10-Year Anniversary: Blogs Then and Now

Ten years ago this week, I started writing this blog as a fun diversion. If you will excuse an old man some navel-gazing, I'm going to throw up a few posts this week observing those ten years and how they changed beer, blogging, and me. (Aware that navel-gazing is innately repellent to those not in possession of said navel, I will try to make these reminisces relevant and interesting for everyone.)

Opening day at Hopworks Urban Brewery, one of the dozens
that have opened in Portland since I started blogging.

Ten years ago, as the Bush administration's second term was beginning to take on serious water, I was working as a researcher for Portland State University and most of my serious blogging time was spent on politics. Bloggers are far more sensitive to the attractions of their own minds than writers working for newspapers or magazines, so their interests and obsessions dot their output. Public policy was far more a feature of the early years on this blog, particularly with my focus on the beer tax and honest pints. (And I know from feedback at the time that the former was not an interest of readers.) It was almost entirely a blog about Oregon beer, and I spent most of my time talking about specific beer and breweries. Now things are ... different.

Blogs Then and Now
During that first five-year bloc (2006-2010), both beer and the media were going through a substantial change. When I started blogging, American craft breweries--basically the only category I was covering--numbered 1,400 and brewed around six million barrels of beer. There are now three times as many breweries and they're making around 25 million barrels of beer. That's obviously a huge change, but the change in media is even more profound. Twitter was founded a month after this blog and Facebook was still a college site. Blogs were still in their brief heyday as the alternative to legacy media but also occupied a quasi social-media role as convener of discussions. Everything existed on a far smaller scale then. I was blogging about a smaller beer world for a small, almost entirely local group for whom blogs were the main source of chat and discussion.

Looking backward, we can see that blogs were a transitional medium between legacy news media and social media. In the world of beer, that was especially important. A few newspapers still kept reporters on the beer beat, but they had in large part quit covering beer. Blogs were an avenue for what we might call "regular news": bloggers were where you went for information about events and new beer and breweries. We also provided a proto-social media function, offering opinion and discussion.

Social media changed the way beer news flows, but not entirely as I expected. It does some things far better than blogs, but--critically--it does some things far, far worse. People no longer go the blogs for discussion. They were never a great medium for that anyway; without a relationship to other commenters, the discussions were often rude or snide, and they often didn't go anywhere. With Facebook, we select our discussion partners in advance, so the discussions are more cordial and usually lead somewhere. But social media is a terrible place to post longer pieces, especially ones that you want to have lasting valence in the conversation of beer. Something goes on Twitter or Facebook, and it's gone in hours, lost in the miasma of words. Social media does a great job of recreating a virtual water cool; it's crap at recreating a virtual newspaper.

So over time blog content has begun to shift. Those who are doing durable, interesting stuff (current faves are folks like Boak and Bailey, Bryan Roth, Kendall Jones, and Good Beer Hunting) are getting eyeballs because we're not finding this on social media. (We are also enjoying a new golden age in professional media, though this time in the form of magazines like All About Beer, BeerAdvocate, and Draft Magazine.) Social media, desperate for something to discuss, devours good pieces. Three or four years ago, traffic here was nosediving, and I thought social media would destroy blogging. Now my traffic is far higher than its ever been, and it's clear the symbiosis between blogs and social media feeds each. It has meant that content has had to change, though. Longer pieces, more thoughtful pieces, analytical pieces--these are what people now go to blogs for.


The Blogger Then and Now
Of course, even if the medium had stayed the same, the blogger would have changed. At the start of 2010, I left Portland State and began writing books. I also began writing more articles and a year and a half ago began a roughly weekly blog at All About Beer. It's an estimate and may overstate things by 5-10%, but in this second half-decade of blogging, I wrote roughly half a million words. That's the stuff I got paid for and excludes everything on this blog. If your only connection to my writing comes through this blog, you might consider the last couple years a serious collapse in quality and frequency. I devoted less attention and less of my best ideas to this blog. (The people paying me got my best stuff.) But overall, the changes were mostly positive and, going forward, I think they'll start to appear here again.

