Kidd and I have never met or even spoken before, barely interacted online, and he’s openly revealing his insecurities, anxieties, and regrets, all while his three-year-old son Soren playfully chats it up in his car seat on the drive to daycare.

Founder of the beer satire website Don’t Drink Beer and co-host of the popular Malt Couture podcast, Kidd effects an easy, comfortable, and conversational style, but I’m still surprised he’s ready to jump right into the psychological deep end with me. For years, he operated behind a carefully constructed online persona, cloaked in anonymity by his avatars and usernames, shielding himself from the public. As the voice behind DDB’s thousands of salty beer reviews, podcast with tens of thousands of listeners, and tons of social media followers, he invited his audience in one anonymous and funny beer review at a time.

People gravitate towards Kidd, they always have, even if few have ever met him. He rarely travels or attends beer events. Yet people feel like they know him even if they know very little about him.

Shaped by events in his childhood, Kidd grew obsessed with stability at an early age. He long strived to achieve a measure of security, often at the exclusion of everything else. He’s always possessed a strong sense of anxiety, a feeling that at any moment, things could go south on him. And then last year they did. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer at age 39.  

Kidd is not letting his diagnosis stop him. He’s had a plan since he was seven years old. And he intends to follow it.

In his writing and podcasts, Kidd primarily sets his lens and comedic satire on luxury goods and experiences. He’s fascinated with exploring the obsession others have with them, especially in the shadowy world of rare beer, all while he himself is deep in that scene.

A man of contrasts, he’s torn between an obsession with stable professionalism and an artist’s burning need to perform. A lawyer in a conservative practice area by day, his beer alter ego DDB craves subversion and chaos. He loves poking fun at the nerdier elements of the beer community while remaining one of its geekiest members. Firmly ensconced in the professional and financial mainstream, Kidd identifies with outsiders and advocates for under-represented communities. Deeply respectful of the experiences of his youth, he’s spent a lifetime trying to escape them.

Now, Kidd is newly contemplating difficult chapters in his history amidst the uncertainty of his future, granting him a remarkable level of candor with strangers that is both disarming and refreshing as he reexamines his life choices.

“Let’s say you have like two, two-and-a-half years left. Are you going to go out exaggerating and not tell the whole truth?” he asks. “Why not just dump it out, all the insecurities, things that I like, or didn’t do well enough?”

The Boy From Fresno

If you want to understand Kidd, you must understand Fresno, the city where he was born and raised. Located in the broad, flat interior of California’s Central Valley, Fresno is a place accustomed to taking some shit. Rural and hot, caught halfway between San Francisco to the north and Los Angeles to the south, Fresno is often the butt of Californian jokes. The Daily Beast once named Fresno the 55th smartest large city in the United States. Out of 55. Locals are used to the jokes, even from breweries, but they still sting and leave residents, both current and former, with some sensitivity to the subject. That certainly is the case with Kidd.

“It’s definitely a part of my upbringing,” Kidd says. “Growing up in Fresno, it’s like, everywhere you go, everyone’s going to have some remark about being from Fresno, and it’s even worse than LA. You get judged as though you had some ability to decide where you live as a kid.”

Kidd describes his upbringing as solidly working class. His father worked on copier machines and as a sales rep, while his mother spent 30 years working for Child Protective Services. Watching his mother work influenced his worldview, as did his interactions with Fresno’s substantial Hispanic and Hmong populations. 

“I saw a lot of things growing up,” he says. His experiences led to an appreciation for the diverse backgrounds of others and for his family’s comparatively advantaged economic status.

Young Alex loved comic books. He was an overweight kid, not particularly interested in athletics, and stayed indoors a lot. He started collecting comics and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, which sparked in him a desire for completionism, a need to tick every box, collect every set. He sought out obscure cards, ones the local stores didn’t stock. Acquiring the hard-to-get cards made him feel good, boosting his self-esteem.

He also loved drawing, attending extension classes at the local community college. “I wanted to be a comic book artist,” he recalls. “I would draw my own comics and my dad worked at the place selling copiers. So, I’d make my own comics on his machines and then bind them and pass them around at school.” The response of classmates to his work also felt good, encouraging him to publish more often.  

When Kidd was in first grade, his dad was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors and had to undergo surgery. “It was a super stressful time even as a little kid,” Kidd recalls. “My parents had just had my sister, who was not even one at the time. I was six and it was kind of a rocky time.” Kidd recalls that for his birthday that year, his cake was a meatloaf. “Looking back, cakes are not expensive. But it was one of those things that stood out. I was like, ‘Oh, this is different.’”

The surgery was successful, but it gave Kidd a taste of the destabilizing impact medical emergencies can have on a family, leaving a lifelong impression on him. “That was something that was very childhood altering for sure,” he says.

After his father returned to good health, the experience left Kidd incredibly conscious about the fragility of his circumstances and imbued him with a life defining desire for stability.

While he still enjoyed drawing and wanted to become an artist, he experienced anxiety about the stability of his life and worried about his financial future, twin concerns underlying all his decisions moving forwards. These concerns took hold in a conversation with his mom. While discussing his desire to become an artist, his mom asked, “Do you want to be the guy who draws comics, or do you want to be the guy who owns the comic book publishing company?”

The question left young Alex dumbstruck.

He left the discussion thinking that maybe he should do something more intellectual.

By seventh grade, he consciously began laying the foundation for his future. He asked himself two questions: what do I like and what am I good at? “I was always pretty good at explaining or arguing about things,” he says. “In the back of my mind I thought, ‘Maybe I could be a psychologist or something.’” 

He also knew that he enjoyed performing. He just needed to find a way to get paid for it.

Alex Kidd, Pizza Party Host

When Alex was 10, with his father’s health issues stabilized, the family moved to the nearby suburb of Clovis. “It’s a different kind of world because when you think of Fresno, the clichés are agriculture, meth, and Hispanic people,” Kidd says. “But Clovis has its own kind of scene. It’s like the Brentwood or the air quotes fancy part of Fresno.”

The change in location also resulted in a change in Alex. After experiencing economic insecurity for the first time, he noticed his classmates were wealthier, prompting him to become concerned with money. He picked up several jobs as a young man. After working retail, Alex started working at John’s Incredible Pizza, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, arcade, and family entertainment center akin to a Chuck E. Cheese. He worked as a birthday party host, where he entertained kids three to 10, making balloon animals, playing games, and generally being funny.

From the age of 16 to 19, Alex played host to more than 400 birthday parties at John’s, often running three back-to-back 90-minute parties a day from Friday to Sunday. After each party, he’d clean the room and get it ready for the next party.

“Sunday was the real moneymaker,” he says with a laugh. “That’s when all the kids would have their birthday parties.”

At one point he had three jobs, working as a host and server at The Old Spaghetti Factory and a retail clothing gig. “I remember I would just fill any space that I could with work,” he says. 

He worked Monday, Wednesday, and Thursdays at his other gigs and all weekend at John’s. “I was just living off the tips and the wages were just abysmal. You’re making $7.25 doing such hard, weirdly specialized work for no money.”

Despite the low wages and his young age, Kidd kept his perspective. “Fresno isn’t some ultra wealthy zone,” he notes. “You’d get families that could barely afford the party in the first place. Or they collected money at the end of the party from relatives and stuff. So, you’ve just spent two hours and you’re not getting a tip on this. But that was part of the experience.”

By high school, Kidd’s weight jumped to 240 pounds, and he describes himself as a “really overweight kid.” He still wasn’t interested in sports, but he did love making people laugh. “It was very much the class clown type of thing,” he says. “You know, the classic defense mechanism of using comedy to hide your insecurities and avoid scrutiny.”

In a nod to his future self, Kidd and his buddies loved making funny videos for his Buchanan High School classmates. “We had video announcements every Friday and me and my friends were in charge of hosting them. So, we hosted and other people shot and edited them. Early, early on, that was something I gravitated towards.”

“We didn’t know at the time, but we were just making sketches,” he says. “We were literally just making a 10-minute sketch show to make the school news interesting.”

He also joined drama and debate, where he enjoyed mixing the performance and intellectual aspects of creating and delivering a monologue. “I found I was pretty good at doing improv, which is a category of improvisational debate,” he recalls. “And that was before I even knew what improv comedy was.”

Kidd eventually participated in the school’s talent show, where students were directed to show off two skills. “The two talents I picked were freestyle rapping and stand-up comedy, which are the two hardest things to do in the entire fucking world,” Kidd says. After years of practicing at kids’ birthday parties, the talent show gave Kidd his first real taste of performing comedy before an audience. He loved it.

He took runner-up to a guy who lip-synced to a Toby Keith song. Years later, he still sounds miffed at the outcome, but it left him with increased confidence and a revelation. “When you’re overweight, if you’re not scoring touchdowns, you can compensate with comedy,” he says.

While Kidd enjoyed the limelight, he was also focused on getting out of Fresno and feared that the performing stuff was a distraction. “I knew that you don’t make any money as an artist,” he says. As a high schooler he thought, “Okay, I gotta get my professional life in order.”

So, Kidd decided to become a lawyer but wasn’t sure how to achieve that goal. “It’s not like my dad was a lawyer,” he says. I didn’t have somebody who was like, ‘Hey, you have to do this, or you got to take these prereq classes.’” 

He joined mock trial and was the student representative to the Clovis City Council. He even ran for class president, and won.

