A Brief History of The Rubber Chicken that Flew Around the Beer World

Part 1: A Brief History of The Rubber Chicken that Flew Around the Beer World

I flew to Alaska last week to drink beer with many old friends. In January. In Alaska. Did I mention beer was involved? There are so many reasons this happened the way that it did that I realized to tell the story properly I needed to start at the beginning. This week is Part 1 that will get you briefed up on The Rubber Chicken. Part 2 will be my Alaska journeys, especially the ones in January to the Great Alaska Beer and Barleywine Festival through 2020. Part 3 will be a trip report covering my 2022 adventure.

Hi, my name is Phil Farrell and I will forever be a homebrewer. I was also a military and commercial pilot. The Beer Bug bit me long before Craft Beer was a major “thing” and before I ever homebrewed. I left active duty with the Air Force in 1987, was hired by Delta Air Lines, joined the AF Reserve, and settled in New Orleans to work both jobs. I helped someone homebrew once in Arizona in 1984 and helped several people brew in their kitchens in Myrtle Beach and New Orleans, however it was clear to me I had a lot to learn. I was always drawn to the more unusual flavors that small regional breweries and imported beers had. Starting in the early 80s, the number of craft brewers started to grow, and I tasted things I had never experienced before. Flying around the country and overseas exposed me to beer experiences I would never have had if I worked 9-5 at one location in the USA. It primed me to always try things I had never tasted before. I would visit with the brewers at breweries that often were small enough to fit in my garage. When we moved to Georgia in 1994, I finally had a basement to let the beer properly ferment undisturbed. My wife wasted no time buying me a full set of pots and buckets at the local homebrew shop that first Christmas, ensuring that before Santa finished post flighting his sled, I would be in the kitchen brewing my first solo batch of homebrew.

I joined a homebrew club in Cumming, GA based out of the homebrew shop where my wife bought my Christmas present. Flying for 2 different jobs in 2 different cities made making it to meetings impossible the first year. It had always been a priority for me to plan my trips and layovers around brew pubs, beer festivals, and beer dinners in the 80s, but by 1995, it was routine. I met pioneers in the craft beer world before they became household names. I could now bring beer I had made and get critiques and pointers. I was able to learn a lot speaking to the experts when they had some downtime and pitching in at a brewery to make the downtime sooner.

By the time I finally was able to schedule a day off to make a brew club meeting, the club disbanded. My original homebrew club, The Brews Brothers, set off a series of unlikely events that made the entire rubber chicken traveling circus possible. The Brews Brothers provided a list of their members’ names to several homebrew clubs in the area. I first went to an annual party hosted by the largest and oldest homebrew club in the state. I gave them an application but my sign-up information was never processed. Later I was cold contacted by the Chicken City Ale Raisers out of Gainesville, GA by phone. They were named after Gainesville’s status as the number one chicken processor in the country. (Just like Detroit is Motown and Nashville is Music City.) The proximity allowed me to make many meetings with CCAR, and a 25+ year relationship began. I built an all-grain stainless steel homebrew system with the help of welders in the club, and most importantly, learned how to take advantage of it.

New Orleans left an impression on me– Always be ready for a party. Every Krewe had a mascot, and it seemed logical to me that when I saw a plucked rubber chicken in a novelty store that CCAR had its mascot. Chicken duties were pretty simple. I would waive the chicken over the beer and like magic, the new batch was better than the last one. The good Mojo the chicken contained kept us out of trouble on brew day. That chicken never made it out of Northern Georgia as it only went to club meetings and club

brewing days. It was not a true traveler. It lasted a couple of years only to be ripped to pieces by a couple of kids at the annual Club Oktoberfest like Stretch Armstrong at a Medieval Renaissance Fair. It had served its purpose though. It “helped” me win 2 medals at the National Homebrew Conference in Las Vegas in 2004. BTW, its LEGacy lived on as a tap handle that Nick Floyd himself once used to pour Dark Lord out of.

