Gardening + Homebrewing = I am a beer writer again!

For just under three years, I wrote a craft beer column at the Philly Weekly. I enjoyed it. Each week I’d recommend five excellent craft beers. People read it. Breweries liked it. Fantastic breweries like Firestone Walker, Stone, Founders and Victory took notice. That’s amazing. I got to know some amazing people doing it, and also got to try some fantastic beers.

But as is inevitable in the news biz, things change. The column was nixed in late 2015, and I was a beer writer no more. No hard feelings! I love the people at PW and still do. Look forward to doing more work with them (and it’s inevitable that I will).

Just sayin’ that my days of saying I was a professional beer writer had come to an end.

Sure, I still occasionally blog at Celebrating the Suds, but that’s my own personal thing, put together for writing resume-building purposes. (Yes, folks, you just saw a cynical side of what writer-type folks sometimes have to do.) In my mind, it doesn’t count. I mean, anyone can spit some shit onto a blog, right?

So I was happy to land some articles at Homebrew Talk, in my opinion the best homebrewing community on the web. The first of a series of homebrewing articles combines two of my great loves, homebrewing and gardening, and it starts like this:

For most homebrewers, the process begins and ends in their brewing area, and whatever goes into their beer comes from their friendly neighborhood homebrew supply shop or their favorite online retailer.

While there is nothing wrong with that– it’s a system that serves countless happy homebrewers every year -– it’s possible (and impossibly fun) to expand your brewing hobby to an unexpected place: your garden.

You don’t have to be a skilled gardener to do it either, nor do you need a lot of space. All you need is the desire to be even more hands-on and creative with the things that go into your beer.

You know you want to read more.

So please do so at this link.

‘Cause I’m thrilled to be writing about this world again, and hope to be doing so for a while yet. Cheers!