I’m sitting at a familiar spot in Portland that serves beer off the tap and also features multiple doors of canned beer to choose from. You should know the drill by now; I may have even talked about this place in the past, although it’s not my favorite bottleshop by far. But it’ll suffice for the moment.
I’ve been in Portland for just over 2 months and it’s been going well. Hard to describe the homecoming without getting into personal details, but I did pick an apartment within walking distance of a known beer source. There’s several sources of food and even multiple bus lines running through the area. It’s full of families and children and shit but that’s for another conversation. At least I’m not surrounded by old people, an affliction I cannot stand – they don’t drink craft beer that often.
I’ve been lacking in insights or unique thoughts about the beer scene for a couple of months more than that, to be honest. I can sit here and get a strange overview of the brewing scene up here based solely off the beers on offer, but that’s sans any actual press or media coverage of any of the beers I see in the can. I’m flying blind out here, really just going commando into the thick of it. When all the cans have amazing artwork and vaguely descriptive words about what’s inside, it’s a crapshoot; when you finally chose one, if you weren’t careful, you’ll have ended up with a 5.5% abv ‘IPA’ (session). That just won’t do.
A family affair
My folks are currently touring the PNW in a motorhome – they find themselves at breweries, on average, four nights a week. Not kidding. Yet I cannot get either of them to write about their travels in beerland. “Oh we were at suchandsuch brewery last night, yadda yadda”, yet I can’t get more than that. People, if you’re not worried about giving others the impression that you have a drinking problem, share your stories about craft beer. My dumb ass just writes whatever comes to mind when I’m nursing a pint, and I can clearly do better, but that shouldn’t stop others from trying some basic communication about their craft beer escapades. BE BEST.
I’d say email me your contributions but most of the hits I get are bots and none of them have anything worthwhile to say, unless I’ve misread the translations. It’s more than likely you know me personally and so I suggest dropping me a line on facebook. Ugh yes.
You can’t live without it
Seems like you can’t get much of anything done without joining one of these facebook groups – it’s the only way to sell things locally anymore. I’ve had to resort to the marketplace to sell a few things recently and it’s resulted in me, sitting on my couch, scrolling through endless ads hoping for a single post that hits my reward center. The ads are ridiculous and hilariously useless to me, and the 2-week old posts might have been relevant if I’d seen them when they went up. FB could have been so much more but now it’s just a sad relic, like myspace. Lol.
The beer content there has been utterly pointless and commercial, with just a few regional breweries doing anything to promote there. Instagram is more relevant to that sort of stuff, but of course that’s another waste of time you’ll get sucked into once you start using it. I guess what I’m trying to say is, support your local beer writer on whatever platform they’re working on. We need all the help we can get. Aside from doing it for the love of the beer, it’s not exactly rewarding…