Way back when I first wrote Stuff Every Husband Should Know and contributed to Geek Wisdom, I pitched the idea of doing a beer book to my editor at Quirk Books. I can kinda write, and I like beer, so why not bring the two together for a beer book?
I was given a dose of reality. You have no history of beer writing, he said, so pitching a beer book would be difficult.
Made sense. I may write, but that doesn’t mean I could suddenly do a great book on growing great tulips. (I could.) I needed experience. So I started blogging about beer. It was a way to get my feet wet and start building cred in the beer world. To be honest, I only took it half seriously, but good things started to happen. My first professional beer piece was published, and though it’s kind of wordy, it got the ball rolling. Soon I was doing a load of beer reviews for Philly Beer Week, interviewing Jim Koch, and these days I’m doing a year-long series on beer for the Philadelphia Weekly. Heck, my blog post about J.R.R. Tolkien and beer has drawn over 12,000 views to date. A beer audience is building. Press releases come my way, beer packages, loads of stuff.
So somehow, I’ve become a beer writer.
And that’s kinda neat.
Which means, I suppose, I need to pull that beer book proposal out of the archives and pitch it again. Because I like to write. And I like beer. The problem, of course, is that beer is BIG right now. So do I have anything new to say about it?
We’ll see.
