Andreas Samson, Katie McLaughlin, Colt Olin
MacLeod Ale
Katie McLaughlin
Last night was a reunion at MacLeod Ale, the first time all of us had gathered since last March 2020.
Times have changed.
There was a large area outside under tents where many could gather. Let’s hope they keep this pandemic innovation.
Some pizzas are spicier, some beers are smaller, some people are larger.
After 15 months, everyone looks a few years older, including this writer.
As night fell, the place got more crowded, and that familiar loudspeaker announcement came on to have someone move a car blocking other cars on the driveway. There has never been enough parking here, which is a good thing for those who want people to walk, Uber or bike here. Bad for those who measure the quality of life in Los Angeles by how much parking there is.
In 1931, two years into the Great Depression, Frederick Lewis Allen published his history of the 1920s, “Only Yesterday” covering the period from the end of WWI until the market crash, in October 1929, that plunged the world into poverty. The American economy would not revive until war and destruction obliterated Europe and engulfed Asia, and after the suffering and the debacle of that period, enlightened leaders vowed to never allow world war again.
So, here we are, now.
We seem, again, to be living in the most exciting of times, a moment of collapse when people are without money, in fear of their health, and watching the world outside collapse. Families and friends are unwittingly jammed up inside, fearful of intimacy, terrified of shopping, petrified about their money, unable to sleep at night, and looking for some savior vaccine to end this nightmare.
An incurable contagion devastates the lungs, drowns us, and we die alone. Please, somebody, do something.
We look up high to the presidential podium for answers.
But we hear the cries from the asylum.
Every aspect of normal human life is now that moment in the horror movie when The Lone Girl goes downstairs into the dark basement after she hears a noise.
7.5 billion are now The Lone Girl.
We are home with children or aged parents, or quite alone, with nobody. We are sitting at computers, trying to work or forget; obsessed over disabled relatives in group homes; monitoring children playing in the yard when the wind is blowing.
We can’t go to the gym, to the mall, to the coffee bar, to the park. We do push-ups if we can, and we lay on the couch all day until we try and sleep but we can’t.
We are on guard receiving a package at the door, opening a letter, putting hands on a steering wheel, touching a doorknob, wiping down a mobile phone, cleaning a countertop, eating a banana with unwashed hands. We dare not open a window to let in a virus or forget to sanitize a salt shaker.
A text message, “Call Me”, is alarming.
Everything is terror.
We are told, now, too late, to wear masks when we leave the house. Before they were of no use, now they are essential. We are told to use hand sanitizer, but what if someone behind us, at the grocery store, unmasked, sneezes or coughs?
Drew Morlett, 6/27/15, Venice, CA.
In the midst of this darkness, I learned, strangely and horrifically, that one of my friends from MacLeod Ale, Drew Morlett, 37, had been stabbed to death last Sunday, by a woman, during a fistfight with a man, at a party given by a nurse (Drew’s girlfriend?) who unwittingly invited the murderer over to her apartment on Kester Street.
To attend a party during a pandemic is foolish, but just being foolish is not reason enough to justify murder. In poetic justice, all the fools at the party would catch the virus, their punishment for violating what we all know we must not do.
Though I knew Drew for five or six years, I hardly knew him at all.
We had met at MacLeod Ale, and then we’d hang out, always by coincidence, never by intention.
From what I knew, he lived walking distance from MacLeod, with his family, near Hazeltine and Oxnard. He had a raspy voice, with a sound almost frail and hoarse, so I nicknamed him “The Raspy.” He was a townie, like many at MacLeod, adults raised in Van Nuys who never leave Van Nuys. MacLeod was his parish.
Drew Morlett Served by Drew Murphy, Whole Foods, Venice, CA. 2015
On Saturday, June 27, 2015, The Raspy and I went to Venice, this time by intention, to take photographs and drink beer at Whole Foods, beer served by bartender Drew Murphy, an amateur expert on beer, who used to casually serve us oysters, shrimp tacos and other good foods that somehow never ended up on the tab.
That bar at Whole Foods on Lincoln had become a place I went to often, especially in the year 2014 when my mother was laid up in bed in Marina Del Rey, dying of lung cancer, and I’d go down and see her, and then stop off at Whole Foods and self-medicate, and drive home slowly in the night air, always careful to let the beer burn off before I drove, sometimes going up Beverly Glen, the long way, windows open, as Jo Stafford or Frank Sinatra played, and the profusely growing night jasmine floated in.
The Raspy worked in computers, or fixing computers, or something like that, I never knew. He was gentle, and short, and thin, and a twin, with a twin brother. He had olive skin and wore olive t-shirts. I felt like I could have been his best friend, but we never talked about anything, really.
Others at MacLeod, people who drank nightly, or played darts, knew him better. I was not one who played darts or drank nightly, and last year I only spent some $800 dollars at MacLeod, for all of 2019, and I would guess Drew spent considerably more, though I don’t know, and to speculate is to lie, so I can’t say.
