{"id":9016,"date":"2012-04-06T20:13:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-07T02:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=9016"},"modified":"2012-04-07T08:14:05","modified_gmt":"2012-04-07T14:14:05","slug":"the-session-62-am-i-talking-to-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/the-session-62-am-i-talking-to-you\/","title":{"rendered":"The Session #62: Am I talking to you?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.appellationbeer.com\/images\/00-thesession150.jpg\" alt=\"The Session\" class=\"alignright\"\/><em>Angelo at Brewpublic hosts The Session #62, asking us to write about <a href=\"http:\/\/brewpublic.com\/beer-blogs\/announcing-the-session-62-what-drives-beer-bloggers\/\">\u201cWhat Drives Beer Bloggers?\u201d<\/a> You&#8217;ll find more confessions there.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/about-this-site\/\">about\/mission page<\/a> pretty much explains why this blog exists. I&#8217;m not sure you should care what motivates me to serve that mission (on at least 4.57 posts out of 10), or in fact that want to share it.<\/p>\n<p>So, as is often the case here, I&#8217;ll leave it to you to connect the dots between point A and point B.  <\/p>\n<p>A) During our <a href=\"http:\/\/theslowtravelers.com\/\">Grand Adventure<\/a> in 2008 I visited Alaskan Brewing. I saw the mash filter they were in the process of installing. I pitched the story to a few beer-related publications, but nobody was interested. I thought this was one of those stories somebody should write about, so when the filter was up and running <a href=\"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/balancing-nature-tradition-and-progress-in-alaska\/\">I wrote about it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>B) On June 4, 1968, I fell asleep listening to a Pittsburgh radio station broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale&#8217;s sixth consecutive shutout. I awoke to the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot later that night in Los Angeles. As I did six mornings a week that summer I headed to the offices of The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.appellationbeer.com\/images\/20120406-ap.jpg\" alt=\"Associated Press wire machine\" class=\"alignleft\"\/>I liked to get there by 5:30, so I could pull the paper off the teletype machines before the &#8220;wire editor&#8221; (his title) arrived. He tended to be way too slow sorting out the sports stories, because he&#8217;d probably rather have been working in the sports department just as much as I&#8217;d rather have been working in news. Plus he was an alcoholic and I didn&#8217;t much care for the phlegm that ended up on the paper he passed along.<\/p>\n<p>On this day, though, I just wanted to be able to stand in front of the machine and watch it type out the news one letter at a time, before anybody else in town would read it. This was <em>news,<\/em> to me more real than watching television replays of the shooting itself, because it was &#8220;real time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Beer is not that important. I understand that. I constantly remind you of that. But there are times when I learn something interesting enough I can&#8217;t wait for that clattering machine to bang out the next sentence. This blog gives me a place to pass along those stories. Maybe I&#8217;m just a beer gossip.<sup>1<\/sup><\/p>\n<p><font size=-2><sup>1<\/sup> I just checked and the domain beergossip.com is taken, but thebeergossip.com is available.<\/p>\n<p><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Angelo at Brewpublic hosts The Session #62, asking us to write about \u201cWhat Drives Beer Bloggers?\u201d You&#8217;ll find more confessions there. The about\/mission page pretty much explains why this blog exists. I&#8217;m not sure you should care what motivates me to serve that mission (on at least 4.57 posts out of 10), or in fact &#8230; <a title=\"The Session #62: Am I talking to you?\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/the-session-62-am-i-talking-to-you\/\" aria-label=\"More on The Session #62: Am I talking to you?\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-session"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-2lq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9016"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9063,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9016\/revisions\/9063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}