The posts I haven’t been writing

There used to be a recurring debate in the beer community about the value and ethics of negative commentary. There was always some curmudgeonly old dude who’d forgotten more about beer than most of us ever knew, and he’d be complaining about how bloggers/whoever only cheerlead for the industry in exchange for free beer. And then there’d be some enthusiastic youngster who discovered beer, relative to this codger, last Tuesday. And the enthusiastic youngster would basically say, Do we really want to be the type of humans whose actual hobby is to talk shit about other people’s hard work?

I came down somewhere in between. Surely we needed more in-depth beer journalism, more calling out of bad beer and bad beer people. But I’m conflict-avoidant, so it’s not going to be me.

So when people have been asking me if I still write about beer and didn’t I used to write about beer and am I ever going to write about beer again: yeah, sure. But I’m also drinking less beer than I used to and feeling less excited about it.

Here is an incomplete list of posts I have not written in the last 10 months

• Hazy IPA was fine (and in the hands of certain breweries, even good) until somewhere along the line it became the default “IPA” at many bars and for many people, and that makes me want to stab all of Vermont.
• Beer is in its “beer for people who don’t like beer” phase.
• Why does every place have cornhole now? Who started this?
• The Shitty Beer Men List (someone else needs to actually start this whisper campaign)
• The devolution of  the local beer community as people move away, quit drinking, or die
• Remember the olden days when local beer news was NOT extensively covered by the East Bay Express, East Bay Times, Berkeleyside, and all the hip SF listicle-making machines?
• Who is the user Eastbaybeer on Instagram because it’s not me
• Let me tell you my theory that since Trump’s election beer sales are suffering because beer drinkers are increasingly turning to harder drink, legal weed, and probably opiates.
• The obligations of normative middle-class American “adulthood” are really fucking up my ability to keep up with the local beer scene with anything approaching promptness or completeness.
• The East Bay had a golden age of beer. Pretty sure it ended in 2014.

Okay. I’m going to keep not writing any of those. But I did just reluctantly re-embrace SF Beer Week for the first time in years, so I’ll tell you about that in the next post.