One time I saw Drew Morlett and he said he was laid off and looking for work. Another time he said he was living with his girlfriend on Kester. One late night he called me and invited me out, and it was after 11pm and I didn’t go. He was known at other bars, other dart places, and in other drinking establishments, and it seemed he was out and about and all around the city, going out and about and all around the city.
Until he died last weekend.
Now he is dead, dead in the way Van Nuys kills you: in obscurity, senselessly, ridiculously. That weekend, two days before he was stabbed, another man, a homeless man, Dante Tremain Anderson, 35, was killed the same way, by knife, not far away, on Burbank Boulevard in the Sepulveda Basin.
Before I learned about the identity of the second victim, Drew Morlett, I knew about the first and second murders. And in my mind, they were indistinguishable. Just anonymous and tragic and forgotten.
Now one of the dead I had really known, and hugged, and laughed, and drank with. He had siblings, parents, friends, and they all mourn his death. I cannot feel the grief his family carries, and they have my deepest condolences.
On June 21, 2015, a year after MacLeod Ale opened, that brewery held a big party.
Drew Morlett was there, and so were hundreds of other people. They lined up to buy tickets, to sample brews from guest taps, to listen to lectures by brewers discussing brewing, to meet other enthusiasts and lovers of craft beer.
MacLeod, One Year Anniversary Party, 2015.
I took many photographs that day, and now they look remarkably dated.
It is not only that we are presently, legally restricted from gathering, but that we are older. We are now incarcerated by grave and ominous fears and worries, and to drink beer in a crowd and listen to music and get drunk, that is our fondest hope for what we might do again.
We hope, not only to be well, but to live, to be in this world, not banished from it, and to return to happiness and blithe ridiculousness, and even carelessness and stupidity. We should not have to die for our love of each other, we should not have to die because we partied, or touched our face, or went to a movie, or shopped for food, or cared for a sick person in hospital. Somewhere there is a profound lesson in all this, but I can’t quite fathom it.
So I have been on a month long hiatus from most alcohol including beer and wine. I wanted to see how staying away from drinking made me feel and so far it’s been good. My pants fit easier and I don’t wake up in the morning with a headache of regret.
But I still went to the 3rd Anniversary Party at MacLeod Ale. Which, as I said for a few years now, is the best thing to happen in Van Nuys since maybe 1960.
Friends and near friends were there. I went back and hung out with some people and we drank and laughed and everything was fun.
There was one eccentric, older woman with red hair. I decided in my intoxication that she should join our group and I pulled her over.
She immediately asked everyone where “they were from.” She didn’t mean Reseda or Santa Monica, she was inquiring about the ethnicities of all the people.
And the usual bragging rights afforded to the mediocre came out. “I’m from old Norwegian stock and on my mom’s side her father was a ship captain from Ireland and we also have some pirates who we trace back to Crete, and then on my grandmother’s side she had a distant relative who was a first cousin with the Rockefellers.”
When her finger pointed to me, I knew what was in store so I dodged the bullet. When you are around drunk people you don’t say your last name is Jewish. You say Russian. So I did. That seemed to satisfy her, and she related my background to something noble that helped elect her leader who was making America great again.
Around the hops the discussions continued. This time the drunken brother of a regular customer was making fun of another person who he said was “a fake boyfriend of my sister and definitely gay.” The chuckles and the chortles of the regular dudes continued and they made fun of the man they pegged as gay.
It reminded me, in a strange way, of those days, long ago, in Lincolnwood, IL when I was friends with the Clarke Family and good old Pete, Dave’s older brother would greet me at the front door with “Hello Fruit!” or “The Fruit is here!” There was always a laugh on that one, the calling out of that which is not normal or regular.
I think I was 10 at the time so I didn’t understand what he was saying. But my father, schooled in Chicago manliness, honed on the ball field, said, “My son is not a fruit!” and so I learned I better not ever be one.
It is now 2017 but you wonder if those sober vows of tolerance are really just ready to burst especially when the intoxicated gather. There is public tolerance for almost everything that once set teeth on edge: gay people, pot smokers and growers and sellers, mixed race couples, trans people, obese people with tattoos, homeless people. We think it’s OK for people to walk around mentally ill and sleep in the street, and we are quite “cool” also with two dads for Sarah, and if Sarah wants to become Sam, that is “cool” too.
Everything that once made us uptight is “cool” just as everything else is “amazing.”
And maybe when we are sober, and rational, we decry the hate speech, but get a few beers in us, and we revert to our old ethnicities, our old tribal thinking, or old dumbness, really.
And somewhere there are little kids playing well together and everyone gets along great until one little kid learns he is a Unitarian, or a Ukranian or a Uruguayan and then the trouble starts.
Yesterday was the two-year anniversary party at MacLeod Ale, here in Van Nuys, held at the brewery on Calvert St.
It coincided with one of the hottest days of the year.
A hot wind baked the concrete front yard set with white tents for ticket sales, another tent housing a barbecue preparation area.
A black cook loaded meats into a black steel smoker under a cloudless blue sky.
