Can We Survive Without Beer Writers?

I am into the third year of trying to persuade my youngest daughter to put the vowels back into words. She texts faster than I can speak. I worry that even after she transitions from adolescence into womanhood, she will talk and think like a trailer for a TV drama. Unlike her sisters, she reads few books.

I declare an interest. Next month, my publishing company launches a guide to the beers and bars of Amsterdam, and the following month sees the much-delayed second edition of LambicLand go on sale.

The publisher’s worst nightmare used to be that the book trade would order thousands of copies of their new title and then return them unsold a year later. The new fear is that some semi-human equivalent of a dung beetle decides to read it and then share its essential information with acquaintances in cyberspace, mistakenly believing that the information it contains is somehow “free.”

My daughter and her pals believe that you can find anything you need on the internet, as long as you know where to look. They worry that it may be out of date or out of fashion, but not that it may be out of copyright or out of context.

No large and carefully compiled set of facts comes free. At some point, real people spend countless weeks traipsing around poorly lit streets and rain-sodden country lanes to piece together these guides, while others sit in garrets way past bedtime, rearranging words and images, discarding the approximate and meaningless, to get the message right.

The global craft beer movement bounces from day to day on the new discoveries of e-linked beer lovers eagerly swapping opinions about the new this, the next that, who is in and what is bad. It is vibrant, chaotic, essential and very “now,” but it has the attention span of a kitten with fleas.

“C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (Google it.)

The 30-year struggle that created today’s beer nirvana was driven by writers and publishers, not by brewers. These writers and publishers followed in the wake of Michael Jackson, the prominent beer writer, and others; they were grateful for the exposure and willing to rise to the challenge, though sometimes reluctantly so.

Will the new information streams leave behind a legacy? We have yet to see. My guess is that without some kind of payment, the boots-on-the-ground reporting that keeps the facts fresh will dribble away. Dabbling without dedication will not be enough.

Don’t misunderstand me here. I adore the gusto, swagger and wide-eyed joy of the twittering classes, even when they help create subclasses of freak beers that make the grownups tut. I just don’t want them to undermine or replace the efforts of those who plough through the tedium of the lackluster to inform others about the broader subject. Gathering a whole sheaf of facts, chucking out the irrelevant and condensing the best bits into a readable story takes time and experience, but it changes our world slowly by use of reason.

In Denver this September, the Great American Beer Festival will once again devote a large area to selling books and hosting author signings. They understand that beer lovers and beer writers train on the same pitches and generally turn out for the same club.

In London this past August, the Great British Beer Festival sold books alongside T-shirts and silly hats, on half of a smallish stand that stocked mainly their self-branded titles. They invited along only a few of their creators. I do hope they are not expecting “Generation TXT” to be the fount of new knowledge.

Yes, the world would definitely keep revolving without beer writers. However, the craft beer revolution may not. Go cheer up a beer writer today—buy their book. ■