The Great American Saloon Series
Coyne, John R. Jr. & O'Lessker, Jr.R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Karl
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES as R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. f Karl O'Lessker I John R. Coyne, Jr. A Symposium on Beers The "Confessions of a Beer Snob, " by Aram Bakshian, Jr., published in our...
...Since I'm working it doesn't seem like I'm drinking," I say...
...Schmidt's of Philadelphia comes to mind as does Waldech produced by Hamm's and Andeker produced by Pabst--though Andeker is a bit too sweet...
...The stuff is too much a part of life's primeval cycles...
...Now before asseverating my preferences, I should state that I have never encountered a beer without some redeeming social value, save two appalling Wisconsin concoctions, Chief Oshkosh and Oaonto, and one miserable juice of uncertain origin which is memorably entitled Acme Beer--Gad what sewage...
...Even in the winter, however, Budweiser maintains high consistency...
...Americans prefer lighter beers, and there are but few heavyweights...
...The temperature in this barn is unbearable...
...It did the job just fine...
...Those who wish to stupefy themselves in it desecrate it and would be better off taking morphine, cocaine, or a pistol to the head...
...And when I am especially deserving of a reward I turn to that finest of all English brew, Bass Ale, so far superior to any other of its class as to deserve to be stored on a pedestal...
...Tastes like pine needles," says Helen...
...It is a beer of poignant taste, balanced animation and clarity...
...A roach looks up at me from a crack in the table and wiggles his filthy little antennae at me...
...Of the middleweights there are many that have engaged my attention and won high respect...
...18 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976...
...Many of Coors' critics object to the politics of the Coors' family or are ignorant of the fact that Coors, being the only nonpasteurized beer in the country, travels least well of all beers...
...Rignes Bock...
...But maybe that's the Coffee Snowshake...
...I'm sitting at the dining room table in one of the most dismal old houses in the world...
...Norwegian...
...Sweet as hell...
...Strange...
...Who but an envy-maddened and graceless female could, like "Bakshian," dismiss as "much over-touted" beers of the quality of Coors and Olympia...
...Helen and I just went out to get a bunch of foreign beer...
...Another Pennsylvania product--smooth, rich, a big thick head you can eat with a spoon...
...Bakshian's taste in all things is cultivated, yet he, in his toniness, neglected a few elemental facts concerning the rules of hops-quaffing...
...The best light beer in America is Coors...
...But now they're also putting it in cans...
...If I could find out where it's brewed, I'd go get a U-Haul full...
...Work, work, work...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 17 credit his senses, preferring to believe that his taste has gone happily awry...
...I take a couple of drinks...
...Easily a doctoral dissertation there...
...A light beer will go nicely with anything else, and the heartier, deeper-bodied Europeans are at their best with thick steaks and ribs but may well overwhelm the flavor of lighter meats...
...Dutch...
...It's one of those beers that drink well from the bottle...
...A note of good sense, no doubt meant to disarm and mislead, crept into the otherwise lamentable paragraphs signed "Tyrrell" when he (she) indicated that there are better European beers than the heavily advertised Heineken and Lowenbrau...
...Some bastard stole my gas tank top--gas tank top cap...
...In fact local beers are one of the surpassing achievements of Yank culture, though recently they have fallen into such straitened conditions that some might have legitimately applied for grants to the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...It hasn't...
...Scotland...
...I think of some of the beers I've liked...
...Their euphemism for it is going to bed...
...Helen Clark, my sister-in-law, has come out from Iowa to help us move...
...Lacking those, you might as well stick to corn dogs and Stroh's...
...Dirt, leather, sweat, mildew...
...I lost many friends during Mr...
...There was a bad accident...
...I try to hit him with my beer bottle but I miss and the beer spills...
...We've lived in the thing for three years now, and we're finally getting out...
...I smell, and I can't take a shower because the well's running dry...
...We mix the Mackeson with Schlitz Light...
...No great intellectual burdens are imposed by attention to this principle...
