I can’t recall whether it was from Goose Island, Flossmoor Station or Mickey Finn’s, but I remember vividly how that first sip transported me to the Christmas of my youth where my aunts and uncles would all sit around nursing bourbon and 7UP on ice as children ripped open boxes of toys from Santa.

My parents hosted the party each year, and while they were never huge booze hounds, each holiday season offered them the opportunity to procure a new handle (1.75 liters) of Jim Beam for celebrating. On the morning of the celebration, my father poured the first cup and a half into his legendary eggnog while the rest was reserved for drinks. Ours wasn’t a large family, so a handle of Beam lasted until next Thanksgiving, and opening the Christmas bottle was a special moment.

Apart from the sheer size of the bottle, what I remember most is the smell and taste of those drinks. Bourbon is a powerful spirit. Even as a child, I was able to nose sweet caramel, bakers vanilla and the woody notes that erupted from the bottle. For me, the bourbon was always more aromatic then the Christmas candles flickering above the fireplace. But truth be told, I really never liked the way bourbon smelled or tasted.

But Chicago changed the way I felt about bourbon. It was the first time that bourbon stopped being associated solely with the family gatherings. That Saturday morning in 1998, I was staring at a flight of beers aged in bourbon and whiskey casks. As the memories of Christmas past flooded my senses, suddenly the caramel seemed perfect, the vanilla more Tahitian and the spirited wood flavors as warming as the fireplace we used to snuggle up to.

Each new glass of beer was a roller coaster of expression. Squinting across the table, I could almost see a veil of ethanol leaping from the glasses as the beers tried to breathe. These beers were that hot. I wasn’t sure it was even safe to drink some of these beers and, while not a smoker, I was praying no one else would feel the need to light up next to me.

Later that year, I wandered up to British Columbia and visited the Granville Island Brewing Co. in Vancouver. I knew the brewmaster there at that time and was given a good tour of the premises, along with a sampling of its brews. It had been a good morning. That afternoon, I was tasting various Canadian brews at a local beer emporium when I noticed that the Granville Island beers on tap tasted odd. Since I had savored those same brews at the brewery that morning, I was stunned at how bad they tasted. Then I remembered that particular taste was due to dirty draft lines. In this case it was exceptionally noticeable.

I originally identified this particular taste in Everett, WA, where I grew up. I was drinking with an older friend, a former brewery employee, when he noticed that same phenomenon with a beer we were drinking. He identified this taste parameter to me so I could distinguish it. Later I found out that Everett was notorious in this regard in 1951 and Seattle not much better. I thought nothing more about the matter until that day in Canada when I remembered the very recognizable taste of dirty draft-beer lines.

As it happened, two Granville Island marketing people were seated near me. I stepped over and asked them to try their brewery’s beer and tell me what they thought. They knew something was wrong immediately, but not the reason until I explained it to them. The telltale taste that cruddy draft lines leave in beer is readily recognizable once you have been attuned to it. On my way back down to Portland, I stopped in Seattle and sampled the Oregon brews just to be sure, and there it was, dirty-line syndrome, as I call it. The Seattle brews had the same taste, but I had never tasted them any other way and had thought that was how they were supposed to taste. At that time Portland had a law that the tavern keeper had to clean his lines at least every two weeks, which is why I had never encountered that taste in my home city.

I can’t name the exact culprit in this scenario, but I know it when I taste it, and you would, too, if it were pointed out. I’ve not found anyone in the industry who can dignify that ester with a scientific designation. In any case, the moral here is double: Bar owners should clean their taps regularly and religiously (once a week is not too often), and brewers should sample their brews in as many venues as possible to ensure consistency of taste.

This will be my last column, as the Mayans have predicted that we are all to experience a painful death in December 2012. Unless the Mayans are lying, we’re dying. But then again the Mayans weren’t the most trustworthy bunch. Did they really predict the end of the world? No matter, if this is it, I sure as hell ain’t going to be banging out any more articles. I’ll be too busy immersing myself in a sort of Bacchanalian revelry. Caligula will have nothing on me. Bring me my bottle of Infinium and my jewel-encrusted chalice and release the dancing girls. What, no jewel-encrusted chalice or dancing girls? Well, just bring me my 1998 Anheuser-Busch commemorative mug, a can of Steel Reserve and my long-suffering wife.

