Should Old Acquaintances be Forgot?

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Thebeerchaser

Besides Wayfinder Brewing, which I reviewed in my last Beerchaser post, I’ve been back on the trail the last two months and had first-time visits to a number of breweries and bars that I’ll be sharing with you in future posts.

These include Binary, Von Ebert, and Pono breweries, the Wildwood Saloon and the Basement Pub – the latter a wonderful neighborhood bar on Portland’s SE side. Stay tuned and here’s a preview with some photos below:

That said and without trying to be maudlin at the start of a new year, I feel compelled to recognize three great Portland establishments – two that recently closed and one that will in the next few months. No glitzy brewery with shiny taps and sleek modern furniture can replace them.

“And surely you’ll buy your pint cup!

and surely I’ll buy mine!

And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,

for Auld Lang Syne.”

The Jolly Roger

A June, 2022 Willamette Week article entitled, “Beloved Southeast Portland Dive the Jolly Roger Is on Its Final Voyage,” relates how co-owners for the last twenty years, Rob and Starr Jackson, negotiated with their landlord for an early exit on their lease.

“Admittedly, civic preservationists may have reason to worry about the Jolly’s truly irreplaceable feature.

Jackson admits there’s no clear plan on what will become of the bar’s justly treasured signage—a majestic freestanding pylon sign shaped like a ship’s mast at a height no longer sanctioned—but it’s evaded the wrecking ball before.”

For twenty years, an eastside landmark!

“….the property was bought by developers whose plans are for a five-story, 100-plus-unit residential complex……’We got destroyed during all the conflicts,’ (Portland protests and riots) Jackson tells WW.

‘No matter how much we tried to fix the building, people kept hurting it, and the police were unavailable to help.’ “ (emphasis added)

(Another sad commentary on the City of Portland’s disastrous inability to protect its streets and businesses during the pandemic.)

Portland’s permitting process is notoriously slow – a blessing for regulars at the JR because the original closing was supposed to be on Super Bowl Sunday. A bartender told me in a phone call today, however, that it has been extended to April or until the developers get the final go-ahead for their project.

I hit the Jolly Roger with my friend and Beerchasing Regular, Hillary Barbour, whose other Beerchasing exploits have included The Verne and Mad Hanna – a Reed College alum who appreciates dive bars….

And the Jolly Roger certainly fits the definition of a classic dive as you can see from the photos below – the cheap beer, video machines, dark and windowless rooms, historic beer signs and the restrooms which defy health department and perhaps contemporary society’s standards. It is memorable and Portlanders will be sorry to see it set sail.

While the SE location will be missed, fortunately the Jackson’s have two other locations – the Jolly Roger at John’s Landing and the Sports Page in Beaverton.

Perhaps the historic ship’s mast should be placed at the top of Portland City Hall. Then all the City would need is a rudder……..!

A Buried Treasure Disappears

Photo Nov 15, 5 08 29 PM (2)

One of the establishments I reviewed in 2016, was one I visited for lunch many times while I was working at the law firm before retirement in 2011. The Schwabe firm was only two short blocks away from Mummy’s – an iconic Egyptian Lounge and Restaurant in the basement of another building.

It was owned by two unforgettable Egyptian brothers, Ghobvial and Phillip Mounir. They bartended, cooked and served the food – they were the only “employees.” They opened Mummy’s in about 1986.

Photo Nov 15, 5 48 26 PM

I used to take some of our Summer Associates (law school clerks) there for lunch. Since we were competing with other law firms to recruit them, these top students were typically wined and dined at Portland’s finest restaurants – Higgins, the Heathman Grille, Jake’s, etc.

To our Recruiting Director’s initial horror, I would usually take them to Mummy’s – that is until without exception, they would tell her that they loved the “tomb experience,” – the ambiance, Pyramid Beer, the brothers’ hospitality and the good Egyptian cuisine:

And the Schwabe managers and my family surprised me after hosting my 2011 retirement dinner at nearby Nel Centro, with an after-dinner reception at Mummy’s – it was memorable – in fact, there is a video someplace in the Ethernet of me reluctantly sharing the floor with a belly dancer, who was performing that night.

The last time I was there was for late afternoon drinks with two of my favorite Schwabe lawyers, Brian (Brain) King and Margaret Hoffman – both skilled litigators who have since retired. We met at the firm at 5:00 and headed on our two-block journey – like a reverse exodus of the Children of Israel.

Even though it had been five years since I had been to their establishment, when I walked in, Ghobvial immediately exclaimed, “Schwabe!” and pointed towards what had been my favorite booth.

Photo Nov 15, 5 22 12 PM

Whether it was the pandemic or the brothers deciding to forsake the daily grind, Mummy’s closed permanently in 2022.

