Announcing The Session: “The Hard Stuff”

The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic.

I’ll be hosting September’s Session with folks’ posts going up on Friday the fourth. For this session, I’m asking my fellow beer bloggers two related qustion questions:

  1. What do you want people in beer culture to be talking about that we’re not?
  2. What do you have to say on the topic(s)?

“Beer” is its own subculture at this point. There’s an expected “look” and expected desires. Beer festivals are everywhere. Beer blogs flourish; indeed at this point there’s reasonable sub categories for them. New breweries are popping up at record pace; the US alone has more than 3,000.… Continue reading →

Things That Are Wrong with The Beer Wench’s and The Northdown’s Posts

I got so goddamn frustrated reading both 6 Dirty Lies Men Tell About Women and Beer, by Ashley Routson (The Beer Wench) and 5 Reasons The Beer Wench is Bad for Beer by Kate Gallagher (owner of The Northdown) that, honestly, the first draft of this piece may have involved me saying they’d both made themselves look… bad. Yes. Bad. That’s what I wrote in that first draft.

I was deeply dismayed. Both women have good points. Needle-sharp points. If only they both hadn’t proceeded to throw those points in dairy lagoons. Because, frankly, I hate looking for a good point in a pond of shit.

For a variety of reasons, I ended up swimming in these manure lagoons, so I decided to share the joy by giving you the needles without the manure.… Continue reading →