“I had this idea when I was in ninth grade, that I kind of get along with everybody,” he recalls. “It’s not because I play sports. I’m not really like gunning for anyone’s girlfriend. I’m not in any segmented thing. So I thought I could represent people in a way that’s different from the established popular kids’ social group.”

Kidd also wanted to effect some change. “I remember wanting to improve the school food,” he says. “One of the things that everyone ate was ranch and roll. You would literally just buy rolls, dip them in ranch. And that was an actual thing that everyone ate. And I was like, ‘Dude, this is not real food.’ And I was already overweight, and the options were abysmal.”

He also wanted to engage his school in more charity efforts. “I remember also thinking that I might have a perspective a lot of these other kids didn’t have.” Kidd enjoyed connecting with other students, many of whom considered themselves outsiders, like him. In a school of 3,200 students, it was easy for kids to slip through the cracks or feel a lack of connection to the place. It was 2001 and many students volunteered for the military, following the September 11 attacks. 

By his junior year, Kidd ran for student body president. He used his dad’s photocopy service to blanket the school with black and white posters filled with nonsense jokes, like “Vote for Alex Kidd, he’ll get rid of the pirate problem.’” 

He lost that race in circumstances he suggests were questionable. But he had bigger issues to worry about: his father’s brain tumors were back and required surgery. “That kind of stopped my career in politics,” he recalls.

He put comedy and performing on the backburner, with a plan to return to it, and focused on his true goal: getting into the University of California Berkeley. 

“It was important to me to always be like, ‘Yeah, it would be cool to be an artist, but I gotta make sure that everything’s okay.’ I always wanted to get the professional side established. And then dip my toe into some fulfilling artistic stuff when I have the chance.”

Despite his focus on the future, Kidd still loved playing improv games with his friends. They didn’t drink or go to parties, so they’d go on walks, chain smoke, and riff on different scenarios.

“We didn’t know what we were doing but we’d just say, ‘Oh, what if this guy came in here and did this.’” He experienced the euphoria of working with a team of smart, funny people and quickly grew addicted to it. “Those are some of the best times and I just love being surrounded by people that are quick and funny and can tag and do callbacks, it was like the type of person I liked to hang out with.”

Reflecting on times spent messing around with his high school friends, Kidd still manages to center the experience in a larger context. 

“It never felt like a valid career or something I could pursue,” he notes. “But it has been an important outlet for me throughout my life.”

Escaping Fresno, Always In The Rear View

Kidd was obsessed at an early age with attending the University of California Berkeley, the founding campus of the state’s public system and one of the nation’s top universities.

“I’ve always loved that school because it was the best public school and all I went to was public schools,” he says. And coming from Fresno—it always comes back to Fresno—he felt he had something to prove. “I had this academic chip on my shoulder, and I really wanted to prove to everyone that I was a smart kid,” he says. “I was smart, but I don’t think I was cut out for an Ivy League or anything like that. And also, I thought in my heart of hearts, fuck those people. I saw a lot of that as an institution of people who maybe didn’t earn it. Whereas at a good public school, you couldn’t just get legacied in.”

And then there was Green Day, Operation Ivy, Rancid, and AFI. Berkeley’s punk music scene is legendary, and Kidd heavily identified with its anti-authoritarian ethos. The campus was notoriously political and left leaning. This was the era of George W. Bush’s presidency. Affirmative action fights loomed on campus, anti-war protests raged, and Kidd wanted a piece. 

“There was so much to be angry about and at that time, that’s where I wanted to be. If I didn’t get in there, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says.

But Fresno wasn’t done with Kidd just yet. As much as he wanted to attend Berkeley, his practical side once again intervened, convincing him to do a couple years at the local community college, and then transfer. “It cost so much money to live in the Bay Area,” he recalls. “I was always, always trying to save money and not be an idiot. I constantly had this feeling of instability, where I’m like, ‘Don’t overextend yourself.’ Because it’s better to just live way below your means.”

Besides his mother gently suggesting he not live as a starving artist, Kidd’s parents never tried to direct his future. This caused him to be even more ambitious. “It’s funny, they never really pushed me,” he notes. “They were more like, ‘Hey, you can do what you want’ in a hands-off approach. That made me even more driven. It was weird, that aloof approach almost made me seek the validation more to do something more dynamic.”

The pressure on Kidd was always of his own making. 

And the goal was always singular: get out of Fresno and stay out. “I always had this idea that you could end up just going right back to Fresno if you’re not careful.” Kidd had a drive to succeed but knew from experience that “nothing is really guaranteed.” So, he attended community college, paid lower tuition, and saved money. He didn’t have a credit card, fearing debt, and avoided buying things.

In his mind was the thought that “alright, I’m from Fresno, I gotta dig my way out of whatever that is.” 

The pressure continued. 

“I’m a white, straight dude with nothing wrong with him, nobody should be helping me out. There are people who are smarter and better than me and people who come from other opportunities, and I just want to try my best to make sure that my kids don’t end up at a two out of 10 elementary school.”

This focus included not drinking until he got to Berkeley. Kidd played bass in local bands and identified with the straight edge subculture affiliated with many of his favorite hardcore punk rockers, which involves abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs. 

“I’d be like, ‘If I’m drinking or doing drugs, or doing this shit, I’m holding myself back,” he says. “Those are going to be obstacles that I introduced to myself.” So, he continued to abstain.

His relationship with alcohol was also influenced by his weight, which was still well north of 200 pounds. He started exercising, lost weight, and liked how he looked and felt. When he thought of beer, he recoiled, associating it with stupid jocks. “What’s the most infamous thing you know about beer?,” he remembers thinking. “That it makes you fat and lazy and is so bad for you. I didn’t want to go back to that high school life so there was a health motivator as well.”

Despite appreciating his hometown and the lessons it imparted, Kidd focused on getting out of town. When he finally transferred to UC Berkeley, Fresno was never far from his mind and the fear of having to return continued to drive him.

A Straight Edger Falls for Beer

At UC Berkeley, Kidd didn’t join anti-war protestors or soak in liberal politics. Instead, he did the unthinkable: he joined a fraternity. He didn’t care about football and had a two-year social disadvantage compared to other non-transfer students. Kidd wanted to make up for lost time. So, he reached for the first available shortcut.

And it changed his life.

“I wanted to meet people as fast as possible, because I was going to be out of there,” he recalls. He didn’t know anyone on campus. He majored in philosophy, which was a tiny program at Berkeley, and his roommates studied math and computer science and “they didn’t go anywhere.” So, he joined Zeta Beta Tau (ZBT), the world’s first and largest Jewish fraternity whose membership is today non-sectarian.

Skeptical of fraternity life at first and not a drinker, Kidd still managed to quickly connect with the ZBT guys. “At Berkeley, it was kind of a crazy place with a lot of different characters,” he says. These weren’t rugby or lacrosse dudes but filmmakers and guys from around the world. “I don’t know how they all found each other. Even though it didn’t make sense on paper, it ended up working out great.”

Kidd immediately used music as a way to connect with people, putting to use his people skills. He DJ’d the rush and fraternity events, playing Pennywise or Mars Volta, which attracted recruits interested in his kind of music. They were often guys who also thought fraternities were lame. They’d go to punk shows together in the Bay Area.

“The greatest irony is I met a bunch of like-minded people, and it worked out fantastic,” he says. “But it was so antithetical to my beliefs and what I thought.”

Kidd took a class on writing in the style of the Heuristic Squelch, a satirical magazine published by UC Berkeley students, where he learned to write Onion-esque articles and other “faux journalistic pieces.”

Kidd started drinking as a social lubricant at frat events and during Mario Party games. As he was a few years older, he leaned away from the Natty Lights and towards the beer a roommate homebrewed and bought. That was when he first realized beers didn’t all taste the same.

His roommate would go to the local liquor stores and bring back beers with insanely high alcohol levels, a hallmark of the early 2000s. And Kidd started getting curious. “I’m drinking a St. Bernardus 750 and it felt like a different type of drinking,” he says. “It’s funny, because at that time, he was like the beer god. And I was learning from him. He was just advanced enough to kind of show me the ropes.”

“We thought we were really on the fringes because we didn’t know anybody who even drank craft beer, let alone tried to make it.”

For his 21st birthday, Kidd and his fraternity brothers took a train to a town 40 minutes away to secure a keg of Stone’s Arrogant Bastard. Stone was hard to find in the area and a 7.5-percent ABV bitter bomb sounded amazing. They loved the caustic language on the bottle warning that their baby palates weren’t worthy of drinking it. “It had this adolescent rite of passage aspect to it: you can’t drink something this bitter. You can’t handle flavor. It was all the same trappings of the music scene, but in beverage form. I had never tasted something that aggressive or that bitter.”

Kidd was hooked. He started homebrewing alongside his roommate and conducting trades on BeerAdvocate.com, where he was a member in the mid-2000s. He really wanted to try Dogfish Head 120 Minute and traded for it. 

The Stone Vertical Epic series blew his mind. He started experimenting more, drinking different beers at Jupiter, the famed Berkeley beer bar. 

He Googled information about bittering units and became obsessed with locating beers others hadn’t heard of. The ZBT guys would grab a bunch of unknown craft beers and play Japanese RPGs. He saw beer as another way to express his outsider status, kind of a flex.

