Good Beer Festival candids and snapshots

We had a blast covering the Good Beer Festival this year and can't wait to see you all again next year. Feel free to download and share the photos, if you'd like to give us a shoutout when you do, that would be cool and fair. GBF blogs to follow.

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Searching Philadelphia for Maryland Beer

The Van Pelt library at the University of Pennsylvania truly is the type you can get lost in. I know 'cause I did. Early in my research I discovered that there was a person named John Beale Bordley, who was a colonial hotshot and one of the first production-scale brewers in Maryland. Bordley was friendly with Thomas Jefferson and as concerned as he was about what we now call sustainable living. Part of that, for Bordley, was not having to rely upon the British for ale. After reading his book online and fumbling across some of his papers, it became clear to me that it might just be possible to find his recipe. Finding the first Eastern Shore beer recipe and including it in my book , would be a massive coup. I had to head to Philly to have my computer repaired. The best way to have your Mac die, it turns out, is to get behind on your writing schedule and then engage on a wild goose chase. The Apple people took it from me and sent it off to have the hard drive replaced. I thanked ...

Away we go

In a very, very technical sense, this was the first photo taken for the book. When +The History Press agreed to publish my book , I was a little worried about getting the right photos. But not quite as worried as they were at first. You see, Eastern Shore Beer was to be a pretty book, as well as an informative one. I got something like 32 color pages for a photo insert and was responsible for the cover and back cover art. When they asked if I thought I could get photos I said, "Kind of." There were three problems as I saw it. First of all, beer hasn't been all that well-documented on the Eastern Shore. Certainly, it hasn't been treasured until recently, so the archives that aren't bare, aren't well marked. Secondly, there weren't the kinds of high-profile prohibition busts in the 20s as there were in metropolitan areas, therefore there were no photos of colorful characters in bowlers smirking for the camera after destroying a beer barrel.

Beer makes great copy

Sure. Like you don't have a beer writing hat. When I was a reporter, and then when I was an editor, publishers would give me a hard time if I wrote too many brewery stories. I understood where they were coming from, but there were (and still are) few small-town business stories as compelling. The story about small batch breweries has always been a double-trend story. Opening and hiring people was bucking the employment and economic development trend of the time (2008-2012). Plus, there was the larger, new micro-brew revolution trend. Beyond the fact that the story was compelling was the fact that it included beer. No one believes spending an hour or so at the brewery counts as taking one for the team. It's funny but at the time I never considered how widespread that phenomenon was. I wrote for a small paper in a small town. There were millions of guys like me, educated but barely employable in any other industry. We were all gravitating toward the local beer s...

The State of the Beer

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