...I speak of Guinness Stout, not the bitter, gassy stuff bottled for American consumption but the mellow nectar served from the tap only in Ireland...
...Government economic policies have made it difficult for local producers to compete with more profitable national concerns...
...That is why I favor the legalization--always by local option--of most drugs and of all forms of suicide...
...The Huber Brewing Company's Regal Brau is also a worthy heavyweight, and for enthusiasts of the bar stool, I suggest Schlitz's dark...
...In the winter it lets in the cold...
...Pat and Helen have passed out...
...Hic...
...Emmett Tyrrell, J r . " Despite the presence of some cleverly wrought obfuscation there is unmistakable evidence in each as to the perpetrator's sex and lack of sensibility...
...Maybe that's why I share Tyrrell's fondness for Stroh 's...
...A bottle of Fix...
...Examples of the congeniality of Guinness and belles-lettres are sprinkled throughout the pages of literary history...
...The Dutch beers, notably Heineken, are much overrated...
...Greek...
...Centralized, planned economies eliminate the little fellow, and diversity is swept from the landscape...
...As for the Europeans, there are many delectable potions, running from Carlsberg and Tuborg in Denmark, to Pilsner Urquell in Czechoslovakia, several surprisingly fine Italian beers, and the reliable Watneys of England...
...Good beer should always be taken with good friends whose tongues are eager to chatter even as their throats yearn for flash floods of malt...
...Each has a crisp, even sharp, clean and clear flavor, without a trace of that execrable sweetness which renders Stroh's and, to a lesser extent, Miller and Schlitz quite undrinkable...
...Nondescript--that beer in the Eagles Supermarket was just as good...
...I'm drinking beer...
...Admittedly Lowenbrau often leaves me with the disconcerting sense that it is the product of a pharmaceutical firm, but there are hundreds of little towns which produce sheer masterpieces, rarely for export beyond these tiny jurisdictions...
...She and Helen try the Coffee Snowshake...
...It's so sweet it makes you fat," says Helen...
...It has charmed me many times during relaxing interludes spent along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, but after three glasses the stuff cloys--a feeling never to be encountered with Coors...
...I have an octogenarian aunt who swears by it...
...And what about the effect of pot...
...The best American beer I ever had was actually an ale--Neuwiller's Cream Ale, I think it was called...
...Ours are not among the very great beers of the world, but a half-dozen or so are by no means to be despised, being quite capable of satisfying any but the cultist's or snob's palate...
...Here Pschorr is the best, and Hofbrau about what one might expect from a government-run establishment...
...These sages usually drank beer, and so at an early age I entered upon a scholarly appreciation of the ancient elixir...
...We drink a bottle of Pripps...
...But those lobsters...
...People who cannot face life should not indulge in one of life's more sublime moments, and they should never be forced to overindulge in it...
...It's a pretty green 7-ounce bottle, shaped something like a small M-1 rifle grenade, with four horses carved on the glass...
...The beer is Rolling Rock, brewed in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the best of the Eastern beers, a lot like Coors--light, delicate, but with just a touch of that bitter bite that all good beers have...
...All other beers I will welcome over my tonsils and into my maw, including the East's Nationa/Bohemian, the South's Dixie and Pearl, and the Heartland's Burger and Hudepohl...
...Iron City is a unique and eminently praiseworthy beer...
...Beer's gone now...
...I first drank it under very special circumstances...
...Generations of dirty people have lived here...
...If we drank only for taste, we'd probably all be milkshakeoholics...
...And who but a simpering, latent-hysterical virgin could, like "Tyrrell," heap praise upon that Kool-Aid of beers, Stroh 's...
...All alone now, trying to carry on my research...
...It is served solely on draught, and best appreciated when quaffed from "frosty" mugs...
...If a fraction of the money that the Federal Government has squandered on higher education had gone to supporting good saloons I have no doubt that America would be a vastly more literate and serene republic today-though the drinks would be more expensive and less expeditiously delivered...
