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Later, out on the Bama’s boardwalk, I spied him in a captain’s hat, surrounded by a number of young, bikini-wearing admirers and a Bama employee. At first, he seemed in parade captain mode, but then I heard him in animated discussion about trying to speed up business at a beer stand over to one side of the boardwalk; people didn’t seem to know it was there.
    The employee suggested the stand could put up a sign offering a special: say, a free fourth beer after a customer had purchased three.
    Gilchrist smiled and shook his head. He said, “Well, actually, I’m more interested in selling twenty for the price of twenty-four.”
    A couple of weeks after the Toss, I e-mailed the Bama hoping to get an exact count of how many beers or equivalents (since a pitcher holds seven 12-ounce glasses) got drunk that weekend. But nobody had that kind of figure (or at least they weren’t giving it out). I did, however, get an estimate of Bud products from David Bear, a principal in the Lewis Bear distributorship.
    â€œIt was about 2,000 case equivalents,” Bear told me on the phone. And with Bud making up about half of all Bama beer sales, the extrapolation is about 4,000 cases altogether.
    That’s 96,000 beers—if they were bottles laid end to end, a pipeline of beer nine miles long.
    I later had lunch with Paige Lightsey when she visited New York on a work assignment. I wondered how she would assess this Toss compared to others she’d attended. She laughed and said, “I can’t remember.” Then she got serious and said, “I’m very comfortable at the Bama. I work in a very pretentious business and the Bama is a place where I can decompress and be unpretentious. I’ll be back next year.”
    As for her annual Mullet Toss beer consumption, well, a lady never tells. But Paige did allow that another reason she had such a soft spot for the Bama is that, “I don’t have to buy a lot of my own beer.”
    The only other thing I wondered about the Mullet Toss is what became of the mullet.
    The answer is that, after the last mullet is tossed, they are fed to the seagulls.

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    Author’s note: Mickey Newbury and Mike Fincher have both passed away since the reporting of this event.

A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity.
    â€”D R. S AMUEL J OHNSON
CHAPTER 2  · THE QUEST BEGINS
A Pilgrim on the River of Beer, Stillwater, Minnesota
    On a fair Saturday in September of 2002, I bumped down through the late summer thermals aboard a Northwestern Airlines 727 and landed in Minneapolis after a two-hour flight from New York. I claimed a rental car, checked into the industrial park hotel I’d booked as part of a last-minute special on Orbitz, and set about plotting my itinerary. I pulled out the Yellow Pages from my bedside table and started looking up bars.
    I was going to spend the next two weeks driving the length of the Mississippi River from north to south, in search of the Perfect Beer Joint. The Flora-Bama, and its beach-bar/dive-bar niche, was certainly one model but I was interested in exploring others.
    Though I’d already been researching this book for a few months, I dove into this quest with little preparation. First of all, I didn’t want to taint my research with anybody else’s prepackaged notions of the Perfect Beer Joint. Second, if my basic thesis was true—that beer is a ubiquitous, even saturated fact of American culture—then little research should be necessary. In principle a person ought to be able to alight in almost any place in America, save the nation’s 320 or so dry counties, and find if not a Perfect Beer Joint at least a good one. And surely, in the 2,500-odd miles that the Mississippi chugs from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana, the odds were good of stumbling upon some place approaching mythical Perfect Beer Joint status.
    Of course, I had my reasons for choosing the Mississippi. For