Last week I observed that in 2025…
Maine, with only 1,414,874 residents (42nd) had 157 breweries (21st), or 14.2 per capita (2nd). That’s right. Second ― to Vermont nearby, which has 15.4 breweries per capita.
When I wrote these words prior to our vacation departure, I knew we’d be visiting Maine. However, Vermont wasn’t on the itinerary.
We originally planned three seaside evenings in Marblehead, up the coast from Boston and only a few miles from Notch Brewing Company in Salem, which just might be the worldwide leader in session beer consciousness.
Notch specializes in highly drinkable, lower-ABV artisan beers (typically 4.5% ABV or less) inspired by centuries-old traditions from the Czech Republic, Germany, England, and Belgium.
Alas, the approach of the weekend nor’easter encouraged a rethink, and we ended up staying shoulder-season in a ski lodge in the Green Mountains of Vermont for a spate of ideal autumn weather, foliage and hospitality. Our hosts were gems.
My Vermont beer observations were unscientific, and yet it seemed that the number of establishments I saw leading with “craft beer” vastly outnumbered those boasting “coldest Mich Ultra in town,” and the tally wasn’t even close.
One might argue that this is primarily about tourism, and I’m sure this tracks to an extent, but when we had lunch at the Windsor, Vermont location of Boston’s venerable Harpoon Brewing (it is located at the former site of Catamount, a 90s-era favorite of mine), I briefly surveyed license plates. 90% of them were from Vermont.
The place was packed inside and out for lunch on a Friday, many with preschoolers in tow, and assuredly, at 66, I was the oldest person drinking and dining.
To be sure, statistically speaking, the craft beer downturn has affected both Vermont and Maine.
However, what I spied in there (and in New Hampshire) was something that I firmly believe is cultural in basis. Perhaps it has to do with longer traditions of self-reliant “buy local” thinking; whatever it is, Kentuckiana doesn’t feel quite the same to me as Burlington.
Then again, I could be full of “it.” Before indulging a rant, consider this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Accordingly, my closing sermon for the month of September, from the pulpit of the First Cathedral of the Fermentation Byproduct
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It has been 44 years since I became enamored of the notion that beer could be much more, and far better, than the watery substance I grew up in SoIN learning to only barely tolerate, even before I was of legal age to purchase it.
It was a Brit, Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson, who said is best: “The pursuit of the perfect pint should last a lifetime.”
What this always implied, at least to me, was an implicit acceptance that while perfection is impossible (the words “to perfection” on a restaurant menu should send us elsewhere to a more honest eatery), it’s quite likely that a solid pint of cool (not cold) cask-conditioned Ordinary Bitter consumed at an accommodating seaside pub on a warm spring afternoon might come mighty close.
But it won’t be perfect. Accordingly, the search continues.
Speaking as a philosophy major with almost enough European history credits for a minor, I’ve probably long since combined Jackson with Diogenes … shaken, not stirred.
Diogenes of Sinope (l. c. 404-323 BCE) was a Greek Cynic philosopher best known for holding a lantern (or candle) to the faces of the citizens of Athens, earnestly searching for an honest man. He rejected the concept of “manners” as a lie and advocated complete truthfulness at all times and under any circumstance.
Indeed.
For me, BudMillerCoors was (and remains) a flagrant, mass-produced lie designed to appease shareholders, not Joe Sixpack. Meanwhile, pursuit of the perfect pint meant a search for authenticity in beer and brewing. For all I know, it might lead to a cobbled-together homebrewing kit on a mountaintop in Bolivia.
Probably during the 1980s, and surely by the 1990s, the biggest chunk of my professional career, as well as a sizeable bit of my private life, became living this quest for the best that beer can be.
I plead nolo contendere to the charge that reducing pollution, curing cancer, resolving world hunger, banning hyper-cars and kneecapping fascists are worthy crusades that dwarf in significance what I’ve chosen to pursue in life.
But I was raised according to an axiom credited to Joe “String Music” Dean, a basketball lifer as player, coach and commentator, who attended high school in New Albany. Dean’s advice, paraphrased: “Whatever you choose to do, however humble, just try to be the best at it.”
