Who dat?

My name is Chris and I go by the nickname "digitalflood". The nickname is a long story, but the short version is back in the early 90s when I was a teenager I was looking for a name to publish art and music under. I wanted something that merged a natural element of nature with the emerging element of new age media technology (specifically this thing that never caught on much called the "Internet" ). So I decided water (flood) and technology (digital) could be a "digital flood" of new artistic creativity and access. I've reused the moniker over a number of decades at this point for digital artwork including comic books, graphics, and paintings. I've also used it for a band name during my whole emo-goth-metal phase in the late 90s and one of the first podcasts (digitalflood Pirate Radio) before that was a thing in the late 90s into about five years ago that was itself a digital version of AM radio show I hosted in the mid to late 90s on a local AM college radio station. There was a blog earlier than that where I did current events and news commentary from like 1992 until about 1998. All this stuff was admittedly horrible and my only defense is I definitely was not afraid to experiment with the Internet as an artistic media even if most of the experiments resulted in cave man level results of fart jokes and stereo typical angsty teen stuff that didn't age well. Most recently though I've been using the name digitalflood Studios for my own non-profit IT consulting work that helps out various social causes I'm fond of and also some side IT work that I do to help local businesses get modernized with technology and new media affordably (I'm a big "shop and eat local" guy). This is definitely very different from where I started.

I'm a network engineer by trade and have 25 years of experience in telecommunications that I use in my day job to manage a telephone voice operation for a middle sized cable company. It's a nerdy and (to most people) a job that people generally don't understand not because I want it to be, but it just happens to be one of those jobs that hard to describe, but if it didn't exist you'd notice since your phone service wouldn't work. All nerdy stuff. No surprise.

I got into beer around 1998 shortly after my 21st birthday. I did not want to just start drinking Bud or some other macro-brewer and I was well aware of the quickly popularizing idea of micro-brewing. So I decided to start with "better" beer and to focus on appreciating taste. My first beer was a Saranac Hefeweizen and now while that may not be "amazing" where we are; it was at the time revolutionary and well beyond anything Coors was making. That lasted a good 6-7 years and then I discovered the local dive bar scene so that was that for a short time between 2004 and 2007. Aside from Guinness I don't think I was too worried about taste, but of course that wore out its welcome after a while. So I got back into craft beer in 2007 and have really been focused on learning, appreciating, and understanding beer as it is related to culture, science, and history since then. I also fell in love with the idea of beer pairing and the whole "beer as a place" and local-vore thing to understand how food and drink result from culture and how that creates a way to learn about people, places, and times in a specific geographical area. It's all very nerdy history stuff, but in case you haven't figured it out I'm a pretty nerdy guy so there's that.

My final leg of beer life happened about 2 years ago in 2021 when I started having issues with my health and part of the recommendations by medical care team was to give up alcohol because doing so really helped to resolve a lot of my symptoms and would long-term stop me from having major heart issues 15-20 years down the road. This made me wonder if there was good non-alcoholic beer (and other drinks) so now I've been on this quest to understand, learn about, and document good NA beer. It turned out I wasn't alone in as there were many others I found with similar things going on in their life. This turned into my whole "someliring sober" thing and that became something I started on Instagram to promote a way to drink for food enjoyment despite maybe having some personal or health based choices that required you to do so without alcohol. So there is that now too-- very nerdy NA beer advocate for those looking to keep in drinking even if it is with some accommodations to do so.

I've been on Beer Advocate since Feb 4, 2011 though I used the site for at least 2 years before deciding to actually document my drinking history for all to see. I read the magazine for a long time too and was a subscriber for many years.

So there you go. All about me and who dat in a very long drawn out nutshell (another hallmark of my personality... no such thing as a short conversation).