Though our culture’s love of aww-shucks folk wisdom offers plenty of competition, there are few platitudes dumber than the idea that people shouldn’t comment on something if they don’t know how to do it themselves.
This might seem like a fairly anodyne old chestnut, roughly stating that insight from those with experience is probably worth more than the imaginings of those without experience. And in many cases, that’s true: Most of us would prefer to read an article about how to get from Port Authority to Newark Liberty International Airport, for example, that was written by someone who had recently made the trip and could accurately describe the dirty underpass where we might find the bus in question, rather than an article written by someone who had not experienced that particular challenge.
If we extend this idea, however, it quickly reaches the heights of the ridiculous. “If a journalist hasn’t ever played football, they shouldn’t cover football” might not sound so unreasonable, but “If you haven’t coached a college football team yourself, you have no right to criticize a college football team’s coaching” is clearly bad thinking. If it were true, that would leave us with just five living Americans who were “qualified” to write about the challenges facing the president, and only a handful of people with the right to opine on which films are worthy of a Best Director award. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and insightful analysis can sometimes come from those with limited—or even no—hands-on experience.
But when it comes to writing about beer, I cannot overstate how helpful it is to actually brew the stuff.
I say this for two reasons. The first is that I have heard several beer writers proclaim, often with what bizarrely sounds like a note of pride, that they don’t brew or homebrew themselves. The idea almost seems to be that they are untainted by bias when it comes to brewing, much in the way that some political pundits point out that they don’t vote, and therefore apparently exist on a plane high enough above the fray as to stand beyond reproach. (This latter claim is, of course, nonsense.)
The second is that I can clearly see how brewing has deepened my own knowledge of beer. By taking a weekend certificate course at the brewing school here in Prague and by homebrewing fairly intensively for many years, I learned more about my favorite drink than I thought possible. And I wasn’t starting from zero: I had already written a beer book for CAMRA and close to a hundred articles about beer by the time I started brewing seriously. Brewing for myself helped me understand dozens of aspects of beer culture more practically, from packaging and storage to fermentation and conditioning. When I think about lagering, I remember tasting my own homebrew over the course of many weeks, noticing the subtle changes in a batch from day to day. I think about labels differently than I did before, because while labeling my own bottles I learned the importance of making them easy to identify on a dimly lit shelf.
As a writer, brewing for yourself can help cut down your own dumb prejudices. You might abstractly hate the idea of high-gravity brewing as done by industrial Lager breweries, but you’ll look at things differently when you’re trying to get nine gallons of beer out of a fermenter that holds just seven. A number of beer writers seem to romanticize decoction mashing, but the process becomes a lot less esoteric when you’re stirring your own decoction on the stovetop. (It doesn’t feel particularly mysterious. It feels like a pot of runny oatmeal.)
Beer is a wonderful beverage for many reasons, not the least of which is the base knowledge of a good number of its consumers. People love wine, too, but clearly a far smaller number of passionate wine drinkers have actually made wine than the amount of beer fans who have brewed their own Imperial Stouts and Pale Ales. It seems strange that the people writing about beer wouldn’t want to know at least as much as the most interested consumers who might read their work.
In short, it is about knowing your field. But in the end, people like us are really not brewers and publicans: We are writers, communicators, and publishers. The real tools of our trade are not hydrometers, barley malt, and delivery vans, but content-management systems, royalty rates, and the law of copyright. This is what we use to do our work, the work of writing.
Of course there’s no shortage of willful ignorance in the world, and over the years I have heard more than a few beer writers boastfully note that they know nothing about how publishing works or how royalty rates are calculated. There is a limit to the amount anyone can know, of course, but there’s a lot to be said for learning everything you can about your industry. Even if you don’t plan on starting your own magazine or publishing house, familiarity with advertising rates, CPCs, CPMs, copyright, libel law, and new platforms can help you envision where publishing is headed and prepare you for the work that lies ahead. You can make your own world slightly better by learning as much as you can and sharing that knowledge with your colleagues—especially those who might not have as much access as you do.
One of the best things about a career in writing is the depth of what we can cover and how we can report it. From new media to new kinds of drinks, there’s always more to learn, uncover, and understand.
If you figure out where to find that bus at Port Authority, please let me know.
