Welcome everyone to the DC Beer Show. We are at DC
Beer across social media. Brandy with the
good hair. What are you drinking tonight?
Oh, Jake. I love you. Jake is joking
because hair is not good. Hair has been in hat for days.
Jake, what have I not consumed since I got off work
today? It was a long day today. So
I opened this smoked Hellas from Schilling when I
first got home. I shared that with the partner. That was delish.
And then Jerry of Share A Pint Hey, Jerry. I know
you're not on Instagram, but I know you're gonna hear this. Hey, Jerry. What's up?
He brought to the last beer share this Ein stock doppelbock
from from Einstock Olgert
Olgert, and it is delicious. Heck, yeah. I love
that one. Icelandic beer worldwide. Yeah.
Thanks, Jerry. That was very I thoroughly enjoyed that. And then
I said, fuck it. And I made a, a Negroni
with, rest in peace, District Maid. Hey, Alex.
Mike Stein, what are you drinking? Well, in my
stein, technically a Tubinger,
I am having the Czech style Dark Lager
from Wayfinder Secret secret.
It's not a secret that this Czech style dark lager
is absolutely delicious.
In my humble opinion, of the I think it's half a dozen I
think it was 6 beers that just came into town
from Wayfinder, which is originally brewed in Portland,
Oregon, that this secret secret, Czech style
dark lager is the best. Completely
biased, being the son of a man
born in Czechia, currently seeking dual citizenship.
Totally biased for the Czech style dark lager, but it's a dark lager. It's dynamite.
Mister Berg, Jacob Scoops Berg, if you
will. What are you drinking this evening? Just shout out to
Wayfinder. I believe that if you're making a cold IPA
and you're unsure of where to turn, their
witchy brew really is sort of like the gold standard in
cold IPA. It's not just an India pale lager or hoppy
lager. There's a process behind it. It's very cool that we get Wayfinder
now. We are awash with good lager. Right? We got Live Oak.
We got that drop of notch. Now we got Dovetail. We got Wayfinder.
Happy, happy. Anyway, speaking of lager, I've
got started today with dinner, a
lawnmower beer considering that I just had to mow my lawn in March,
which I'm not terribly thrilled about. New Allagash,
spring summer seasonal surf house. It is
the sticker, you know, like a Czech style
light lager. They hit it with a lot of citrusy
hops. I wanna say that it's a lemon drop hop, but
it's not really. It's probably something more like
Calista, but it's super citrusy, super lemony,
really nice, easy drinking. Then in Brookland,
where I live and near where Brandy lives, there's a
Norwuz Persian New Year Festival every year.
And I just randomly got to the metro, saw people partying,
figured, hey. I'll swing through. And lo and behold, what were
they drinking But New Day IPA from Back
Home Brewing, a contract based beer
brewed in Staten Island, hopefully soon, a brick and mortar
location in Brunswick, New York. Zara,
the founder, the brewer, the owner of
Back Home was in Brookland
selling cans. And so I've got here this is
a tax purposes alert. She handed me a 4
pack for a sample. Thank you, Zara. Back
Home New Day IPA, a hazy IPA with apple and
sumac, traditional Persian New Year foods. Sumac's
kinda lemony. You don't really, really get it
because hops can be lemony. The apple is there. Anyway,
7%, a lovely beer. Look forward to better beer stores
in the area. Alright. We got a bunch of stuff going
on. First and foremost is,
Birch and Barley is usually closed on Tuesday,
but they're gonna be open on Tuesday, 26th. Brandy,
why is that? Well, I was hoping you'd bring that up, Jake. So
I'm super jazzed. I miss the brewers
brunch at Birch and Barley back you know, right the day after Savor.
I miss that. I miss that so much. And since
I have been curating, coordinating this this women's
panel at Other Half, which is has already happened because
this comes out on Friday. So happened last night. Hopefully, it
was great. I was like, I'm gonna go all out for women's month.
So I reached out to Greg, and I was like, hey, what do you
think about this? He was like, hell, yeah. Let's do it. At Birch and
Barley, Tuesday, 26th, we will be
having a beer pairing dinner. The menu looks incredible. It's a
4 course dinner. And, Megan and Anne from Lost
Gen and Bonnie from Wheatland Spring will be there. And
I have been so jazzed because I wanted to
bring together Anne from Lost Gen and Bonnie from Wheatland Spring. They'd
never even met, apparently. And because I've I'm manifesting
a collaboration between the 2 breweries. I'm manifesting it so hard
to the point where I was like, hey, let's do a beer
dinner. So I'm so grateful and thankful,
for all of this, and I'm so excited. It's gonna be delicious.