I drove out to Baltimore in 2005 for that year’s AHA HB Convention, now known as Homebrew Con. While I was driving, I realized I had the replacement rubber chicken in my trunk, so I hatched a plan. We had taken our Chicken to local breweries as a drinking buddy, however there had been no effort to channel Mojo. At this convention were going to be some of the best brewers and enthusiasts in the country, so I was going to take advantage of it. I was going to take the chicken to everyone with any beer horsepower, let them hold the mascot, and channel all the Mojo. It was working as planned until I reached my ultimate target, Charlie Papazian, the OG of homebrewing and craft beer. We were going to channel Charlie’s 1.21 Gigawatts of Brewer’s Association, Complete Joy of Homebrewing, and Great American Beer Festival Mojo into a single rubber chicken. A funny thing happened though. Charlie asked me “who is going to know I held the chicken?” I hadn’t thought past stealing the Mojo part. Charlie, having a love of photography (after beer) told me I had to snap a photo for proof of contact or else the Mojo wasn’t valid. It was at that point Charlie gifted me the missing piece of what became a decades long quest to unite the craft beer world with a $7.50 rubber chicken and a camera.

I shot that first Chicken Photo and it became an instant hit. Better yet, it kicked the door open to go on a marathon through the beer world. I collected chicken photos of Sam Calagione, Ray Daniels, and Randy Mosher that weekend as well as most of the award-winning homebrewers in 2005. Once I took the Rubber Chicken on my trips with me, I would make it a goal to collect iconic photos of the most famous people in craft beer I could find. I would ask people to pose for a photo that represented them and their brewery. Often, the entire staff would pose. It rarely happened, but occasionally someone was a little camera shy or wasn’t sure about taking photos with a chicken. My go to move was always the original photo of Charlie I carried with me to bust out for situations like that. Charlie cradling the Rubber Chicken in his arms while grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland was the universal pass key for every brewery.

I specifically traveled to beer towns on trips such as Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, San Diego, Anchorage, Chicago and both Portland’s (OR and ME) to start my collection of Chicken Photos. On the “hobby” side of things, I became a BJCP judge, later becoming the SE Regional Rep and the VP of the organization. I volunteered at both the World Beer Cup and GABF as staff, and now routinely judge at both contests. I was elected to the Board of Governors of the AHA and was Wynkoop Brewing’s Beer Drinker of the Year in 2011, so I had inside access to a lot of events and gatherings that I might have otherwise missed. IOWs, I was as inside the craft beer world as you could be without brewing at a brewery.

Before there were smartphones and instant wireless connectivity to social media, I carried around a scrapbook of photos, an old school digital camera and a rubber chicken. It became the worst-kept inside secret in craft beer. Some photos were all my making while others were people grabbing friends to be initiated into the club with a chicken photo. There were a couple of photo bombs but for the most part these were all posed photos of people related to beer. After that initial Charlie photo, one of my favorite photos was of Charlie “getting caught” taking a photo of me with the rubber chicken.

That was in Denver in 2007 at the AHA Convention and you must keep in mind I was exclusively taking photos of other people for years, so there were almost no photos of me with the chicken because this wasn’t about me, and traditional cameras had no selfie mode. The photo caught us after Charlie asked me: “Hey Chickenman—I need a photo of you with the chicken”. I was already “Chickenman” to many people, but with Charlie’s affirmation, I forever wore Chickenman as a beer badge of honor. Most of all I love our expressions in that photo that seemed to indicate we were caught doing something we shouldn’t be doing.

The chicken photos became second nature after a while. People I knew BC (Before Chicken) treated me the same and my new friends because of the chicken just assumed I had always done this. There were a few people BC I had the privilege to meet before they passed like Bert Grant, but I never was in a rush to photograph someone because I thought they had a shorter time with us than we expected. That said, Michael Jackson, the Beer Hunter, probably the single most important person in the world to promote beer, was someone I immediately put at the top of my list after Charlie’s suggestion. I photographed (and shared a beer) with Michael at the World Beer Cup in Denver in 2006. His remark at lunch was something to the effect that the hotel’s reputation for rubbery chicken was understated. I had no idea that would be the last time we would be in the same place at the same time.

That first official traveling chicken suffered a lot of abuse. It was stolen, held for ransom, led on a wild goose chase and even restored to my possession in a publicly humiliating fashion. (more on that in the next installment). Even the finest latex chickens made with imported rubber from China eventually wear out. I asked a wise old friend and drinking buddy, Don Younger of Horse Brass Pub and Oregon Brewers’ Festival renown, what to do. I told him that the chicken could no longer hold his beer. This was the chicken that Michael Jackson had held so I couldn’t let it die. As I told Imbibe Magazine back in 2015, Don was always clear with his words. “Just bronze the motherfucker” he said. I didn’t know that was possible, but Don insisted anything could be bronzed. I called up a place in California that said they specialized in bronzing anything. When the rep started telling me they had to charge me for filling the chicken first I thought they were trying to auto dealer upcharge me to death. He then said a rubber chicken will otherwise start to collapse when the metal starts building up due to the differential current in the ion bath. I asked him the obvious question, “so you’ve bronzed rubber chickens before?” He replied that they did about 4 or 5 a year. That is when I knew I had found my people. There is still a rubber chicken underneath the bronze plating with Michael Jackson’s touch DNA on it.