As the end draws near, it brings on bouts of reflection. Which naturally beget regret and a few points of light. As I look back on my 20-plus-year career in the beer industry, I ask myself what my enduring legacy will be. Mmm. Not much, I fear. I haven’t produced any good beer, erected any fermenters, owned any distribution trucks or sold any beer at retail. I’ve drunk an awful lot of beer and made an awful lot of friends. Urine? And laughs. That counts for something, I guess.

I’d say the main legacy that I’ve left behind is a big honking block of beer writing, chronicling the beer industry’s change five days a week since 1998 in Beer Business Daily. Assuming 250 workdays a year, and an average issue of BBD is 2.5-page long, that’s 8,750 pages of beer trade writing. It’s exhausting just writing that sentence. That’s the equivalent of about 40 novels.

Of course, when I started writing about this industry, it was much different. The players were different, the number of players was different, and the power each player wielded was different. Back then, it was Miller Brewing Co., Coors Brewing Co., Anheuser-Busch and a few regional and craft brewers and importers who didn’t amount to much. In fact, when I got into the beer business in 1991, craft beers had less than one market share point. The largest three brewers (A-B, Miller and Coors) had 80 share points and growing. The regionals (Pabst, G. Heileman, Stroh, Schlitz) were gasping to hold onto their 15 share points, and the imports only had 5 share points and were not growing.

The hot topic that year was the doubling of the federal excise tax on beer, and whether Coors was going to buy Stroh or when Heineken was going to start using more beer distributors instead of wine and spirits distributors. Budweiser was starting to feel softness, but was still by far the largest beer brand in the United States, selling 2.5 times as much as the next-largest brand, Miller Lite. Amazing as it sounds today, Bud Light and Coors Light were selling about the same amount of beer. Corona sold less than a million barrels. Heineken was twice the size of Corona. Pabst Blue Ribbon was in a free fall and would lose half its volume in the next 10 years.

Bud Light now sells more than twice as much as Budweiser, Coors Light outsells Miller Lite, and PBR is back to what it was selling in 1991. And crafts are inching up on seven share points and growing like gangbusters.

The structure of the industry has changed as well. We now have what I’d call a duopoly, with AB InBev and MillerCoors eating up about 80 share points. Both are owned by multinational conglomerates. Craft brewers have sprung up in virtually every town, and some have grown to be national or regional brewers. Yuengling and Boston Beer, which were barely on the radar screen in 1991, are now large players with more than one share point a piece. Stroh, Schlitz and G. Heileman, once players, are gone as breweries. And yet some former big brands are making a comeback. PBR is the big one, but you also have Genny, Lone Star, Rainier, Narragansett and others. Even Budweiser is starting to turn around. My, have times changed and continue to change. But of course, it all won’t matter come December, 2012. If you can’t find any dancing girls, just bring me a turkey leg.

“Do you find yourself drinking more beer these days, and enjoying it less? An increasing number of Americans are finding themselves in this dilemma. American beer has become lighter and lighter, until finally one is forced to concede that it is indeed water.” I concluded that, for the most part, there was no diversity of choice in American beers, even though there were labels aplenty. My conclusion: “If you taste one American beer, you’ve pretty much tasted them all.”

At that time I had tasting notes for some 120 beers from across the U.S. and other countries. I was fairly well educated in what beers were out there in the U.S.. I searched for beers that had taste; discussed imports and the problem of shipping beer over long distances. I quoted Chicago columnist Mike Royko that American beer tasted as though it were “filtered through a horse.” When some of those brewers complained, he apologized—to the horse.

In that, and subsequent articles, I searched for American beers with taste. My northwest selections were limited to the brews of then Heileman-owned Rainier in Seattle, Pabst-owned Blitz in Portland, independent Olympia in Washington and General Brewing  in Vancouver, WA. There were few Craft Brewers in existence. My beer ratings were as follows:

No world class beers.

Fine Beer: Rainier Ale. My enthusiasm for that beer is embarrassing, as I read it now: “Rainier Ale has the good taste of English ales and is only slightly inferior to such greats as Bass and Worthington (and much cheaper).” Hey, what did I know?  The imported English Bass of that era was rather pathetic, and Rainier was better then than now, although it was what our brewers called bastard ale (i.e. bottom fermented warm at 70F and aged as a lager at 40F. Rainier at that time had an OG of 15P/1060, 7 percent ABV, with only 30 percent corn grits. Half of the malted barley was 2-row Klages and Peroline, the other half 6-row Larker and Beacon, and hopped with Yakima Cluster hop pellets.