Another possible theory was one I came across today in the Morning Brew newsletter – the ubiquitous arbiters of political correctness conceptually assigned the establishment to the same fate as one of Egypt’s most famous mummies Ramesses the Great, who was evidently ready to depart at the age of 90 after reigning for almost sixty years:

“Because of the many battles he fought, Ramesses’ body showed evidence of healed injuries and arthritis; his arteries were hardened; and he had a large dental infection that might have killed him.” (Photo attribution #1)

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is ramses_i_mummy.jpg

You see, the word “mummy” itself has now been banished or exiled to the toxic waste dump of no-longer acceptable terms.

Examples include “manhole” – now “maintenance hole” ; “unemployed” – now “involuntarily leisured”; “master bedroom” – now “primary suite”; or “wrong” – now “differentially logical”; etc. etc. etc.

And don’t forget elimination of “The Civil War” for the annual Oregon State vs. U of Oregon football game.

“Some museums want you to remember that mummies were once—a really long time ago—people, too. A trio of British museum organizations said they will avoid using the word “mummy” whenever possible, and swap it out with “mummified remains of” or “mummified person.”

Well Mummy’s may be gone, but it will not be forgotten – neither the name, the brothers, the food nor the ambiance and charm.

Sloan’s Tavern – Goodbye and Keep on Truckin’

One of Portland’s most iconic neighborhood bars closed on December 30, 2022 as reported by Willamette Week in an article: “Sloan’s Tavern is Remember by Regulars and Former Employees Following Its Closure“:

“(Sloan’s) closed for good Dec. 30 following Sloan’s sale of the property to developers— they plan to build a seven-story apartment building on the land, and (Shirley) Sloan will settle into a well-earned retirement.

Nostalgic well-wishers spent the last few weeks of 2022 coming by for one last visit and often to learn just how little they really knew about the establishment.”

And why do I describe this establishment as “iconic”? Well, just check the photo of the exterior wall on its west side in the photos I took when I reviewed the bar in 2016 – you can also view a younger Beerchaser from that visit….

Co-owner Bob Sloan also owned a body shop (Sloan’s Custom Body and Paint) next door and did skilled body and restorative work on classic autos. His specialty, however, was working on Freightliner Trucks which is evident from the exterior wall and a Freightliner grill built right into the bar.

When a café next door to the body shop run by an elderly lady closed, they bought the property and opened the bar in 1979. (The entire property was originally a creamery that opened in 1926.) Some reviews labeled it a “dive bar,” but it is no such thing.

When I interviewed this charming and classy lady in 2016, Shirley described Sloan’s as “My living room.”

The Bridgetown Bites blog conveys the décor aptly:

“Notable elements of the décor there at Sloan’s is the ‘frozen in time’ 1970s look inside; the semi-truck cab jutting out from the building; and the Chicago Coin Band-Box jukebox, a rare thing to find anywhere in the U.S. (it’s estimated there are only about 10 of them operating around the country).

Put in a quarter and you’ll see the figurines at the top dancing and playing the musical instruments in their hands, in time to whatever tune you picked (mostly Country music).”

P1040022

I was joined on my visit to Sloan’s by friends “West Coast” Dave Hicks, a San Francisco consultant with whom I worked in law firm days and John Horvick. People in the NW will recognize< John as an oft-quote political and polling consultant at the respected firm DHM Research and with whom I served on the Board of the City Club of Portland.

The three of us enjoyed the ambiance and the food (essentially home-cooked since it’s Shirley’s living room….). I’m sure they join me and other Portlanders who said farewell to this Albina area neighborhood institution. It’s one of a number of bars that will now exist only in our good memories.

P1040014

May Shirley Sloan have a wonderful retirement and let’s hope the Oregon Historical Society or some other protector of historical artifacts gains possession of the Chicago Coin Band-Box jukebox.

Cheers!

External Photo Attribution

#1 Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ramses_I_Mummy.jpg) Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Alyssa Bivins 8 July 2016.

Leaving 2020 in “Good Taste”?

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Thebeerchaser

Image courtesy of Pam Williams

(Welcome back to Thebeerchaser. Since this is a long post, if you are seeing it through an e-mail, please visit the blog by clicking on the title above to see all of the photos and the narrative is not clipped or shortened.)

The Taste of Beer – Follow-up

In my last post, I did a rant, of sorts, about beer reviews – where some of the descriptions of my favorite beverage, in the reviewers’ attempt to be creative, are ridiculous. I had saved examples clear back to 2014 to illustrate my point. https://thebeerchaser.com/2020/12/23/holiday-cheer-and-the-taste-of-beer/

The Von Ebert Boarmobile

The reaction was positive and I wanted to follow with one more current example – from Willamette Week’s 2019 Beer Guide.

