![\"Max's](\"https:\/\/kfi.jpm.mybluehost.me\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/20211029-beerbar.jpg\")
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Following up, as promised, on a discussion about<\/a> The New York Times article headlined, \u201cLast Call for the Beer Bar?\u201d it seems fair to start with words from Josh Bernstein, who wrote the article that might otherwise been headlined, \u201cThe Evolution of the Beer Bar.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is most definitely a place for beer bars that are integrated into a community and serve it well, with well-chosen beer and other beverages,\u201d he wrote on Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n Isn\u2019t that the way it has always been? Flip through the \u201cBars of Reading\u201d (1988), Pat Baker\u2019s \u201cBeer and Bar Atlas\u201d (1988), either of the two books on the subject Daria Labinsky and I wrote, \u201cBeer Travelers Guide\u201d (1995) and \u201cBeer Lover\u2019s Guide\u201d (2000), or others that have followed in the same vein since and that is pretty obvious.<\/p>\n We first visited in 1994 and fell in love with the place<\/a>. We went back in 1997 and fell in love again. The beer selection had evolved. Pete sold the place long ago, but this picture from the taproom\u2019s Facebook page suggests beer is still taken seriously.<\/p>\n At the end of 1987 there were 73 U.S. breweries operating that opened after Fritz Maytag bought Anchor Brewing in 1965, plus Anchor itself. Forty-four of the 55 small breweries that began selling beer in 1988 were brewpubs, compared to only 29 brewpubs total when the year started. Several of those brewpubs grew into very large breweries, and they are well known today (Goose Island, Deschutes, North Coast, Great Lakes, etc.). Thus the \u201cBeer and Beer Atlas\u201d arrived during a watershed year, documenting what came before 1988. Michael Jackson wrote the foreword, concluding: \u201cA Beer and Bar Atlas<\/em> has long been overdue in the United States. Now there is enough to write about, someone has done it. The people who have compiled it are American heroes. It must have been an exhausting business but they have tracked down the Right Stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n The descriptions are not long. Quencher\u2019s in Chicago is \u201ca pleasant neighborhood saloon with seven tap and a large bottle collection. Includes interesting regional beers plus imports.\u201d Quencher\u2019s closed in 2018 after 39 years in business, and until its final days was a local outpost for beers from some of the newest breweries in the city.<\/p>\n One final thought. The book includes a list of beer \u201cmovers and shakers.\u201d One of them is Jim Atkinson, who Baker credits with inventing the term \u201cbar bar.\u201d In a 1983 essay in Texas Monthly<\/a>, he wrote bar bars \u201ccan best be described as places where you can go and engage in the sacred rite of public drinking and not be there<\/em>.\u201d <\/p>\n His rules of drinking include extensive side rants about establishments that are not bar bars, such as fern bars. \u201cThe decorative motif of most fern bars is equally contrived. I sacrificed my body and actually had a drink in each of the countless fern bars along Austin\u2019s renovated East Sixth Street to get an overview of current trends,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe scheffleras and sundry items of Irish crapola are still in place, but there\u2019s been a little improvising on the basics over the past few years. One of the stronger themes is this high-tech deco business, which involves plastering the interior walls with shower tile, leaving a bunch of pipes and wires exposed in the ceiling, and putting some forties and fifties music on the jukebox.\u201d<\/p>\n His third rule of drinking states \u201cNothing civilized ever resulted from the drinking of beer.\u201d And that ramble concludes:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I\u2019m getting at is that beer bars have sufficient funk to be bar bars, but they lack the requisite soul. That elusive quality is inseparable from booze\u2014whiskey, martinis, and of course the ever-present shooter of tequila or schnapps\u2014and the special kind of stupor it creates. Beer can just never quite get you nowhere,<\/em> and thus, while beer bars are vastly superior to many other genres, they are forever doomed to being a brick shy of a full load.\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think I agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Following up, as promised, on a discussion about The New York Times article headlined, \u201cLast Call for the Beer Bar?\u201d it seems fair to start with words from Josh Bernstein, who wrote the article that might otherwise been headlined, \u201cThe Evolution of the Beer Bar.\u201d \u201cThere is most definitely a place for beer bars that … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[292,701],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing","category-local-indigenous"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-4kR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16669"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16675,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16669\/revisions\/16675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"What's](\"https:\/\/kfi.jpm.mybluehost.me\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/20211029-ne.jpg\")
Does the draft selection need to be \u201cbetter\u201d than the Northeast Taproom in Reading? When Pete Cammarano bought the place in 1983 the draft choices were Budweiser and Schmidts. By the time \u201cBars of Reading\u201d was published five years later Pete offered the best beer selection in Berks County. Authors Suds Kroge and Dregs Donnigan wrote, \u201cPete is the answer . . . but we forget the question.\u201d<\/p>\n
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