There seems to be a lingering resentment of beer bloggers by some of the “old guard” of beer writers and I do not know why.
Let me back-track, just as the 1st Beer Bloggers convention was getting underway in Boulder last year, Andy Crouch asked “to what end” in relation to beer blogging. Where he made some good arguments but as the title suggests did not know WHY people would blog about the world of beer. In my mind, I heard Woody Allen complaining about kids today and their “technology”
Then this month two separate items caught my eye that again seemed to again reinforce a negative vibe.
First, Tim Webb in his BeerAdvocate column in Issue # 52 proclaimed boldly in the first paragraph about an article on gypsy/roving brewers “do not blog”. Whether tongue in cheek, it sent the wrong message to me and colored for the worse, the rest of the column. Especially at the end when he basically said gypsy brewers would ALL eventually have their own breweries. So I chalked it up to either crass overgeneralizations on two separate counts or someone looking to pick a little verbal fight.
Then I read on the Pencil & Spoon that the chairman of CAMRA slyly dug into the “blogeratti” as well. Again, I tried to reason that maybe he was like a republican trying to say what the Tea Party wanted to hear. Please the rabble rousers type of language.
But I get the strange feeling that their are certain people in the craft beer world who are unwilling to jump into beer in the year 2011 with both feet. I should know. I eschewed Twitter for a long time and rather proudly. But denigrating keg beer for cask as CAMRA seems to do frequently or taking potshots at bloggers from your perch as a beer book author or magazine writer seems one of those desperate hold the Alamo ploys. I know that I cannot snark Twitter out of existence but I can come to a negotiated peace with 140 characters. But some people, I fear, think they can stop the computerized tide with verbal potshots.
I have come to realize that ANYONE involved in craft beer that tells you that blogging is useless or trivial or filled with bad writing is flat out wrong. Are some blogs useless, trivial and filled with bad writing? Yes. And there are days when this very blog harvest all three. But blogs as well as Twitter and Facebook are simply not magazines or books or organizations. They are transient bursts of information that convey instant moods and feelings but that also sometimes transcend the now and become fully formed snapshots. I firmly believe that art can be made from Polaroids as well as paintbrushes.
To the doubters, I say, I do not want to go back to one style of beer. And I don’t want to go back to one vehicle for conveying beer information.
All of us share a mission. To share our love of craft beer. Let’s all work to that end with our varied talents, shall we?
