WILL KNOXVILLE HAVE AN OKTOBERFEST OR TWO?

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds goes to the Knoxville craft beer fair, and is pleased with what's on offer.

Mostly me, and my friend Jim (who I’ve known since junior high) were reflecting on the vast improvement in the world of beer in America, and particularly in Knoxville.  As late as, oh, 1990 or so, you could go into almost any bar in Knoxville and if you asked what kind of beer they had you’d get an answer like this:  “We’ve got everything!  Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Light, Coors, Coors Light – anything you want!”

It's easy to take the craft-brewing revolution for granted, but it brought about huge changes and for the better.  Nowadays, the beer scene in America tends to be better than that in Europe.  No, really.  In fact, one of my former research assistants, who practices law in Belgium now, brought over a couple of Belgian friends who wanted to see Tennessee.  I met them for lunch at Barley’s in the Old City, to hear a bluegrass show and eat pizza and drink beer.  They were very impressed with the fifty or so taps that Barley’s offers.

Yes, the ability for a tavern to brew its own beer expands the choice set, too often the places that don't brew their own offer that restricted set of "everything."

The mass-produced stuff was also a paradigm of the false economies of productivity, and the light stuff, well, that might have started as a way of getting in on the fitness enthusiasm that accompanied a shift to desk work rather than tasks involving heavy lifting, and then it became a way of selling colored water in blue cans to dumb guys.  And, no doubt, the behavioral economists and the sort of conscience-cowboys who get upset about too many choices of deodorant will likely object to all those varieties of beer, particularly when so many taverns curate the offerings as Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite, and the local headache in a glass.

It's possible that at the Knoxville festival, a few of the brewers got out of the hoppy-fruity rut that strikes me as the default setting for craft beer.  (The comments suggest as much!)

Beyond the industry, the brew festival marks a whole culture. I remember being excited when Knoxville got its first microbrewery, the Downtown Grill & Brewery (then called the Great Southern Brewery). The DGB is still in operation, owned by some guys I went to high school with, but there are now so many flourishing breweries in town that I probably couldn’t name them all off the top of my head. (Actually, I’m sure I couldn’t.) A whole bunch of people circulate among the various breweries around town. And people in that culture seem to be pretty happy.

The crowd was diverse, especially as to ages, running from early 20s to probably 80s. That’s unusual these days in most settings, where age segregation is a thing. Everyone was cheerful – well, there was beer, and tacos and barbecue and such from food trucks – and friendly and outgoing, with lots of strangers opening up conversations. It was a Salena Zito kind of place.

Let's see if he files an Oktoberfest season report.  Prosit!