You know how, when you’re sitting down to eat someplace, looking at the menu, there’s that section most people skip right over, because it’s not really an entree, and sometimes they’re really small anyways, but most people mostly skip the salads. I think it’s okay if we admit that, and if we did, then we could just get rid of that section on the menu altogether, and the kitchen could focus on something else instead!
Wait, what?
It was a dumb thought I had once, while working as the solo closing cook at a place with the word ‘Roadhouse’ in the name. Somebody had ordered a Cesar salad and the spinach leaves were buried in a cooler on the other side of the kitchen, and I was seriously annoyed. All sorts of questions went through my mind, mostly something like ‘Who the fck orders a Cesar salad on a busy Friday night in a place like this DON’T THEY KNOW I’M COOKING STEAK?”
Anyways, I’ve often wondered if brewers go through the same kind of existential crisis moments while trying to finish a bunch of things all at once when they’d rather just be making their favorite beer or whatever. I’ll get the chance to ask a real live one soon, and he’s been making some of my favorite beers – including my favorite red for the last decade – for a while now. I haven’t lined anything up officially, so I can’t say much more, but I think it’ll be fun to step into the ‘real content’ idea a little. My last thought on it today is that you never know who you’re sitting next to at the bar, and you shouldn’t be afraid to chat.
ALL the drama
Recent political events have definitely cast a new aspect to the role certain social media organizations have in our casual discourse, and ‘beer twitter’ will probably be forever changed by simple association with the owner. I’ve struggled to get traction for a long while, being asked to pay money every time I post in order to ‘be more seen’. Fuuuck that with a big F. When I think of the work of self-promotion and the platforms to do it these days, it’s a real struggle to find the motivation to really get going, even if I’ve already bought some of the most important parts of the operation (hosting and domains). Tying everything together in some sort of promotional fashion takes a lot of coordination and time and digging through endless menus and it’s like…a personal blog? Once I thought I might make something out of it but…see above. It’s the circle of life of unfinished projects.
There are apparently other social media platforms emerging from the haze, so maybe I’ll join one of them… But it’s not like I drop regular content. This was a draft from late October, and I have other content to finish up and post BECAUSE I CAN heh and for no other reason. This is like my own personal Myspace and since I pay for all of it, if you don’t like it you know exactly what you can do.
Keep reading
It’s hard to unwrap my personal politics from the way I see the word but I do try, and my adventures through beer have led me deep into territory that’s actually apolitical in a way that’s painful to see sometimes. There’s a struggle as a brewery to remain an open space for everyone yet have an identity online or in the local community that doesn’t start to lean one way or another. I am…uhh…definitely not republican, but I’m sure the people who I run across are, from time to time, even in my little bubble spaces of librul breweries, and I still try to talk to those folks about life and beer (mostly beer) because it’s a business most people can understand and relate to.
None of this is about beer, but it somehow is, as costs and labor and regulations hit breweries more than many other businesses. I will try to remain mostly PC myself but there may be things coming up that show my bias. I hope you still come back to read the next round…whenever it comes. I’ll try to get back to the big pretty pictures between paragraphs format soon, I just have to push myself to get the damn words out as it is. Cheers. Keep drinking that local beer, and don’t forget to chat up the person at the bar next to you. I’m not saying they’ll always pay for your beer…but they might.