Ranter’s Block

When Todd asked me to write Last Call from a publican’s point of view, he said “no punches should be pulled.” He also gave me a tight deadline, so I quickly tried to think up a decent rant. The problem is that pretty much nearly everybody involved with the craft beer movement is so darn wonderful that I don’t really have anything to rant about—but I’ll try not to let that stop me. People who know me will tell you that I can complain with the best of them, so let’s do this thing!

Running a good pub is tough work. We are open 15 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year—except for leap year, when it’s 366. That’s a lot of hours to be open, a lot of opportunities to wow people and a lot of opportunities to completely drop the ball. Overhead is high and profits often nonexistent. But the people make it worth it. I knew about the hours, the workload and overhead before getting into this, so there’s no one to blame there except me, and I’m not going to rant about myself (I leave that to others who do it much better).

The brewers, most of whom started out small and struggled for a long time before hitting solid ground (I know how that feels), still continue to both put out solid beer and also to push the envelope, keeping things interesting. There are one or two currently well-established breweries that seem to have gotten a little greedy; but on the whole, craft breweries are committed to providing innovative tasty beer that is also a good value. Really nothing to rant about there.

There are many distributors—the often-unseen middlemen—who really try to offer a great selection of beer and great service to their distribution areas while keeping their markup reasonable. True, a few of them suck, and some are greedy, but many have done more than anyone to further the advocacy and availability of great beer. Really very little to rant about there.

Beer journalists and publishers, who do what they do out of passion (it’s definitely not the money), are the glue that unites us all. They’ve given many of us our first exposure to the outside world when we couldn’t afford advertising. Nothing to rant about there, either.

And most importantly, there are the end consumers, who keep us all in business. Without them, the bar for quality beer would be set much lower, back to where it was 15 years ago. Their loyalty, adventurousness, and tolerance for the occasional misstep or growing pain have kept many of us around for over 10 years now, some much longer. They attend beer events heavily and make these events a really fun time with very few problems.

The way everybody (for the most part) gets along and acts so friendly to each other is really amazing. It’s really a wonderful little world we all are a part of. The downside is that all of you damn people have made this a really terrible rant—probably the worst Last Call ever.

For that, thank you. Please don’t ever change. ■