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

of benchmark to use along the way.
    I was halfway expecting a smart-ass answer to my e-mail but the Grand Wazoo delivered a thoughtful reply: “You may find this definition changes as you encounter different people,” he wrote. “Younger crowds will tell you it is the place that has the best drink specials, older, more mature crowds will indicate the ambience. For me it would be the pub where I would always want to go back to for the hardest-to-find beers.” He closed with this sober admonition, which I planned to flourish if the accounting department ever got after me for my beer expenses: “If you are like most homebrewers, never be content in saying your quest has been satisfied. We are forever on the prowl, looking for that one perfect place.”
    â€œForever on the prowl …”
    I liked that. I liked it a lot.
    Michael Jackson, the internationally known British Beer Hunter, seemed the perfect person to whom to pose the Perfect Beer Joint question. When I ran into him during an East Coast brewery tour, he offered a counterintuitive observation. While his idea of the Perfect Beer Joint was certainly about the beer, he noted that in his experience, “the more macho the bar, the wimpier the beer.” He once made the mistake of postulating this in Australia, which, like America, loves its middle-of-the-road lagers, and was almost run out of the country. But, assuming you accept the premise that middle-of-the-road lager is wimpy beer (and some people don’t—recall those Miller Lite ads arguing the merits of “great taste/less filling!”), Jackson makes an interesting point. Go, as I have, to any of those big line-dancing, country-music beer joints out in Texas where every vehicle in the parking lot is a jacked-up Ford 4x4 pickup with a gun rack. Odds are good that about half the guys riding the mechanical bull will be drinking Miller Lite.
    Sentiment also can’t be overlooked in the configuration of what makes the Perfect Beer Joint. Paige Lightsey, after I met her at the Flora-Bama, went on become Paige Buckner. She and her new husband carried on a meaningful part of their courtship at the Bama. Though he is a Californian with a farm and vineyard up in Mendocino County, he agreed to buy her a waterfront house about a mile from the Bama as part of the deal because, she told me, “I couldn’t live without the beach or the Bama.” The Bama is her version of the nearly perfect TV beer joint, Cheers.
    I admit to a couple of sentimental favorites myself. The place I grew up, Bayou Black, Louisiana, had a sole beer joint, Elmo’s Bar and Grocery, which sat in a large clamshell-paved parking lot next door to the bayou Catholic Church. (It opened, not coincidentally, on Sunday right after Mass.) These were the days before almost all beer came from Milwaukee or St. Louis, so Elmo’s mainly served regional beers long gone such as Regal and Jax (and Dixie, which survives).
    Bayou Black was a Cajun enclave and most Cajuns are Catholic, which meant back then that they didn’t eat meat on Fridays. So Elmo’s marketing strategy was to induce bayou residents to his beer joint on Friday nights by offering free seafood—usually boiled crabs or crawfish that he or some relative had plucked themselves from the nearby bayous or swamps. All you were required to do was buy beer (a quarter a can or bottle) and put quarters in the jukebox (six selections per quarter), which featured mostly Cajun music or its first cousin, swamp pop. (Think the Fats Domino song “Walkin’ to New Orleans.”) Friday nights were always packed.
    My singular memory of Elmo’s, though, was the time rumors spread up and down the bayou that Elmo was going to be cooking turtle sauce piquant for his next Friday night feast. Sauce piquant is essentially a spicy stew of tomato sauce, celery, onion, and cayenne pepper with chicken, rabbit, or turtle at its core. It would take a