Drink Local: AGAIN, Why This is What Saves Us.

“Let’s stop seeing the consequences of our continued support of beers like Budweiser and Coors and Miller and Pabst as abstractions. They are NOT…We, the beer-buying American public, get to choose whether our own neighborhood businesses survive and thrive or whether fat cat foreigners just keep gettin’ fatter and fatter. I know which one I choose. There has never been any doubt.” – The Pour Fool, July 2023

“I URGE you to Say Something to restaurants that don’t offer a reasonable number of locally-produced beers, wines, and spirits. Any restaurant that boasts about “locovorism” and then offers a French or California-heavy wine list (unless you’re reading this in California or France) is a big, fat, stinking PHONY. Any public facility anywhere in the US that offers MOSTLY BudMillerCoorsPabst as their beer choices deserves to answer direct or even RUDE questions about it, daily. Brewing, distilling, and winemaking are booming, in every part of this country. Your local businesses should be supporting your local producers – PERIOD. And you should be supporting your own economy – PERIOD.“
– The Pour Fool, June 2014

I have written at least ten, twelve times in the history of The Pour Fool about why it’s important to literally pass up big national brands and chains to Buy Local, to spend your money in YOUR community or state or region, instead of laying out for lower quality goods from Other Places.

Now, as I launch this leaner, yes MEANER version of this website, it is even more important to embrace this idea because, FINALLY, there is a slow-emerging Opening to slip through. Today, I read of a shocking number of giant retail chains that have fallen on Hard Times. Home Depot, the hardware juggernaut, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Other chains of similar size have filed or are about to. For decades, American retail was dominated by the superstore concept. In the aftermath of Covid, with retailers everywhere raising prices, what I predicted aeons ago – that, one day, retailers would simply price themselves out – is coming true. There are other reasons, of course, but prices drive trade and people are getting sick of being an ATM for billionaires and lesser Fat Cats to siphon dollars from.

There is already a noticeable and expanding Void in the marketplace. As chains shrink, the need for, the DEMAND for, those goods and services diminishes not at all. As I said in these pages in these pages and elsewhere on the ‘net, I firmly believe small business is the path back from recessions and worse. Taking the main thrust of American commerce back from a dispersed, national-scale model to local people habitually buying locally-made goods keeps dollars in teir own local-state economies, which otherwise go to foreign countries. Since SABMiller and its subsidiary brands were bought by AB InBev and SABMiller was acquired by MolsonCoors (of which a number of their brands are owned by AB InBev), all in 2016, basically all the Western mass-produced beer is owned by ONE company – based in Leuven, Belgium, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

If you’re drinking any of one of their fifty or so subsidiary brands, YOU are NOT drinking American beer. PERIOD.

So…ball’s in your court. You CAN, absolutely, here in the fat middle of the Craft Beer Lager BOOM, find EXACTLY the same style of beer as you get in every single can of Bud, Miller, Coors, Pabst, or _______, only properly made and BETTER. And this FAR better beer is made by…YOUR friends, your neighbors, maybe even your own family, in YOUR community, YOUR county, YOUR state, YOUR region. For BETTER beer of the BudMillerCoorsPabst type that costs usually no more than 10-12% more – and often, these days, LESS! – where would you rather that money goes: supporting your local/state economy…or off to Belgium and the pockets of rich guys looking to buy another yacht?

SHOP LOCAL. BUY LOCAL. EAT LOCAL. DRINK LOCAL. As far as I am concerned, there is NO EXCUSE for ANY functionally intelligent American adult to be drinking ANY beverage from global mass-producers. NONE. If it’s an issue, for you, of manliness…C’mon, dude. These wimps are the very ones who invented “Bitter Beer Face!”, freely admitting that they can’t handle some hops in their beers. If they want to avoid Bitter Beer Face effectively…there’s always Pepsi and Coke. But copping to being a wimp…well, how manly can that really be?

There will be more about this Down The Road…because some people just will not listen…