The Birthday Party Lawyer

After a brief respite at Berkeley, Kidd recommitted himself to the professional plan, enrolled at law school in Los Angeles, and reverted to his prior spare habits. He discarded a lot of his stuff and moved into the living room of a one-bedroom apartment in Koreatown. He put up a partition and thought, “this is awesome, I only have to pay half of a one bedroom.”

He largely stopped drinking and homebrewing, because he couldn’t afford it, and focused on school to the exclusion of almost everything else, including beer and performing.

For fun, Kidd occasionally drew cartoons and wrote short comedy posts on MySpace, where he amassed 15,000 followers. While he loved the reactions to his writing, he thought, “What am I doing with this? I’m in law school? Who am I writing these for?” He deleted his MySpace account, shelved comedy writing, and refocused on his legal studies. He thought, “once I become a lawyer, all those things could come back bubbling up to the surface.”

Again, the comparison to the lifestyles of classmates loomed large. Many lived in luxury and high-rise apartments in LA’s fashionable neighborhoods. They could afford nights out. Meanwhile, he didn’t have internet at home because it was expensive, and he figured it was free at the law library. Kidd retreated into solitude.

The feelings of instability returned as he studied for classes and eventually the bar exam.

“I have to pass this,” he told himself at the time. “If I don’t, I’m going back to Fresno.”

Kidd didn’t know what kind of lawyer he wanted to be. He initially contemplated criminal law, because he had seen it on television, his mom worked for CPS, he had liberal leanings, and he was anti-police. After entering Southwestern Law School, which has a top entertainment law program, he tried that route. 

It was the era of Entourage on HBO, and everyone had the same thought. Kidd worked for one entertainment company and hated the work, which largely consisted of redlining screenplay agreements. He wanted to see the inside of a courtroom and to perform.

Kidd also worried about the low level of starting pay for entertainment lawyers. So, he pivoted. He tried to audit a class on worker’s compensation law because the adjunct professor was a partner at a large firm and he instead ended up landing a job interview. The professor was impressed with Kidd’s high school work history, which was one of the only things on his sparse resume. The professor told him that worker’s compensation defense was essentially like waiting tables, you massage people’s egos, manage expectations, and get them to settle. He offered Kidd a job.

“I always think about that,” Kidd remarks. “How I was so ashamed to be a birthday party host and it was the thing that got me my first big job.”

Kidd’s upbringing in Fresno prepared him well for the response he gets when he tells people his area of practice. He’s quick to note that worker’s compensation defense “is a career path nobody aspires to” and lacks the prestige of entertainment law. But he’s good at it and it plays to his strengths. He’s constantly in court, arguing cases, dealing with high volume numbers, and regularly doing trials. He admits to “weirdly loving it.”

“I ultimately realized that if I’m trying to transfer to a different type of law because of how other people react when they hear it, what a stupid way to frame your life,” he says.

The unglamorous practice area also afforded him something other legal jobs would not: time to pursue other interests.

The Rise of Don’t Drink Beer

With Kidd’s first legal job came the financial stability he long craved. While worker’s comp defense paid about half the rate of other first-year lawyer gigs, it changed his life. Kidd could afford his own bedroom. He could go out to eat. And he finally had time to engage his passions for comedy and beer.

He started taking classes at Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), the improv and sketch comedy group co-founded by Amy Poehler. He performed standup sets a couple nights a week for several years. The two primary components of his life, law and comedy, fell into a natural working rhythm.

“One makes the other possible,” he says. “Being a lawyer provides security and stability to do comedy. And comedy is the blow off valve that allows me to do the lawyer job forever. The two complement each other. I know so many burned out comedians and so many burned out lawyers, so I guess I’m lucky in that regard.”

In 2015 he helped found a sketch comedy group called Dr. America with other members including Stephen Loh and Michael Gabriel, his now long-time collaborators and co-hosts on the Malt Couture podcast. 

Loh recalls that Kidd would show up to sketch team meetings dressed in a suit. “So half the time we’d get lawyer Alex showing up,” he says. “The other times it’d be his true self, a guy in loud screen printed band shirts that grew up playing in punk bands. There wasn’t really an in-between.”

Kidd often pitched a lot of high concept ideas that were chock full of multiple ideas, often without any seeming connection to one another, according to Loh. When he started reading Kidd’s DDB reviews, he understood where it came from. They collaborated on simplifying his sketch ideas before working up to the absurd and ridiculous points.

Loh wrote one sketch based on Kidd’s ability to make balloon animals from his days as a birthday party host. In the sketch, the team dressed as clowns and crashed their car. As Kidd slowly died on stage, he made a balloon animal. As he twisted it together, the audience stood up to see what he was making. And when he finished and collapsed on stage at the feet of a balloon dog, the crowd erupted in applause.

Kidd also returned to homebrewing once he moved out of the Koreatown living room and had some space. He would bring his homebrew into work and let the other attorneys try it.

Before stopping in to watch UCB shows, he’d grab beers from a little market nearby that had a well-curated beer selection. He’d watch the comedy shows while sipping on a St. Bernardus from the bottle. He’d get distracted by the beer, thinking about the styles and flavors. He’d then stop back into the market and ask for similar beers. “It was just a seamless thing, craft beer and comedy for me,” he recalls. “The consumption of craft beer led to the production of comedy like a closed loop.”

As he encountered different flavor profiles, his mind started to spin, wanting to know the details. He’d study beer judging guides but found them lacking, so he dug a little deeper into brewer interviews, brewing books, and blogs. He was fascinated by what he could learn from homebrewing. 

“Homebrewing is some of the best education you can get,” he says. “And I failed so many times, with so many batches, each batch in your mind is like $80 worth of ingredients and just the hours it took. But you learn each time.” He was engaged with the reactions of people drinking his homebrews. One time he failed to move a decimal over while scaling up a salt addition to a German sour ale recipe and ended up with 42 bottles of seawater, he gleefully recalls.

Long before he became interested in beer, Kidd exhibited completist tendencies. From his early days collecting comic books and action figures, Kidd developed a drive to learn everything about a subject, especially if there was a list involved. He has seen every movie on the American Film Institute’s top 100 list and is currently reading every Pulitzer Prize winning novel. 

At one point, Kidd spent two years reading The Story of Civilization by historians Will and Ariel Durant, which won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1968. Written over the course of four decades, the complete set spans nearly 10,000 pages across 11 volumes.

Kidd explains these tendencies through the lens of popular culture. “There’s an ordering element and a satisfaction in gamifying things,” he says. “You can cross it off of a list. In so many years of playing video games, and particularly Japanese RPGs, so many things are quest based. You go on these elaborate quests that you set up for yourself.”

As Kidd’s interest in beer grew, he spent more time on beer websites like BeerAdvocate.com (BA). The site, founded in 1996 by brothers Jason and Todd Alström, was a raucous online playground for beer lovers that hosted discussion forums as well as consumer written beer reviews. The site aggregated the data from millions of beer reviews, issued numeric scores on a five-point scale, and even listed the top 250 rated beers. Kidd set off on a quest to acquire and drink all 250.

“That was very involved,” Kidd admits. “It was another list-based thing but it updated algorithmically so the bottom slots constantly shifted. So, it gave me a perpetual thing to chase.” He spent countless hours trading for rare beers with people he’d never met across the country. “A lot of these were draft-only stuff at festivals so I really had to work connections to figure out how to get it.” He would have someone go to a local beer store and buy a sixtel keg of a beer and then fill a bottle with it and mail it to him. “There were all these schemes and things that forced me to go all across geography lines,” he recalls. “It taught me a lot about things I value in terms of context.”

Where many beer lovers would have traveled to the source, Kidd almost never did. He remained focused on building for his future, whether it be school, law, or eventually buying his own place.

Kidd made more than 150 trades for beers in two years, at times receiving up to 10 packages a day at the 740-square-foot condo he shared with his future wife, Normandy, whom he met while he was in law school and she an undergrad at Loyola Marymount. “Alex was an almost mythical character on the beer trading sites, everyone knew him,” says Drew Pool, co-founder of Wren House Brewing in Phoenix, Arizona, who traded beers with Kidd.  

As he worked his way through the 250 beers on BA’s top-rated list—he would go on to try 247 of them with three retired beers remaining out of his reach—he set his sights on a new quest: conquering the White Whale List.

Compiled by BA’s power users, the fabled list of the top 100 rarest beers in the world posed a nearly insurmountable task, something that of course attracted Kidd. He paid $1,800 for a bottle of Cantillon’s Soleil De Minuit, a “cloudberry lambic” from the legendary producer. Kidd estimates that he spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars tracking down beers on both lists.

To date, he’s managed to tick off 77 beers on the White Whale List, with the rest being extinct beers or ghost whales, or ones he just can’t justify paying $6,000 for a bottle.

“There’s very few that really crack that $2,500 barrier,” he notes. “And those are all basically just passed around by 50 different people. I can tell you the 50 people who have either owned it, traded it, moved it around, and they never get opened. Their value is more in the myth of someone being a possessor.”

In securing these and other beers, Kidd combined his drinking interest with his comedy skills and started writing longform, humorous reviews on BA. The typical online beer review usually follows a straightforward if unexciting formula, with a few dozen words covering a beer’s appearance, smell, taste, mouthfeel, and overall character. 

