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Now that Twitter or X or whatever Ol’ Muskie is calling it this week has jumped the relevancy shark, we beer fans need to find the educational content elsewhere.
One stop should be Instagram and the Beery Godmother aka Beer education consultant LaTreace Harris.
She has a fun Friday ritual on Reels, Beer Fact Fridays. Quick lessons on beer. It is on my calendar now to check in and learn and refresh my beer knowledge.
I ran across an interesting post about “influencers” that is longer than the usual but you should really READ it.
Why is it important to me? Well, peddling influence is seemingly in the news every day from politics to, well, more politics. Or for a flaming example, the Fyre Festival debacle.
And if it has shown up in food, you can rest assured that it will rear it’s ugly head in beer, wine and spirits too.
What that means for the passionate beer fans is to create a true world wide web of beer sources. I zoom around multiple blogs, tweets, photos as well as information from PR folk, newspapers and magazines. I put all that information in my brain and then spit out what I think. And I am not afraid to chuck a pet theory if the overwhelming data contradicts it, I just pivot and turn. That is how Science works too!
I don’t rely on just one source of news and neither should you because there is a raging river of content out there and some of it is bought and paid for, or as the London Eater piece puts it, “We shouldn’t marvel that influencer content is utterly lacking in nuance, that it appears totally blind to even the concept of imperfection. This is a paid-for performance marketing channel; far from a charming cottage industry of like-minded Best Food Friends, it’s cold-bloodedly capitalist.”
Be careful to not put too much stock in a pretty photo or an op-ed that is really advertorial.