There’s now one less place for beer writers to write about beer

With Good Beer Hunting leaving the scene what does that mean for people who pay the mortgage writing about booze and boozers?

We try not to do this too often but the news that Good Beer Hunting (GBH) is going on hiatus has given us the urge to write about beer writing.

The American online magazine evolved out of Michael Kiser’s personal blog. We’ve always admired its ambition – and its commitment to professionalism in design and photography.

Over the years we’ve included many of its articles in our weekly ‘news, nuggets and longreads’ round-ups, and our end-of-year best-ofs.

Of course it was never perfect. Its longreads sometimes crossed the line into self indulgence and would have benefitted from trimming. And we were sometimes confused by the relationship with sponsors and commercial partners.

But, still, it raised the bar in many senses and, more importantly, gave a platform to some great writers to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

Its closure (let’s call it that, even though it’s clearly complicated) feels like yet another signal that the craft beer party of the last decade might be over.

It’s also no doubt worrying news for people trying to make a living, or part of a living, writing about beer. It means one less place to pitch stories and GBH also had a reputation for (a) paying well and (b) treating writers with respect.

As historian Brian Alberts said on BlueSky:

Who else would have let us publish 11,000 effing words about beer and white supremacy in Reconstruction Charleston? Or wax on connecting 17th and 21st c. women brewery owners?

And it’s already a difficult environment out there for beer writers.

David Jesudason, award-winning author of Desi Pubs, recently offered some insight into the difficulty of making a living as a freelance beer writer:

Over the past year I've been reporting the Brewdog Waterloo situation which you will have seen. It's been self-funded and came after a book project that also was at great personal cost. A second book deal has been offered by the publisher but my situation is so dire I can't accept it… Although I'm not in abject poverty - I have two kids, and am a responsible parent – I am currently in a position where I'm not sure I can continue this type of work.

The fact is that, in terms of supply and demand, there are too many really good beer writers, and simply not enough outlets for their work.

Even at the height of the craft beer boom, it was tough to convince non-specialist magazines, websites and newspapers to cover beer and pubs. Without specialist publications, it’s even tougher.

What’s left now, in the way of serious, paying mags? If we were still attempting to sell our writing, we’d be looking primarily at:

• CAMRA’s BEER magazine

• Craft Beer & Brewing

• Pellicle

There are also magazines like Ferment published as a bonus for subscribers to a beer delivery service and industry publications like The Brewers Journal.

We used to write for Beer Advocate (gone) and All About Beer, which disappeared for a while but has now returned primarily as a podcast platform. Original Gravity (also gone) published us once or twice.

Beer writers who’ve been around longer than us will also remember other publications which have arrived with great fanfare, then disappeared after they failed to make any money. 

CAMRA’s glossy Pint magazine from the early 1980s is one example. The Grist, which published vaguely technical articles about microbrewing by people like Peter Haydon, might be another.

Increasingly, professional beer writers (those who attempt to pay their mortgages by doing this) are likely to be making a bit of money from articles they sell; a little from Substack, Patreon or Ko-fi; and also from writing on other subjects such as food, travel and culture.

They might also be supported by spouses or partners with well-paid jobs, or have full- or part-time non-writing jobs of their own.

Does any of this matter? Publications come and go, writers come and go, it’s all part of the circle of life.

Well, yes, although if we want beer writing that is good, challenging, insightful, beautifully written, or some combination of the above, it might be good if at least some practitioners felt:

• happy

• relaxed

• stable

• secure

As it is, we too often get the sense that people are only one unpaid invoice away from flipping their desks and walking away.

At present the only thing consumers of beer writing can do to help, if they’re so minded, is to put their money where their, er, eyes are and pay for beer writing they like.

In particular, supporting Pellicle feels like a no-brainer, if you enjoy reading it. Take a look back over the past year or two of its output and you’ll probably see several articles that are among the best things about beer you’ve read recently.

That’s certainly the case for us based on both our 2023 and 2022 best-of beer writing lists.

But everyone knows this. Everyone is, in fact, slightly sick of being asked to ‘sign up and subscribe’. Why is getting people to pay such a challenge?

It’s partly because of the lingering sense the early internet gave us that content should be free. We see the after effects of that in the struggle to get paid which has affected writers, musicians, filmmakers, and all sorts of other ‘creators’, for the past decade or more.

It’s also because nobody can support everybody. We back quite a few individuals, podcasts and publications via Patreon, and subscribe to multiple print magazines. But it gets expensive quickly.

One reason why supporting publications makes sense is because they can redistribute that one payment to many writers. Until that much-longed-for micropayment model comes along, it’s the best option there is.

There’s also another problem, though: frankly, many people don’t want to pay for beer writing because they don’t respect or even particularly beer writers.

