I guess I should have written this when Sam was alive, so I could let him know he had a big impact on yet another beer dork. But it probably would have embarrassed/annoyed him,or maybe he just wouldn’t have given a damn. I also thought Sam, if anyone, could miraculously overcome the health troubles of his last few years with pure stubbornness and live to be 100 telling us what to drink from a recliner in the corner of the shop.
2006: Walking talking beer encyclopedia right here, like a fish out of water in the beer desert that was LA county
I learned to drink good beer in Boston, and I found my long-term beer home in the East Bay, but in between I met a lot of good people and learned a lot in, of all places, LA. This was back from 2003-2009 when LA had a pretty pathetic local beer scene. When you homebrewed not just because you wanted to but because you kinda had to. When there were four — FOUR — beer bars I deemed worthwhile, and Stuffed Sandwich, more than 20 miles from my place on the Westside, was one of them. It was so good my homebrew club would occasionally charter a bus for trips there.
2003-4ish: Me and Greg Beron, owner of Culver City (and now Eagle Rock too!) Homebrew Supply. This photo is so old I’m wearing a Howard Dean t-shirt without a trace of irony.
Stuffed Sandwich was founded in 1976 and it wasn’t even really a bar. It was a deli, in a heavily Asian-American town, run by a white couple who still had “Freedom Fries” on the menu a decade after 9/11. I think a lot of people in San Gabriel had no idea it was there. Certainly some of the regulars just showed up to eat a sandwich and drink a soda. Beer people, however — as few as we were in LA a decade (or three!) ago — came from all over for the huge selection and Sam & Marlene’s encyclopedic knowledge.
I was selfishly excited when our friends Peggie and Dylan moved a mile from Stuffed Sandwich. They didn’t know about it when they chose their house, but as you can see they later shared my enthusiasm.
It’s hard to process how far ahead of their time Sam and Marlene were. In 1976 the good stuff was mostly “imports” when that term meant something. People still road-tripped to get Coors from Colorado like it was the best thing on earth. The first modern microbrewery hadn’t released its beers yet and Sierra Nevada didn’t yet exist. Anchor Liberty — and I — were one year old.
Stuffed Sandwich had quirks. You had to get food to get beer, that was a rule. (Fries counted.) The best sandwich on the menu was a spicy Polish sausage that would surely screw up your palate for beer other than the most obnoxiously flavored. If you didn’t bring your own glass, you’d be served from the tap or bottle in a plastic cup that would be filled awkwardly to the brim and you’d be encouraged to lean in and take a big slurp before carrying it back your seat. You could say Sam didn’t suffer fools gladly but that implies he suffered anyone ever. If he felt like giving you a big smile and a “hey lady!” he would. If he felt like being brusque, he would, and if you took it personally, oh well (you shouldn’t have). He was a good guy, but not one for the fake nice-nice of the service industry or Southern California.
Here’s the type of thing that got Sam called shit like “Beer Nazi.” You’d go up to the counter and ask for a beer you felt like having. Sam would ask why you wanted that beer. You’d explain it to him as best you could using the limited vocabulary you had, which to Sam probably sounded like pointing and grunting. He would say something like, “Oh, you don’t really want that, you want THIS” and hand you a bottle of beer you’ve never seen before that was exactly what you wanted but BETTER. If you couldn’t recognize that it was better…then, well, too bad.
Go away, hipsters. Nothing to see here.
Sam would have been the king of Untappd if he’d cared about such things. He tried every beer for its own sake, not for bragging rights. One of the things Sam was notorious for was going to the Southern California Homebrew Festival and sampling one very small pour of every beer in the place. He did quickly yet methodically, always chatting with the brewer of each sample if he was around yet not lingering long over any one beer or booth. Sam giving even faint praise of your beer was always great news for any homebrewer in attendance. And he never seemed to get even tipsy, let alone as hammered as I’d be if I’d tried half that many.
Chalkboard in the ladies’ room circa 2009
Stuffed Sandwich was my favorite beer place in the Southland and I probably only went a dozen times. I’m so glad I got to go at all. Thanks for everything, Sam.
