Beervana at Fifteen
Listen to this post:
2007. The Wayback Machine goes no further back (Click to enlarge.)
The mood in western Oregon in late February is one of impatience. The first of the crocuses are out, and maybe a few bold daffodils, but the weather remains stuck in the forties and drizzle dampens most days. We are growing tired of winter and can sense spring’s presence, even if we have to conjure most of its evidence from hope. Those are the moments I act rashly, and fifteen years ago, I started this blog on February afternoon while waiting for the sun.
I had no plan. My promising start writing about beer eight years earlier had dwindled to nothing, and I was deep in a period of political writing. Those were the early, freewheeling days of blogging, and two years before I’d cofounded BlueOregon—the most important left-wing state site in its day. Writing about politics felt more substantial, and it led me to rub elbows with senators and congresspeople. Fun stuff! Yet it was also somewhat poisonous, and I yearned for simpler, more wholesome topics. On a whim, I typed “Beervana” into the seven-year-old free hosting site Blogger and was surprised to learn it was available. I cocked an eyebrow and posted a review of Supris, a defunct Duvel-ish offering from BridgePort, itself now defunct. (Over the course of the blog, my predictive powers have proven to be legendarily bad—I’ll have a whole post on that—but I was correct in noting about Supris, “I wonder if it will find much of a market.” It did not.) I figured I’d use beer writing as a valve to regulate the pressure building from politics, posting the odd review or observation.
Within three years I was done with politics and back to writing about beer.
2006 was a perfect year to start a beer blog. Not only was the form still relevant—regular media even saw blogs as dangerous potential disruptors, if you can believe that—but beer was coming out of a ten-year slump. Sales had barely crept up during that time and the number of breweries was actually ticking down: in 2005, the number of breweries dropped to 1,394, the fewest since 1997.
Yet that previous ten years was also when craft brewing matured and professionalized. Breweries learned how to make consistent, quality beer that would survive 90 days in a bottle. As the Supris review illustrates, breweries were still looking for inspiration in places like Belgian styles that would later turn into blind alleys. Yet they were also discovering what drinkers really wanted. Serendipitously, that review highlights another trend that rumbled in the background: hops. BridgePort was the first Northwest brewery to release an aromatic, low-bitterness IPA, and that would be beer’s future. Other breweries were also taking the measure of hops, learning different ways to squeeze lush aromas and tongue-tickling flavors from them. The age of IPA was dawning.
2102. You can’t see it, but I was touting the Honest Pint Project below the blogroll.
It was the moment new breweries really started opening again, and that, along with the focus on hops and a newly experimental attitude, made it a joy for bloggers. It was an exciting time because, while the founders had dominated brewing for twenty years, it was the little guys’ moment. They were the ones who would lead the way in terms of hops and experimentation. We tend to focus on the excesses because they’re so entertaining (and I reveled in doing that here), but that was the era of those incredibly important shifts that now seem foundational: the arrival of wild yeasts and fermentation, barrel rooms, the proper use (rather than misuse) of adjuncts, and of course hops hops hops—in whirlpools, in conditioning tanks, during fermentation, with unkilned cones. Because it may seem impossible to imagine a time before Citra, I’ll remind you it debuted in 2007. Bloggers of the day were there to cover it all.
Because I’d written for newspapers and magazines, I knew how to report a story and had a fair number of contacts in Oregon. Even while fiddling with my blog I could call up a brewer and ask a question if I wanted make a point with real information. I still thought of the site as purely bloggy—loose and unprofessional—but over the first five years I continued to learn more and more, particularly about commercial brewing techniques. If you look closely enough in the archives, you’ll see the shafts of professionalization falling on the odd page.
Other massive changes were on the horizon. Industry consolidation hadn’t yet arrived—even Anheuser-Busch was still a family business, but it would start soon enough. As quickly as things were happening in the evolution of beer itself, they were happening even faster in the business realm. I had an unsophisticated understanding of this part of brewing, and many of my worst posts—they’re all still here, waiting to be mocked—reflected that. As AB InBev and MillerCoors started snatching up more and more breweries, we all sensed a shift. Beer was growing up and becoming a serious business.
2015. Six weeks before The Beer Bible landed in bookstores.
Beer writing went through a major change as well. The great Michael Jackson died in 2007, just as the transformation was beginning in craft brewing. Jackson dominated his era in a way no one ever would again, and his writing became a touchstone for most of the pioneering breweries of the 1980s and ‘90s. Yet in a development paralleling craft brewing, a bunch of scrappy writers got started around that time and filled in blanks left by Jackson. The era of the blogger, which despite social media is still very much alive, brought a new professionalism to the subject. History replaced legend. Detailed technical information blossomed. More bloggers meant more stories. In some ways this may be the most underappreciated hallmark of this era: for the first time, a vastly-larger pool of writers were producing a flood of high-quality information, and the average beer geek’s knowledge shot up. This has had a smaller effect on regular beer drinkers, but those in the industry and those who love beer now have more information in their brains than the “experts” of the 1990s—by a mile.
This blog followed a similar course. The early posts are not especially interesting, and certainly not very informative. But as I started writing more, I learned more. Since the blog’s outset, I’ve taken extensive tours with a few hundred brewers and interviewed scores more. At the start of 2010 I left my job as a researcher at Portland State University to write about beer full time—still more ignorant than I realized. A bit more than a year later I miraculously had a contract to write The Beer Bible, a process that became like a graduate course in beer. (Looking back, had I been the editor at Workman, I wouldn’t have hired me to write the book—and I only got the nod because Kylie came to this site and liked my voice and the way I explained things. Yay, blogs!)
2018. In 2017 I finally left Blogspot and got my own url and site.
For the two years I was writing The Beer Bible, I used this blog as a sounding board for first drafts, explorations, and as a place to test theories. Because I’m a refugee of the salad days of blogging, I’ve always seen the form as a dialogue with readers—and you have always been incredibly engaged and insightful. All my beer writing has been collaborative, and readers have been a big part of that.
I really hope you see the change here from the early years. I never considered myself a reporter, but I’ve begun to behave as one more often than I expected. I now post less frequently but try to offer more substance. I can offboard the chatty, single-observation material to social media and focus on these posts. This has resulted in series like my posts on sexism, wages, historically important beers, and, last year, Coronavirus. Please have a look at my still-developing archives page, where I’ve curated my best and most significant posts.
And things are still evolving. I have new projects in the works, a three-hour interview with Teri Fahrendorf to transcribe—part of a series on women pioneers—and a few ideas that I’ll jump on once the pandemic makes travel safe again.
Hitting milestones like this allow you to take in how much has happened in a given period of time. When this blog started, the beer industry was in an entirely different place, and I was a still-young fellow in his 30s. We have been aging together. From time to time, it’s nice to use these occasions to reflect. Off and on this week I’ll do so, trying to have a bit of fun with my crystal anniversary. You, of course, will have the final say—as you have done for fifteen years.