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"  As owner of Benton&amp;#039;s Smoky Mountain Country Hams, Allan Benton is a bacon legend of the South. This weekend, he heads north to Brooklyn&amp;#039;s GoogaMooga festival, where, alongside Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery, he&amp;#039;ll present an event titled, simply, &amp;quot;Mmmmmm, Beer &amp;amp;amp; Bacon.&amp;quot; Benton talked to us before departure about the love and labor that go into both. I&amp;#039;m looking forward to the city. That&amp;#039;s so exciting for a hillbilly like me. It&amp;#039;s the only city I&amp;#039;ve ever been in in my life that I truly enjoy. I have to say, I&amp;#039;m too old to be working the way I do. I still work about seventy-plus hours a week. I&amp;#039;ll be sixty-five in a few weeks, but I don&amp;#039;t think work hurts you. Making bacon and dry-cured hams is my passion. I feel blessed. A friend of mine \u2014 he&amp;#039;s a home-brewer, and he was telling me yesterday, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll send you a couple of bottles,&amp;quot; and I said, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t really need any this week.&amp;quot; He looked at me with a grin and said, &amp;quot;What are you talking about?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Oh, I gotta go hang out with Garrett Oliver.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve gotten to talk to Garrett Oliver on the telephone a time or two. I&amp;#039;m a huge fan of Brooklyn Brewery. I don&amp;#039;t know much about pairing the right beers with the things that I do, but I&amp;#039;m sure Garrett has a kind of sixth sense about it. The only things available in Tennessee are the brown ale and the lager. Garrett sent me a few of his beers that he ages in oak barrels, and they were absolutely over-the-top. We sent up lots of bacon, and also some of the prosciutto and the country ham. I think it was about 130 pounds of the bacon. It&amp;#039;s food and beverage that makes my world go round. I never really thought of myself as a &amp;quot;foodie&amp;quot; until the last few years, and I finally thought, well, you know, I guess I really must be. When I travel, it&amp;#039;s always about food. I&amp;#039;ll drive out of my way and plan where I&amp;#039;m going to stop, and what I want to try. A great wine is always a distinct pleasure with prosciutto. If it was bacon wrapped around a piece of sturgeon from the Northwest, I might like a good white wine. But if it were bacon wrapped around a good lamb chop, I might much prefer a great Zinfandel. I hope I&amp;#039;m able to eat at one of David Chang&amp;#039;s restaurants. I would love to see what some of these folks are doing with my product. I feel like I probably need a little mom-and-pop shop that would carry my bacon retail. I don&amp;#039;t feel like we&amp;#039;re famous. We&amp;#039;re down here in Tennessee, and I made a goal for myself that I wanted to produce dry-cured hams and smoked bacon as well as my European cousins do it. And I won&amp;#039;t be pretentious enough to say that we do that, but I will be bold enough to say that we try to do that every day. All I&amp;#039;m doing is using the same recipes that were handed down to me by my forefathers from a log smokehouse behind the house I was born in. My grandparents did it the same way. I&amp;#039;m probably doing this not much better than they did it. Anything we can do to make our product better, we try to do it. We try to buy the very best fresh pork that we can get. We try to buy pasture-raised pork \u2014 they have a little more fat and marble. And if you start out with something really good, it&amp;#039;s so easy to end up with something really good. Quality&amp;#039;s the bottom line around here. And sometimes we don&amp;#039;t necessarily make money at what we do. But I have a friend in the bourbon business, Julian Van Winkle, who makes Pappy Van Winkle, and they have a motto at that distillery: &amp;quot;We make fine bourbon, at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must. But always fine bourbon.&amp;quot; PREVIOUSLY: Allen Benton: What I&amp;#039;ve Learned &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a14100/allan-benton-bacon-8950493/>