Honorable Mentions: Don't Drink Beer, Courtney Iseman, and Chris McClellan
It’s been an eventful week in Cruncherland and I’d love to shout out three recent mentions. One is tied to craft beers most influential and inspiring human, the second is a well-done article I was quoted in on accepting Hazy IPA’s success, and lastly the sweet new beer gig for Beer Cruncher’s top collaborator.
“From Fresno To Famous: Alex Kidd Brings Life To Beer”
If Don’t Drink Beer has had a positive impact on your enthusiasm for beer or work in the industry, then please take the time to read Andy Crouch’s magnum opus on craft beer’s most influential and beloved character. The piece is lengthy at 14,000 words with each one deserving of your valuable time. There’s never been a more complete and inspiring deep dive into Alex Kidd’s story. I had the honor of being interviewed for this piece, so you’ll see a number of quotes from my experience with Alex.
Once “ole DDB” stepped out of anonymity and revealed his true identity, we partnered together on back-to-back barleywine-themed comedy shows in Chicago. Alex and his partners in crime Stephen & Michael flew in from LA, on the coldest day of the year both times, performing flawlessly in front of sold out crowds. The pandemic, followed by the birth of Alex’s beautiful children, and his unfortunate cancer diagnosis put “Barleywine is Live” on a permanent hold, but will always stand out to me as one of the proudest events that I got to be a tiny part of, “all thanks to Alex" (a phrase I say often) 🧡 🦦
https://allaboutbeer.com/alex-kidd-dont-drink-beer/
“Has the Great Hazy IPA Debate Finally Been Settled?”
Sometimes a beer-related take pops into my head and my first instinct is to lob it onto Twitter and see what happens. That’s what happened when I tweeted the following:
A super talented beer writer named
of must have caught that tweet and worked it into a great piece of hers for Inside Hook that aimed to figure out if we’ve all finally come around and are ready to give Hazy IPA it’s well-deserved pat on the back.
Beverage alcohol trends can't stay on top forever, but craft beer and IPA specifically have had an unprecedented run, if you think about it. The style has been able to remain so top of mind in part because it's no longer a style. It's a diverse family of sub-styles, not dissimilar from Lager. Thanks to its seemingly infinite ability to evolve, IPA gained a second life around 2016 when Hazy IPA extended craft beer’s reign at the top.
https://www.insidehook.com/beer/has-great-hazy-ipa-debate-finally-been-settled
“Take, Countertake” Star Chris McClellan Recruited Away
The very first ever collaborator of the Beer Crunchers blog, Chris McClellan, formerly of Guinness and Manhattan’s Torch & Crown, famous for dying on his marketing hills in our Take, Countertake series, has just been hired by Lawson’s Finest Liquids as their Senior Sales Manager. Chris who is originally from Vermont where the beloved brewery is based, will be leading the sales team and some trade marketing efforts remotely from Brooklyn where he resides with his family. Hopefully Chris can some day rejoin me to once again battle it out over another hot marketing topic. Here’s our three previous battles:
Coming Soon to Beer Crunchers…
I had the chance to ask the founder of LA’s Highland Park Brewing a few questions right smack in the middle of Timbo Week, a special week of events, releases, and collaborations dedicated to the style they invented and popularized, the West Coast Pilsner. This will drop early next week:
