Travels with Barley (2 page)

Oh, and would it surprise you that beer—good ole American-as-apple-pie beer—so aggressively and adroitly protects its interests in Washington that it is considered by many to be one of America's top ten most powerful lobbying groups?

This paradox, with its built-in tensions and contradictions, its converging and diverging passions, its entrepreneurs and characters, seemed best explored by journey. So that's what I have attempted to do, setting off on both a literal and figurative voyage on the River of Beer, traveling through the precincts of the beer makers, sellers, drinkers, and thinkers, trying to gain insight into the forces that drive the mighty River onward.

The narrative heart of this book is a car trip I took, following the Mississippi River the length of our mighty beer-drinking country, in a quest to find the mythical Perfect Beer Joint—a quest that I might admit, if pressed, was part pretext to gain a view of America through the prism of a beer glass. Since all great rivers have their tributaries and backwaters, I knew it would be impossible to stop at every port or scenic wayside. So this book in no way attempts to be an atlas of the American beer experience nor, except coincidentally, a pub or brewery guide, but rather a selective (and thus subjective) look at what makes beer in America interesting today.

By way of affording the reader partial insight into my thinking: the state of Big Beer was impossible to avoid; Extreme Beer gave me a compellingly fresh way to look at the maturing craft brew industry. On the other hand the people who spend their lives collecting beer cans and what is loosely called breweriana certainly reside on the periphery of the beer world. But I decided early on they didn't fit in this book. That said, as soon as I got a whiff of the very notion of beer yeast smuggling and beer yeast rustling, I was hooked. And I concluded that the pivotal role of the Beer Goddess in modern beer retailing has been woefully underexploited in beer literature.

The River of Beer beckons. Here's what I discovered.

Perdido Key, Fla.
—Paige Lightsey is certainly in a celebratory mood at the moment and so, it seems, are flocks of male gawkers who have assembled on a beachside boardwalk on a warm April afternoon. Tall, blond, and trim, Ms. Lightsey has slowly made her way up the walk in a blue zebra-stripe bikini and bare feet, carrying a frosty plastic pitcher of Miller Lite. She holds it out in front of her, like a subway commuter holds a newspaper, as she squeezes past throngs of other beer-clutching patrons.

A goodly number of them are bikers, one wearing a T-shirt that says on the back: “If You Can Read This Shirt, the Bitch Fell Off.”

A blond, lithe, well-tanned woman among the Harley crowd sports a skimpy two-piece bathing suit made from a print that's also kind of hard to ignore; it's the Confederate flag. When she reaches, in a highly provocative gesture, to adjust the stars and bars of her top, a skinny, shirtless guy in baggy swimming trunks actually stops and salutes (though perhaps not the flag).

The bikers laugh it off.

The thirty-three-year-old Ms. Lightsey, who works for an Atlanta private banking concern, is oblivious to the commotion, though. She's just hoping her pitcher won't be jostled and the contents lost given the time she stood in line to get it. It's a full 64-ounce pitcher with a long clear plastic straw bobbing indolently in the middle; sharing isn't her intention. She settles easily onto the broad weathered upper railing of the boardwalk, raises the pitcher with two hands, and takes a long slow sip on the straw.

“I'm a beer person and ordering by the pitcher makes it easier,” she says, green eyes peering from under the brim of a ball cap. “I don't have to keep going back to stand in line.”

She gestures toward a nearby bar—well, one of seventeen beer stations, actually—where the lines portend a ten- to twenty-minute wait. Considering that it's about 80 degrees and growing warmer, waiting itself can be thirsty business, though there are a number of diversions designed to help pass the time. Nearby, a band on a stage at beach level pounds out some straight-ahead twelve-bar blues, while in an open-air bar up a flight of wooden steps, a songstress is running through a Creedence Clearwater Revival number. Beer pennants flap in a light breeze and bar walls are draped with gaudy plastic signs that say things like, “No Shoes, No Kilt, No Service—Killian's Beer.” Another announces a “Show Your Hein-y Contest” later in the evening sponsored by the Dutch beer maker Heineken. (Sadly, the prize for winning is undisclosed.)

Near one of the beer stations is a stall offering elaborate temporary rub-on tattoos—from cartoonish kittens to Gothic demons that religious people of a certain inclination might call satanic. The tattoos start at five bucks; for a $100 surcharge, they'll put one anywhere you want them to. “Yes, I've done a few butts,” says Shelly, one of the faux tattoo artists. “So far, nothing wilder than that yet but, after dark, who knows? You'd be surprised what people have asked us to do.”

