I love the Windy City. It has buildings that stretch to the heavens, the cursed Cubs and its own style of hot dogs. What’s not to like about that? It’s a gritty lakefront community with a checkered history of crooked politicians, mob bosses named Bugsy and Capone and their illicit everything everywhere. Like most cities, it endured the Great Experiment that was Prohibition and has a rich landscape of old bars and rundown pool halls.
Chicago is almost the polar opposite of Flagstaff, AZ, home to Northern Arizona University and The Lumberjacks. About the only thing these two places have in common is that both can get quite windy from time to time and I’ve heard last call uttered more times than I can remember in both these cities. Because of this, I have a soft spot in my drinking heart for them both.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain why a city needs a plethora of dive bars and juke joints if it hopes to maintain a shred of credibility. Luckily, there’s no shortage of these in Flagstaff. My collegiate favorite was Charly’s. I quickly came to appreciate Charly’s as a silvering institution in downtown when I discovered my laughingly fake ID instantly made me a man at this fine establishment.
The windowless smoky watering hole was dominated by its pervasive bourbon, straight, no-chaser attitude. The rotting floor under the pool table slanted toward the Grand Canyon. Every Sunday a new acoustic trio plucked bass strings as cool-hand Luke brushed the snare drum from a corner stage.
Some were touring groups passing through Flagstaff pausing long enough to tune up on their way to Phoenix. Others were much more baby-faced, toting their inexperience and aspirations of grandeur to the stage in hopes of becoming the next big thing. From time to time we were blessed by the presence of a gifted trumpet player dissecting classics, adding new layers and riffs. The whole concept of drinking and shooting pool while new bands closed out each Sunday night was so very hip and entirely college-like.
Late-night Sundays brought early Mondays where I constantly nodded off during intro to music. The professor often reminded us that there is nothing more quintessentially American than jazz. For more than 100 years, it has moved in and out of the American fabric, allowing a group of craftsmen to weave the most amazing tapestry that we recognize as jazz. But if you distill it down to the core, jazz musicians are just people making music. What makes these greats legendary is the manner in which they are inspired to seek out new and unusual opportunities with their instruments as they hone their craft.
At our core, brewers are people who make beer. Yet the brewers I spend more time with consider themselves more artist than scientist. It leads me to wonder: Has craft brewing become another quintessential American form of expression? What if in the midst of this great American craft brewing revolution, brewers are acting more like jazz legends riffing their way through classics on their way to bigger, bolder and more amazing flavors?
In 1992, Greg Hall from Goose Island Beer Co. in Chicago might very well have become the first American brewer to produce a bourbon-barrel-aged beer when he filled six oak barrels that previously contained Jim Beam. He poured this experiment at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver that fall, inducing rumors, appreciative nods and whispers of something entirely new. Sure, the beer looked like beer, but clearly this was something altogether different. His improv succeeded and in doing so launched an entirely new genre of beer. While I wasn’t there, it clearly was a landmark release and pointed the compass of brewing down a new road.
