Do Beer Blogs Even Work Anymore?

But I don't want it to be just beer.... I want to to be so much more.

I've always felt the need to write.

As a kid, I loved to perch myself up in a tree with a pen and my diary. I would make up elaborate, chapters long stories- mostly fantasies, with a main character that would be eerily similar to me.

Somewhere around the age of 10, I wrote an entire “novel” about the Titanic- only a partial storyline copy of the 1997 film, with evidence of my own life sprinkled through. I worked on that “book” like it was a full-time job (and I recently brought it back from the states and let me tell you, it’s a doozy).

True art.

In middle school, in the days of FreeWebs, I created an anonymous gossip website- mostly because I loved talking shit on everyone, including myself [hey, knock yourself down before anyone else can, amiright?] - and this was before the time of Mean Girls or Gossip Girl, thank you. 

Look, my email at the time was CMS.cheer.chicka.dee@aol.com - CMS was my middle school (Carver… um, Go Cougars) and yes, cheerleading was my life and most of my personality for those three very long years. 

I was in high school in the infancies of the 2000s- and this is when blogging really started to take off. My sister became a decent mommy-blogger at that time and naturally, I felt the need to compete follow in her footsteps. Xanga was all the rage my junior-senior year of high school, and I, once again, loved to get on it and talk.absolute.shit. And this shit talking got me into much trouble, mainly because I was saying a lot of things that my high school theatre teacher did not like me saying publicly.

As a theatre major in college, I was always writing scripts for webseries that I would never do anything with- classic Lindsy.

Throughout my mid to late twenties and early thirties, I dabbled in blogging here (for a while I did a blog about going out solo in New Orleans, then I did one for my travelling adventures but never really kept it consistent and now here I am, at damn near 37, starting a beer blog that I doubt I’ll keep consistent but hey, at least the intention is there.

Oh yeah, that’s right -a Beer Blog. Which is SO SILLY considering the industry as we know it is dying.

This image was created with Chat GPT

The naive, free-spirited, optimistic, chill, just a couple of “bros-making-beer-that-we-wanna-drink” Craft Beer Industry is in the midst of it’s death.

Okay - maybe not it’s death (I do tend to be a bit dramatic) - but it is the death of the industry as we have known it.

Australia and New Zealand seem to be the real hot bed for all of this; it is bleak out here, my friends (just take a browse through Crafty Pint and you’ll get the current vibe).

Breweries closing left and right. Craft Beer Bars being forced to shift focus, or close. Brewers and employees left jobless, possibly eventually being forced to abandon the industry all together.

Those of us currently still standing are either putting “mind over matter” and true manifestation via mindset shifts to the test while weeping into our DDH Pale Ales every night, eying our external options (what the heck are my transferable skills?!) or bracing ourselves like it’s NYE 2000 and WE COULD ALL BE GOING DOWN.

I hope you’ve hoarded plenty of tinned corn pasteurised west-coast lagers and picked up some skills from Fallout because things just aren’t really looking good.

This image was also, clearly, created with Chat GPT

AND YET.

Here we are. We are here.

While I quietly, not-so-quietly (let’s be honest, doing personal things quietly isn’t really my forte) shift away from the industry and while I’m still one-foot-in, one-foot-out, there are still things I want to achieve. And share.

Really - share.

And dammit, there are a lot of people in this industry that I adore, and care about, and want so badly to see them succeed because they are good, creative, passionate, talented, kind people. 

So that’s what this is for. Or, that’s what I hope this can be for- sharing. Sharing stories, lessons learned, and how to [maybe] fall back in love with something when you can’t clearly see the future anymore.

Sharing skills, sharing despair, sharing heartache, and hopefully, sharing hope.

A Phoenix can only renew itself from the ashes of its own burning.

Also, Instagram is exhausting to be on these days and the more ads The Iconic and Asos throw in my face, the broker I become and the more glittery things I hoard.

ANYWAY. I promise there might be some value in this thing, so, please subscribe to my substack if you want to motivate/encourage me/ make me feel guilty for starting something and then doing nothing with it….

Xoxo.

-Lindsy