MICHAEL JACKSON

I just learned
that Michael Jackson has died.

Jackson was
immensely influential on all of us: drinkers,
brewers, distillers, and of course, writers. (He
could be almost too influential; I remember one
writer telling me that he didn’t read Jackson’s
work at all any more, because he didn’t want to
sound too much like Jackson.) His books were bibles
for beer and Scotch whisky drinkers – more so here
than in the UK, perhaps – and his tutored tastings
were ground-breaking. Jackson was the first rock
star of beer, drawing crowds of admiring fans
whenever he appeared.

I was one of them.
I met Michael in the men’s room at the University
of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archeology and
Anthropology, during one of his mass tastings that
was part of The Book & The Cook. It was before
I even knew what TB&TC was; Michael Jackson was
in town doing a beer tasting, what else did I need
to know? After the tasting (yes, I took notes, and
still have them), Jackson was signing books and I
overheard someone asking him a question about
“stock ale”, in the context of the Samuel Adams
Boston Ale, then sub-labeled as a stock ale. MJ
gave a somewhat circuitous answer that left me
still curious (At a TB&TC press breakfast years
later, I told him I admired how he took questions,
any question, from a beer audience and answered in
detail. “It’s simple,” he told me. “If I don’t know
the answer, I take a sentence or two to speculate,
another sentence to note what other subject that
brings up, and then I just answer the question I
want to answer.”).

I was a long time
in the line for the bathroom afterwards, and just
as I stepped up to the urinal, I heard some
commotion behind me: “Pass him up! Oh, please, Mr.
Jackson, go ahead! After you!” The next thing I
knew, there was MJ at the porcelian appliance next
to me. I took the opportunity to introduce myself,
declined an offer to shake hands, and asked him,
“So the stock ale: is that really a style, like a
New England biere de garde, or just an extra-aged
ale?” He eyed me, still working, and said, “Well,
more age, more hops. It was made, but I don’t know
if I’d call it a style.” I thanked him, we washed
up, and then shook hands. I’d met Michael
Jackson.

Working with John
Hansell at malt advocate gave me a lot more chances
to talk to Michael; he and John were good friends.
Eventually I would wind up editing his column for
the magazine. It was not something I looked forward
to; Michael was a bit of a sloppy writer at times,
largely because of the rush he was always in. MJ
always had numerous pots boiling at the same time,
a project here, a project there, trips, visits,
lectures, editing, writing. He was immensely
productive: multiple columns in print and on-line,
books on beer and whisky, feature articles, video
series, CDs.

If it was about
beer or whisky, he did it.

But it was
Michael’s sense of place that really made his
writing so important to me. When MJ wrote about a
beer, he wrote about where it was brewed and where
people drank it, the look of the walls and the lay
of the land, why the town was there and who the
brewer’s father was.

I remember driving
Michael around on a tour of area breweries, a day
that turned into a travel disaster. He was two and
a half hours late leaving New York, thanks to some
skinny git who was trying and never did open a
brewpub in NYC, but still managed to hold MJ’s
attention all morning; I suspect he simply refused
to take him to Tony Forder’s house until he’d said
all he had to say. We had to cancel the appointment
at Yards and drive on to Brandywine Brewing near
Wilmington in heavy rain.

Yet when Michael
got there, he calmly pulled out his notebook,
tasted beer and started asking questions . . .
about the rug in front of the fireplace. “Now why
is that rug there? It doesn’t look like the right
place, it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the
room. Is there a spot on the floor? Why that rug?”
I was baffled and a bit annoyed; I brought him all
this way to find out about a cheap little imitation
oriental rug? Dave Dietz shrugged and said “It’s
just a rug.”

But as we slowly,
slowly made our way up through heavy rain and
ridiculous traffic to the Stoudt’s Fest, arriving
an hour before it ended (MJ made a quick tour of
the floor, and then locked himself in Carol’s
office with a bottle of Triple), I realized that he
was right. The rug didn’t fit on the wide expanse
of blonde wood floor. Except it was a touch of
softness in an open space, something interesting.
Whether he ever wrote about it or not (and I never
saw anything about it), it was a memory key, a
small something that would bring back the whole
feel of the place. I learned that trick, and use it
myself.

Maybe the most
valuable thing I learned from Michael Jackson was
that importance of place. I learned it second-hand,
because it was actually something he told John
Hansell, and John’s hammered it home to me: you
can’t write about a place if you haven’t been
there. Seems simple, obvious, yet I see writers
crossing it every week.

I did. I’m working
to overcome that, and to go to the places I write
about.

What Michael meant
is that it’s crucial to go to the place where beer
or whisky is made to understand it. I finally went
to Scotland for the first time just last month, and
Scotch whisky makes much more sense to me, even
though I’ve been drinking it for years. I went to
Koln and Dusseldorf in January to get my own
personal understanding of kolsch and altbier. I
went to Bamberg, I went to Aying, I went to
Andechs. I’m planning a trip to Ireland, and a trip
to Belgium. And it’s all because of Michael
Jackson.

What I do, every
day I write, is all because of Michael Jackson. If
MJ hadn’t been there to fire my interest, to show
me a path that could be taken, I’d still be a
librarian. I might be happy with that, but I
wouldn’t have had the fun, the late nights with
great people, the satisfaction of a well-written
piece or the satisfaction of opening someone’s eyes
to a great beer, if not for Michael
Jackson.

t’s hard to
believe he’s gone. We all knew he was sick, he had
been staring down Parkinson’s for years. When I
came across him walking to his Monk’s dinner with
Carolyn Smagalski this past spring, he seemed
cheery, lucid, and not so weak as he had been. We
greeted each other gladly, and walked on to Monk’s.
He did a great presentation, good stories, much
less meandering than usual.

It was the last
time I’ll see him.

Michael
Jackson has died.

I’ll miss the man,
the writer, the friend.

(REPRINTED
with PERMISSION from the 8/3O/O7 POSTING on LEW
BRYSON’S BLOG: SEEN THROUGH A GLASS at
WWW.LEWBRYSON.BLOGSPOT.COM.)