A few of the specific changes:

• I'm more knowledgeable. I joke sometimes that when I was hired to write The Beer Bible I wasn't qualified. It's not a joke, though--I wasn't, really. (I'd have hired Stan Hieronymus or Randy Mosher.) Writing that book was like getting a graduate course in beerology. I lived and breathed beer for two years, studying, traveling, touring and discussing, and thinking about beer basically nonstop. If bloggers didn't have a warts-and-all approach, I'd delete most of my archives because I've learned how much I didn't know when I wrote them.
• My palate has changed. Admittedly, this was already underway, but I was far less focused on mild, low-alcohol beers before I swam in them in (particularly) Britain, Germany, and the Czech Republic. I still drink IPAs and American sours, but far less than I used to. I write less about them, too.
• The blog is more international. Again, as a result of travel, I got to see inside some of the world's great breweries. It made me more Europe-focused at exactly the time Americans were moving away from imports. 
• The audience has changed. Thanks to the two preceding bullets, I started getting readers from around the world, not just around the state. Although I am still relatively small fry as a voice in the beer world, writing books has exposed me to a larger audience. In 2008, the average reader of this blog was a Portland beer geek. He was probably a he, probably a homebrewer, and quite likely another blogger. I used shorthand a lot when I wrote because the audience wasn't so diverse. (Indeed, that probably reinforced who came to the site.) Now people find me from all over. I'm sure the majority are still quite knowledgeable, but there's a substantial and group who are new to beer. It means I don't write like I'm talking to friends nor do I assume the reader knows what technical terms are.
• I'm spread more thinly. I don't have as much time to devote to this blog. My goal is to post 15-20 times a month, which would be a step up over the 12 I averaged over the past two years (but well below the 1.5 posts a day I averaged in 2009). I could write more if I padded the blog with fluff pieces, but I'm also hoping to improve the quality. I do think my posts are, compared to 2008, more accurate. People don't care anymore if you're posting two or three posts a week instead of ten, so long as they're good and substantive. I endeavor to make them so.

Peering into the past is a misleading endeavor. The near-past looks a lot more like the present than it really was. You have to start going back two or three decades in your mind's eye, to a time when the world looked like a quaintly odd place of giant cell phones, squarish cars, and weird fashion. There you find radical differences, like the absence of the internet. But a decade? Seems basically the same. But memories lie. The granular details of life--using our smart phones to mediate so many different experiences, staying connected through social media, unplugging from television--most of us weren't doing these things a decade ago.

We have that same myopia when we look forward a decade. It'll basically look the same, we figure, except for a few minor improvements here or there. That's almost certainly wrong. I fully expect to have a car service that ferries me around in a self-driving smart car. It will take me to and from pubs, and on the way I'll be able to use my neural implant to chat with friends via Mindbook. That will be handy, since another 327 breweries will have opened in Portland by then. The cool thing is, I'll be able to use that time more profitably, likesay by blogging while in transit.

See you there--

What We Write About When We Write About Beer

Over the past month, I have been part of a four-person team judging magazine articles for the North American Guild of Beer Writers' annual contest.  We had 34 entries that were published in probably ten different publications, and they ranged from very short reviews to lengthy pieces on styles, equipment, or process.  One entry on a bit of brewing history ran on for thirty pages.  When you immerse yourself that deeply into something, you have a chance to see patterns and habit--not all of them good.  (I've written a few articles this year, and I recognized my own culpability in this.)  So as a public service, here are a few takeaways about how we can write more interesting, less repetitive stories.

• Vary the structure.  This is how the vast majority of stories unfold: 1) anecdote about how a brewery does something, 2) expository about the subject of the article, 3) more brewery anecdotes that buttress the theme.  This is a classic form, and it's going to be hard to break the habit, partly because we like stories.  But so many of the anecdotes are repetitive--they start with a description of how some brewery does something, as if it's a wholly unprecedented.  Craft brewing is no longer new and exciting--we need to seed our articles with something more unexpected.   

• Vary the quotes.  Gary Fish is doing something right.  He was quoted in tons of the articles we reviewed.  So were Ken Grossman, Jim Koch, and Sam Calagione.  We really need to do a better job of finding different voices to speak for the brewers.  

• Be more critical. Critics rightly fault writers for fawning over breweries, but we do it subtly and inadvertently.  Many of the articles we write begin with the narrative as brewers would tell it, and then unfold from their point of view.  We select a topic, go interview a bunch of people, and then write what they say.  This is reportage, but it's not great reportage.  As writers, we need to figure out a way to write about beer so that it's not just a kind of soft promotion.

• Find new ways to talk about beer.  The extended world of beer has a nearly infinite number of subjects to discuss, and yet we tend to pull out the same tired templates to discuss things.  I haven't quite figured out how to address this one, but it's a real issue.  If we were to go back in time to before Michael Jackson wrote about beer and entirely reinvent the way we write and talk about beer, what would it look like? 

