Old Podcasts Don’t Die, They Retire to the Archives
Moments ago, we posted Beervana Show 194: The End. After nearly a decade, Patrick and I have decided to call it a wrap on our long-running, if fitful, podcast and radio show. I doubt this will come as a shock to listeners, who must have noticed there have only been two episodes in 2024. We’ve never been especially reliable podcasters, but even by our standards that’s pretty bad. In the end, the scheduling has become too hard, and we felt like perhaps we’d covered most of the things that needed covering. It was time.
Many podcasts abruptly end with no warning or explanation, much less an obituary—just a “final” episode sitting there in the playlist like a severed limb. This has been a fun and substantial project for us, and it deserves better. So as our final episode goes live today, We’d like to mention a few words going out.
The Beervana Podcast debuted almost exactly nine years ago, in May 2015. Patrick, slow to the ways of the 21st century, had recently discovered the existence of podcasts via soccer pod Men in Blazers. He liked its informality and spontaneity and thought: “Hey, we could do that.” With a minimum of planning or preparation, we decided on a topic (parti-gyle brewing), settled on the acoustics of his basement, and recorded it in one take.
That first episode was a master class in half-assing an endeavor, but it was also a promise. I recently re-listened to it, and all the hallmarks of the pod were already present. The show was rife with defects that would remain in some form throughout its run: the initial audio, recorded over cheap computer headsets, was terrible. The hosts, amateurs despite their brief time as college radio DJs, umm-ed and ahh-ed their way through each episode before trailing off indistinctly at the end of sentences. The busy hosts had tangled lives and never released new episodes on schedule for long. Yet it also had a nerdy quality, excellent information threaded with personal experience, and the pleasure of two friends joking and talking. Good content, flawed packaging.
In 2015, podcasting was in the fading months of its initial niche, DIY stage, before the New York Times, NPR, and the major networks started producing their suites of glossy, professional shows. Like blogs a decade earlier, scrappy efforts like ours were tolerated because they offered something fresh. Despite its technical flaws, the Beervana Podcast was unique in the world of beer. As old friends who started drinking beer together in college, started brewing it together in graduate school, and who had had an ongoing dialogue about it for a quarter century, taking our thoughts to the airwaves made sense. We brought a nerdy appreciation of the history, culture, craft, and economics of beer, something other podcasts didn’t offer.
Our orientation was fundamentally educational/explanatory—appropriate for a university professor and book author. That’s a good thing, too, as we exit the studio. Those episodes will age well, whether Patrick is discussing the producer price index or I’m talking about decoction mashing. They’re timeless topics, and will remain valuable for years to come. In the nearly two hundred episodes we recorded, we covered all the world’s major beer styles, all the economic principles relevant to industry and beer, and met with tons of interesting people along the way. Over those nine years we managed to touch on most of the major issues and trends within beer, so it’s a wonderful time capsule as well.
We had a ball, and we met a lot of great people along the way. It’s worth giving a shout out to a few, starting with, of course, Producer Will Romey. He was working at the XRAY radio station in our early years and offered to professionalize the show by giving us a studio and some editing. Covid would end the studio piece, but Will stuck with us, editing shows even after he moved back to Massachusetts. Thanks also to XRAY’s Chase Spross, who recorded our 100th episode live at Ecliptic (RIP), and kept our show on the air for years.
Thanks to our many guests and friends of the show, like Alan Taylor, Van Havig, (Reverend) Nat West, and Tobias Hahn (and forgive me for forgetting others). And a very warm thanks to the regular listeners and commenters who gave the show a reason to exist. We were always surprised to meet people who listened to the show, and it was the best payoff we could have received.
I asked Patrick if he’d like to add anything, and he sent me the following comment, which I’ll use as our final outro:
I’m proud of the job we did teaching people about beer and the economics of beer in a way that was respectful of our audience, the beer and the people who work in the industry. I hope we showed people that by understanding it, you can love and appreciate beer even more: that being a beer nerd can be fun! And lastly, I hope we helped shine a light on all the passionate people who are a part of making craft beer, because they deserve to be appreciated and celebrated.
Well, that wasn’t so bad.