When The Wheels Come Off
The following post describes changes in my working life, but I want to note up here at the top that it won’t affect this blog, which I will continue to write as I have for the past 20 years. All bets are off for everything else.
Burton upon Trent was once the center of the brewing world. It was the triumph of English industrialization fused with empire. Like Silicon Valley today, it set the pace for product and industrial innovation. One of its companies registered the first UK trademark and its beers traveled, like Champagne, to toast celebrations around the world. And recently, the last living link to that era, Marston’s Brewery, died at the hands of a Danish interloper.
We also learned that two German breweries, with a combined 750 years of heritage, would also be shuttered. Relative youth is no protection, either; closer to home, the most consequential extant brewpub just announced its closure. The place Greg Noonan founded, the Vermont Pub & Brewery, is closing after 38 years. Noonan was a revered figure in brewing, and his legacy lasts among the brewers he taught, but even a landmark like the Vermont Pub, situated in a very beery town, couldn’t find the support to keep the doors open. Eventually, things fall apart.
In the tell-all manner of a right and proper blog, I’m here to add that the little business I’ve been running as a writer the last 17 years isn’t really viable anymore.
Back in 2010, a year before IPAs became the best-selling craft style, I launched a career as a full-time freelance writer. “Freelance writer” makes it sound like a single coherent job, but anyone who has tried this business knows it’s actually a bundle of ever-changing side hustles bound together with wishful thinking and white knuckles. As a freelancer, I wrote books, I wrote articles and columns, I did brewery consulting, I taught classes at Portland State, I hosted two podcasts, I ran a sponsorship-funded blog, among other work I’m certainly forgetting. And those were just the activities that worked. A good third of my time has been devoted to finding or inventing the next project, and most of those ideas went nowhere. Freelancers put a lot of lines in the water hoping for a single bite.
And it worked! Sort of. Freelancers get screwed on taxes and we don’t get benefits, which are structural issues that make this job harder. We get paid at unpredictable times, which means we have good and bad years. Somehow, though, I earned enough to keep at it—though always at substantial cost. In 2010, I left a researcher job at the local university that had fantastic benefits and an adequate and reliable paycheck. In only one year since I left that job have I earned the same baseline income, and that ignores the benefits. Financially, it was a stupid plan; yet professionally, it was a wild success.
I got to write books and travel the world. I learned an incredible amount about beer and became an expert in the subject. I met hundreds of amazing people and made quite a few friends along the way. I was fortunate to have a spouse to help pay the bills, but even still, I made real money, enough to have survived, barely, on that income. Finally, people appreciated the work I did. When you start a life like this, that’s the biggest question (one I put far too much emphasis on when deciding to pursue writing full-time): can I publish my work and will people read it? Creating and peddling stuff, whether it’s pilsners or paragraphs, is an emotionally destabilizing adventure. What if no one buys what you’re selling?
Yet they did—you did—to my gratitude and pleasure. The activity of researching, traveling, touring, interviewing, tasting, and eventually writing is hard work, but man, is it fun. We all get different things out of our jobs, and freelancers write because of the work, not the income. They do it in spite of the income.
I am afraid the business model is no longer viable, though. If I don’t figure out something quick, I’m not going to earn enough to justify this life. (2026 is going to be grim.) Worse, I don’t see any path back to solvency. Speaking with another freelancer on Zoom yesterday, a few ideas emerged—but in the gray light of dawn, my optimism wanes.
My career writing about beer was a lot easier as a White man, and I am very aware (now) of the advantages I enjoyed. In the late '90s, brewing was almost entirely a male space. That was a little less true in 2010 when I became a full-time freelancer, and is still less true now--which is fantastic. Yet craft brewing was and remains overwhelmingly White. I was dumb and callow when I started, but I was given the latitude to learn my trade. That wasn't true for everyone.
Why have things fallen apart? The threads of income freelancers once wove into a career are all fraying. It used to be that when one thing failed, I could replace it. Now they’re all failing at the same time.
There are fewer outlets willing to publish articles, and book publishers just aren’t buying beer titles anymore. I am hoping to replace my lost blog revenue with new sponsors, but of course potential partners are also struggling. (Amazingly, my traffic is up and at its highest point ever this year.)
And this is all before the AI crisis has fully detonated in the media/internet world. The internet killed print magazines (recall BeerAdvocate, Beer, Draft et al.?), and now AI is in the process of killing the internet. People don’t read as much as they used to, and social media, though fully enshittified and widely despised, is still glazing the eyes of millions who might otherwise be reading articles.
What else? Well, beer education and training is dying. Gone is the certificate program I taught at Portland State back in the halcyon days of hazy IPAs. I was also hired to lead business-to-business “experiences” in beer tasting (Teamraderie), and that’s dead, too. I don’t know how well the Cicerone program is doing, but my sense is that the demand for beer education is way down. It’s hard even to schedule free events or get people to watch online videos that train or educate. The intense interest people once had in beer has shifted elsewhere. (DraftKings?)
Many writers moonlight in marketing or consulting. This was once frowned upon, but I think most people realize that even writers gotta eat. Unfortunately, breweries and other companies in the industry are struggling, too, so these gigs are getting scarce.
And on a personal note, I am now well into middle age and I’m getting tired. I was so excited to start a nonprofit and promote Oregon beer. That wasn’t exactly a side hustle, but it felt like a cool thing I was very well-positioned to do to boost the breweries I’ve grown to admire. But it added at least 20 hours a week to my workload, and in seven of the ten months in 2026, I have been doing it as a volunteer. I don’t have the energy I did 17 years ago, and those 17 years have been exhausting.
Hire Me(?)
I’m not really sure what to do next. It’s been a long time since I had a regular job. I don’t love the idea of dropping the projects I’ve started, but at some point you gotta call it a day. I will spend some time talking to people and evaluating, and we’ll see what comes next. And, if you have some need for a skilled comms/storytelling type who really knows beer and the beer industry, give me a holler. I am definitely open to project work, so reach out with anything.
You have all been very supportive of me and my work all these years—please know that I appreciated every click and comment (even yours, small-d david 😉). It was a wonderful ride.