What if Michael Jackson Hadn’t Died?
If he hadn’t died of complications related to Parkinson’s disease, we’d be celebrating legendary writer Michael Jackson’s 80th year in 2022. Instead, we mark the 15th anniversary of his death today. If you’re younger than about forty, you’ve probably never read a word of his prose, and are aware of him by reputation only—if even that. Part of that is the long period since his death (three or four lifetimes in beer years), but also because far fewer people read about beer now. In the late 1970s and through the end of the century, people hung on Jackson’s words. There was no internet and information about beer was hard to come by. If you read about beer in those days, you read Jackson.
He was still very active at the time of his death, which came at the most important moment of change in the craft era of beer. In the United States, breweries were finally emerging from a decade of stagnation and for the first time developing their own voice—one that would spread worldwide. The changes were beginning to affect his home country, where American-style breweries had begun to become a thing. Breweries weren’t quite in the dire state they were in the US, so it took longer for little outfits to come along and start making unusual, non-British kinds of beer. Jackson died just as the world he covered for 40 years was going through a dramatic change.
Jackson died far too soon and too young, and he was working hard right to the end. Writing in All About Beer just before his death (in an article published posthumously), he documented the places he’d been visiting right up to the end:
I have also been in Turkey, where I cavorted professionally with a troupe of Russian girls in tubular golden dresses. (It was the girls who were in the dresses, not me. They were purporting to be stalks of wheat.) This curious event was in the service of a major Turkish brewery which was launching a wheat beer in broadly the south German style.
I have been in Poland twice this year. On both beer and whisky business…. Italy, I can reveal, is as beautiful as ever.
Had Jackson not died, he would have continued writing. Martyn Cornell, ten years his junior, has a new history of Porter coming out. Roger Protz, three years older than Jackson, continues to write. Ron Pattinson is no spring chicken. (Writing is an affliction, not a profession, and if writers could stop, they would never have become writers.) It’s impossible to say what he might have written, but a lot easier to assume that the writing, in some form, would have continued on for years.
I would have loved to read his thoughts in the age of hazy IPAs and CRISPR-modified yeasts. Jackson had spent his career documenting traditional breweries and brewing traditions, caring for them like an archivist, and doing more than any single person to preserve what remained of the dying old ways. Yet he also embraced new developments. He was so popular in the US precisely because he came and wrote about tiny little breweries making offbeat (and often just off) beer. They weren’t getting a lot of notice by the national press, never mind the international press, and his attention was electrifying for them. (I witnessed it firsthand a few times.) He would have poked around every new development, reporting it out in his beautiful, clever prose.
Jackson was an envoy from the era of shoe-leather reporting, when a person actually had to drive to Roeselare to learn about Rodenbach. Decades of visiting the world’s breweries gave him a kind of authority no other writer has ever approached. He died at the dawn of Twitter, when the democratization of opinion changed media permanently. I often wonder what we lost when both of those events happened simultaneously.
--Alan Sprints, in one example of Jackson's influence
People sometimes chafe at Jackson’s reputation, pointing out that he was hardly the only writer covering beer. Why was he the sole world authority? I’m sure they have a point. Yet he was exceptionally good at the writing bit, and perhaps people pay too little attention to that. Ultimately, though, reputation is self-reinforcing, so once we all made him the Michael Jackson, there was no retreat. It’s why his death created a vacuum that could never be filled—especially coming as it did at the moment opinion moved to social media.
Yet that kind of authority would have been so interesting these past fifteen years. Which breweries would he have championed? Would he have ignored buzz breweries, or made them all the buzzier? In Britain, his beloved cask ale continued to decline in the years after his death. Could he have made a difference? He was also a wonderful speaker, which is why he was in such demand until his final days. His short-lived Beer Hunter TV series didn’t get renewed—but perhaps he might have had a second life as a personality in the Netflix era.
One of the signature qualities of modern beer is fragmentation. It’s impossible to keep abreast of everything. Had Jackson lived, that would continue to be the case, but his profile might have helped focus our attention, as it did when he was alive. He was always so generous in his writing to new drinkers, and surely that quality would have been useful for people coming to this cacophonous world today. Perhaps someone of Jackson’s stature might have convinced them to pick up a reference book. One can imagine so many ways he might have changed things.
We will of course never know, and on this date each year, that’s what leaves me yearning. Jackson should have had many years of writing left, many more marks to make on history. Each August 30th, I am left to ponder what might have been.