So I hope you guys come. Come to Birch & Barley on on Tuesday. I'm
jazzed. Well, Brandy, if I'm not mistaken, the dinner is
supporting excellence in the industry.
And if I were to paraphrase and steal a page from
Chaka Khan's playbook, I would say ain't nobody
does it better than you, DC beer co
owner, Brandy. So Thank you. Shout out to
Wheatland Springs and of course, Lost Generation. And I have to say,
despite getting close to or maybe even at or above 10,000
breweries in the US right now, With Lost Generation being one
of the newest breweries in DC, we are constantly reminded how good their beer
quality is. And I really feel like they've
had others step up their game. We've noticed a wonderful increase
in the beer quality at City State. We had our
share at Hellbender. I had not one but 2
absolutely dynamite lagers at Hellbender, so shout out to our
old friends, Ben and LT. So we're really excited for
beer excellence. Outside of beer excellence at Church
Key on Tuesday, what else are we looking forward to as
we cruise? Just absolutely charged through
women's history month. I'm excited because, you
know, I know you've heard me speak of this, but the women's panel is a
huge deal for me. I've been so overly, you know, excited
and chill bumps constantly just thinking about it. But, you know, the
bearded godmother, whom we've recently had on, is one of the panelists.
And she's visiting always all the way from Georgia because I really love
that she gives all these beer facts and comes in as in a
new way to the social media plat platform,
the education of beer. And
because she's visiting, I wanted her to have a legit DMV
visit. So we are heading out to Virginia
on Saturday. So tomorrow, if if you're listening to this,
we'll be at Wheatland Spring from 12 to 2 and at
Dynasty. Shout out to Dynasty. Love you, Favio and Travis
and Lauren and Ramon. So we're gonna be out there, and
then I gotta drop her off at the mayor airport. So if you're out that
way, we're we wanna give Virginia love too because I know we always stay in
the in the DC, in the district. So, come hang out.
And then after after next week, hopefully, things start to calm
down for me a little bit. But I'm looking forward to our beer share
on National Beer Day at Third Hill. We haven't been to Third Hill for an
event yet, so I'm excited. Are you guys gonna show up maybe, or
you have other big plans for National Beer Day? I
mean, I live every day like it's National Beer Day, but
I will Amen, Jacob. Yeah. But I will be at Third Hill.
But there's only this day with the legislative significance
since your omnibus to make everyday beer day has
failed in in the in the DC Council,
editor burg. Alright. All kidding aside,
fresh jokes aside, what else are we looking at? We have the beer share coming
up at 3rd Hill. Super, super excited for that. What else
is going on in the next few days,
weeks, even even into April? The window for
early bird tickets to the Maryland Brewers Festival is
closing, so you should act soon on that. Perhaps as
soon as you're listening to this, smash that pause button.
That is going to be May 11th over at Caroll
Creek. It always looks lovely. That's why Fox 5 puts it on
like their, like, late night weather cam. You can see the water sparkle off the
creek. They keep adding breweries. There are a host
of new breweries popping up, places I haven't been, like RAK,
Random Acts of Kindness, right on the creek. I believe that's an
ex Sapwood Brewer striking out on their own
over there. Sapwood makes good beers. He made
beers at Sapwood. Ergo, I think he's
probably a pretty good brewer. So very interested to
see, how that shakes out. We also have another
DC Brau heavy metal collaboration, another darkest hour
beer. I know that Mike Stein and I recall, Savor the Swill,
the brow darkest hour Hellas. There's going to be
a slightly overhopped amber. And so if you're a fan of
Cap City's RIP, although it's being brewed in Atlas, amber
waves, maybe this is gonna be something,
coming up April 6th release at blackhatblackhat.
Yeah. So we love amber ales because we're old school like
that. We also love GoGo and DC hardcore.
But, yeah, I was just talking to Meth Gunasingh, who's a brewer at
Atlas Brew Works, and he had just finished up a batch of Amber Waves
Ale, which was the beer that was made in DC's first brewery
since the the last one closed in 1956, that's
Capital City Brewing. So those beers are actually coming out. If you go
to Capital City, they have a Kolsch and an Amber, and those beers are actually
coming from Atlas, who's done a bang up job on those. They've now got
the GABF hardware to prove it with their stout, but
we love the old. And we also wanna usher in the new. You know, we're
in an age of all these closures, but we're pumped. New breweries are still coming
online. Brewers who worked for their old brewery now opened a new
brewery, and we wanna see that circulation continue. We wanna see the
blood pumping and the blood flowing and new things going.