...But their lobsters are different from ours...
...They're the hardest beer-drinking people in the world...
...But Germany is a veritable cornucopia of malt delicacies, though I should add that the beers of Munich are inferior to less popular German beers...
...Hee, hee, hee...
...Why don't you pour it down the toilet and write about that," says Helen, who's coming unglued...
...If these critics were real connoisseurs, they would admire the unbending standards of this illustrious brewery and forget the politics...
...And in a pub off St...
...That's why they call it stout...
...Today the truly dignified and educational saloon--the saloon free of simian music, rutting "singles," and that gloomy lighting that Americans so often confuse with "atmosphere," is almost unknown...
...Tyrrell's" enthusiasm for Dortmunder Union and lUurzburger, I prefer that Czech masterpiece, Pilsner Urquell, to either...
...I should not, myself, choose any beer to go with the more delicately prepared fish or veal dishes...
...Terrible...
...So remarkable and uncharacteristic a brew is this that anyone who does not yet know it will, upon a first good swallow, refuse to "How the pseudonymous "Tyrrell" could hope to get away with calling Coors "light" but Harem's and Schmidt's "middleweight" is beyond even my profoundly pessimistic view of female fallibility...
...Nonetheless the beer they serve is a prodigy, and I rarely visit New York without venturing down to Luchow's for a Wurzburger seance...
...It's the hottest week of the year...
...It was in saloons, not universities, that I first encountered serious students of history, political philosophy, and the Beethoven quartets...
...Nixon's wage and price controls barred little breweries from raising prices, they had feeble borrowing power at the banks, and when the more profitable national breweries smothered local markets with advertising many local breweries turned belly up...
...This has been the most confused week of our lives...
...Requires extensive research...
...As for painted ladies, forget not the doleful fate of the patriot Hays...
...About 14 percent, and after a few quarts the Aussies and Kiwis would get into fist fights...
...Is that before or afterJFK...
...To continue the discussion of what the late Walter Lippmann might have termed "The Open Question, " The Alternative presents herewith a disputatio de gustibus...
...They seemed to yearn for a springtime of violence and highminded rampage...
...Maybe Heineken...hell...
...Back to the beer...
...It is a poet's drink and perhaps the key to Irish eloquence...
...Beer is to be voluptuously i~lgested in prodigious swallows+ Eructate only in carefully selected corn pa W. 'fhen, too, beer is most congenial with esculent accompaniment...
...Swedish...
...Note that good beer, like good Beaujolais, does not travel well...
...Pat has just read O'Lessker's piece...
...To begin, one should never seek in beer a retreat from worldly burdens...
...Pat and Helen decide to pitch in and help with the research...
...Hugh Kenner, with whom I recently shared many bottles of this lovely juice as we sat before a peat fire...
...I have no idea how the curators of Luchow's manage this, for their food is often uninspiring and always overpriced...
...The Rolling Rock is gone...
...MacEwans Tartan Ale...
...It is a truly hearty brew whose every swallow provides not only excellent flavor but also a tasty finale...
...but here they only reveal their provincialism and their trendy anti-Americanism...
...KiHn and Asahi that I drank during R&R in Japan under the sort of conditions you never quite tell your wife about...
...the latter being a quality often ignored even by the cognoscenti...
...I turn now to the constructive part of this discussion...
...I think of those Australians...
...I pray for August Busch nightly...
...They're beginning to giggle...
...It's a hell of a question...
...Tastes like homesteaders in Alaska smell," says Pat...
...and so I generally drink with friends in private domiciles...
...offers an abstruse monograph, on which Dr...
...Cans are just no good, unless you like to yell and throw them out your car window onto people's lawns...
...It is one of those rare beers that--in America--tastes best from the bottle, though the enormous seidels of it that are served at Luchow's in New York are about the greatest malt treat to be had in the entire world...
...The more bookishly attitudinized they were the more anti-intellectual I suspected them to be...
...Thick...
