Friday! Finally. We thought it would never come. Let’s see what transpired on this day, so we may face the dawn with the sure and steady knowledge that our forebears met similar challenges with pluck and ingenuity.
Ho ho! On this day in 1849, Anthony Yoerg caused many a pioneer to drop to his knees and shout huzzah. As the Historical Society page puts it:
Bavarian immigrant Anthony Yoerg opens Minnesota's first brewery, located in St. Paul below what is now the River Center parking ramp.
If ever there was a name that sounded like a cautionary tale against the inevitable result of excess beer consumption, it’s “YOERG.” You okay, man? You look like you’re going to yoerg. The name survived its owner; here’s a bottle top, and here’s a cone-top bottle. It was “cave-aged,” which may have been overkill; no one ever thinks of beer as being “aged” anymore, even if Beechwood is involved, and the cave-aging makes you wonder if bat-droppings spattered the vats. But in olden times, caves were perfect for aging beer. More Yoergtastic info here, and here.
It’s interesting how many early MN beers sound like gutteral threats. YOERG. GLUEK. SCHMIDT. It’s like listening to someone cough up a Lego piece.
Many have great nostalgia for the local beers, the individually honed recipes that fell one by one to the mass-market barley-pop homogenizer Decepticons. I don’t drink the stuff myself anymore; somehow it got into the washing machine and made my pants shrink. But I was partial to a local beer called James Page, partly because the label and the box was illustrated by an immensely talented local artist named Nora Wildgen, and partly because it was just the apogee of the art, the sort of beer that beer would drink if beer drank beer. I realize it’s a little early in the day for a thread about bygone local beers, but it is Friday. Request: no beer snobs.
In other old news: <keillorvoice> It’s the birthday of the Prairie Home Companion. </keillorvoice> The first live broadcast of this Minnesota institution happened today in 1974, and buzz.mn extends its congrats to Garrison Keillor and all the folks at PHC for thirty-three years of keeping the traditions of old radio alive.
Holiday-wise: it’s National Fried Chicken Day. Well, when isn’t it? When I was a kid Dad would bring home a bucket from Chicken De-Light, which was the most amazing food we’d ever had; you’d bite, you’d chew, you’d savor the flavor – and then the next bite had actual chicken. A few later the Colonel came to town, and that was the end of Chicken De-Light. We tried KFC once or twice, but somehow everything in the bucket – the chicken, the buns, the coleslaw, the mashed potatoes – seemed to meld together into one greasy bolus, and those complimentary wetnaps were like an apology.
I’m confounded by the fact that no one in America has invented Fried Chicken Pizza. It would seem to be a rather obvious twist on a classic.
Well, I’d better google that, just to be sure . . .
mmmm chicken
Oh wow the Fried Chicken Pizza link has a recipe!