Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Read Free Book Online

starters, it is a storied river, full of lore and color, known to the Old World since 1540 when Hernando De Soto came upon it, though there is no record of him drinking beer along its shores. Mark Twain, a man who was known to like his beer, wrote an entire book about his life on the river and most certainly drank beer along its shores. For all I knew, the Perfect Beer Joint might reside in Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. (Preview: It didn’t.)
    By contrast, an east-west alternative, following, say, Interstate 80 from Manhattan to San Francisco, didn’t seem as interesting. I have a theory about latitudinal homogenization, believing the predilections, tastes, and biases of the urban coasts travel all too easily along the great east-west hyper-corridors, spreading a kind of sameness that wouldn’t serve my quest. It’s probably occurred to you that you could get in a car in, say, Paramus, New Jersey, and drive coast to coast, stopping at the unavoidable shopping malls that crop up every three or four hours. You could visit a Gap or a T.G.I. Friday’s in every mall and you could see the same kind of people that you’d left behind … and you could arrive at the Pacific Ocean 3,000 miles later with no feeling that you’d gone anywhere at all. (I’m actually planning to try this one day. But it didn’t seem right for my beer quest.)
    On the other hand, the vast longitude of the Mississippi, meandering its way through ten states, seemed a lot more prospective. Scenic highways, small towns, a vast range in terrain, demographics, and climate. About 12 million people live in the 125 counties and parishes that border the river. I would begin in Minnesota among folk who, geographically speaking, are practically Canadians and by reputation descended from good beer-drinking Swedes and Germans. I would slide down soon enough into the Great Beer Belly of America, for, by lore at least, Midwesterners are presumed to be the mightiest of U.S. beer drinkers. I would travel through the heartland and land upon the shores of the King of Beers in St. Louis, for though the Budweiser people had shown only wary interest up to this point in talking to me about this book, I could at least visit the huge Anheuser-Busch brewery there as a tourist.
    What, I wondered, went on at the beer joint closest to the Bud plant? Would they serve Miller Lite?
    Then, I would push on down South, where two of my favorite cities, Memphis and New Orleans, beckoned. I was intrigued by the possibility of an Elvis-and-beer connection in Memphis, since a fair amount of beer drinking (among other things) was said to have gone on at Graceland, though there seems to be an enduring mystery about whether Elvis himself was fond of brew. Maybe Graceland would hold some clues.
    And I knew, by dint of having grown up near there, that New Orleans harbored perhaps the oldest continuously operating beer joint in the nation. And even if I didn’t find the Perfect Beer Joint (and as a man on an expense account, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t want to succeed too quickly), what better way to cut to the heart of beer passion and get an intense look at what Beer People were thinking (and drinking)?
    Beyond that, the beer joint as an institution, with its vaunted place in beer’s sociopolitical and commercial history, surely warranted further exploration. Clearly a New World derivative of the British public house or pub (and in some parts of the country, the German beer hall), the first licensed one opened in 1634 in colonial Boston. By the time the colonies had worked themselves up into the lather of revolution 140 or so years later, the taverns of the would-be nation were bubbling with sentiment for independence. Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams (the patriot and brewer for whom Jim Koch at Boston Beer named his brew), James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson were big fans of the early American beer joint; indeed,