did my level best to support them at the pub whenever possible. In terms of economic localism, this flowering represented a shift – and if shift could happen in Louisville, it was possible in New Albany, too. I began to see the possibilities.
But there always was a palpable caveat pushing back, wasn’t there? Even as large numbers of our customers began drinking NABC beer, even when guest alternatives were available, others continued thinking: Locally made items always will be of lesser quality … locally made items will never have the implied scarcity value of ones produced elsewhere … localism is just a shell game deployed by pitiful schmucks unable to compete with the big kids.
Perhaps little can be done to dispel craft beer’s snobby, narcissistic streak, so all that’s left for me is to continue defining and redefining personal and business goals, and working hard. Accordingly, going into 2014, my beer aims are more localism, not less; more place-making, not less; and more community-building among the like-minded, not less.
I believe there is a potential craft beer market unimpressed with the pontifications of the priestly caste, one also is willing to ante at the typically higher price point of artisan brewers precisely because the craft is both evident and localized.
I believe this market sees a far broader picture, and already supports it in other areas, whether in the realm of edibles or arts.
I believe in atoning for my own past faults by helping create a new world. To quote an oft-cited paraphrasing of Albert Einstein:
“The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
Anything’s possible, right?
