It’s hard to know what to write anymore.

It’s not writer’s block exactly. It’s where we are in beer culture. The dirty little secret is that craft beer in Ontario is succeeding even now. Even despite the fact that we are in a correction. You can order it online and have it shipped to your door. You can subscribe to three or four magazines that will let you know everything you might want to know. You can get notifications sent to your email for new releases and right now you could choose never to drink the same beer twice for the rest of your life. Today’s our best day. Tomorrow will be better. With or without me. 

Luxury.

You tell people that there was a month in 2010 when no one released a new beer and they won’t believe you.

I have teenage siblings and I find myself uttering the phrase, “when I was your age,” pretty frequently.

At the time I started, I wanted to be a brewer and was working towards it, but the writing won out. I didn’t intend to make it a George Plimpton embedded journalist thing, but there are upsides. For one thing, I don’t have to clean fermenters. For another, I’m a hell of a lot more dangerous with a keyboard; Ask the Axe The Beer Tax people.

That’s not all I’ve done this year, but it looks that way. Economic analysis of taxation structure and debunking some self serving statistics is fun for me. I took finite math in university as a bird class. I’m good with formulas and spreadsheets. I suspect the government has already made up their minds on Axe The Beer Tax. I hope those carpetbaggers cough up every penny.

I lie awake nights reading. Ace Atkins for Robert B. Parker or Somerset Maugham or William Gibson or Walter Mosley or Ray Bradbury or Ta Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic or Matt Taibbi or cookbooks or history or just about anything. But I haven’t been writing the blog. It hurts me to not be writing something. I’m conditioned to it. 

I’ve been doing this for eight years now and for a long time I tried to make a living purely as a writer on a specialty subject. It’s a hard way to make an easy living. There were months where I ate a lot of red lentils and brown rice. I bought discounted bananas for the freezer and ran out of coffee. You want a good literary line? Try Sturgill Simpson: I was so broke I couldn’t pay attention. It’s better now.

At some point, maybe after the second edition of the guide, I started looking for work that didn’t involve writing. Nothing left to prove.

I brewed a beer with Folly called Winnowing Oar. You want an esoteric reference? Odysseus’ final journey. To appease Poseidon, Odysseus has to walk inland and give up being a sailor and:

When I meet a farmer

Bold enough to look me in the eye

With “where are you off to with that long

Winnowing fan over your shoulder?”

There I will stand still

And I’ll plant you for a gatepost or a hitching-post

And leave you as a tidemark

The problem is that he’s still Odysseus and the wine dark sea is as much the rivers flowing from inland as the depths of the trench.

Wherever you go, there you are.

Man, I’ve worked. I’ve hoisted kegs off a refrigerator truck. Until you’re in charge of a dolly with two 58.6 litre kegs for just over minimum wage for three days, you don’t know how a beer festival runs. I’ve hosted tasting booths at the LCBO. Until you know just how disinterested the general public is in what we’re putting down, you don’t understand how far there is to go. I’ve held private tastings that ranged from comatose to rabid. I lead public beer tours of the brewing history of Toronto: I spend my weekends as an ambassador for everything we’re doing here to people who come to it with no context. I am teaching at George Brown and right now I’m developing a three course Con-Ed beer certification for them. I’ve also got a full time gig as a side hustle. That’s where I’ve been. 60-70 hours a week. No irony. No detachment. Just straightahead.

Every time I go and do something new, I learn more and it better equips me to talk about this. I meet more people and I make more contacts and I try to figure out where we are. Nowadays, instead of blogs it’s a picture, three sentences, and seventeen hashtags. The universality of instagram is great for product exposure for breweries and I’ve got no issue with people instagramming or youtubing. It’s just not what I do. I’m short sighted and colourblind and my hands shake from a familial tremor. I’m taller behind a keyboard.

Writing for magazines is great. You get paid for doing it. The immediacy of writing a blog post is something I miss. You don’t get paid for doing it. Maybe it was the mercantile aspect that was holding me back. I doubt it. If I were in this for money, I would have offered my services to Beer Canada’s campaign instead of waging a one man twitter war against them to amuse myself; and let’s face it, no one else was going to do math. I was a little let down that the entirety of the media pushback against them seems to have been me. It made me think there might be more heavy lifting no one else wants to do. I like hard work.

This summer I’m going to try to do a blog post a week. I’ve got things to say and I don’t know how to unpack them without this logorrheic outlet. Writing helps me think and reading helps me write and I’m worried that if I don’t offload material as it goes along, I’ll become constipated. Beer is supposed to help with that.