It’s an excerpt from the eighth-ranking in their Beers-of-the-Year – the Pilsner (4%) from Von Ebert Brewing – a small and good brewer right in Portland’s Pearl District.

I’ll follow with what I regard as some common sense advice on tasting beer from two experts. I might add, that of all of them, this description was one of the most ludicrous although the brewery’s Pils is a great beer:

“When the first sip of Von Ebert’s Pilsner crosses your lips, it tastes as if you were reading a 19th-century love letter painstakingly translated from German.

Three different Pilsner malts, each with its own crackery nuance, join like the tiny gears inside an imported continental timepiece, ticking beneath a flowery blend of Perle, Saphir and Tettnanger hops lifted into your nose by spritzy natural carbonation. And after weeks of cold-temp lagering, you can actually read a letter through it.”

“Crackery nuance?”

Wie hat Ihnen diese Beschreibung gefallen?

Oh sorry, I meant “How did you like that description?” I got so carried away with German that I forgot some of you may not be enlightened enough to know the nuances of German to English translation (much less the “crackery nuance” he mentions). The reviewer’s tirade of wacky similes made me laugh.

For some more practical advice, and because he is a smart and gifted entrepreneur with common sense and a great knowledge of beer, I asked Adam Milne, the owner of Old Town Brewing for his take. (His brewery also produces one of my five favorite beers – Shanghai’d English Style IPA – a 2018 Gold Medalist at the World Beer Cup.) His e-mail stated:

“I always like one of two approaches. One is to use common terms that are known to beer drinkers, so the readers have a universal understanding. This can be words like bitter, hoppy, fruity, malty, IBU’s and many others.

The second approach is to go outside the beer world for terms that apply to food and drinks that everyone is familiar with. This can be describing sodas, cakes, fruits or vegetables. Basically compare to any ingredient in a grocery store or made in a restaurant. This allows for people who are not as familiar with beer to easily relate.”

Goethe – did not mix German beer and love letters

Notice Adam did not use Shakespearean metaphors or an example from Wolfgang Von Goethe although the WW reviewer might have taken the advice from this 18th century German poet, playwright, novelist and scientist who opined: “A person ‘hears’ only what they understand.”

I thought another good source might be an article in Draft Magazine entitled “What a psycholinguist can tell us about how we describe beer flavors,” but unfortunately, Draft Magazine was discontinued in 2017 and the pieces is no longer available.

There was, however, a practical article entitled “How to Describe Beer Like a Pro,” that seems reasonable. https://www.finedininglovers.com/article/how-describe-beer-pro

Finally, before I leave the subject, I have to give Parker Hall, the reviewer from Willamette Week at least some credit. Although I think his beer reviews are pretentious, I respect his education and background. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music – a very respected institution, where he studied jazz percussion on a scholarship.

Oberlin – respected educational institution

“He remains a professional musician in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, and is an award-winning homebrewer besides being a contributor to Portland’s alt-weekly Willamette Week.”

And While I’m Ranting About Reviews…

I guess before I depart from the subject of reviews, I’ll also talk a bit about book reviews. Obviously, my exploits to new bars was stymied this year by the virus, so I read a lot more – mainly fiction, but also some good non-fiction works as well.

2020 warranted escapism so a much of my literary menu was thrillers by popular authors such as Lee Child, David Baldacci, Harlen Coban, etc. But I found that relying on well known authors to rate their contemporaries is not very helpful in selecting a good read. Usually, they are one or two sentence comments on the front or back covers and thrillers typically have phrases such as “fast-paced, a real page turner, superb plotting, absorbing nail-biter, an all-night read, etc.”

James Patterson writes of Lee Child, “I’m a fan.” Best selling author, Lisa Gardiner writes of David Baldacci, “…one of the all-time best thriller authors,” and New York Times best-selling author Lisa Scottoline states, “Baldacci delivers, every time!” One has to ask, with their writing demands and appearances, how thoroughly are these best-selling authors going to read and digest another writer’s book?

Perhaps others have arrived at the same conclusion as stated in a 2012 Los Angeles Times article, “Why is Amazon deleting writers’ reviews of other authors’ books?” The author quotes Amazon in a response to a reviewer inquiry:

Amazon Book Store

“We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product. As a result, we’ve removed your reviews for this title.” (emphasis supplied)

And, of course, this raises all kinds of questions such as, “How does one define ‘directly competing?'” The article quoted one writer opining “….author-on-author reviews comprise so little of Amazon’s overall site content as to be nothing more than a “sparrow’s fart.” Evidently, Amazon amended its position because the policy now allows authors to submit reviews of others’ books:

“….unless the author has a personal relationship with the author of the book being reviewed, or was involved in the book’s creation process.”