Kidd derided this format as boring and incapable of capturing the true context of a beer. His reviews routinely clocked in at 500 to 700 words with big blocks of text containing obscure musical and cultural references. BA’s Todd hated his reviews and told him to quit it. “I think he thought I was trying to degrade the quality of their data or draw attention,” Kidd recalls. “And I just was like, ‘No, I’m not gonna stop. This is how I want them to look. And this is how people like them.’”

Kidd was writing under the alias “SubpoenaDeuces” at the time, he didn’t attend the popular BA get-togethers in Southern California, and no one knew who he was. He just kept writing his lengthy reviews.

After receiving a few extended timeouts from BA’s leadership, Todd Alström eventually leveled the permanent banhammer and gave Kidd the boot for his reviews and a series of other pranks and shenanigans aimed at what he viewed as the site’s authoritarian direction. 

By this time, Kidd had other plans. “Getting banned from BeerAdvocate was actually what made me just want to have my own website,” he recalls. “Their ultra militant admin strategy actually helped me because it took a platform away. So, I made my own website.”

He Drinks Beer So You Don’t Have To

In August of 2011, Kidd’s first post on dontdrinkbeer.com went live. It simply said:

“Dont drink beer. I will take care of that for you.”

The site’s tagline read “Drinking beer, so you don’t have to.” That motto continues to adorn the site today.

After spending a decade chasing the world’s rarest and most expensive beers, Kidd turned his lens on the culture, skewering the beer geek obsession with whale beers and the ethos surrounding it. The irony wasn’t lost on Kidd. He reveled in it. He had little interest in reviewing everyday beers easily accessible to drinkers around the country. His early reviews effected an exaggerated character endeavoring to try the world’s rarest beers. 

“The gestalt was to take the rarest or most coveted beers and take them down a peg with harsher views because that didn’t really exist,” he says. “It was supposed to have a subversive appeal. The idea was that I would drink the rarest beers so that you wouldn’t have to feel inadequate or the need to chase them. It was going to be my job to try these beers, tell you what they taste like, and give you an alternative. To say, “Listen, you don’t need to drink these beers.’ It was kind of tongue in cheek because the people who covet them the most, they want to drink them.”

This aesthetic fit Kidd’s own personal beer journey, of course, which continued in pursuit of the White Whale List and the rarest and often most expensive beers in the world. The blog only fueled that drive. He negotiated three times trying to buy a bottle of Drie Fonteinen Selectie C, but ultimately balked at the suggested price of five to six thousand dollars.

In his review of Cantillon’s Soleil De Minuit, the $1,800 bottle of lambic he bought, Kidd wrote the beer “is a dog whistle to how deeply maladjusted and passionate someone can become, while singularly demonstrating a depth in a niche hobby. This is an Ahabesque pursuit in the strictest sense. In pursuing something so massive, the white whale itself destroys the organic love of whatever craft existed.”

The DDB blog design was stripped down, with most posts featuring a poorly arranged photo of a bottle and a beer in a glass, usually on Kidd’s brown and white speckled counter, stovetop, or next to his toaster oven. The appliance was so ubiquitous that it became famous among his growing fan base. His reviews were punctuated with seemingly random memes and gifs, bringing an eccentric lightness to each post. Kidd eventually struck an even more discordant note, changing the site’s design to a kid’s WordPress theme topped by a pink elephant and other zoo animals.

Kidd reliably produced content to feed the growing interest in his quirky, sharp, and funny take on beer reviews. Before launching in August of 2011, he banked reviews so he had a steady stream of content available. He quickly started averaging one post a day. A year later, he doubled that number, and then tripled it some months.

He also loved that he could write blog posts and remain anonymous. His anonymity, however, attracted attention. “People were like, ‘Who is this guy?’ Because most everyone knew each other at that point,” he laughs. “In the culture, if you were in Southern California, everyone went to the same releases and the same bottle shares and shared what they traded. I didn’t go to bottle shares. The reason all these pictures are just in front of the toaster and stuff is I drank all these beers by myself, for years and years.”

After trading beers with Kidd, Pool of Wren House became a fan of Don’t Drink Beer and its cynical yet engaging and funny takes on craft beer, but had no idea who ran the site. “It wasn’t until later that I connected the dots that Alex was DDB, it was a secret,” Pool laughs. “It didn’t come out for many years that Alex was DDB.”

Kidd’s reviews were singular, engaging, frenetic, intentionally obtuse, witty, and above all funny. Littered with obscure pop culture references, ranging from Scandinavian metal bands to ’90s Japanese video games, they were often hard to follow, all by design.

“Sometimes nobody really understood what he was talking about in his review but you could understand the whimsical nature of beer and how special and impactful it could be,” Pool says.

Augie Carton of Carton Brewing in New Jersey agrees. “He’s a gamer, which I’m not, a big millennial music fan, which I’m not, and he’s a bit of a fashionista, which I’m not,” he says. “So, when he strings all those metaphors together into his beer reviews, it’s almost like reading David Foster Wallace because so much of what I’m reading, I have to figure out or look up what the fuck it means to find if it’s actually funny. And the great reveal is, it is.”

Firmly grounding his reviews in satire, DDB lampooned the culture of rare beer while being deeply conversant in it. To make the detailed level of jokes that hit with this audience, the author had to be one of them. “For something like DDB, he is joking about the industry but you can’t make a very accurate joke without clearly knowing and caring about it,” his Malt Couture co-host Michael Gabriel says. “He has both of those things, almost like this constant state of contradiction.”

“He’s the Vonnegut of beer writing,” suggests Carton. “He’s never not satirizing. There’s tons of insight in a satire, like Vonnegut’s love of humanity and hate of what humanity is doing. There’s his love of beer and hate of what beer’s doing, right? And, like Vonnegut, he’s a legitimately funny guy. So, it all makes for fun fucking reading.”

Kidd loves using satire as a way of disarming his audience and getting them to think about the industry and its tropes in new ways. “So much truth can be said in satire,” he says.

He remains fascinated with the culture surrounding rarity and engages in an anthropological study of its contours and rougher edges, one beer review at a time. 

“What essentially is Don’t Drink Beer?” Kidd asks. “It’s presenting a kind of idol toppling everyman that looks at the world’s most coveted beers and asks, ‘Why are they coveted? What type of subculture surrounds it? And what does that say about the nature of things that we value?’”

Expanding the DDB Empire

Kidd constantly surveyed beer and internet culture to direct DDB to new and emerging areas, including video content. Never content to mine one gag for eternity, a year in he started releasing a series of grainy, low-res YouTube beer reviews poking fun at other video beer reviews. “Every single person was doing a 20 minute long, single shot, unedited, talking head YouTube review,” he recalls. “That was seen as the future, and they were all getting double digit views. Just unwatchable shit. I wanted to stay anonymous, and I definitely didn’t want to do that.”

So he stayed off-camera and mockingly effected a boneheaded character, akin to those played by Sacha Baron Cohen. “In the clowning school of theater there’s this type of comedy that Cohen is the master of, la bouffant, the idiot. It’s a heightened version of whatever truth is, straight out of five act plays, Molière, and finds the character who is self-assured, confident, and overdoes things. Then have that person be the mouthpiece of serious things and you can freely lampoon them. Because you’re presenting this guy who thinks he’s a homebrewer, thinks he’s a professional brewer, and from that optic you can exaggerate all the pre-existing tropes of the beer culture, making fun of them. But because it’s an exaggerated version, people can go ‘Well, I don’t do that. But yeah, I get the joke.’”

He hated that video reviewers were talking about widely accessible beers, like who cares what these random guys think of Sierra Nevada’s Narwhal Imperial Stout? So, he lampooned the reviewers, but with rarer beers. 

In his review of Cantillon Kriek, a Belgian sour beer much lauded by enthusiasts, he poured the lambic directly into an Ikea cake pan to mimic a Belgian koelschip and then into a red Solo cup. “It reminds me of Crystal Light that they serve at my son’s dance recitals,” he feigned. He usually ended his videos with an exaggerated catchphrase, “Get it at Binny’s!,” referencing the popular Chicago beer store.

Behind the scenes, Kidd elaborately planned out the videos, including the scripts, camera angles and movement, and use of props, in contrast to the single take effort of other video beer reviewers. “It had to be seamless with no edits and have fidelity to the thing I’m making fun of, and it was pretty hard but you also have to make it look shitty at the same time so it’s relatable.”

“I think the net result is that people still watch them and show their friends a decade later,” he laughs. “Whatever those were, they captured the zeitgeist of people thinking it was someone worthy of making a farce in the beer culture.”

Kidd has cultivated an unusually strong relationship with his audience. His social media pages, especially on Instagram, rack up thousands of likes when he posts memes augmented with various beer-related additions and humor. But it was his Barleywine is Life (BiL) Facebook page that caused his popularity to explode, eventually posing a challenge to his anonymity.

“I first saw Alex’s work when I came across his Barleywine is Life Facebook page,” says Kelly McKnight, the lead research and development brewer at New Belgium Brewing. “It was a hilarious parody on the craft beer culture that was priding itself on tearing breweries and beers apart. I also was able to learn a lot about hype beers from BiL.”

BiL is awash with increasingly raucous memes and inside jokes, many of which feature Photoshopped pictures and cartoons of Kidd. A recent one captured him as Jesus at the Last Supper with a bottle of Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Barleywine. The intensely loyal group, with more than 5,000 members, celebrates several BiL Holy Days, including one on Kidd’s birthday, September 13, when they celebrate him as its Dear Leader.