If there is any such thing as an eternal approximation of beer, symbolic or metaphorical, perhaps even spiritual, then this is what I’ve embraced. It doesn’t matter that I’m a parish priest, and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. a stand-in for the Vatican.
I locate those of like mind, people who “get” that the beer belief system we espouse is worth defending. Then we advocate for our segment.
In truth, advocating for my segment (better beer) has often been to my own detriment. The Pints&union portfolio (2018 – 2023) is a prominent example, seeing as my beer program was so aesthetically accomplished and financially fruitful that what it got me was fired, because the owner’s cherished goal of a nationally recognized “craft cocktail” program kept sinking like the Titanic.
Apologize for making him money with a world class beer list?
Nope. Won’t happen. I was an influencer before the term was cheapened into a flagrant expletive.
While I’m at it, I’m seldom bothered that 200-million-plus Americans routinely disagree with me.
I’m an atheist in the Bible Belt, a left-winger (to the left of Vermont’s Bernie Sanders) among braying conservatives (to the right of Attila the Hun), a fellow who listens to classical music amid the ersatz twang of country music and prefers pickled herring on rye toast for breakfast rather than bacon.
I read ― actual books, not backlit screens. I watch documentaries, not television, or the amorphous “content” of our benighted age. I’ve never been to Las Vegas, nor made bets in any tawdry casino, anywhere in the world.
Branson? Hardly. My next visit to a Disney installation will be my first. Give me Bamberg, Poperinge, or Split, though Porto is awesome, too, even with Super Bock as the primary beer choice.
Above all, my quest for the perfect pint has led me to value education. What did I do during all those years at the Public House?
I taught school, that’s what.
Craft beer’s single biggest mistake during the era of “market correction” has been to abandon teaching. It’s what I’ve tried my best to do, always, and if it means the scars and scabs have left me unwilling (unable?) to suffer foolishness, so be it.
Beer needs to be ice cold?
Nope. Just admit that freezing it means you really don’t want to taste beer.
Beer needs to be flavored with yams, Jolly Ranchers and coffee beans defecated by a civet?
No, it doesn’t. It can be beer, according to a taxonomy that embraces numerous, tasty and historically-derived styles. Can you manage to brew an English Mild or Abbey Ale, please? Those are better tests of brewing than Hard Kumquat Kombucha, anyway.
Beer choices must reflect the diminishing knowledge base of younger customers who didn’t believe in beer from the start?
I’m tempted to agree and say “let ‘em drink non-alcoholic flavored malt beverages; they deserve the profound disappointment,” but I won’t. How on earth can they be expected to know anything when we haven’t taught them?
None of us emerged from the womb understanding the difference between doppelbock and IPA (malt versus hops, flavor profiles, etc.)
If all this seems strident and off-putting, all I can do is shrug. I’ve been a complete ass about beer since Reagan was president precisely because it’s what I chose to be good at doing, and bad actors within my chosen field make me crazy. When craft brewers praise miserable dreck like High Life or PBR, it’s not brutal honesty.
It’s history’s greatest example of self-owning.
Okay; I’m exhausted.
Maybe next time I’ll address a pressing question: Why is it that avant garde mixologists who open their own bars invariably have embarrassingly subpar beer lists?
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Previously at Hip Hops:
Hip Hops: Alan Pugsley, Peter Austin and that pre-NEIPA, NE state of mind (and brewing)
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 44 years of beer business experience in metropolitan Louisville as a bartender, package store clerk, brewery owner, restaurateur, writer, traveler, polemicist, homebrewing club founder, tour operator and all-purpose contrarian.
As a co-owner (1990 – 2018) of New Albanian Brewing Company Pizzeria & Public House in New Albany, Indiana – founded in 1987, 1992, 2002 and 2009 – Roger played a seminal role in metro Louisville’s contemporary beer renaissance. He was beer director at Pints&union in New Albany from 2018 through 2023.
Roger’s “Hip Hops” columns on beer-related subjects have been a fixture since 2005 in Food & Dining Magazine, where he currently serves as associate editor and contributor. He is a former columnist at both the New Albany Tribune and LEO Weekly, and founder of the NA Confidential blog (2004 – 2020). Visit RogerBaylor.com for more.
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