Before we finish off March, I
wanna give so much love. I know I've been giving love. We
always give love. But to all the women in beer, it's been an
incredible month for myself. But
just don't let, you know, your
feelings start to simmer. Just keep supporting
and keeping awesome, and, keep finding ways to
help other people. I do hope before we
kick off April that I will see everybody next Wednesday, the
day after the dinner, the pairing dinner. I'm gonna be so tired, so you gotta
come keep me awake. But we're gonna be at the Solace at the navy
yard. So we're gonna have a all night happy hour. Super shout
out to Solace for giving us a huge discount to our
group. We'll be there from 5:30 until, I don't know,
9:30, 10. Who knows? And, they're giving us
25% off of our tabs all night, like like industry
folks. So come on out. Don't let it go to waste, and,
I can't wait to cheers with everybody. And I've seen the weather
forecast already for next Wednesday, and I hear it's partly
cloudy Oh. With a chance of cops.
Oh. I don't know. I'll play I'll play south. Jake,
you might you might have taken some of my crazy pills
on the water on the waterfront. We're just gonna
keep, you know, crushing the solace puns. No. We love
it. Brandy, I love that you're treating March, like
snallygaster week. You're just back to back to back. I love
it. Keeping that fire burning, keeping the lights just
cranking. We'd love to see it. So come see us at Solace in
Navy Yard, a wonderful little location there, you know, a
stone's throw from Atlas Navy Yard and then Blue Jacket
further down the strip, towards It's really pretty
there. Like, it's huge. And it looks out on the water.
So, I mean, it's I mean, yeah. I love that place. Off the
water if we truly happy hour into the wee hours.
But we'll see. Regardless, it's a great deal. Yet another reason you
should report, you should support DC beer on Patreon.
We love to see it when new supporters come in. And a massive thank
you to everybody who's already supporting the DC Beer Show and all the work we
do at DC Beer Media on Patreon. I
can't wait to, you know,
reflect on meeting Doctor J Jackson Beckham because
she is a role model, an icon, really, in the
beer industry in the in this world that we live in.
And, you know, when I announce the panelist to all
the other panelists, they're like, holy crap. Doctor Jay's
coming. Oh my god. I get to meet Doctor J. Like, all the other women
on the panel, they're like, oh my god. Oh my even, you know, Matt Splein,
the GM of other half, his one of his bosses in New York was
like, oh my god. You got Doctor J? That's huge. So
I'm so thankful, and I feel honored to,
share the, quote, unquote, stage with Doctor J. And,
I can't wait to hear more from her. Doctor J. Jackson
Beckham, thank you so much for joining us on the DC Beer
Show. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Mike. Yeah. It's my
pleasure. You are a very important person in the beer world, not just because
me, some some person says that, but because people
whose work I respect so much more than me have said this
expressly. You wear many hats. You have
titles with one of the, biggest, trade
firms in the beer world, but you're not coming to us as representative of
that. Tonight, we're talking about some of the
other hats you wear. I'm asking you to wear the hats of
brewer, writer and recovering academic.
So these hats you wear I was going to say thank you so much for
coming to speak about, the rise of authoritarianism
and autocracy around the world, but that's actually a different podcast,
that's not tonight's podcast.
But first off, happy spring. What's growing in your
garden right now or what do you plan to plant? What are you reaping? What
are you sowing? I mean, we only have a half an hour, so that's
tough. But I will say early spring stuff is out
right now. And so lots of coal
crops. Got our greens, cabbages, got a lot
of peas out. I my peach tree is, like, in
full bloom right now, so it's got beautiful, bright
magenta blossoms on it right now. I've got
4 apple trees. They're just starting to show me a little bit of
buds. Our fig tree is budding. My
grapes are coming along. So we
grow we grow a ton of, like, just, vegetable crop,
but, the fruit is like fermentation
fodder. So, it's exciting to see that stuff come back. That
is super exciting, hearing about everything
that is that is and will be. So I'm
wondering, what beers, ciders,
wines, teas, coffees, or other delicious,
beverages are you currently enjoying these days?