“Although there is a true passion and appreciation for the beer style, humor is definitely the core of why people are still so engaged in it,” says Melodie Simond, an admin on the BiL Facebook page. “And more than a few people, myself included, have made real friends through it.”

Kidd maintains a carefully connected relationship with his intensely loyal fan base and focuses his efforts on making them laugh, intentionally at the exclusion of a broader or less beer knowledgeable audience. 

“If you are at Don’t Drink Beer, you probably mean to be there,” he says. “Very, very rarely do people end up there by accident.” Matching his original intent to focus on drinking the world’s rarest beers, Kidd also acknowledges that consuming his content often requires his audience to already have an elevated level of familiarity with the subject. 

Kidd is happy with his uncompromising approach and thinks that trying to appeal to a broader audience would ruin the joke. “I write in a way that assumes that you already have all the information you need,” he says. “In reality, I don’t really handhold. My content is kind of niche and esoteric. And if I have to sacrifice setting up the joke, then it just subverts it and kind of sells out the people who are there for it. It shows your hand.”

Kidd knows his audience and he targets his efforts on making them laugh. “I write for a lot of people in the trenches that do these jobs and that work in and around beer,” he says. “I write for the attractive front of house girl who has to deal with dipshits asking for her Snapchat. I write for the guys who want to open their own shop right now, shift brewers, and they want somebody else who can talk shit because they can’t.” 

Kidd is also proud of the percentage of his audience that is female in a historically male dominated industry, both in numbers and focus. “I know it’s traditionally seen as a dudes’ game,” he says. “I’m very proud that I have a 22-percent female audience. It’s extremely difficult to write the type of content that I write in the way that I do and secure that demographic.”

Kidd views his work as helping to unite these groups. “I like to think that in dunking on these people, you bring in other sections of the beer industry, including female brewers who haven’t been taken seriously. You get all these swaths of people from different walks of life. But I’d say the unifying thing is they’re all just normal people involved in the beer world. None of them are super wealthy, they aren’t commoditizing it like the wine or whiskey worlds. I like to think I write for normal people who have gone deep down a rabbit hole and have enough information to appreciate what I’m writing.”

He acknowledges that his somewhat inaccessible approach to content results in accusations of elitism and can turn off some. “DDB can be accused of gatekeeping or being elitist or dismissive, and it’s probably all of those things,” he admits. “But it’s not in a pitchfork way or a way that’s attempting to shut other people out. It’s just like, if you want to interact with this content, it’s here, assuming you have the prereqs. I’m here to provide a different type of commentary.”

He also understands that others think that he shouldn’t yuck someone else’s yum.

“I get that criticism a lot, actually,” he notes of his content dunking on people who enjoy things that he doesn’t. “And I think that they’re missing the point that it’s more a commentary on who’s enjoying these things. Why do these products exist and why do they sell so well? If somebody really enjoys smoothie sours, great, they’re in a taproom contributing money.” But Kidd also notes his views likely reflect the people making the beers he ridicules, and his audience appreciates his efforts. “I don’t think anybody’s necessarily better than anyone else,” he says. “It’s just a reflection of where we’re at, with things that brewers are compelled to make and what will sell versus what they want to make.”

Kidd also acknowledges that his early comedic efforts sometimes went too far and don’t stand up well today, with jokes about women, sex, and even getting cancer. “The tone and humor of the site in 2011 was almost 2010s YouTube humor,” he notes. “It was emblematic of the time, like cheap sexual jokes. It was stuff you could kind of get away with just because you’re like, ‘Oh,  that was written in a parody. I don’t sanction that, that’s not me. That’s the Don’t Drink Beer mouthpiece.’”

The reviews occasionally got him in trouble with his parents, who didn’t really understand the site or its purpose. In one review of Hair of the Dog’s Matt, a famously under carbonated beer, Kidd called the beer “flatter than a Taiwanese gymnast.” His dad quoted the line back to him. Kidd cringed a bit. His humor evolved over time and away from some of the problematic earlier jokes.

“Alex has said that he can’t even read his early stuff, the references and the sense of humor of it,” his Malt Couture co-host Loh says. Loh notes, however, that comedy is ever changing and that Kidd has always been sensitive and willing to adapt when certain jokes and references are no longer socially acceptable.

Loh also notes that many of Kidd’s early jokes were as part of a character and don’t represent him. “People don’t understand that Alex is like the Colbert Report,” Loh says. “There is Alex that drinks beer and has opinions but on dontdrinkbeer.com he’s more of an exaggerated, worse version of himself. He’s playing extremes on that whereas Alex Kidd is a real person.”

Contrite and able to change, Kidd focuses on entertaining and connecting with his audience. “I’m not trying to drive a brand, or build something and sell hair, vitamins, or whatever,” he says.

And that audience loves him for it. He funds his DDB efforts largely through his Patreon, which has more than 500 members contributing monthly to the site.

In an industry where beer reviews only appear fawning or laudatory in their language, Kidd also made a name for himself with his willingness to critically roast any beer, even the world’s highest rated ones.

“I think too many beer critics online always feel a sense of conflict, that if they say something bad, then they’ll be shunned,” says Doug Veliky, chief marketing officer at Revolution Brewing. “And that might be true. But I think Alex saw the long term. You could always tell that it was never about that with him. He never cared about whether a beer was free or not. And he never cared what people thought. And by rising above all the noise of beer reviews and being the person who people know are going to give it to you real, he distanced himself so far from everyone else that no brewery can ignore him now. And now he has the freedom to say something negative about a beer. And that’s not going to stop them from wanting his opinion.”

Veliky has sent Kidd beer to review, even knowing he might write something negative. He respects Kidd for his independence. “You’ve got to put the customer first, the follower first, not the breweries,” he says. “That’s how you become more powerful. And that’s what he did. He became the most powerful beer reviewer by many multiples.”

His dedication to learning brewing process details helps him understand flavors and gives him the ability to speak to both a consumer and industry audience. “Alex has tasted and reviewed so many beers that his opinions are immensely valuable to professional brewers,” New Belgium’s McKnight says. “He has helped give honest feedback to brewers and make them grow and produce better beer. Not everybody’s opinion matters to us brewers so when Alex weighs in, we really listen.”

It’s all part of Kidd’s obsession with understanding how people perceive quality in things such as art, music, movies, or beer. “When you look at these things that are lauded as best, either on beer lists, or books, or AFI, you want to find the strain of things of what makes them good or high quality,” he says. “It really keys you into this idea of what we collectively value. What things are worthy of being valued? I think that the art of commentary takes on its own art form that is reflective of the culture.”

Kidd also believes you can learn much more from bad beers and figuring out where they went wrong. He compares it to his practice of only watching movies in either the top or bottom 5-percent of Rotten Tomatoes scores. He wants to see what makes something great or terrible.

“You’re deconstructing the process, asking, ‘Okay, what did this really start as?’ You’re trying to figure out what is the shortcoming? Then you broaden out and ask, ‘Who drinks this and why is this acceptable to those people?’” He lives for bad beers as it energizes his mind. “If something draws your attention for the wrong reasons, you’re left with questions.”

Kidd thinks DDB has hit its ceiling in terms of audience and he’s fine with that. “I don’t think DDB can get much bigger,” he says. “I think it’s at its perfect saturation point for the industry interaction.” He loves that his audience has to work hard to understand his references and humor.

“I write jokes for 17 people,” he laughs. “But for those 17 people that get the joke, it hits hard. I think that’s a good way of approaching it, because those people won’t forget.”

He contemplates what it would take to grow DDB and appeal to a broader audience but ultimately rejects the idea. “I could pivot and make that but those 17 people who got the jokes would be like, ‘What is this?’ That’s not the relationship that I have fostered over a decade.”

Alex Kidd Unmasked

It all happened very quickly, Kidd recalls.

In 2018, he hit a creative wall with what he could achieve anonymously. He couldn’t use his voice or face in videos or do live comedy shows about beer if he wanted to remain in the shadows. The BiL Facebook group, which he started in 2017, was taking off and he wanted to try out live shows and start a podcast. But he still had concerns about mixing his professional work as an attorney in a conservative industry with his edgier beer comedy persona. “Initially I didn’t want to co-mingle Don’t Drink Beer with my legal career because I thought that those two intermixing could have some consequences,” he says. 

But the situation was untenable. So he made a decision.

“I was like, ‘I gotta fix this, I gotta take the plunge,’” he says. “And come what may, I’m just gonna do it.”

He had already cleaned up his content, veering away from sexual and misogynistic material. “I learned how to write better, be decent and more sensitive, and not do cheap types of jokes,” he says. “I’m like, ‘You know what, I can stand by this product, this is good enough.’”

At first, Kidd felt vulnerable as he was accountable for his content in a way he previously hadn’t been. He quickly learned to love being in the open, even wished he had done so sooner. But he also realized he wasn’t ready at that time. “It cuts both ways,” he says. “I guess I wish I did it a couple years earlier. But did I need to wait until I got funny enough or responsible enough to make it worth it?”

Launched in June of 2018, the Malt Couture podcast shot DDB and Kidd’s profile into the beer stratosphere. Jokingly described as the “world’s jankiest beer podcast,” Kidd hosts the show along with longtime collaborators Loh and Gabriel. Each of the hosts represents a different sphere of the beer world, with Kidd occupying the nerdiest perch, Loh in the middle, and Gabriel just happy to drink Modelo. They joke with one another, run skits, interview brewers, make obscure jokes, and hang out each week drinking while the audience eavesdrops.

