Beer’s Secret Ingredient: Ink
Three months ago, the English writer Pete Brown announced that he had been hired to write a column in the Sunday Times. Pete is the most visible beer writer in the UK, so this didn’t strike me as especially surprising until he explained that until very recently, and for decades, none of the 23 national papers had a regular writer covering beer.
“Our new generation tried and tried to get more beer coverage in the mainstream press. You’d get responses like ‘We did an article on beer last year. We’ve covered it.’ Or even ‘So long as I’m in charge, we will never cover beer in this publication.’”
The timing was interesting because just a few weeks earlier, longtime Oregonian journalist Andre Meunier published a warm goodbye as the regular reporter on the paper’s beer beat. Oregon has been blessed with constant coverage of our favorite bubbly beverage in at least one of the daily or weekly papers—not to mention three regular blogs all well over a decade old.
The media landscape in the two countries isn’t analogous—the U.S. has only two or three nationally-distributed papers. The U.S. is vastly larger than Britain (which is just a hair smaller than Oregon in area), and national papers don’t make a lot of sense here. But we do have city papers, and the beer-writing situation there is just about as woeful.
Reaching a Mass Audience
This role of journalism in the beer industry isn’t much examined. The influence of media has declined so much that we barely think about what the papers are up to. Yet I wonder if that belies how important it remains to the health of certain aspects of local culture.
Take Oregon as an example. The state has the most robust beer culture in the nation, with substantially greater rates of local beer consumption than anywhere else. Beer is a part of Oregon’s cultural ecosystem, and nearly everyone in the state, beer drinker or not, knows about local beer, recognizes local brands, and has visited local breweries. It’s worth considering how Oregonians became so educated about local beer—and hard to ignore the very rich information environment here.
Going back to the 1980s, the state’s major paper, The Oregonian, covered beer. After Britain’s Michael Jackson, the most famous English-language beer writer is Portland’s Fred Eckhardt, who covered the industry closely in the 80s and 90s for the O. Then in the mid-‘90s, John Foyston took over the beer beat, reporting on every new brewery opening and beer happening in the young industry. Over his two decades there, John became an institution. After he left, the O had a short gap before Andre jumped into the breach.
“John Foyston had left The Oregonian. I always loved his coverage, and I would go with him on his assignments—I’d call myself his intern.”
I don’t think there’s any doubt that this coverage was critical in creating “Beervana” (the Portland nickname that originated with Marc Zolton at Willamette Week). The vast majority of people who drink local beer are not beer geeks—they’re regular drinkers who might click the link to an article about a new brewery or taproom, but whose eyes glaze over if anyone starts talking about thiols or biotransformation. As the industry falls into its “wallpaper phase”—when more and more people matriculate from beer geeks to regular drinkers—that coverage is all the more important.
I spoke to Andre a couple months ago about all this. Unlike me, he wrote for the masses. He authored hundreds of pieces about beer for the paper, and every week he also sent out a newsletter to 18,000 subscribers. Andre’s readers just wanted some info about that new taproom down the street. Andre wrote for the mass media. Whereas this post might reach a few thousand readers, his most popular articles could reach a hundred thousand. For the small brewery hoping to connect to potential customers, that kind of reach has a totally different value. I wanted to hear Andre’s experience writing for his audience, because I suspected he had some important insights into the role newspapers play, even at this late date.
A Journalist on the Beat
When John Foyston got the beer beat, it’s because an editor pointed to him in a meeting and told him to cover beer. When he left, that beat fell through the cracks until Andre started covering it in his spare time. “I had a deep appreciation of beer. John had left the Oregonian, and I was the morning news editor. If it was a slower day, I would just start reporting. I knew just enough about beer to get into trouble.”
Andre Meunier. (I don’t know the original source, but Andre has used it in social media and elsewhere—please don’t sue me!)
Andre was well into his career by then, and he knew how to report and write an article. He just started reporting more and more about beer. Over time, he carved out about half his time to cover beer, and at some point it just gobbled up all his time. It didn’t hurt that beer was a popular topic and these pieces performed well.
Reporters learn on the job, and in service of self-education, Andre went on a project to tour every Portland brewery and document each visit with a video. By the time he was done with that project, he was more well-connected to Portland’s breweries than anyone in the city.
He was a reporter’s reporter, a guy who went out and talked to his subjects and wrote complete stories about them. His output was tremendous. He tried to keep his eye on every story related to beer happening in the city—a metro area that includes six or seven dozen breweries, hundreds of bars and taprooms, and more new beers than a normal human can fathom. His experience as a high-volume reporter helped him manage the information.
“Going into it I knew one thing: I wasn’t an insider who knew a lot about beer. I didn’t want to do listicles and that sort of thing. I could tell the story of who was behind the mash tun, and I could relate to the average reader. I think people knew I was a beer fan, and I tried to let my storytelling shine through. I really wanted to tell the story of the little guy. They were so thrilled The Oregonian covered them.”
Accuracy and Credibility
Among the underappreciated virtues of the mainstream press are its mundane qualities. Despite how much people say they hate the press, their real preferences are revealed by how much they rely on it. Andre’s corpus is notable for how full of basic, accurate information it contains. Google any Portland brewery and you’ll find at least one Meunier story about it. You’ll find accurate names, dates, and places (hours change, so I check those). The first brewery that popped into my head was Stormbreaker: yep, here’s an 1,100-word story that gives you all the info you need. Brujos is a new brewery and, yes, here’s his piece on them.
He also captured every major news story that happened during his tenure. Modern Times abruptly announcing the closure of their Portland brewery? Andre had a piece out the same afternoon. Von Ebert taking over the old Ecliptic space? Andre used it as an opportunity to write a 1,500-word piece on the brewery’s history and evolution as it made the transition. He came to beer later in his career in journalism, so these pieces are impressively-researched and informative. Not every reporter is as efficient as Andre was, and able to cover so much of the beer world.
Still, the very fact that he was covering beer at all distinguishes the O from a lot of city papers. There’s that old saw about journalism being the first draft of history, and Andre’s pieces are an excellent example. In key ways, though, that means that in cities without a reporter on the beer beat, there’s no draft of history.
“There are a lot of forces out there, a lot of voices” Andre told me, referencing the explosion on social media and the internet. “With the MSM taking the hit, it’s hard to hang onto that credibility and authority. That’s what I tried to do—get out there and report on the news.”
In the wake of Andre’s retirement from the beer beat, The Oregonian seems committed to capturing the major stories, like the news last week that Assembly was closing. That’s good. It would be even better if they assigned someone to beer at least part time. Credible, accurate journalism may not seem like an essential component to healthy beer culture, but I suspect it plays a bigger role than we imagine. I would prefer not to find out what happens without it.