Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

Jefferson is said to have written some of the Declaration of Independence over pints of ale in Philadelphia’s Indian Queen Tavern. Around the same time, in the very same city, military folk plotted how to best structure and equip an outfit to be called the Continental Marines as they drank pints in the Tun Tavern. The organization grew into the U.S. Marine Corps. I’ve never met a marine, active or retired (including my father), who wasn’t universally proud that the Corps was born in a beer joint.
    The beer joint also has historically been the main commercial lifeline of America’s brewers. Until the concept of mass merchandising, chain supermarkets, and convenience stores swept America after World War II, the beer joint and other on-premise sellers probably accounted for 95 percent of all beer sales. In fact, before the thirteen-year dry spell (1920-1933) known as Prohibition decimated America’s brewing industry, the nation’s brewers owned or controlled, through often dubious contractual agreements, perhaps 85 percent of the nation’s taverns. Many historians have argued that the abuses that grew out of these anticompetitive relationships—free lunches, for example, to entice working men to spend their lunch hour (and pay) at the local beer joint—provided a good deal of the Prohibitionist fodder.
    Little more than twenty years ago, beer joints and their brethren (including that newfangled invention, the brewpub, which first cropped up in 1982) were still moving about 75 percent of America’s beer. Then, the states all began to stiffen drunk driving laws; this and demographic shifts such as the aging of the population bulge known as the baby boom set off an astonishing sea change in beer consumption habits. These days, only about 25 percent of all beer is bought and consumed in bars or other on-premise locations while 75 percent is sold and consumed off premises. Convenience stores, supermarkets, and package liquor stores account for almost 60 percent of off-premise sales, with drugstores and super-centers like Wal-Mart accounting for most of the rest.
    That said, the beer joint remains vital to the beer industry because on-premise retailers still represent the single-largest category of beer sales, moving about 51.2 million barrels of beer in 2002—about four million barrels more than its nearest category rival, the convenience store. Moreover, the beer joint is still the industry’s great cash cow; it and its allies may account for only 25 percent of all beer by volume, but by dollar amount they rack up almost half of all annual retail beer sales.
    Why? Because beer joints usually charge more for beer than do retail stores, the gross profit margin for the average beer joint is a whopping 82 percent. That worked out to a tidy $29.4 billion worth of gross profits in 2002. By comparison, gross profit margins for convenience stores and their ilk average a mere 22 percent.
    Now, as to what might constitute the Perfect Beer Joint, I admit this is a highly subjective and possibly even controversial matter. Purists will argue that the Perfect Beer Joint fundamentally has to be about the beer, followed by an ambience conducive to the pleasurable drinking thereof.
    This was certainly the answer I got from a newly minted Internet pal by the name of Jimmy Paige. I’d found Jimmy on the Web as I researched the vast universe of homebrew clubs—like-minded people who get together socially to talk about and sample beer they often brew in isolation, with great secrecy and competitive zeal. Jimmy was head of one of the bigger of such clubs, a Houston outfit called the Foam Rangers.
    Well, head isn’t exactly what Jimmy was. His official title was Grand Wazoo of the Foam Rangers and, once his term was over, he would become forever the Wuz Waz . It therefore seemed mandatory, before launching my quest to find the Perfect Beer Joint, to get the opinion of the Grand Wazoo as a kind