This is the scene at the Flora-Bama Lounge and Package Store, a storied beachfront bar straddling the Florida-Alabama line, during an event called the Mullet Toss. For the piscatorially ignorant, a mullet is a foot-long, silvery fish common to this section of the Gulf Coast, known hereabouts as the Redneck Riviera and famous for its azure waters and sugar-sand beaches. Smoked or fried, mullet is considered a local delicacy. This annual congregation of hedonists, in its eighteenth year, ostensibly centers on a contest in which participants, competing in men's and women's divisions by age, see who can toss a one- to two-pound (dead) mullet the farthest. Jimmy Louis, a long-time Flora-Bama musician, first suggested this idea to the bar's principal owner, Joe Gilchrist, after observing a cow-pie-throwing contest during a break in a rodeo out in Oklahoma. Mullet seemed a more savory (not to mention indigenous) option. Gilchrist, a man with a wry sense of humor and a keen sense of commerce, knew a good beer-selling shtick when he heard one, and so the Mullet Toss was born.

It's technically called the Interstate Mullet Toss, since competitors stand in a ten-foot-wide circle in Florida and fling their fish across the state line into Alabama. The throwing field is carved into the beach like an elaborate, squared-off hopscotch arena and staked out with fluttering red plastic tape of a kind that nowadays marks police barricades; there's a white scorer's tent and table; judges running around with tape measures, as though they might be officiating the javelin throw at a high school track meet; and somebody on a cranked-up PA system announcing results. The only rules are that you can't use gloves and you're disqualified if you step out of the throwing circle or throw your mullet out of bounds, thereby putting spectators in danger of being mullet-smacked.

Techniques vary. Some use a discus throw; others sling mullet sidearm style; others spread their mullet's lateral fins and sail them forward like a paper airplane. (Tip: mullet don't fly very well.) The most popular method is to double up the mullet head to tail and throw it overhand like a baseball. This is exactly how Michael “Woody” Bruhn, a fire-sprinkler installer from Oak Hill, Tennessee, set the mullet toss distance record back in 1996 with a throw of 178 feet (the equivalent of flinging a mullet from mid-right-center field in Yankee Stadium to home plate).

Bruhn, who looks like a workingman's version of the actor Woody Harrelson, is a six-time Mullet Toss winner; his distance record is all the more impressive considering the competition over the years has included former National Football League quarterback Kenny “the Snake” Stabler. It's also pretty impressive considering Bruhn's other favorite mullet-tossing strategy, which he explained a few years back in a Mullet Toss quasi-documentary, available on video for $15.99 in the Flora-Bama's gift shop: “Before I throw, I always drink four or five beers, but not so many that I'm drunk.”

In fact, virtually all Mullet Toss competitors and virtually all Mullet Toss spectators like Paige Lightsey, a perennial returnee, lubricate this celebration of airborne mullet with copious amounts of brew. For make no mistake about it: mullet tossing is a sideshow to the real action here. The Flora-Bama, though hard liquor concoctions like Lethal Mudslides can be had, is one of America's great beer joints. And this is one of America's great weekend beer spills.

On a jam-packed Saturday night during the height of its summer tourist season, the Bama, as regulars call the rambling honky-tonk, will attract about 1,500 people. There are probably 2,000 here now and the crowd will swell to 3,000 to 4,000 by dark. And this is only Day One of a three-day event that, before it is over, will draw a rolling crowd of about 20,000 paying customers. So it helps that the Bama sits on an acre and a quarter and, in addition to its five indoor bars, has a scrum of outdoor tents, food and drink stands, pavilions, and picnic tables (not to mention for this event, twenty-five portable toilets). All this is anchored by a handsome beach, some of it Bama property, most of it public, that allows the crowd to spill over and spread out. When Gilchrist bought the place twenty-four years ago, putting down $100 of his own money (which, he says, is all he had) plus loans from friends, it wasn't much more than a dilapidated beach shack. Now, after a number of additions and renovations, it looks like a succession of dilapidated beach shacks. The impression—totally desired—is that an architect has designed an ideal summer camp for convivial drunks. The Bama, in fact, was voted one of America's Great Dive Bars for 2002 by
Stuff
magazine (think
Maxim
)—a designation that Gilchrist considers not a slur but a supreme accolade.