With more than 260 episodes, Malt Couture is one of the most popular drinks podcasts. Tens of thousands of fans download the show each week and Kidd says most listen nearly all the way through to the end, no easy feat for a show whose weekly episodes can run as long as two and a half hours each. 

Freeing himself from the constrictions of anonymity also allowed Kidd to expand DDB’s reach into live shows. Soon after he unmasked himself, Kidd received an inquiry from Revolution’s Doug Veliky asking if he’d be interested in doing a live show tied to a special barleywine release. Kidd agreed.

Revolution put 80 tickets on sale and sold out quickly. The brewery flew Kidd out to Chicago and he performed a 30 minute stand-up set about beer and beer culture. “That is really, really hard to do and he maybe rehearsed it once,” Veliky recalls. “It killed from start to finish, it was as polished an act as I’ve ever seen. And it was so damn funny.”

Kidd returned to Los Angeles energized by meshing his love of performance and beer. He and Loh devised a format for a longer comedy show, to be called Barleywine is Live. They performed a test show and then returned to run it at multiple locations in Chicago, including at Revolution. The show was a hit, selling out quickly.

“The fact that he brought me in to do Barleywine is Live changed what I thought was personally achievable through comedy,” Loh says. “Getting paid to do shows is nice but after that first [BiL] show, I felt like we were rock stars.”

Since stepping into the limelight, Kidd has established a balance between his professional work and his beer comedy. “I’ve actually had insurance adjusters find me and follow me,” he laughs. “They’re like, ‘Dude, this makes you one of the coolest attorneys. I like referring you work because you’re not just some drone.’ That’s amazing.”

The  Unwanted Stage

After decades of chasing stability, carefully plotting out his life plan and then successfully executing it, Kidd was finally where he wanted to be. He had a solid job as a lawyer that paid well and he was balancing out his successful legal career with comedy performances. His personal life was on track as well. He took Normandy to punk shows, they went hiking, and watched bad movies together.

As with many beer spouses, while Normandy is supportive of Alex’s beer side gig, it’s not her thing. “She barely tolerates beer, hates the boxes arriving,” Alex says. “She realizes it’s a passion of mine and generates a modest income but the idea of having a beer cellar or bottles around is trashy to her.” 

Normandy prefers very dry white wines, including Rhône and white Burgundy. But Normandy has also tasted many of the world’s best beers. “She’s been around this culture for so long, she’s had everything,” he remarks. She has also by osmosis absorbed a ton of useless beer knowledge. “One time I asked her what a gueuze is and she said, ‘It’s a blend of three different lambics.’ And I said, ‘How do you know that?’ It was insane.”

After Alex graduated from law school, Normandy attended and graduated law school and now handles wrongful death and catastrophic personal injury cases. The couple married in 2013 and settled into their professional and personal lives together. 

As with many couples, Kidd says they struggled with fertility issues and underwent rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) retrievals and shots. In 2021, they delivered a son, Soren, named after Kierkegaard, the Danish poet and philosopher—a nod to Kidd’s Berkeley philosophy degree, of course.

Two years later, after another round of IVF, Normandy was pregnant again and due in September of 2023 with their second child, a daughter. The couple decided to sell their house in Los Angeles and move closer to San Diego to allow Normandy to reduce her professional workload and spend more time with their growing family, while Alex continued to financially support the family. Everything they had worked so hard for was coming true. 

Then Alex’s stomach started hurting.

On Mother’s Day, in May 2023, the 39-year-old Kidd went to the hospital with stabbing abdominal pains. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer that had spread to his liver and lungs. Surgeons removed the portion of his colon affected by the cancer. 

His sudden health issues brought immediate financial hardships, the kind Kidd had worried about his whole life. He faced an uncertain and growing level of medical expenses while unable to work, while his wife was getting ready to give birth and become the primary caretaker of them all. 

After his surgery, Kidd posted the news to social media and it quickly spread through the beer community, shocking both friends and mere acquaintances alike. Social media lit up with well wishes from across the globe.

Before he did so, he let his friends know the news, including Malt Couture co-hosts Loh and Gabriel. Loh contacted Doug Veliky, with whom he’d developed a friendship, to tell him before Kidd posted the update.  

“I was driving to work,” Veliky recalls. “Steven was kind enough to send a very long, detailed, and devastating text message that I made the mistake of reading at a long traffic light. My phone buzzed, I saw the big preview, and had to pull over right where I was. I think I sat there for at least 20 minutes, cried and just had to like, gather myself before I even felt comfortable driving again because I was so upset.”

Many in the beer world experienced similar shock. 

“It was a gut punch, which I guess is weird because I’ve never met him before,” says Em Sauter, creator of Pints & Panels and co-host of the All About Beer podcast. “You never realize who has a profound effect on you until something happens. I think many people felt this way. As someone who lost their father to cancer when they were a kid, I mainly thought about his family and what they must be going through.”

Immediately, brewers, friends, and DDB fans responded with outpourings of sympathy and calls to action. A DDB fan quickly set up a GoFundMe and tens of thousands of dollars in donations rolled in to help benefit the family. By the time it closed, the campaign had raised $404,888 for the Kidd family.

The news also caused a lot of people to contemplate their own health situations and to seek testing. Drew Pool was shocked. He and Kidd were the same age and both had young kids. He scheduled a colonoscopy after hearing the news. “I thank him for being brave and upfront about it,” Pool says. “He could have chosen to hide and keep it private.”

Pool and others also wanted to assist Kidd through their own efforts, namely with a collaboration beer. He started the Life International Barleywine Collaboration, where dozens of breweries brewed a barleywine and donated profits to Kidd and his family. “It was our way of raising awareness of what Alex is going through but also for getting screened and taking symptoms seriously and talking to your doctor about colon cancer,” he says.

Loh says he was overwhelmed at the response to Kidd’s cancer news, but wasn’t surprised. “Seeing the beer community come out after his diagnosis, it’s the thing we’ve always told him, that we think you’re beloved in the community,” he says.

After recovering from the initial surgery and through his cancer treatments, Kidd remained desperate to release podcast episodes and keep DDB on track. He acknowledges that his plans for DDB, including more live shows, remain in a holding pattern, but he remains driven and determined to continue his work.

How Alex Kidd Changed Beer

Following the news, many in and around the beer industry contemplated and reflected on Kidd’s impact on it. Some noted his influence on the rise of beer nerd culture and whale hunting, while others said he just made things more fun. 

“Alex has had an enormous impact on the craft beer scene,” New Belgium’s McKnight says. “Don’t Drink Beers and the Malt Couture podcast team have been able to capture craft beer’s purpose. He uses his satire to relay that while beer is culturally relevant, the side attitudes, exclusivity, and ego aren’t even what beer is about.”

Beer cartoonist and podcaster Sauter says, “I once called Alex our generation’s Michael Jackson,” referencing the famed beer writer. “I still stand by that. I can’t name another person in or out of the industry that has created calls to action like Barleywine is Life and beer styles like pastry stouts.”

That latter term is among many additions to the craft beer language that Kidd has made. 

“When everyone started tossing desserts and sweet adjuncts into stouts, Alex coined the term pastry stout,” recalls BiL’s Simond. “It wasn’t initially meant to be a positive description, but it took off and was immediately embraced by breweries and added to labels. Witnessing the real-world impact of that silliness as it played out was pretty funny.”

The joke landed hardest when the phrase ended up in a headline in the Chicago Tribune. Kidd jokes that his wife probably wishes he could figure out how to monetize others’ use of the phrase.

Brewers also note that Kidd has influenced not just how but what they brew. 

“I can say for sure that we wouldn’t make this much [barleywine] if he wasn’t one of the champions of the style,” Pool says. “I think Barleywine is Life became its own thing. Any time we post about the beer, the first comments are #barleywineislife. It was an obscure style that maybe your dad drank. But now it’s a mark of pride when someone wins a medal for one. I think his name has become synonymous with barleywine.”

Veliky agrees. He notes that before Kidd promoted the barleywine style, Revolution’s staff was torn about how often to produce its well-regarded Straight Jacket series. They worried the brewery couldn’t sell very much and considered moving production to once every few years. Now, Revolution releases four different barrel-aged beers in cans and bases hugely popular special events around them. “And it’s 100-percent due to him,” Veliky says.

For his part, Kidd downplays his importance to brewers, drawing a connection to the movie Fantasia. He told a beer podcast that people view him as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice for barleywine, where he directs breweries to create more barleywine and every time he cuts one down, three more appear. He insists that’s not the case and his impact is limited. As many note, however, the style was largely moribund before he started promoting it.

Others see Kidd’s work as having a financial impact beyond barleywine sales. 

“Because his reviews were so perceptive, it built a trust within the beer community at large,” says Simond. “So, when he gave a beer a glowing review, no matter how small or obscure the brewery, there’d be a run for it. I have no doubt that breweries have had a perceptible financial impact from his positive reviews.”

Beyond beer, Kidd is most proud of staking out distinct positions in favor of political and cultural issues, especially related to the treatment of people of color and under-represented communities. At first he was hesitant to enter the fray but that changed during the pandemic and in response to police shootings of Black Americans. 