A Solution?

Now since in the last blog post and this one, I railed against the over-the-top creative license by beer reviewers and now I’m slamming book reviews for being boring gibberish, one might ask, “Okay Don, what’s your solution?”

My answer – after giving it about the same amount of contemplation that Lisa Gardiner demonstrated in her review of David Baldacci’s book above – is in two parts:

First, since one of the purposes of book reviews and comments is to help readers avoid wasting their time on bad books and other literary works, reviews should be limited to those of lousy writers, poets and other artists. To illustrate, I will use the example of English poet William Topaz McGonagal (1825-1902).

I became aware of him from a calendar of events in the Oregonian which noted the date of the death of the man “who is affectionately considered Britain’s worst ever poet.” Upon researching, I learned that others “celebrate” him in more exalted terms – “The world’s worst poet.”

An excellent 2011 article in the British newspaper The Independent entitled, “The Story of William McGonagal” stated:

“In his lifetime, he was a music hall joke….He was paid five shillings for a public recital so that his mostly working-class audiences could jeer at his bad poetry or pelt him with rotten vegetables…..

….Yesterday, the writer and comedian Barry Cryer went on the Today programme to pay tribute to the Dundee bard, and recite the only poem McGonagall was ever paid to write, which was an advertisement for Sunlight soap:

Requires minimal elbow grease….

‘You can use it with great pleasure and ease — without wasting any elbow grease.'”

In concluding this section and without trying to overdo the topic – albeit extremely fascinating – I leave you with a poem he wrote after visiting New York City. It gives credence to the Wikipedia summary:

“He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers’ opinions of his work….. His only apparent understanding of poetry was his belief that it needed to rhyme.

McGonagall’s fame stems from the humorous effects these shortcomings are considered to generate in his work. Scholars argue that his inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary, and ill-advised imagery combine to make his work amongst the most unintentionally amusing dramatic poetry in the English language.”

Empire State Building – Tall, but more than thirteen “storeys”

“Jottings of New York” by William Topaz McGonagal

Oh mighty City of New York! you are wonderful to behold,
Your buildings are magnificent, the truth be it told,
They were the only things that seemed to arrest my eye,
Because many of them are thirteen storeys high.

McCongagal died in Edinburgh in 1902 in poverty and was buried in a pauper’s grave leaving behind a vast quantity of work and a reputation that endures more than a century after his death.

To reinforce my point – reviews of bad literary work are much easier to write, there is more consensus on the degree of unworthiness, it helps readers avoid wasting their time and it may actually help the author’s awareness. (I just need to be hopeful that reviews of this blog and the manner in which I play the oboe since retirement will be only mildly disparaging when included under this standard.)

“Bard” Reviews

Furthering my argument to essentially limit critiques to lousy literature or maybe even substandard beer, I would submit that the model in the following article could be used to promote creativity and more inventive descriptions. Book Bub published a captivating piece, “Twelve of the Funniest Shakespearean Insults” – replete with affronts which would be fit for describing either a shoddy literary work or hideous malted beverage.

For example, let’s assume you’re about 120 pages into a novel that is boring, puts you to sleep and has no redeeming literary value. You could aptly describe it as, “A fusty nut with no kernel,” (from Troilus and Cressida Act 2, Scene 1).

Now since my nickname is “Dirt” as you will see from the blog header above, I might take issue with the following. It could describe an author who should be pursuing a career using his or her hands to produce a product other than the written word – “O Gull! O Dolt! As ignorant as dirt!” (Othello Act 5, Scene 2)

Or let’s suppose you hit a new brewery and after sampling their flagship beer, you have to force yourself to swallow the loathsome malted concoction. It would lead you to describe the brewer as, “Thou cream-faced loon,” (Macbeth Act 5, Scene 3) while describing his brew as “(A) mouthful of foul deformity.” (Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2).

This scheme could be expanded to other classical philosophers such as Machiavelli who might have been describing a writer when he wrote – “……fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.”

Socrates (left) with buddy, Aristotle

Or perhaps, Aristotle, advising a scribe to pursue another occupation – “To avoid criticism – say nothing, do nothing, be nothing!”

Upon reflection, it’s unfortunate that some of these utterances were not employed during the election cycle this last year. So ends my rant and I guess, if reading annoying and trite reviews is my biggest annoyance, I’m pretty fortunate.

So Happy New Year from Thebeerchaser. We are thrilled and encouraged that our two nurse daughters both recently received their COVID vaccinations and let us hope that the vaccines end up in arms around the world in a rapid, safe and responsible manner.

That said, since I’m a healthy, retired guy under 75, my older daughter when I asked her when she thought I would get my shot, responded with the following photo and said, “Drink up, Dad!”