...For me there was the time Von Kannon and I peered from behind pints of the brown stuff, watching a Kilkenny man in a remote pub read Dante's Purgatorio accompanied by his faithful pint...
...That's right...
...I wish I had a regular job," I tell Helen...
...Bill collectors are calling...
...Ever since I have remained inveterate in my view that a carefully selected saloon generally provides an educational experience superior to that of any university...
...It can be appreciated as much for its flavor as for its philosophical significance...
...Four American light beers are pre-eminent (and geographically well distributed): Olympia, Coors, Harem's, and Schmidt's of Philadelphia...
...I have enjoyed oceans of beer in many lands, but as for those most memorable, give me Coors and Budweiser and Wurzburger, and on my death bed give me Guinness...
...How many picnic lunches have been ruined by a pretentious host's serving Heineken with cold chicken or a lobster salad...
...Stephen's Green there was a roaring debate over Joyce that would never have been so eloquent had the bartender not stood intrepidly at his station, pulling pint after pint of this magical drink...
...I owe various people two speeches, two articles, two columns, and two books...
...The bouquet is especially memorable as is its liveliness...
...asks Pat...
...In the winter it is exposed to a greater variety of temperatures during delivery, and the result is saddening...
...It must never be bounced around, set in the sun, or exposed to widely varying temperatures...
...Sweetish aftertaste...
...2. Karl 0 Zessker For the man of taste and judgment who participates in this Symposium, the first and most important act is to disassociate himself from the sophomoric, not to say puerile, views of the young women who write under the pseudonyms of "Aram Bakshian" and "R...
...My wife, Pat, has deserted me for the day, off to Washington to sit on an HEW advisory panel...
...One final point, all too often overlooked...
...I'm getting stewed...
...Still some Coffee Snowshake...
...There is only one distinguished middleweight* beer produced in the United States, and that is Pittsburgh's Iron City...
...Helen bought something awful called Mr...
...I'm sweating and doing research...
...I. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...When it's hot and damp, you can smell them all...
...It atso has ample body, bouquet, and consistency...
...I've had six Rolling Rocks...
...So many variables...
...Not bad, just a bit like Rolling Rock...
...Ever try to say that when you're half stewed...
...Journey to the West where the high standards of the Coors brewmasters remain prepotent, and enjoy...
...To get stewed, ~of course...
...Our editor R. Emmett TyrrelI, Jr...
...A shame...
...Karl 0 'Lessker, professor of poh'tical science and of public and environmental affairs at Indiana Unwersity, comments...
...But hell, maybe it doesn't make any difference...
...Too much of anything, save Hubert Humphrey, is always a bad thing and possibly a peril...
...But you can't get a lot of things here...
...In the summer it holds in the heat...
...One other light beer deserving favorable mention is Budweiser, which can be drunk without violence to the tastebuds wherever none of the other four is available (in the Deep South, for example...
...The champion in this division, and--truth to tell--the title-holder over all American beers, is, in my opinion, Budweiser...
...But now I'm doing research...
...Nixon's fling with national socialism and gained but one, Old Chicago, a new beer produced in Mayor Daley's paradise...
...He also neglected a few worthy brews...
...Boston Coffee Snowshake...
...The latter has often accompanied me in my days of public service...
...I will drink Guinness anytime and anyplace, but the only true Guinness flows close to its source, along the quays of the Liffey in Dublin...
...Hell of a research project...
...We'll use Rolling Rock as our control...
...How many picnic lunches," asks O'Lessker, "have been ruined by a pretentious host's serving Heineken with cold chicken or a lobster salad...
...There was an Australian beer called Abbott's which I drank in Korea...
...But a man's got to do what he's got to do...
...No one ever set out from Tobey's Saloon to shout America into the New Age...
...Great...
...Guinness is also brewed and served on tap in England, but beware...
...She's sweating an.d packing...
...After the second quart it could have been Bass or Harp...
...A Symposium on Beers The "Confessions of a Beer Snob, " by Aram Bakshian, Jr., published in our May edition, provoked an unpara/led burst of intellectual activity from all quarters...