To paraphrase, the sentiment is something like this:

Why on earth should I pay you to write about beer and pubs? It’s not important. If you stopped tomorrow, who would care. And, anyway, how is what you’re doing any better than my blog, or that blog over there? Bighead.

As Phil Edwards said on BlueSky when we canvassed for opinion:

I started beer blogging for fun, to express myself & to share ideas and experiences with other bloggers. I've never made a penny from it… and I'm happy to – indeed, prefer to – read things by people in the same position… Write a book & I may buy it. Crowdfund for a book & I may support it. But paying for blogging is a no-no… In the abstract this seems like an odd attitude for me to have, considering I was a freelance journalist for several years. I guess fundamentally I don't really think of beer journalism as A Thing, as opposed to “that blogger I used to read, only now he's got a byline, good luck to him I guess”.

There is a fair challenge here. In striving to become weightier, more worthwhile, and hopefully worth paying for, some beer writing has simply ended up being long-winded and self important.

Lapsed beer blogger Michael Young put it like this in a discussion our Patreon:

Articles which take deep, forensic dives into the clinical minutiae of a beer's construction are no doubt fascinating for the hardcore enthusiast and serve as guides/pointers for other folk within the industry but for the everyday casual reader they are unfun, almost aloof in tone and, worse, take away a lot of the wonder and magic that, I feel, is an intrinsic part of beer enthusiasm…

There’s also the problem that once you’ve been following beer for a few years, the same blog posts and articles start to cycle round again: children in pubs, mild is back, porter is back, the magic of the pub, in praise of lager… Dig through back issues of CAMRA’s What’s Brewing and you’ll see the same themes on loop back to about 1975.

On our Patreon Peter Hudák said:

From my personal perspective, there is too much writing on beer, too many podcasts copying each other, too many new beers to follow. I stopped trying.

Then there’s the problem of the brewery profile. Reflecting on Good Beer Hunting in particular Jordan Buck said on Patreon:

Their gentle expository prose interspersed with soft-focus photos of tap handles and fermentation vessels worked for the more abstract/personal pieces, but often made their features seem a bit twee and identikit. Sure, I learned all about the railway accident that killed the founder's great-grandfather, but why should I care about this idyllic small-town brewery and what makes it any different from the last idyllic small-town brewery that was covered? Is the beer even any good?

When we look at our best-of-beer-writing for 2023 what stands out is that these writers found new angles, explored the space around beer, did original research, and/or tried something different in the way they wrote.

Rachel Hendry’s piece on Scampi Fries, for example, was a deep dive on something nobody asked for a deep dive about – but which hit the same pleasure zones as those ‘Who remembers sherbet dips?’ posts you see on Facebook.

As a result, it escaped from the bubble and went viral with people who would laugh if you told them ‘beer writing’ even exists as a concept.

In his day job as a content designer, working on websites and apps supporting services, Ray spends a lot of time thinking about ‘user needs’. What is the problem that this page or screen needs to solve? What does the service user need to know or want to achieve?

Perhaps there’s room for a little of this thinking in beer writing, too.

Our most-read post by a long way is this one about Watney’s Red Barrel. It didn’t do remarkable business when we published but now shows up when people Google, for example, ‘Was Watney’s Red Barrel bad?’ Which means it gets between 100 and 200 views every single week.

One particular question beer writers could think about answering, with Jordan’s comment above in mind, is: is it any good?

Tell people whether they should drink it, whether they should go there, and what they might gain from the experience.

On the blog

The main event on the blog in the past month was a 10,000-word epic. (Did someone say something about beer writing becoming long-winded and self important?)

It’s called ‘Brew Britannia 10 years on: progress in a pint glass?’ and is an attempt to summarise the last decade in British beer culture.

It draws heavily on the thinking aloud we’ve been doing here on Substack in the past year or so so thank you all for listening and responding.

It’s actually been kind of haunting us for months ever since we had the idea to do something to mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of Brew Britannia and we’re super relieved to have it done and off our desks.

A few days before that, we published another chunky post about the history of Caffrey’s and the rise of nitrokeg beers in the 1990s. (Did somebody say something about excessively niche subjects that might alienate casual readers?) This really was a case of writing something to scratch an itch.

We also wrote about the class status of cask Bass in Bristol pubs where, as far as we can see, it remains a primarily working class drink.

Our post about Smiles Brewery wasn’t new – it was originally published in 2022 – but we updated it quite substantially after brewery founder John Payne got in touch by email. We’ve been trying to talk to him since about 2012 so this was quite a surprise, and a delight. He corrected our post here and there and filled in some missing details.

There were also multiple rounds of news, nuggets and longreads, along with accompanying footnotes on Patreon.

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And that’s it – time, please, ladies and gentleman. Haven’t you got bleedin’ homes to go to?

Jess & Ray