Here are six seconds from my weekend (click on the photo to start video).
Evan Rail’s essay about beer writing that I linked to last week continues to inspire comments on social media and in the blogosphere. Jeff Alworth asked, “Is Beer Less Interesting, or am I?” and Alan McLeod provided context.
I would add this thought. What is new to me or Evan Rail or Jeff Alworth or Alan McLeod might be different than what is new to somebody finally getting around to visiting a new brewery because one opened in their neighborhood.
And consider this. Saturday, Boak & Bailey wrote, “We’ve been pondering why we like the beer and brewery profiles at Craft Beer & Brewing so much. Because, in some senses, they’re quite boring. But perhaps that’s a feature rather than a bug? There’s comparatively little ‘storytelling’ or mythologising, on the one hand, and a decent amount of technical detail on the other – but pitched at a level we can follow. For example, what makes Rothaus Pils taste the way it does?”
There are many opportunities to write something new, for both the beer experienced and the beer inexperienced audiences.
Or, thinking about publications rather than single stories/posts, there are places where readers from both inside the niche and outside the niche may be served. For instance, looks at the table of contents for the most recent issue of Final Gravity. “Our entire goal is to publish the beer stories that don’t (or rarely) find a home in traditional outlets. We just need more people to be aware of it,” publisher/editor David Nilsen wrote via email.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK
Tropic of chancer
— From The Beer Nut
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“I was racking my brain for quite a few weeks and eventually realised just about the only thing I could use from the camel to make a beer is the dung.”
— Maris Biezaitis, of South Australia’s Robe Town Brewery
POINT AND COUNTERPOINT
– “Lost in a haze: North American craft beer searches for mojo”
“The once-dynamic North American craft beer market is now stagnant. A lack of innovation in a sector awash with hazy IPAs has been blamed.”
– From X: “Hazy IPA is killing North American craft beer lolololololol.”
Click to see the photo that makes the counterpoint, and perhaps to follow the lengthy discussion.
YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY
– Let’s Make Craft Beer Great Again
A checklist.
– Why Modern French Beer Culture Never Took Off.
“To the French people 15 years ago, beer was not a product for the table. It was a product for poor people.”
– Character assassination at BrewDog destined to happen
“The problem inherent in (James) Watt’s strategy is the very nature of punk. If it’s true that all political careers end in failure, then all punks end up selling out. Punk is a short, sharp, shock. It’s not meant to last.”
– Is the Good Beer Guide trusted?
“In short, the GBG isn’t the trusted resource it once was.
– ‘I flew to Spain for one beer – turns out it’s in my local but brewmaster blew my mind’
Credit to Alan McLeod (again) for pointing to a tweet from Pete Brown (again) that led me to this. It goes back to the subject at the top; what gets written about beer, who writes it, and who it is intended for. This was not intended for me, and that is OK. But their surely is an audience for it. One that is more patient than I about pop ups and the number of times you need to hit an x to close something in the way of words. You have been warned.
Jeff didn’t open comments on his post, so I will foist them on you!
In terms of what I don’t tend to read these days: I think that for me, the explosion of breweries that are most often just brewpubs isn’t interesting in terms of reading about them — only if I were to travel somewhere would that be of use. And hyper-localness means the sense of anticipation that regional brewery X might be distributing locally has vanished — I remember how cool it was when Deschutes showed up in Illinois, and Short’s (no longer here!), and Urban Chestnut, etc. The big business and multinational corporation stories are too reminiscent of my real job, the stories on horrible behavior and overwhelming white-maleness of the smaller breweries are depressing as the flood of them hasn’t diminished (happily Chicago and surrounding communities are making strides in representation, both in brewery ownership and brewer-wise), I don’t need to read about styles I don’t drink, and I just don’t care if hard seltzers or other non-beer malt beverages are eating into beer’s market share, so doom-and-gloom stories don’t matter so much to me. In terms of what I enjoy reading about: I do like to hear from people in the industry: Jeff is great at interviewing folks, and Josh Noel was great at this when he worked at the Chicago Tribune. Folks in Wisconsin still tend to do this. But what I end up doing in local media’s no longer writing about beer is to follow folks on Twitter, like Jenny Pfafflin and John Laffler: I get a sense of personality and interests beyond beer — which is what I get from reading you and Jeff, and no-longer-bloggers like Lew Bryson and the late Jack Curtin. I think Alan’s points are good: that not all topics are exciting, not all stories are interesting, and that anybody writing on any topic for years and years stands a good chance of not being as intrigued by things. And Pete’s suggestions might go a good way to help combat this.
Anyway, thanks for keeping your blog going!
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Bill.
A certain percentage of comments here seem to come from when Jeff fails to turn on comments on one of his posts.
I could be wrong (I’m used to it), but I think that stories that interest people, like you, who have been paying attention for a long time may also appeal to those newer to drinking beer or more casually interested. And so we circle back to the points that Evan Rail was making.
The “easy” stories — a new brewery in town, woo! hoo! — have been written. It is time to go to work.