My second choice was Blitz Old English 800 Malt Liquor, which also had better taste in those days. I said it had “the rich full taste of an ale if not the color, with an impressive English hop bouquet.” At that time Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve was being touted as a great beer, but my third choice  was Heileman’s Mickey’s Malt Liquor * from Seattle, followed by Henry’s, which I panned as being nothing more than a higher class smoother Blitz-Weinhard. At least my opinion of that beer is not embarrassing to me now.

I reveled in the opportunity to blast the cursed big brewers and what they had done to my beer. I babbled on somewhat incoherently about American beer, which I labeled “yellow industrial swill,” made from the regular Reinheitsgebot ** ingredients plus such “cereals as corn, rice, oats, rye, unmalted barley, sorghum and soy beans, and which may be in the form of flour, coarse ground grain, steam rolled and pressed grains, (or) chemically leached cereals such as grits. To these may be added any of the 59 other chemicals and ingredients then approved by the FDA.” The product was called “malt beverage and has been known to appear in such soda pop flavors as raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime…(and) fermented and aged for as little as two weeks…and (thoroughly filtered to) remove most of the…‘good’ taste of beer your grandfather may remember.” I concluded: “One of our beverages is missing—beer!”

But there are some considerable differences. UT is a huge campus, and we crawled about campus constantly consulting paper maps trying to find our classes during that first week.  My boy has a UT app on his iPhone, which maps out where each class is relative to his current position using GPS. I had to run around campus signing up for the classes I wanted to take. He merely sat as his laptop and registered. I wrote my class notes on notebook paper, and typed my papers on an actual typewriter. He will take his laptop to class and print his papers out on a color printer the size of a shoebox. Damn kids these days. They have it easy.

To add insult to injury, the choice of beers in the local grocery store and the choice of taps available in Sixth Street bars will be much better for him. My son (when he turns 21, of course), will have so many diverse beers available to him that, yes, I admit it makes me jealous. Back in 1987, the choices were Bud, Miller Lite, Coors Light, Corona, and Heineken. Today there is of course a rainbow of craft beers—both local and from afar.   Young adults today see it as a given, and perhaps are unaware how far we’ve come, as an industry, from that point to this.  To say the least, it was not an easy or quick transition for an industry that’s been doing things pretty much the same way since the repeal of Prohibition (may the gods bless it).

One could make the legitimate case that the rapid growth and availability of craft beers is driven by consumers. Efficient marketplaces, we are told in economics, must always adapt themselves to the Vox Publica. The people’s desires will be served. But what may not surprise you is that the strongest players in any industry dominated by a few well-capitalized companies can strongly affect the public’s desires—in our case through a saturation of the airwaves, controlling of distribution, shelf space and taps, and through a systematic domination of sports, that all-important doorway to the average young man’s heart and soul.

And I’m sure you’re shocked, shocked to learn that even some borderline dirty tricks were employed. On Oct. 13, 1996, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of communications took Jim Koch and Sam Adams Boston Lager to task on “Dateline NBC” for being brewed under contract in Pittsburgh. A-B also filed a complaint with the BATF during that time against Pete’s Wicked Ale, citing language on the label describing the beer as being brewed “one batch at a time,” even though each batch was 400 barrels.   And then in March 1996, A-B announced to its distributors that they would now be giving A-B its “total commitment” in the form of exclusivity—in other words, it informed their distributors that they would only carry A-B products, with penalties for noncompliance. At the time Brandweek said that A-B was trying to  “legally squash competitors.”

And it wasn’t just A-B:  Miller Brewing Co., Coors Brewing Co., and Heineken USA (called Van Munching & Co. at the time), while not demanding that their distributors jettison craft brands, “strongly encouraged” their distributors not to take on competing brands.

There was an American who had studied all he could find about bull fighting, he’d read everything and examined all the videos, so he wrote a book and declared himself an “expert” on bull fighting. Soon, he traveled off to Spain to reap the rewards of being an author and an expert. The Spanish bull fighting aficionados welcomed him with open arms, and took him to the great arena. The spectacle was an extraordinary one, the first he had actually witnessed, he was hooked, he was an author, he was an expert and he discussed it with his new friends, using all the right terms. They were proud of him and took him to a great restaurant catering to such people. At the dinner’s main course, the chef brought out a huge dish bearing the two monstrous tokens of the bull’s enormous power center. Our expert devoured them with great gusto.

