Speaking of beer, Ed drew my attention to the brewing feud between a St. Louis liquor distributor and Yellowstone Valley Brewing Co. When I lived in Billings, some friends and I dropped by George and Jay’s unassuming warehouse brewery–back when they were still building their taphouse bar–and they treated us to a short tour and brewing lesson. These are excellent Montana microbrewers who view beer as a celebration of local ingredients:

Milled under the Cretaceous Rims of the Eagle Sandstone – A paleo beach in Montana!
Brewed from waters of the Yellowstone River – the last free and wild river.
Fermented in the shadows of the majestic Breartooth Mountains.

Who doesn’t love a poetic geochemist brewer?

Well the David Sherman Corporation, purveyors of Everclear grain alcohol and Rebel Yell whiskey, does not share George and Jay’s appreciation for the unique Yellowstone river landscape. According to David Sherman, Yellowstone Bourbon was developed in 1854 by Kentuckian J.B. Dant; it’s name came from one of Dant’s salesmen who visited Yellowstone Park in its inaugural year of 1872: “He had the idea that if the name Yellowstone were put on a bottle of good whiskey, chances were good that the folks out West would buy it, and since the park was receiving publicity, the name would stick in everybody’s mind.” I can’t tell if the “folks out West” buy much Yellowstone Bourbon, and I haven’t seen it in many bars here.

Trademark law is more complicated than it should be because each case depends on a particular court’s view of what may or may not confuse consumers, which is hard to predict. Unfortunately, this uncertainty drives many bigger firms to threaten smaller ones, because judges see a plaintiff’s diligence in enforcing a trademark as evidence of the brand’s value. While the article notes several examples of Montanans successfully standing their intangible ground (Montana Knits of Dillon beat Claude Montana, and the Golden Nugget of Troy beat Las Vegas’s Golden Nugget), the costs of a trademark infringement lawsuit often force the little guy to give up his brand. In the end the dynamics of trademark law probably lead to overprotection of brand names in circumstances when no reasonable consumer would be confused.

If Yellowstone Brewing can’t afford to defend the lawsuit, it would be nice to see someone take up their cause pro bono, or for a public interest group or law school clinic to jump in. That may sound strange, but clear and evenhanded enforcement of intellectual property law benefits the public as much as robust real property law; there are all sorts of nonprofit conservation groups that champion the property rights of the small landowner–how about the intellectual property rights of the small brandowner?

[A]n early reference, in the Trenton Times for 20 June 1883 said “It is called the growler because it provokes so much trouble in the scramble after beer”.

At the turn of the last century, the growler was associated in tenements of New York with the unsavory practice of sending boys to fetch beer for men who were either too industrious, lazy, or mindful of their reputations to enter a bar themselves. Jacob Riis described the practice in his How the Other Half Lives:

I doubt if one child in a thousand, who brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar, is sent away empty-handed, if able to pay for what he wants. I once followed a little boy, who shivered in bare feet on a cold November night so that he seemed in danger of smashing his pitcher on the icy pavement, into a Mulberry Street saloon where just such a sign hung on the wall, and forbade the barkeeper to serve the boy. The man was as astonished at my interference as if I had told him to shut up his shop and go home, which in fact I might have done with as good a right, for it was after 1 A.M., the legal closing hour. He was mighty indignant too, and told me roughly to go away and mind my business, while he filled the pitcher. The law prohibiting the selling of beer to minors is about as much respected in the tenement-house districts as the ordinance against swearing.

We’ve been to a few Mulberry Street saloons (you occasionally see our favorite, which sat around the corner from Autumn’s apartment, on the Sopranos), but growlers are harder to find there. While there is one small brewery in New York that brews beer worth taking home with you–today, most of New York’s breweries are chain restaurant tourist gimmicks–that brewery lies in the far reaches of Brooklyn, so I never had the opportunity to fill a growler with Brooklyn Lager.

Growlers more common in Montana’s local breweries. They are now glass jugs, not tin cans, and they can keep beer drinkable for up to two weeks–though I’ve never owned a half gallon of beer that long, and once you open a growler you’ve got only a day or two to get to the bottom of it. Take home a growler of Montana beer and a friend or two, and that won’t be a problem.

The Pauline takes its name from my grandmother, a tough old Scot born on the flanks of the Crazy Mountains, my mother’s mother. When I came to visit her after some time at college, at the appointed cocktail hour, as she was mixing me a Squirt and maraschino cherry juice, my mom let slip that I had started drinking harder stuff. At that, Pauline promptly walked over to the sink, poured out my pop, and topped off the pyrex measuring bowl of liquor she was mixing. That night I’d start drinking martinis.

This cocktail was no fancy gin with some postmodern whisper of vermouth, or even the cold war vodka version. This cocktail was a shot each of gin and vodka from a plastic bottle (Lewis & Clark, I recall), topped off with a generous shot of vermouth.

An ounce and a half of vermouth: You would think it was a superfund pollutant, the way otherwise sensible liquor drinkers avoided it. But vermouth dates the drink, takes it out of the age of artisan gins and quadruple-filtered vodkas, back to when bartenders struck a balance between high-proof rutgut gin and the finer, more dilute vermouth. Vermouth–not just a whisper, but enough of it to flavor the drink–makes it a cocktail and not just a shot of booze. And when some apparently tough bartender rolls his eyes at my order, like I’m one of those who wants his gin spiced with organic juniper, or his subliminal vermouth atomized, I tell him that my grandmother’s been drinking that mix for twice as long as either of us has been alive.

Someday I’ll train a bartender to make a Pauline by name, but until then I’ll suffer the sideways glances, take my gin and vodka and vermouth and ice and olives, and toast my dear old grandmother.