He has since successfully turned DDB into a social justice platform, mobilizing his audience in support of good causes. In March 2020, when police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, in her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment, Kidd publicly decried the killing on his social media pages. He also hosted a fundraiser for her family, helping raise $67,000 by coordinating rare beers for auction.

Kidd hears words of support from brewers who support his views but also fear potential financial repercussions for going public. He understands their concerns and is happy to work with them behind the scenes to support his campaigns. “In a way, it became like a safe space for brewers that wanted to say something but didn’t want to take the heat from their own fan base,” he says. “They could launder that position through me and nobody’s gonna stop buying their beer.”

He also appreciates that the financial security afforded by his legal job allows him the freedom to take controversial public positions. “The worst thing that can happen to me is I go back to being a lawyer,” he says. He also loses followers any time he posts something political, but he doesn’t care. 

“I’m content to lose those people, that’s fine.” 

Kidd has also coordinated charity efforts in support of the service that provides him psychological counseling for his cancer diagnosis. In a come full circle moment, Kidd raffled off a Soleil De Minuit, the Cantillon beer he once paid $1,800 to secure, to raise money for counseling for others.

“I had bought it for a show and was going to apportion it into very tiny juice boxes for the audience,” Kidd says. When he started receiving rare bottles for the auction, he decided to sell them. The auction raised $10,000. “I don’t get my little attention seeking stunt, but other people get counseling and the world’s a better place I guess.”

Brewers also appreciate Kidd’s smaller efforts towards promoting inclusivity in the beer industry, even in the form of a simple beer review. “I really appreciate that Alex took the time to try Biere de Queer, which is a 7.4-percent Mai Tai inspired beer that is dear to my heart,” McKnight says. “I originally made it for National Coming Out Day to give queer people visibility beyond PRIDE month in June. Alex took the time to try it and give space for those who it also resonates with. Small gestures like that are what make marginalized people feel included in the beer world. I’m so thankful for his support.”

Veliky, like so many others, believes Kidd is a positive force for good in the beer industry. 

“You’re never going to totally win the war on self-awareness, but boy has he won a lot of battles in terms of basically calling out everything that needs to be called out, finding a way to not make it attacking,” he says. “He has everybody kind of looking in the mirror a little bit more.”

Legacy Is A Loaded Word

In the final minutes of our conversation, which has spanned almost six hours over multiple telephone calls, Kidd catches me tripping on my words in the final question. 

“It’s weird, I noticed you didn’t want to use the legacy word because it’s kind of too heavy for it and I think about that as well.”

Since we last spoke a few months ago, Kidd had transitioned to maintenance chemo, a cancer treatment that involves regularly administering drugs to keep his Stage 4 cancer under control. He was busy raising his son, who recently turned three, and his daughter Paloma, who was born in September of 2023. He was back to work full-time and trying to manage the chaos that is raising young children, while also managing cancer.

He spoke with his surgeon in mid-July and found out his lung tumors had grown 15 to 20-percent. The surgeon told him chemo would keep him at stasis but encouraged him to take a more aggressive tack: thoracoscopic lung surgery to remove the tumors.

“It’s funny, this would be the worst thing that happened to most people in their life,” he says. “But for me, this is nothing.” He says it’s easier than his liver and colon surgeries and other procedures and treatments to date. And after he recovers from the surgery, they have to operate on his other lung and do it all over again. “I’m like, ‘Whatever, let’s do it.” The first surgery is scheduled for early August.

It’s a trope that a cancer diagnosis clarifies things and gives perspective. Kidd appreciates this and is in the inevitable place of reflecting on his relatively short life, taking stock, and questioning his decisions. “You never know the ‘correct way to conduct your life,’” he says. “You can’t help but start thinking about your different path than the one that you’re on. There are the opportunity costs to any given thing. I spent so much of my life going to law school, setting up all these things, getting a house, moving to San Diego, fighting to get my kids. And once I’m all set up, it’s like, boom. No matter what I did, I was gonna get hit with this Stage 4 cancer.”

“I think one of the toxic aspects of that cancer frustration is you end up resenting other people’s lives when they’re easier,” he observes. “And that obviously doesn’t help anything but it’s also liberating and freeing in a weird way. It’s so absolving, because I used to beat myself up, ‘Why didn’t I go all in on comedy? Maybe I could have made it that way.’ It’s something that rolls around in my brain.”

While Kidd sometimes laments not traveling more, or opening his own law firm, he knows these are just passing thoughts inevitable to his current situation. 

“Ultimately, if you’re fighting this boss cancer, out of nowhere, all that stuff does not matter at all,” he says. “Because ultimately, I would end up in the exact same place. So, it’s frustrating on one end, but you also realize, because you get so colossally fucked over, that none of this matters. All these things that I thought were such a big deal, ultimately are not that important at all.”

One thing he knows for sure is he wishes he knew that his grandfather had died from colon cancer at age 57. Had he known, he could’ve pushed for an earlier colonoscopy.

Kidd has long appreciated that nothing is given, that he must continue to grind, and not sit around to see what happens. That was his response to the beer industry’s support for him. 

“It truly was like, ‘Well, now I can’t quit,’” he says. “If I ever had this idea that I could just diagnose and dip out, I can’t. There are too many people that care enough to donate.”

He looks through the thousands of donor names on his GoFundMe and recognizes many of them. “I know that guy, he doesn’t have any money because he’s a keg washer in Ohio. And he’s donating fifty bucks. It’s one of those things where I mean this much to people who are just getting by. I can’t just skate out.”

Kidd is also using his platform to encourage people to get regular cancer screenings, even if it means lying to their doctors to combat insurance company practices. “It’s not ideal and kind of fucked up but these are important things.” He tries to be open and honest with his audience about his symptoms and the need for proactive testing, especially for people that drink a lot of beer and don’t have the best diets.

Despite its importance, he still worries about talking to his audience too much about cancer. 

“The one thing I don’t want is to go this route of performative oversharing, which is big in the LA comedy scene,” he says. “There’s no jokes. It’s just literally trauma dumping. I don’t want DDB to be that. But I do want people to get checked and be aware. We want to get you healthy, and then still make funny stuff along the way.”

Kidd can no longer drink alcohol so he’s recently transitioned to reviewing non-alcoholic beers. He’s thankful that his cancer diagnosis corresponds with the great renaissance in alcohol-free beer and that his audience has stayed with him with the switch to NA-focused content. 

Experiencing a whole different side of beer has been eye-opening, allowing him to plunge into new areas. He also appreciates the irony of transitioning from the world’s rarest beers to those anyone can have sent directly to their house.

“I buttered my bread with inaccessibility and gatekeeping rare beer,” he laughs. “Because you can get NA beer shipped to 42 states, everyone gets to weigh in and earnestly say, ‘DDB, you’re wrong, this one is good.’”

Never a Wasted Day

Paloma Kidd is now nine months old, with an expressive, spitfire personality, according to her dad. 

And with no encouragement from Kidd, his son Soren loves doing goofy characters, performing, and trying to make people laugh. He and his wife have tried to be honest with him about his dad’s cancer, especially when Kidd is tired or connected to a medicine pump, but they try to blunt the impact on him.

“We don’t like to oversell it to him,” Kidd notes. “I think that’s one of the most important things is just having him not affected like that.”

Kidd continues to try and find a life balance and still regularly produces content.

“I don’t think I’m a life changing force for a lot of people,” he reflects. “But I think that there are people whose lives are a little bit better, having read maybe some of the jokes or seeing the things along the way that I enjoyed making. I just hope that people were like, ‘That was cool. We got some good laughs for a decade.’ I’d like to think I added a degree of reflection to it that is also fun and worthwhile.”

Since 1979 All About Beer has offered engaging and in-depth articles and interviews covering every aspect of brewing and beer culture. Our journalism needs your support. Please visit our Patreon Page to show your appreciation for independent beer writing. 

The post From Fresno to Famous: Alex Kidd Brings Life To Beer first appeared on All About Beer.

Fonta Flora Brewery’s Todd Boera has brewed with a variety of locally-grown ingredients, from carrots and kiwis to grain and even bread.

What he hasn’t had the luxury of brewing with, however, is space.

At the brewery and tasting room in the Appalachian town of Morganton, North Carolina, Boera brews on a 3.5-barrel system. The brewing space is confined to just 300 square feet. The tasting room comprises the bulk of the building, where fans of the brewery frequently flock for the brewery’s regular releases.

Boera and his business partners, brothers Mark and David Bennett, opened the brewery in 2013, and it didn’t take them long to outgrow it. A few doors down from the brewery in a building that’s not open to the public is a 3,000-square-foot cellar space filled with additional tanks, barrels and bottles.

Soon, Boera will have more than enough space. About 20 minutes away from Morganton in the small town of Nebo, the team at Fonta Flora is hard at work building a farmhouse brewery on more than eight acres. Shortoff Mountain towers in the distance, and the land is surrounded by Lake James State Park.

Boera first saw a for sale sign in 2015. The seller initially didn’t want to subdivide the 53 acres, but after a year and a half of negotiations the brewery was able to sign a conservation easement with the Foothills Conservancy of North Carolina to protect the land from future development.

“This was I think the property that we all just completely were enamored with and fell in love with,” says Boera. “Surprisingly there weren’t a ton of pieces of property in this area that were for sale and had what this place had.”