Yeah. Yeah. Such a good question. So, it's
an interesting time to ask because I
am currently taking a long hiatus from from
alcohol. So I have been drinking a lot of, like,
nonalcoholic stuff just to kind of, like I'm late to
the party. Right? Like, I know it's huge. But getting, like, really into
not only, like, any beers, which, you know, are just, like,
exploding, but some things that people are doing with
spirits. I'm I'm loving the stuff that's literally just, like,
really herbaceous elixirs where they're just sort of
like, this isn't supposed to mimic a a
standard spirit. It's just like a thing we made up
and it tastes amazing. That's been really exciting. I've been, like,
reuniting with coffee quite a lot and, like,
just sort of enjoying it. And it's interesting because, you know, I,
I'm in the middle of going for level 3 Cicerone,
passed the tasty portion, missed the written exam by 3
points the first time I took it, so I got a retake. But, you
know, in doing so, I think I was just, like,
so laser focused on beer, you know, as part of that
preparation. And actually just spending some
time, like, thoughtfully drinking other
stuff is been, like, really, really,
really helpful for me, as far as just expanding how I think
about things, expanding, like, my sensory work, just getting better
at, like, tasting things. And then, you know, the last
sort of thing I did before my break started, I was at Cidercon,
which is a conference I love. It's I think it's my 5th year at
CiderCon. And I did a, a sensory
seminar at CiderCon that was geared
towards the certified pommelier certification.
And, you know, a lot of the cider tasting
strategy in Lexicon comes from wine, which, you know, it's
different. It's a little bit more deductive tasting. And again, like, I just,
like, learned, learned so much. And, like, anybody who's seen
me at CiderCon knows I'm like a kid in a candy shop. I love new
stuff. I love the fact that I know absolutely
bubkus spelled apples. Like, I just I love that I'm such a
noob. Like, it's so fun. And, that's so I would
say, you know, of the semi recent things that I've been drinking on
the alcohol front, you know, the the cider exploration always gets me
excited every year. Cider is a wonderful beverage, and I think one
that folks really embedded in the beer world
are lucky to get out and bring a beginner's eye
or a brand new pallet to it. You made a
decision to leave academia and to
pursue equity work full time. And you've had
great success from this outsider's perspective. You've had great success doing
that. But I'm wondering now reconciling, you know,
you have all this expertise in academia, sometimes
it's described the pathway of academia is a one way path. If
you leave, it's more akin to a divorce than a
career trajectory shift. You're 100%
right that leaving academia is like a divorce. And, like, I'll be
more I'll put a finer point on that. It's like a divorce
where you really do love the other person,
but like, everything is so utterly
broken that you can't see a pathway forward. So
it's just, like, gutting on every level. Like, if you could leave angry and burn
it all down, it would be way easier. But, like,
that's, unfortunately not what it's like a lot of the time or at
least, wasn't like that for me. When I left higher ed,
it it wasn't to stop being it was an academic. Right? It was
to be a better academic. So, you know, I've I've tell
everybody, like, my research is better now. You
know, my teaching is more impactful
now. My service, has far
greater impact now. Right? So, like, ironically, like,
I'm a far better academic outside of academia
than I ever was inside. Like but I think the
other piece to that, and certainly influencing my decision to go into sort
of equity work, is higher ed has equity
problems. Right? And and some of them are really serious, whether you're
talking about, you know, how we how we use, well,
not we anymore, how how adjunct labor is
used and, and used in a hard exploitation
sense. You know, we talk about the cost of college
and accessibility. We talk about how debt is
leveraged just to give people access. Like, there are a lot
of problems that were hard for me to wake
up every day and, sit
well with. Right? Like, it felt it
felt tough. So, you know, coming into a space
where someone was like, hey. There's a lot
going on in this particular industry, in this, you
know, in this social formation, we don't really understand that.
We need somebody to figure out what's happening. And I was like, oh, you
need a researcher. Right? And then they were like, yeah. We need somebody who who
can, like, help us develop some best practices and share them. And I'm like,
oh, you need a teacher. You know? Like, I I say
it sort of jokingly, but in a in a very real sense, like, I don't
feel like there was any translation from my
prior, skill set and profession into this
one. I just felt like it just clarified everything that I already
wanted to do, and I I got to do it in the place where I
where it actually fit. So it's refreshing to hear there's not really a
lot of, you know, transformative work or a
shifting of of metrics that needed to happen to get you there.
And and as we're looking forward sort of thinking
ahead, I I wanna go back actually to a chapter
in a in a book you wrote, which to my
research very limited was published 10 years ago in in
2014. The book is called Food and Everyday
Life and your chapter was Drinking Local, Sustainable
Brewing, Alternative Food Networks and the Politics of
Valuation. And I'm wondering if you feel that there's been
significant changes made in the practices of sustainable brewing
and alternative food networks. It's so amazing that you
think about that. First of all, like, the fact that that was 10 years ago
is wild. Like, I'm just like, oh my gosh.
That's incredible. So that
that chapter in particular was actually, it was actually
a chapter from my doctoral dissertation that I published
in this edited collection, the Food and Everyday Life collection.