As a scribe wending my way through beer culture in America, I've come to the Bama on this fair weekend not to toss mullets nor to toss down beers and revel in a spectacle that feels a lot like spring break for adults. Instead, I'm here hoping to get a close-up look inside the Great American Beer Machine—the confluence of marketing, distributing, and grassroots retailing prowess that helps to keep America's $75-billion-a-year beer business floating high. The Bama, on its slick Web site, calls itself “the Last Great American Road House”—a boast that would certainly cause verbal fisticuffs in some parts of, say, Texas that have beer joints that share the Bama's Zeitgeist and marketing notions and dwarf it in size and sales. Nonetheless, the Bama sits not just on prime beachfront real estate where the condos next door sell for $500,000 and up; it sits at the crossroads where the American passion for beer serendipitously intersects music and pop culture, the intangibles of place and ambience and the shrewd and sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts of people like Joe Gilchrist.

Or put another way: the Bama is a case study in how fortunes can still be made along the River of Beer by those who divine the mysteries of mixing location, live music, and regionally tinged diner fare with a studiously cultured iconoclasm. This recipe consistently draws an appealingly mixed and slightly feral crowd: conversant, attractive, beer-chugging women in bikinis like Paige Lightsey; bikers who, because the Bama is the Bama, mostly leave any bad attitudes at the door; blue-collar types and mildly dissipated local characters who come, in part, because they like socializing with (or at least looking at) people like Paige Lightsey, same as they like seeing what the bikers are up to; and a goodly number of the courthouse and banking crowd, having traded three-piece suits for swimsuits, who like the idea of being able to hang out for a while with all of the above in a kind of socially egalitarian demilitarized zone. All of this is anchored by cold beer, zesty live music, and food good enough that it doesn't scare anybody away. The allure probably isn't that different from people who ride roller coasters at theme parks; it's a hint of adventure with just a whiff of danger—without having to worry that anything bad (except maybe a hangover) might actually happen. This recipe hasn't just built a beer joint: it's built an institution with a rabidly loyal following and one also known throughout the South—an institution that, at its heart, happens to also be a well-oiled small business raking in millions of dollars a year.

All pretty much floating on beer.

And none of it particularly accidental.

Joe Gilchrist is an easygoing man with a pleasing Southern drawl traceable to his hometown of Pensacola, Florida. He's one of those sixty-year-olds who could pass for forty-nine in the right sort of light. He has an open, friendly, mirthful face and an air of mischief about him, an air accentuated by the studiously rumpled casual clothes he wears and the baseball caps or skipper's hats that he has a penchant for. One impression is that he's just a mischievous boy that the years have dragged reluctantly into adulthood. He's about six feet tall and of medium build; perhaps befitting a man who owns a wildly successful tavern, which mandates a fair amount of late night beer sampling, he has the makings of a beer paunch, which he tries to hold at bay by reasonably frequent golf games. He lives alone in a modest woodframe house on a shaded lot on the bay front not ten minutes from the Bama. A couple of cats patrol the porch and a forty-three-foot Gulf Star sailboat, big enough to sleep on but in no measure a yacht, floats tied to a dock out back. His favorite car is a mildly dilapidated 1976 Cadillac convertible. It's a pretty unostentatious life for a guy that everybody figures is a millionaire.

Gilchrist is well read, leaning toward Southern literature, and pretty well traveled (he once thought about trying to clone the Bama after being mesmerized by the beauty of Cape Town, South Africa), and something of an authority on the American roots music scene. He can wax eloquent on Stephen Foster, the Yankee who penned Southern minstrel standards like “Oh, Susanna” and “Camptown Races” and is considered America's first professional songwriter. He can argue persuasively that Mickey Newbury, probably best known for writing the late 1960s pseudo-psychedelic pop hit “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” is the worthy modern successor to Foster.

Newbury is actually a songwriter of great versatility—Elvis, Way-Ion Jennings, and Andy Williams have all covered his songs—and enjoys a kind of cult following in that gray area of music between country and pop. He is a personal friend of Gilchrist's, as is the legendary country music songwriter Hank Cochran (who penned, among other songs, “I Fall to Pieces,” made famous by Patsy Cline). Indeed, about the time Gilchrist launched his tribute to beer and hedonism (and commerce) with the Mullet Toss, he also started the Frank Brown International Song Writing Festival.

The festival actually began as an end-of-summer-tourist-season party for area musicians who had become Bama staples—bands and troubadours, such as the duo Rusty and Mike, who have played regularly here pretty much since Gilchrist bought the joint. A number of them have cultivated an enthusiastic local following by writing and performing an indigenous take on blues, country, and rock that never seems to quite break out the way, say, Jimmy Buffett's Caribbean-tinged pop did. Gilchrist sought to both broaden the exposure of these local artists, while casting an ever-wider net for songwriting talents who might be overlooked in the precincts of Nashville or Los Angeles.