By: Roger Baylor
Photos by: Roger Baylor & Matt Johnson
In 1984, I was half-heartedly watching the Summer Olympics on television when one of the American athletes sidestepped the reigning Cold War patriotic mood, remarking to a broadcaster that he considered himself to be “a citizen of the universe.”
This sentiment made an abiding impression on me, primarily because it informed a growing interest in beer. After all, there was very little of interest about American beer at the time, and my taste buds were dallying abroad.
I had acquired an entry-level taste for the usual beer suspects, but boredom soon set in. Praise for Schlitz or Stroh’s meant only that they didn’t taste quite as bland and indifferent as their peers – and I wanted to know why.
History provided an answer. America’s post-Prohibition marketplace was stripped bare of competition, producing a handful of monopolistic brewing monoliths that printed money by manufacturing beer as a standardized commodity to be floor-stacked in supermarkets, while the remaining smaller family-owned legacy brands tried desperately to stay alive amid economies of scale-tilted heavily against them.
Fewer than 100 American breweries were in existence when I finished college in 1982, and brewing industry analysts predicted that by 1990 there’d likely be only two or three huge brewing conglomerates left to share the entire American market. Nothing personal, they said, it’s just capitalism.
Except that I did take it personally, and I responded by looking outward, to that wider beer universe – hence the resonance of the Olympian’s words. After all, capitalism also allowed for imported beers, and the choice was simple: peace with Light, Lighter, or Lightest, or opt for Guinness Stout (Ireland), Bass Pale Ale (Great Britain) or DAB Dark (Germany).
My evolving position was unequivocal. Brewing had retained its traditional artisanal status in America until Prohibition, which catastrophically devalued beer as art, if not commerce at the stock exchange. However, brewing traditions survived at least somewhat intact in the Old World, and while imported beers of the period admittedly weren’t always the freshest, even when muted by age they spoke to broader aspects of beer culture missing here at home.
As a passport-carrying beer citizen of the universe, I drank European whenever possible, right up until something entirely unexpected happened, because as it turned out, there were other Americans just as stubborn as me. By the mid-1980s my compatriots on the coasts, and in places like Colorado and the Upper Midwest, were breathing life into a revival of Old World ways in beer and brewing.
These revolutionaries were determined that our nation might have great beer again, and I found myself joining their ranks after stumbling serendipitously into the beer business, first as a package store clerk and later by joining the Southern Indiana business now known as New Albanian Brewing Company.
As a purveyor, I sought to bring a wider universe of beer to my hometown, bonding with folks who’d traveled or homebrewed, and sharing books written by Michael Jackson, an English journalist known as “The Beer Hunter.” During the 1990’s, “microbrewing” at last became established here in Louisville, most notably at the original Bluegrass Brewing Company (BBC) in St. Matthews, which became my “local” even though I lived 15 miles away in Indiana.
BBC and other American beer makers subsequently proliferated, recapturing the grassroots essence of brewing and absorbing European lessons. Three decades later, they’re paying it forward. I’ve visited cities in Estonia, Finland, Italy, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Malta, Germany and France in recent years and found American-style IPAs, kettle sours and pastry stouts in each – and not only at specialty beer bars, either.
I can be as patriotic as the next citizen of the beer universe, and vindication is sweet upon surveying the 9,500 or so American breweries operational in 2024. It seems the internationalization of Planet Craft Beer (now the ideas travel both directions) has vastly exceeded Karl Marx’s vision for communism’s potential reach, if still lagging behind the global ubiquity of atrocious fast food burgers.
Still, the fact that beer and burgers cross paths in places like Uruguay or Sri Lanka is something to celebrate. Or is it? Although brewing dates to the very dawn of civilization, it has become associated with Western history these past few centuries. But what about the rest of the beer universe?
Consider these Indigenous beers: Chicha, Tiswin, Mbege, Umqombothi, Pombe, Chagga and Tesguino. Tiswin is fermented from maize or saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert. Bananas are fermented by the Chaggas and Tanzanie peoples to make Mbege, and Umqombothi is South African maize and sorghum beer (pombe, made from millet, is similar).
Granted, brewing as most of us know it today derives from methodologies perfected in Europe, and the “universals” that beer enthusiasts like me were striving to explore 30 years ago are, in retrospect, more painfully narrow than we understood. There was much we didn’t know, but now we do, and excuses for failing to broaden craft beer’s reach beyond its majority white male base are long past their sell-by dates.
Craft beer has been a rousing success, and yet the genre too often remains confined within a limited social geography, even as we accept that in nature, diversity is a certain prerequisite for survival. This is a fact that America’s 9,500 breweries (and counting) ignore to their ultimate detriment, and my regret for having possessed an imperfect understanding of diversity’s significance for beer during my period of brewery ownership is the reason why I’m writing these words. I worry that I didn’t do enough.
The Olympics return on July 24, reminding me again of my universal beer citizenship. With or without a beer in hand, I propose that diversity, equity and inclusion are goals worth pursuing in everyday life as well as beer business plans. Beer is about people, full stop; let’s all enjoy better beer, and make this tent bigger and more welcoming.
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