And Poof--All About Beer is Gone
Two quick updates about important things unmentioned [10/29]. First, it is possible to track down material via the wayback machine/internet archive. That means the material isn’t entirely gone. For regular readers, however, this isn’t much help—they need to know an article exists and go to the site to unearth it. Second, I currently write for the last of the print mags, Craft Beer and Brewing, and they’re doing a wonderful job. Unfortunately, the archives aren’t as accessible and they don’t go back to 1979.
Consider this the final obituary for the greatest historical record of the craft beer era. All About Beer magazinee, which folded as a print magazine in March 2018, continued to live on as a cache of incredible content online. At some point in recent days or weeks, the bill finally came due on the url, and former owner Chris Rice wasn’t there to pay it. Go looking for that great article you remember Tom Acitelli writing about the early days of craft brewing, as I was just trying to do, and you find the dreaded 404 warning you see at right (or above if you’re on your phone).
I wrote the first obituary before Rice would admit he’d killed the magazine. The longtime owners, Daniel Bradford and Julie Johnson, sold it to Rice in 2014, and it appeared the magazine would flourish. Rice hired John Holl, who quickly turned it into the best beer magazine in the US, updating its approach and bringing new vigor and interest. Rice, through mismanagement and/or fraud, managed to destroy 39 years of publication in four short years.
Go read that first obituary if you want the full blow-by-blow of its demise. I was one of the writers stiffed at the end, but my main regret isn’t about money. It’s that we have lost, in the stroke of a GoDaddy employee’s key, decades of history. Hard copies of old magazines still exist—including the whole set at Oregon State’s Hops and Brewing Archive—yet the loss of the online archive means just a tiny fraction of the public will ever see the old material. It included writing by Fred Eckhardt, Michael Jackson, and every important writer working from 1979 onward. I’ll continue to post some of my favorite articles on this site, so my stuff will survive online—but obviously, that’s not nearly good enough.
As a coda to all of this, let me note that we have entered a new generation of beer coverage. A network of bloggers like Martyn Cornell, Stan Hieronymus, Ron Pattinson, and Lars Marius Garshol have posted some of the most valuable writing about beer on their sites. Sites like Good Beer Hunting and Pellicle have been born online to pick up the slack—and they’ve been doing a wonderful job. Yet none of us has issued hard copies of this material, and it is as evanescent as another employee’s keystroke. I don’t know what that means, except that we live in tenuous times archivally.
AAB RIP.
