Beering Across Arkanssouri.

Several years ago, I ran across a piece about "Beering The Farmers," meaning going around the area sharing a beer with everyone doing farm work, even those who didn't want to be beered. I wish I still had that clipping, because I don't know what the publication it was in was.

This book excerpt in the WSJ, while not exactly 'beering' in the same sense, reminds me of that.

Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

The Quest Takes a Southern Lurch

As I crossed into Arkansas, I realized I actually knew of a somewhat peculiar place where I might get a fresh beer perspective -- That Bookstore in Blytheville, which I knew from a previous book signing there held a keg filled with ice-cold Budweiser. When I cranked up my cellphone and called the store's owner, Mary Gay Shipley, from the interstate, I learned that, alas, Mary Gay was out but, worse, the keg had been removed for cleaning and refurbishing, thus ruining any hopes I had to hang out with a more literary class of beer drinkers. But Amy, a chatty young woman running the store in Mary Gay's absence, did tell me that I shouldn't leave Missouri without visiting Woody's, an extremely famous beer joint in the town of Caruthersville not that far away. The main reason it was famous, she said, was that Woody's had a firm policy of not serving beer in bottles because bottles, well, are just too hard on the human head.

I was happy to learn that Caruthersville, in the so-called Bootheel of Missouri, was in fact just 11 miles east. It seemed pleasant enough, a cotton-farming community of modest houses and tree-lined streets. It had been called Little Prairie until 1811, when one of the most violent earthquakes to ever rock North America (the equivalent of 8.0 on the Richter scale) knocked Little Prairie flat and heaved fire and brimstone out of the ground, causing residents to think the end of the world had come (and for some, it had).

I found Woody's thanks to four kindly men who'd been drinking beer out of brown paper bags in front of a grocery store and volunteered to drive by the place as I followed behind and point it out to me. It was about one o'clock in the afternoon and I counted only two cars in the parking lot. I wasn't even sure the place was open but I tried the front door and it gave. As I pushed through and my eyes adjusted to the dim light within, I realized that Amy had undersold the place.

The décor -- well, the aura might be a better term -- made many other scruffy beer joints I'd visited seem like a beer joint out of Vogue. The first thing I noticed was a well-worn, cigarette-burned pool table standing in the middle of the floor surrounded by a vast pile of empty beer cans and peanut shells. I'd say 400 to 500 beer cans might be accurate. Some were crushed. Most weren't.

Also, every inch of every wall that could be written on had been written on, signed apparently by exuberant patrons. The ceiling was hung with dusty, grimy baseball caps that had once shielded heads from oil changes and chicken coops, and undergarments that looked like they belonged to people who might have been better off keeping them on.

I settled in at the bar and was greeted by a lanky bartender named James Ford. I asked him if there was in fact a Woody attached to Woody's. He said there was but that Woody was away at soccer practice. I perused the beer choices such as I could see them and could tell right away Woody's was a Bud haven. I asked Ford what he served most of. He thought it over and said, "Well, a lot of my customers who don't have much money drink Natural Light. It's cheap, so the fellows who go through a half a case or more a night drink that."

I have to admit I'd never drunk Anheuser-Busch's low-calorie corn lager (it was the company's first light-beer offering) so I ordered one. As the bartender fetched it, I pointed to the mountain of discarded beer cans and asked whether maybe the cleaning people were on strike.

"Oh, that," he said. "Nah, people just throw their empties under the pool table. When there's too many of them, we sweep them up and take them out."