The Best Beer Writing in the World
Illustration by Midjourney. Prompt: woman writing in a notebook with a beer on the table.
Each August, the North American Guild of Beer Writers conducts an annual competition for the best writing of the year. Despite the name of the host group, anyone can enter, and foreign journalists always do well. We learned the winners yesterday, and as always, they reveal much about the state of writing and who’s doing the best journalism.
One of the most obvious developments this year was the displacement of older, more established writers by a younger group who have been doing awesome work for years, but often without the credit they deserve. The names Alworth, Bernstein, Brown, and Dredge appeared only sporadically on the 2024 list, while Iseman, Nilsen, Infante, and Corne were plentiful. I have been charting the growth of women’s voices in these awards for years, and 2024 continued the tend, as women accounted for 37% of the writing medals awarded. Ten years ago, by contrast, only one (1) medal went to a woman.
We’ll discuss all that below, and more, but before we do, I would be remiss if I failed to note that Beervana won a gold for best newsletter or blog. Yay! Longtime readers will recall that that’s a departure from Beervana’s usual second-place showing in the category. It was the only award I won, but it’s the category I care most about. I’m also feeling more than a little good about having some strong new voices knock me off the list. I’m delighted that the work of this site was appreciated— I love writing this blog and especially the communication and engagement it offers with readers (who are often more expert than I). Thanks to the judges!
The Big Winners
Seven writers won multiple medals this year, and three won more than two:
David Nilsen (4): two firsts (beer review, food writing), and two thirds (book, commentary).
Courtney Iseman (3): a first (local reporting), and two seconds (business, commentary).
Dave Infante (3 +1): a first (commentary), a second (blog/newsletter), an honorable mention among writing awards, and a (well-deserved) first in podcasts.
Writers winning two awards included Lucy Corne and Brian Yaeger, and, including honorable mentions, Matthew Curtis and Shana Solarte.
If you don’t know these names, please seek out their work. Courtney Iseman is more itinerant in her writing now that she’s stepped away from her Substack. Her three awards were for stories in three different publications, and she writes for everyone from the Washington Post to Punch, Food & Wine, and Inside Hook. (The easiest way to survey her writing is at her website.) Writing freelance for multiple publications means sanding off the edges of your prose, but Courtney is full of character and personality, finding a way to work tarot into her beer-writing, and bringing her pug Darby in tow to pubs and sometimes into her stories. Dave Infante writes about the beer business, with a special focus on labor issues, at VinePair and on his Substack Fingers, among other places. His writing is something like a cross between Hunter S Thompson and Studs Terkel. You imagine him chomping a cigar as he writes, which is also what he sounds like on his podcast, also called Fingers.
David Nilsen—well, 2024 was really David Nilsen’s year. Not only did he win the most writing awards, but three writers took home awards for work in his new zine, Final Gravity (one was his romantic and publishing partner Melinda Guerra, which must have made the house quite buoyant yesterday afternoon). In his own writing, David has created a very unusual niche: the intersection of beer and chocolate. This is not an obvious subject, but David has turned it into a calling. That’s not all he does, but if you ever ask someone who “the chocolate guy” is, only one name comes up. His work as an editor and publisher is not as obvious except in the kinds of stories he seeks out, which give Final Gravity its distinctive character.
In case it wasn’t absolutely clear in my brief profiles of these writers, all three bring a lot of themselves to their work. This is as important in writing as it is in the subject they cover. We like to read writers with a perspective and opinions. We like to get to know them implicitly and explicitly. We appreciate writers who know how to turn a phrase and bring a point home, but we enjoy getting to know them as voices as well. If you’re new to the craft and you want to break onto this list, read their work and watch what they do. They allow their passions to inform and guide them, and they let that part of their personality spill onto the page. Right now, David, Courtney, and Dave are doing the best work in our world, so follow these links to their work.
The Shifting Publications
It seems like each year the number of publications willing to publish beer articles dwindles. This July we lost Good Beer Hunting. For years, it has been the best place in the US for writers to pursue interesting work. It was once a beer magazine, but became something larger, with pieces that got further and further away from the latest IPA. In past years, it constituted a pretty large chunk of the NAGBW winners. Last year, it was responsible for 14 of the 36 eligible writing awards (excluding emerging writers and honorable mentions). This year, GBH writers only won seven awards, which was still the most by any single publisher. They also won a lot of honorable mentions and emerging writer notices.
Foreign publications helped writers find a platform for their stories, including Belgian Smaak (2), Pellicle (2), and the Drinks Business (1). Taking up some of the slack this year was the consumer/industry combo of Craft Beer & Brewing/Brewing Industry Guide, which accounted for another five awards. That leaves us with a situation in which non-beer mags played a much bigger role. On the one hand, it’s depressing that fewer magazines are devoted to beer. It’s a rich topic, and we could use a few more. On the other hand, it means writers are pitching stories to publications where they’ll see a broader or different audience. A few examples:
InsideHook, a travel and culture magazine.
Belt Magazine, which features art and culture pieces and focuses on the upper Midwest (the rust belt).
Garden and Gun, a rather startling combo that covers exactly what the title says, focusing on the South.
Heavy Table, a food and drink publication covering Minneapolis and the upper Midwest.
The Atlantic, one of the few remaining highbrow print pubs covering politics, culture, and arts.
I prefer to see this expansion into unusual publications as good news. I have always disliked the phrase “beer writer.” “Beer writing” is a niche within a niche, and suggests work that won’t be interesting to anyone save industry insiders, hobbyists, and obsessives. “Beer writer” suggests a stunted form of journalist whose work could never survive contact with the larger publishing world. They are, sadly, somewhat apt at describing the world we’ve lived in. I prefer to think of us as writers and journalists who cover beer. This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it hints at our (and beer’s) broader prospects. The work of the great writers honored this year, as well as the expanding reach of their work, may point to a future when beer is a subject fit to publish anywhere. It will be very interesting to see where the winners come from next year, in the post Good Beer Hunting era.
Congratulations to all the winners. You can find the full list of winners here.