It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Fred Waltman’s death made a deep impact on me—and on many other beer fans. Every passing affects those of us left behind, no matter how tangential the relationship, and Fred was a great guy, a legendary beer traveler with whom many of us enjoyed a lot of fun times over the years. He and I first met in Bamberg in 2007, when I was in the Franconian beer capital on a travel assignment, having already purchased Fred’s PDF beer guide to the area. Fred was there doing his thing: researching pints and pubs in some of the best brewing regions in Europe.
In 2009, he started coming to Prague, adding my adopted hometown to beer destinations like Düsseldorf, Antwerp, and Bamberg, where he would regularly bring groups of travelers to sample Old World classics in situ. During Fred’s annual or semiannual weeklong visits here, we usually met up two or three times. We bumped into each other by chance at the Great British Beer Festival in London in 2012, and spent the day sampling beers together there. To give you an idea of Fred’s kindness and generosity, I’d just say that whenever he started planning his next trip to Prague, he’d write and offer to bring anything I needed from the States, which means that one of my Amazon shipping addresses is his place in Southern California. Whenever I step into a trout stream, I remember that Fred muled my fishing waders over to me in his checked luggage.
As such, it’s obvious that Fred’s passing on May 31 would hit me pretty hard: He was a fun guy who loved beer in all of its manifestations, a great conversationalist who could talk about almost anything over a pint or three. That’s enough for his absence to hit those of us who knew him pretty hard. But after a few weeks, I’ve started to see more depth in terms of what his death means to me, in ways both heartening and somber.
The uplifting aspect of Fred’s passing has come to me through the joyful remembrances of his friends. While it’s terribly sad that Fred’s gone, I take joy in—and absolutely marvel at—the love expressed over the past few weeks by those he left behind. Fellow posters at the Burgundian Babble Belt, a forum for Belgian beer fans back in the day; members of Pacific Gravity Homebrewers Club, which Fred founded in 1995; guests from the scores of trips Fred organized to Uerige for Sticke Day or to the Kerstbierfestival in Essen—people who knew Fred loved Fred, and they’ve put up enough posts and photos to fill a couple of memorial guest books.
What I take away from that is how small and interconnected the world really is, or at least the world of people who love beer. Facebook tells me that Fred and I had 58 mutual friends, yet I didn’t realize that many of those folks even knew the guy who maintained a slew of excellent online beer guides covering Bamberg, Los Angeles, London, Dublin, New York City, Prague, and Antwerp. But of course they did: Fred was in the game before many modern beer lovers were even born, and he traveled widely, and often, to some of the best beer destinations on the planet.
In reality, we’re all much more connected than we realize. And being able to see that clearly is a blessing.
The other meaning I’ve taken from Fred’s death is a bit harder to talk about, so I’ll just come right out and say it: The good beer movement is aging, and funerals for beer lovers are going to be a lot more common than they once were. While it might have been the height of youthful exuberance to launch a brewery or a craft beer bar two or three decades ago, plenty of those first- and second-generation brewery and pub owners—and beer fans, to say nothing of beer writers—are now quickly moving toward and past retirement age. Em Sauter recently wrote a moving memorial to John Stoner, a craft beer lover from Richmond, Virginia, who died in 2021 at the age of 67. In his last post on Twitter, Fred himself noted that Gerhard Schoolman, the force behind Café Abseits in Bamberg, had recently passed away. It’s not like no one was writing memorials for recently deceased beer fans 20 or 30 years ago, but our coterie was younger back then, and thus further from the standard limits of the human lifespan. As far as we can tell, time only moves in one direction, and aging—and thus death—is the nature of the game for everyone.
The last time Fred was in Prague, he told me that the staff at the student pub Mrtvá Ryba across town had started calling him “professor,” since he was obviously older than almost everyone else there, and gray-haired drinkers in student pubs are often faculty members.
Soon after I heard about Fred’s death, I decided to meet some friends at Mrtvá Ryba for the first time in what might have been two full decades. Inside, it was hot, dark, and crowded, and it looked like just about everyone was undergraduate age, the only obvious exceptions being at our table. As I raised my glass to Fred’s memory, I thought of the growing gray streaks in my own hair, and how they seem to shine brighter and brighter, even in very dim light.