...Of the exports every Hun can take pride in such glories as Beck's, Dortmunder Union, and my beloved Wurzburger...
...I wonder why you can't get Heileman's Special Export here...
...It is nectar and highly nutritious...
...And this is another desideratum of beer-drinking...
...All that is required is good judgment and a cultivated palate...
...In fact, ordinary American beers are superior to ordinary European beers...
...Why do we drink anything with alcohol in it...
...Barns, horses, smoky--molasses--ham and sardines," says Helen...
...The earnest habitues of libraries and classrooms always gave me the impression they had been driven to their books by fear and hatred of the world beyond...
...Finally, one should never drink beer while smoking or in the company of painted women...
...They used to sell four quarts of something with a name like A-1 in the Eagles Supermarket in Iowa City for less than a dollar...
...It's terrible looking stuff, the kind of drink that goes with puce pimp hats...
...Tobacco coats the tongue and dulls the sparkle from even the most audacious brew...
...Mackeson Stout...
...Those who will dispute me on the subject will have to face no less a literary critic than Dr...
...Damn these boxes...
...Pat's here now...
...But maybe it's more the associations than the stuff itself...
...We're moving...
...It is tasty enough, but it is not the same gentle embrace one experiences in the pubs of Eire...
...He's asking the existential question," she points out...
...But it's about 40 proof, and it beats Old Spice...
...A lot of odor," says Pat...
...Not as bubbly," says Pat, who can't think of anything else to say...
...Gulp it down, never sip...
...Now having declared my broad appre16 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 ciation for almost all American beers, let me state my especial favorites...
...For my part, while I share Ms...
...2.6 per drinking--drinkable?--population," says Helen...
...Stroh's is the king in this class...
...3. John R. Coyne, Jr...
...nor, of course, do they suffer from the wateriness all too often found in so-called "local" beers...
...Let it be said at once that the best American beers stand up well by comparison to the general run of Europeans...
...Still, my critical interest in beer remains intense, and it is because of this interest that I should like to add a few reflections to Aram Bakshian's learned treatise, which appeared in our May number...
...Many poseurs sniff at it, claiming that true beer is heavier, on the order of European beers...
...Their invasion of the streets in the late sixties, and their resort to quack spiritualism in the seventies confirmed my suspicion...
...It's one of the best Wisconsin beers, heavy and cheap...
...Then you could come home and have a drink...
...Like so many intellectually-inclined youth of my generation I always sought refuge from the crassitude and materialism of the modern world by withdrawing to the philosophical fastness of a dignified saloon, there to listen to the literary chat and theoretical diatribes of learned coves well juiced on worldly experience and ardent waters...
...It's just too big a question...
...Helen's going to write a piece about diet beers and why women hate saloons...
...This is why beer always tastes better in the summer when it is usually cooled just once...
...This is grueling research...
...It can be imbibed in enormous quantities without ever exhausting the palate...
...Clarity is one of the attributes that sets high-grade beers apart from the flotsam and jetsam, and the King of Beers has it...
...I would no sooner drink beer without pretzels nearby than go to Washington unarmed...
...Lastly, I want to mention a stout that is one of the most magnificent liquids ever ushered into my esophagus...
...Sausages, cheeses, and Pennsylvania Dutch pretzels always call one's taste buds to attention, ordering them to their duty as the amber liquid flows about their God-given antennae...
...Awful...
...Oranjeboom...
...Kronenbourg on draught, an Alsatian beer, is almost as light as Coors, has the same clear and refreshing taste, but is hardly as drinkable...
...Beer, like wine, should be selected with reference to the type of food, if any, it is intended to accompany...
...John R. Coyne, Jr., a former speechwriter for Presidents Ford and Nixon, concludes the symposium with a stream-of-loss-ofconsciousness narrative...
...Only Budweiser tastes good from cans...
...Burnt caramel," says Pat...
Vol. 10 • October 1976 • No. 1