Charlie was the only choice to help me inaugurate the next chicken. The Bronze Chicken is affectionately known as Chicken Prime or BC for short. The second Chicken is Deux-y. Tre (s) is the third and Ivy is the fourth because Roman numerals for 4 are I and V. The ceremony consists of Charlie and I popping the AHA Convention beer, pouring it into the new chicken, then sharing a toast. The first ceremony was in Oakland in 2009 and we used Vinny Cilurzo’s convention beer. Unfortunately, the original rubber chicken mold has gone missing when the company that made them went out of business. At some point there will be a contest of some kind to figure out what the new rubber chicken will look like. Since the newest chicken will be the fifth in the line, we are going to have to have a Cinco de Pollo Party.

One of my greatest honors as Chickenman came in 2018 in Portland. Charlie was giving his farewell speech as the keynote speaker at Homebrew Con before he retired as BA President. The BA Staff had constructed an elevated float that simulated a tall head of beer foam. Gary Glass, President of the AHA,

wanted the original AHA mascot to push Charlie into the convention hall with 3000 people in attendance. Gary had yours truly in his sights as the most qualified member of the AHA Board of Governors. The mascot was Ale-Fred, a giant turkey. Ironically enough at the first convention the reporter who covered the event mistakenly thought Ale-Fred was a chicken and it made it to the newspaper the next day. That is correct, Charlie Papazian was pushed to the stage on a float by the Chickenman wearing a turkey costume of a turkey that was once misidentified as a chicken.

Some might ask why I have waited so long to speak so openly about The Chicken since we started StillFire. The truth is The Chicken has always been there in the brewery and pulling for us from the beginning, just not front and center. Occasionally we put BC up on the Brew House pedestal for particularly epic beers. I think the most important thing in my mind was I always wanted StillFire beer to speak for itself. We also have world-class designers and marketing in our family, so I never wanted to distract from or diminish their messaging. I hope you enjoyed this first installment and read the next two in the series that deal more specifically with Alaska. If nothing else, we all can agree homebrewers are a lot more colorful and even a little crazy when it comes to their Number One Passion.

That first Charlie Photo

Sam and Charlie in Baltimore 10 years after the first chicken pictures.

Fritz Maytag Anchor Brewing.

Shaun O’Sullivan 21^st Amendment

Getting interviewed before Octoberfest

Kevin McNerney Sweetwater.

Adam Beauchamp of Creature Comforts.

Fred Eckhardt, Portland beer pioneer at Fredfest, his surprise birthday party put on at Hair of the Dog Brewing.

Michael Jackson the Beer Hunter (and Chicken Slayer)

Peter Bouckaert New Belgium Brewing

Tom Schmidlin Beer Drinker of the Year 2006 Postdoc Brewing (Left). Senator John Hickenlooper, founder Wynkoop Brewing former Mayor of Denver and Governor of Colorado

Charles and Rosanne Finkel, founders of Pike Brewing and Merchant du Vin with Tom Dalldorf publisher Celebrator Beer News

Marcy Larson co-founder Alaskan Brewing in front of their smokehouse in Juneau.

Tomme Arthur Port Brewing and Lost Abbey after winning the Alpha King Challenge in 2008.

No Chicken but Geoff Larson (Alaskan Brewing), Teri Fahrendorf (Founder of the Pink Boots Society of Female Brewers), and me

Georgia Beer Militia at Homebrew Con 2016

2013 me

Me in Providence with the Rubber Chicken in my web belt

Me with the Chicken

Golfing in Portland

Charlie getting caught taking a photo of me and the chicken

GABF 2010 Greg Koch (Stone) Eric Wallace (Left Hand) Ken Grossman (Sierra Nevada), Vinny Cilruzo (Russian River), Unknown, Jim Koch (Boston Beer), Brian Grossman (Sierra Nevada). Sam had to leave to make a phone cal and I didn’t want to wait and lose the shot.

Rocking the Bronze Chicken at Beer Drinker of the Year