And I can't even it's hard to quantify
how much has changed since then. Right? So, you know, I
was looking at this the other day. I was trying to talk to someone about
it is, like, when you write research about
culture, right, or about history
it's, like, literally still happening. So it's it's very much writing
about a moving target. And that was certainly the
case already 10 years ago or probably 12 years ago
when I was actually writing this chapter that, like, it
was, like, hard to write and be accurate because stuff
was changing so fast then. But you know, in that chapter, what I really
was getting at or looking at was that, you know,
breweries were doing something
different in terms of like how they
generated value for the
products and experiences they sold. And,
for those of you who are, you know, wondering about that,
you know, my dissertation work was is called a cultural economy.
So it's sort of like an economic analysis, but it
it kind of contends that, like, numbers are
and supply and demand are not the only thing that drives,
right, economic action and trends. Culture does too.
And so in this chapter, I was looking specifically about about the
culture of sustainability, locavoreism,
you know, AFNs or alternative food networks. Right? And I
was looking specifically at a couple of breweries who were, like, kind of
trading on the value of sustainability and localism, but they
were doing it super differently. Right? So, like,
one brewery was very much about how local, like,
hyperlocal it was. It literally had, like, a kind of
a beer CSA where people could, like, order their beer and pick it up
at the at the farmer's market that was across the street once a
week. They had a foraging program so that people who,
like, forage their food like, I got a pawpaw tree at
home. I could forage my pawpaws and sell them to the brewery who would use
them in a beer. Right? So, like, that was how they did sustainability.
Contrasted it with a different brewery who had, like, just a super
state of the art facility. Right? So, like, really
great solar capacity, c02 recapture.
Right? Like, they were doing all these other things, and it was so interesting to
me that both of them were sort of trading on the logic of of
sustainability, but, like, doing so ex very, very,
very differently. What I've seen in the la you know,
over the years since then is that,
if those two examples 10 years ago sort of
represented 2 ends, it's almost like
the spectrum has entirely filled out. Right?
So people have, you know, adopted any number
of these different practices, you know, whether they're like some of
it's about new technology and some of it's about sustainable reuse and some
of it's about sourcing and ingredients. Right? Everybody's sort of
taking on these these types of practices and building them into
just what they do from the start. Like, it's not special anymore, which I think
is really great. And maybe for me, you know, given
the work I do, perhaps like the most significant thing is
that there has been for some, this
natural connection to social sustainability. Yeah.
That's very well said, and it is remarkable to think
about 2 ends of the spectrum
full of different ways to hit that goal, you know,
with different balance points and on the spectrum of, you
know, social, people, people
power and making sure that there's sustainability within our people
from the from the HR, you know, back of house side to our
customer service to selling direct to consumers, that whole spectrum.
It's it's really quite remarkable. So
when this episode comes out, we all we all hear you will have already
paneled at other half, but, we just have to give a shout
out to Latrice Harris, the Birie godmother, who is, you
know, Brandy was just mentioning earlier in the episode about,
bringing some educational newness
to the social media space. I love Latrice. I love what
she's doing. We we got in contact, like,
very early in sort of the evolution of what
she was doing. It was so obvious that, like, she's just like
a bright charismatic spark, and that, like,
she was gonna have a natural audience.
You know, it helps that she's like like a really,
really talented epidemiologist and educating the public
is like what she does as a professional.
So I I always laugh because I'm just like, I can
I love it when I can see it? Right? Like, people who do this sort
of educational work and, and turn
it and kind of bring all that skill to the beer
space. Like, it's beautiful and wonderful. And, she's she's
such a kindred spirit, and, I'm super excited to hang with her.
Well, Doctor J Jackson Beckham, thank you so much for joining
us on the DC Beer Show. It's been a real pleasure
speaking with you. You too, Mike. Thank you, Doctor J
Jackson Beckham, thank you, Mike Stein. Excellent
interview. Alright, folks. You're gonna see a bunch of us in Virginia.
Come tomorrow, even if the weather doesn't cooperate, we will.
Parting thoughts from both of you. I just wanna appear on a beer
fact Friday. Wink wink, Latrice. That's
Michael. Beer fact Friday. It's Friday. It's the DC Beer Show.
Alright. So, again, we're at DC Beer across social
media. I wanna leave you all with parting thoughts
from friend of the show, Josh Chapman of the late
great Black Narrows, who says Zara is an absolute
gem. And for me, back home beer is exactly
what the hope for the future of beer looks like. A standard where the
quality of the beer is only exceeded by the quality of
the people and ethos behind it truly representing a
time and a place. Well said, Josh. Thank you,
everybody, at DC Beer. We'll see you around. You all,
everybody. Oh, that was beautiful, Jake. I liked how you ended that.
Well done, sir.