We’re facing an inflection point in the world of beer, with almost as many brewpub closings (145) as openings (165) in the United States in 2023. I’ve lost track of the U.K. beer makers—both new-school and traditional—that have shuttered in just the last few years. Even what we now call “beer” can be very different from that term’s more limited definition of a generation or so ago. The entire culture that surrounds beer has changed and still is changing—the methods by which it is made, how it is served, where it is sold, and who makes and drinks it.
That means, inevitably, that how we write about beer has to change as well.
Of course, plenty has already changed. I got my start as a freelance music journalist, but I switched over to covering food soon afterwards. I wrote weekly restaurant reviews for many years before launching a beer column in The Prague Post, the Czech Republic’s English-language weekly newspaper, at the end of 2002. That led to “Good Beer Guide: Prague and the Czech Republic,” the paperback guidebook I wrote in 2007, followed by a bunch of magazine and newspaper articles.
It’s hard to imagine a new beer journalist following the same career path today. To start, The Prague Post and hundreds of other former print publications are no longer in existence. Second, paperback beer guidebooks—and travel guides in general—don’t have the same relevance as they did in the decades before smartphones, as the nearly defunct Lonely Planet can tell you. “No one buys books,” writer Elle Griffin recently half-joked after reviewing publisher data.
We’re in a different era now, and the culture has changed. And while I have a professional take as both a writer and editor here at Good Beer Hunting, I’m primarily looking at beer writing from a personal point of view. Speaking just as a reader, I’m not as interested in the same kind of stories about beer that might have captured my attention a while back—not even many of the types of stories I used to write myself.
That shift in reading and writing mirrors a larger change in brewing and drinking. A generation ago, the opening of any new brewery was relatively groundbreaking, so just writing a profile of that brewery was fairly newsworthy. But when you multiply that by more than 8,000 new breweries that have appeared in the U.S. since the year 2007, you start to grasp that neither a new brewery nor an article that announces its arrival is going to be interesting in and of itself. When there are almost 10,000 breweries in the U.S., the beer has to be good. And when we’ve had 20-plus years of writing about beer in the craft era, the stories about beer have to be good.
Today, we’ve been spoiled by a surfeit of quality in both categories. But just as good beer should always win out, great writing should always find appreciative readers. I’m still fascinated by well-written articles about how brewers, pub owners, malt makers, or hop growers triumphed over challenges. A deep, insightful profile that plumbs the depths of someone’s character can haunt me for days. Authoritative historical writing that illuminates how a family brewery survived through four centuries or how a style-defining ale was invented might cause me to skip a mandatory work Zoom. Truly great tasting notes are hard to find, but once I spot them, I’m sold.
Now that I think of it, none of those are newly invented art forms, and in a similar way, I haven’t found a beer style that was created within the last 20 years that could take the place of a traditional Czech pale lager, a great bottle-conditioned saison or a top-shape cask bitter on my personal to-drink list.
So perhaps it’s not that what we write about beer has to change, at least not in the sense of the form of that writing. It might be more like we have a new opportunity to focus on truly great writing: not getting there first, so much as covering the subject beautifully; not breaking news (though of course that can be important, too), so much as understanding and explaining its nuances; not reporting on every new beer or brewery that opens (an impossibility, given our current numbers), but writing more selectively about the ones that truly matter. And of course we need to continue to bring in new voices, especially those from groups who were traditionally not able to write about beer, the same way they might have been, in earlier generations, kept out of beer culture itself.
With any luck, great beer writing will survive this turning point along with great beer.
