The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [175]
Jetty Fishery, Rockaway Beach, OR
Little Yoeman Brewing Co., Cabool, MO
Ourayle House, Ouray, CO
Prodigal Sun, Pendleton, OR
The Ship Inn, Milford, NJ
Silver Gulch Brewing & Bottling Co., Fairbanks, AK
BEST RARE BOTTLE LISTS:
Birch & Barley/Church Key, Washington, D.C.
Brasserie Beck, Washington, D.C.
Ebenezer’s, Lovell, ME
Eleven Madison Park, New York, NY
The Falling Rock Taphouse, Denver, CO
Heorot, Muncie, ID
Max’s Tap Room, Baltimore, MD
Monk’s Café, Philadelphia, PA
The Porter Beer Bar, Atlanta, GA
Toronado, San Francisco, CA
Postscript
EVERY DAY I WRITE, OR DRINK A BEER, AND ESPECIALLY WHEN I’M doing both, I think of Michael Jackson. Not ‘that one’, as he would say, but the Yorkshire journalist whose life and career was defined by a glorious world tour of beer. The towering hero of craft beer appreciation since the late 1970s, Jackson—author of sixteen seminal works including The World Guide to Beer (1977) and The New World Guide to Beer (1988), The Great Beers of Belgium (1991), and many others—took me under his wing starting in late 1996. With a seemingly bottomless reserve of graciousness, he helped me get started as a beer writer after I won a post-graduate fellowship that allowed me to delve into beer brewing techniques around the world for a year right out of college. Those encounters and that year changed my life.
It was August, 1996. I was twenty-two, and I had arrived in England just a few days before to start a wandering independent study on brewing for the Watson Foundation. After a needlessly nervous phone call to his office I traveled by train from Shawford, a village outside Winchester, to visit Jackson in his London home, in Hammersmith. We headed to his local, and then The Dove, a gloriously weathered old pub along the Thames, and drank for an entire evening. That day he became a mentor, writing to me (and once, to my amazement, about me, in a story about the Belgian beer Orval, a mutual minor obsession), and even promised me he would write the foreword to my first beer book. Alas, I failed to have this one ready for him in time.
I saw Michael infrequently after my year of research, not entirely by choice. Shortly after we’d met again in Portland, Oregon at the 1998 American Homebrewers’ Association’s National Conference, I moved to New Mexico for my first national magazine job, then decamped to New York just two days before 9/11 to pursue my luck as a writer. Though we spoke by telephone and corresponded by e-mail intermittently, Michael didn’t make many appearances in Gotham, and what’s more, I’d drifted away from the craft beer scene a bit in pursuit of New York–based travel writing work, which didn’t call for my craft beer expertise nearly enough (yet). It would take five more years in the trenches for me to earn the right to call myself a full-time writer, and I’ll never forget how he would always inquire, in the most honestly inquisitive and supportive manner imaginable, if I was getting there. “Keep writing,” he wrote to me in a dedication in one of his books he’d given me as a gift. I did.
The last time I saw Michael was at D.B.A., the classic New York beer bar, on a limpid spring night on March 23, 2007. He was in town for a special tasting at a hotel in midtown, and D.B.A. owner Ray Deter and an assortment of other beer lovers who knew him well had arranged for a late-night session to taste rare Scandinavian ales. By candlelight, around 1a.m., we watched as Jackson arrived. He was walking with companions including the lovely Carolyn Smagalski, beer importer Dan Shelton, and his wife, Tessa (Dan had called to invite me to join, for which I am eternally grateful), and Monk’s Café owner Tom Peters. I was shocked when I looked at my old mentor: he greeted me warmly, but his eyes were weary, his frame hunched. It was not the Michael I once knew. Dan Shelton pulled me aside and told me what was going on; it was then that I learned he had been severely weakened by a decade-long battle with Parkinson’s, a closely-held secret for years, but something Jackson had begun