Inside MacLeod, workers, guest workers and guests hunkered down in dimness, air-conditioned. 30 or more firkins from various breweries were built into groups of six, laid down on inclined, mobile lumber units on wheels. Each cask was plugged on top with cork. And at the bottom each one employed a white plastic faucet for pours.
The Pasadena Scots Bagpipers warmed up in preparation for their opening march through the brewery.
Owner Alastair W. Boase made a last minute run in a small Mini Cooper and came back with bags of ice unloaded by the guest workers and brought in and laid on top of each cask to keep them cool. The drooping, dripping ice kept the beer coldish with the weak efficacy of wet towels on the sweaty heads of Indonesian soccer players on the field at halftime.
Last year, MacLeod held its one-year anniversary.
To me, hyped up on IPA, a lover of Full Sail and Lagunitas, MacLeod served a weak, warm, sweet, low alcohol malty authenticity called British Style Ale.
To my uninformed palate and to my unschooled-in-beer mind, the brews were something new but not always enjoyable.
The ideology of MacLeod Ale was firmly entrenched by a young and serious head brewer who rigidly and strictly obeyed his self-imposed dogma of what constituted proper British beer. Dour and dressed in leather braces and a tweed-driving cap, he affected a uniform of anti-social seriousness. He was obstinate, at times argumentative, sometimes on the warpath with owners. Others respected and admired his fastidiousness, commitment and exactitude. The truth of his tenure at MacLeod is subjective.
At 27, he was the head brewer of a new brewery. So that alone made him an object of envy. And maybe some of an element of Schadenfreude popped up when he fell down and was thrown out.
There was an upheaval within the brewery in late 2015 and the young cultist was fired and replaced with a new brewer.
The happy result, seen in profits and popularity, has been an artistic renovation melding historic beverage preservation with robust technological innovation.
New Head Brewer Josiah Blomquist came from an engineering background but he also had made his own alcoholic beverages, including beer, whisky and other exotic intoxicants. With investment in new equipment, and a new investor named Jerry Cohen, MacLeod now has advanced water purification, new tanks, and new filters to remove impurities. But there is also a fervent energy and openness to allow for colder, stronger, more aggressively flavored beers to come into the fold.
Last year, the one-year anniversary seemed to revel in presenting discussions, where brewers sat on a podium and talked in a panel about their various beers. There were two or three of these, lasting several hours.
This year, there was just one set up and it was dismantled after an hour. Afterward came a variety of jazz performers, including one terrific, 1920s inspired trio of musicians. The choice of music: individual, idiosyncratic, whimsical, embodies MacLeod.
MacLeod Ale today is no longer the ingénue. It occupies sort of a higher ledge above the goofiness of American, macho-man, craft beer. If it were a fragrance house it might be Diptyque or Le Labo where whispers of greatness spread quietly among the cognoscenti, and the scent of cultivated, curated success enters the room confidently without shouting.
Yesterday afternoon, I met one gentleman, Ryan Bell, who worked as a sales rep for a downtown brewery, Iron Triangle. He was dressed in a dark black shirt with company logo and a straw hat over his bearded face.
We walked over to try his company’s ale which was rich, deep, malty and reminded me of Old Rasputin. He said (if I remember correctly) it was somewhere between a porter and a stout and had an ABV of about 9%.
I expected the discussion to continue about beer.
But after I asked him what he did before he was a beer rep he told me he had been a 7th Day Adventist Pastor. And he was now, fully, committedly, devoutly, an atheist.
He said he wrote a blog, “Year Without God” and was the founder of “Life After God” where he wrote, spoke and consulted the happily godless on their journey of self-enlightened rationality un-poisoned by the imagery of the all mighty.
I was in the company, once more, of an evangelist, another hybrid in the spiritual community of Los Angeles whose own self-awakening constituted a new reality and a new philosophy for explaining and understanding existence. That it might be done by imbibing beer and abandoning faith seemed utterly logical to me, especially inside that hot, crowded brewery party after six or more ales.
My mind wandered from the packed brewery to the national scene and back again to the heat wave.
I was thinking of God and God’s successor, Nothingness. I was looking at Men and their Gods: beers and beards. I was wondering about intelligence and stupidity and how they were so often interchangeable. I was uncertain about what I should believe in or fear: Donald Trump, Radical Islamic Terrorism, certain atheism or certain faith, the NRA or Orlando, porter, ale or IPA.
Lubricated by alcohol, surrounded by many flavors of casks, some beers flavored with chiles, vanilla and rosemary, nothing seemed wrong or right, just there for the taking. I was elated by the possibilities of dropping long held beliefs, and flying into new consciousness by picking up new flavors, guided unintentionally by the atheist pastor beer salesman.
On that Sunday summer sirocco I was on the verge of a breakthrough. Or I might just collapse from alcoholic dehydration.
Fortunately, outside, there was Amy Crook, in a peach pleated skirt, whose hyena laugh and flirtatious giggle danced around the driveway as I recorded her. I joined her under the hot tent and helped check in guests. I tore off tickets, and peeled sticky armbands onto arms gleefully carrying glasses into a raucously animated party, one I knew I would later misinterpret truthfully.
Here in Van Nuys 
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