The next day, his new friends took him to the same restaurant, where the chef again delivered his specialty, but this time the power centers were rather small and a bit insipid, and when our expert inquired as to why this was so, he was told: “Señor, the bool does not always lose.”

Beer is my passion, but I am often called an “expert” in this field, a label I am very leery of accepting. I actually am an expert in swimming (I know, for example that swimming is not swimming, but rather it is flying in the water, and only an expert in swimming could tell you that), yet I have problems with that title in the field of beer. I am not nearly as knowledgeable about beer and alcohol.

Don’t call me “connoisseur” (“common sewer”?) either, I’m a reformed photographer-cum-swim coach, connoisseur-manship is almost an oxymoron in the face of that. Connoisseurs are fussbudgets, moderate in their own way, but never satisfied, whereas I am in love with the beer in my hand, any beer. For me, moderation fades in the presence of chocolate and beer (or ice cream and beer) and I’ve never met a beer festival that I didn’t immediately fall in love with.

Anyway, I used to enjoy stopping in this joint to grab a beer and talk to its owner, the late Kathy, aka the Silver Fox. She was a barkeep of the old school, mainly because she herself was ancient. They didn’t have cars when she was a girl, something she almost never failed to remind me. There was lot of repetition at the Fox. I think that’s what made it appealing. It was safely and comfortably consistent, like your childhood feather bed.

Nothing had changed about Kathy since 1985—not her denim broom skirt, not her silver conch belt, not her 1985 Lincoln Town Car with innumerable dents and certainly not the décor of the Silver Fox. The un-ironic shag carpet, which smelled of smoke, the vintage posters on the wall of Farrah Fawcett, the linoleum bar, the bar chairs made of pleather—it spoke to another era.

The year 1985 must have been a magical one at the Fox, as they saw fit to freeze time at that year, and it must have been near Christmastime because there were blue Christmas lights on at the Fox all year around. Those lights somehow made me happy and depressed at the same time.

And since the Fox was stuck in 1985, there were no craft beers to be found, even though craft beer’s first boom came in the late-1990s. No, the Silver Fox was a mainstream pale lager type of bar. Lots of Bud, Lone Star and for the younger crowd on Thursday nights (by young I mean in their 50s), the occasional Miller Lite. There was one old WWII veteran named Troy who exclusively drank Schlitz out of a can. He used to bring his wife with him until she died. Then he started bringing his little white dog, Popcorn, until he died. There aren’t many health department types that come around the Fox. Part of its appeal is that you have to know it’s there to find it—and the fuzz never knew where to find it.

The Fox was a beer-drinking place. Not much wine flowed in this joint. It was an odd mix of goat farmers, local blue-collar folk and the newly rich people from a nearby ultra-nice subdivision called the Dominion (that’s where George Strait lives, a former regular at the Fox). So the parking lot was half beat-up pick up trucks and half Jaguars. It was a pretty eclectic cross section of people.

You could still smoke in the Fox, despite a recent law against it, which went largely ignored. You could still play pool for 50 cents. There was a jukebox in the corner that plays Hank one song and Bon Jovi the next. There was very bad karaoke on Thursday nights. The men’s restroom broke years ago so everybody used the women’s. There was a fading local newspaper article framed on the wall featuring the Silver Fox, (check the byline…yep, I wrote that). There were still real bar fights at the Fox. My usual game plan in this situation was to stop, drop and roll. It works for fires too, I hear. It works for a lot of things, actually.

But one thing that makes me nostalgic about the Fox is that it had Hall of Fame permanent Point-of-Sale materials in it. Point-of-Sale materials, or POS as we call it in the industry (yes I am aware that POS is now texting shorthand for a vulgar saying) are the marketing items provided by the breweries and distributors to bars: neon signs, metal tacker signs, cardboard stand-ups, flag streamers, table tents, posters, etc. And the beer industry has created some really good—and some really bad—POS over the years. But it seems the late 1970s through the 1980s were the golden age of legacy beer industry POS. You seasoned beer guys know what I’m talking about.  Every old authentic beer tavern had two items in particular: 1. An over-the-bar circular Clydesdale lamp which is perpetually broken, and 2. The Coors sparkly rocky mountain spring water scene with simulated running water (engineered by the Germans, built by the Chinese, enjoyed by cowboys at the Silver Fox). The 1980s represented a sort of POS arms race between the large U.S. breweries. POS got evermore elaborate and expensive.