For those of you who read beer books, magazines, and blogs, what would you like to see change?  Where do we need to go as we evolve?

The Future of Beer Writing

The release last month of The Oxford Companion to Beer has provoked a lot of discussion in the beerosphere--pro and, mostly, con. (I haven't seen it yet, but I am concerned that the publisher's comments begin with that inaccurate quote by Ben Franklin.) Start with this review by Alan McLeod and then read Stan Hieronymus' post and the extensive comments thereafter.

I won't try to summarize the discussions except to say that we seem to have finally arrived, now more than four years after his death, in the post-Jackson era. The Michael Jackson era began in the mid-70s and ended with his death in 2007. In that time, he published the definitive guide to world beer (World Guide to Beer and later the Beer Companion), the definitive ratings guide (Pocket Guide to Beer), and the definitive guide to Belgium (Great Beers of Belgium). He played a role in defining style, and he identified the breweries that continue to be considered world classics. The way he thought about and wrote about beer became the template of his era. (That some people regret aspects of his legacy is another matter.)

Jackson, of course, started writing in a very different time. When he discussed, say, Saison Dupont, very few people had ever heard of it, much less tasted it. Now the beer is available at most grocery stores. When people wanted information about beer, they had next to no sources beyond Jackson--though this obviously changed over the years.

Now we have amazing distribution networks that shuttle the beers of the world around the globe. We have hundreds of writers sharing information about beers. We have programs to teach people about beer. And perhaps most revolutionarily, we have the hive mind of ratings sites like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer coupled with GPS and the larger internet. This last change is key. The Oxford Companion arrives at a moment when very little information is beyond the reach of a Google search. (Based on some of the critiques I'm reading, a Google search may produce more accurate information, too.) All of this was floating in my mind when I read about a Harvard Business School report (pdf)on the impact of sites like Yelp.

For our purposes, I'd like you to look at this graph from the appendix:


Although Yelp tracks restaurants, not breweries and beer, the point is analogous. In this graph, the Zagat/Seattle Times/Food and Wine entries can stand in for a writer like Jackson, while Yelp is the hive mind. If a consumer is looking for information about a brewery or beer, where do they go? In most cases, they'll find the information they're looking for on a ratings site. It won't be as detailed or have the rich context of a Jackson book, but it will be there. You'll get some information and you'll get it fast. In his thirty years of beer writing, Jackson reviewed a monumental number of beers--but probably around 10% of the beers available at any given time.

I think this makes accurate writing about beer more important, not less. Understanding the history, chemistry, and culture of beer is far more edifying than seeing what Dogboy37 from Ypsilanti thought of Bell's Two-Hearted Ale. And yet we will increasingly rely on raters to aggregate and sort information for us. BeerAdvocate is a tool used by an order of magnitude more people than readers of The Oxford Companion.

This post isn't headed anywhere, incidentally, except to note the phenomenon. Jackson didn't write during the age of BeerAdvocate. Writers today do. It is a sure bet that in order to find an audience, books will have deal with this reality and find ways to appeal to folks who are used to finding information instantly online.

Odd Words From the Washington Post

I've been keeping one eye on the Washington Post's Beer Madness competition, which is now down to its final two. The idea was interesting: a bracket system like the NCAA basketball tourney, but with each quadrant representing a broad category of beer. Obviously, the outcome isn't worth debating (run the same beers past any ten panels and you'd get ten different winners), but the experiment is interesting.

What's weird is today's write-up by Greg Kitsock. It includes passages like this:

A wheat wine from DuClaw Brewing in Abingdon, Md. An Americanized version of a Belgian tripel from Flying Fish Brewing in Cherry Hill, N.J. A coffee stout from Evolution Craft Brewing in Delmar, Del. A double IPA from Lagunitas Brewing in Petaluma, Calif. None of those breweries existed 20 years ago; neither did any of those styles. [emphasis mine]

and this:

Bob Tupper, of Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale renown, summed up the dilemma: “How can you choose between this nice [double] IPA, well brewed, with well-blended flavors, or the big coffee jolt?” He picked the Lagunitas “because this beer is so much harder to brew than the coffee.”

One of the main reasons to hold a competition like this is beer education--especially for a newspaper. The final four certainly didn't represent novel styles--even by American breweries. And highlighting a quote saying a coffee stout is easier to brew than a double IPA is also a dubious claim.

Good luck to the competitors, but to the WaPo I say: work a bit on the education part.