The land was once home to the Whippoorwill dairy farm. While cows no longer graze the property, two buildings of stacked stone remain. One was a milking parlor, a drain trench running straight down the center. This building will be used for sour beer production and barrel storage, while the other will likely hold a coolship.

While Fonta Flora was able to keep these two stone buildings, the property’s large barn—which was initially going to house the brewery—was deemed structurally unsound. The brewery is constructing a new barn that will hold the brewhouse as well as a tasting room (the latter pending approval by the county). Plans are to start brewing later this year, and to open to the public in 2018.

While the tasting room in Morganton is right off Interstate 40, visiting the new brewery requires a longer (but more scenic) drive through rural Burke County. Boera is excited by the prospects of a “destination brewery,” even if it might not make sense from a traditional business perspective.

“Let’s build a brewery without any amenities and away from a population source,” he says. “I guarantee you people are looking at us and they either think that we’re insane, or they’re insanely jealous of what we’re doing. I think those are the two trains of opinions. I think we’re a little bit of both.”

The new property, of course, isn’t completely without amenities. In addition to the old stone buildings and the new brewery itself, the grounds will be filled with gardens and orchards. Boera wants visitors to be able to spend a day at the brewery not just enjoying the beers, but the property as well.

“The big picture of this is going to be a really interactive experience for people,” Boera says. “Nothing’s going to be closed off. I want to have a coolship room, and for the door to it to be unlocked so as people are coming through they can just open up the door and peek in and see the coolship. We want people to be able to walk around the grounds. What’s the point of having something like this if everything is just fenced off?”

The new venture is a return to the land for Boera, who studied sustainable agriculture at Warren Wilson College in nearby Swannanoa. Once, a professor at the school asked Boera if he had land or came from a wealthy family. While it was at first off-putting, Boera said it was a legitimate question for someone with a desire to farm.

“What do you do with a sustainable agriculture degree if you don’t have money to buy land or if you don’t have land in your family?” he asks. “Apparently you start a brewery.”

Fonta Flora has already planted persimmon and pawpaw trees on the property, and Boera envisions a day when they can grow beets for Beets, Rhymes and Life (an Appalachian saison brewed with local beets) or carrots for Alpha vs. Beta Carotene (an IPA brewed with local carrots).

While the plan is to plant a variety of annual crops, Boera acknowledges the brewery will never be able to grow all of the produce it requires, especially since they’re moving up to a much larger 15-barrel brewhouse. And even if he could, he wouldn’t want to.

“The human aspect of connecting with the farms has been one of my favorite things about Fonta Flora,” Boera says. “Going out and seeing these farms, and shaking these folks’ hands, and writing them big ol’ checks.”

Last year, the brewery purchased 2,500 pounds of strawberries from Barbee Farms in Concord—all used on the small 3.5-barrel system. Boera anticipates buying two or three tons next year, and going through “an absurd amount of fruit” at the new brewery.

Much of the fruit will no doubt be used in Fonta Flora’s farmhouse ales, for which the brewery is most well-known. Actually being able to brew these farmhouse styles in a rustic setting, he says, is a blessing and a privilege.

“The ability to be making farmhouse beer on an actual farmhouse, on a really beautiful piece of land is great,” he says, while acknowledging that breweries like Free Range Brewing in Charlotte, North Carolina, capture the farmhouse spirit in an urban environment. “I think for me there are plenty of breweries that are on farms, that don’t really embody to me what it means to be a farmhouse brewery. They happen to have that location, but I don’t think they have that soul.”

Fonta Flora has had that soul since it opened in 2013. The new brewery, the gardens, the farm buildings themselves—it’s all an extension of what they have worked on for the last four years.

“When people come out here and are able to walk around here and see the gardens we’re able to plant, and the fruit orchards we’ve already started,” says Boera. “For us, this is everything. It helps us tell the story.”

Daniel Hartis is the editor of All About Beer Magazine. 

The post Todd Boera, Brewer and Co-Founder at Fonta Flora Brewery first appeared on All About Beer.

It was toward the end of September 2006, and a 64-year-old Englishman was making his way through the Denver airport. He was rotund, with an ample belly and shaggy grayish hair spilling in curls from every part of his scalp save the balding front. He sported a similarly grayish beard that seemed in need of a trim, and his eyebrows were arched, as if signaling perpetual surprise at his surroundings.

The man was catching a flight back home to London. But he never made it.

He instead found himself in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He was having what turned out to be a mild heart attack and drifting from consciousness.

That did not stop the paramedics from asking for his autograph.

And that did not surprise Michael Jackson, the Englishman just then skirting death, in the least. Jackson had by that point been the foremost beer critic on the planet for nearly 30 years. In areas dense with ale and lager aficionados, including Denver, which had just hosted the 25th annual Great American Beer Festival that September, he was famous—or famous enough that, when he introduced himself as “Michael Jackson,” people didn’t laugh. They knew he wasn’t the pop star, but a rock star unto himself.

He made it back before the end of 2006 to his home in London’s Hammersmith neighborhood, where he got back to work in an attached office that, improbably enough, had once housed a brewery.

Work for Jackson often meant travel. The next year, Jackson visited Turkey for a brewery’s unveiling of a wheat beer; to Italy, for the debut of a book of his writing tied to the Slow Food phenomenon; and to Poland (twice), again for the promotion of a collection of his translated writings. He also started planning a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia.

All the while, he continued to crank out commentary for various publications, including All About Beer Magazine, for which he had written regularly since 1984.

It was quite the year, all the more remarkable because of what we know now: In September 2006, Michael Jackson had less than a year to live.

His passing the following August—from another heart attack—capped an improbable rise that seems just as unlikely now, 10 years after his death, as when Jackson commenced it four decades ago.

To fuel that rise, Jackson mined two sources: one a stroke of luck, the other a stroke of genius.

Jackson was born and raised in northern England’s Leeds area, one of three children of Jack and Margaret Jackson (though his twin brother died shortly after birth). Jack Jackson was the son of Jewish-Lithuanian immigrants who had intended to go to America but made it only as far as the U.K.

It was Jack who anglicized the family name of Jakowitz to Jackson, hence etymologically connecting his son to the future King of Pop.

The Jacksons lived comfortably, though not lavishly, amid the U.K.’s postwar austerity, Jack earning enough as a truck driver to purchase a house after a stint in the English equivalent of public housing. It was a warm, inviting family for Michael and his sister, Heather, to grow up in—one of Jackson’s fondest memories was of his father waking him to listen to boxing matches together on the wireless—and included visits to their immigrant grandparents’ place as well as bountiful meals of rich food in the Eastern European and Jewish traditions.

Michael would leave school, and much of this home life, at 16 to become a reporter with a local newspaper in the Leeds area. It was here he first wrote for money about beer.

The pitch to his editor was simple, as Jackson recalled decades later: a series called “This Is Your Pub,” wherein the underage Jackson would visit that staple of English life and report on its characters and offerings.

“So you’re asking me to finance you on a lawbreaking escapade?” his editor asked.

“Yes,” Jackson replied, not missing a beat.

“I like your style,” the editor said. “Those are the kinds of reporters we want.”

“This Is Your Pub” would represent a kind of pre-1970s peak for Jackson and beer writing. He would spend the next decade, into his 20s, working various editorial jobs in British media, including as a reporter at the defunct Daily Herald newspaper. He also worked as a television producer and as an editor at Campaign, a weekly covering marketing and advertising.

As for beer, there was plenty. “Newspaper work at that time was a heady mix of hard graft and hard drinking,” a Guardian obituary of Jackson explained, “and Jackson’s devotion to good beer stemmed from that period.” As did his writing style: “short sentences shorn of adornment”—a kind of Hemingway meets your average travel writer.

There was also an unplanned bus trip into Belgium in the late 1960s, while on assignment in the neighboring Netherlands. “I knew nothing of Belgium,” Jackson would recall in a 2007 interview with importer Daniel Shelton. “One weekend in Belgium changed my life.”

The man and his moment—or pint, as it were—would not meet, however, until 1976, when another writer failed to produce a manuscript for a book on English pubs. Jackson stepped in and produced the reportage and the copy for The English Pub, a book filled with beautiful photographs detailing and depicting just what the title stated.

Jackson was already well at work on his next project when The English Pub came out. He had been collecting thoughts and notes on beer ever since that Belgian epiphany and now undertook to craft them into a landmark book on the drink. In part, a similarly landmark book on wine—Hugh Johnson’s The World Atlas of Wine in 1971—inspired Jackson.

Here was a thorough rundown of the world’s wine regions and styles, coming at a particularly fortunate time: The commercial wine industry was expanding rapidly beyond longtime hegemon France, with growth particularly strong in the U.S., where drier, finer styles such as merlot and chardonnay had just begun to outsell fortified, sweeter plonk.

There was no such book in the beer world, and that world was contracting rather than expanding. Fewer and fewer breweries were producing more and more of the world’s beer. In the U.S., the top five breweries produced more than half the beer on offer—and their share was increasing.

Still, Jackson sniffed an opportunity. He had partnered with two others on an illustrated book venture called Quarto (there were originally four partners) to produce The English Pub, and, in 1977, that London outfit published The World Guide to Beer.

It is difficult to overstate the book’s impact. Charles Finkel, a Seattle wine merchant who would in 1978 begin adding European beer imports to his repertoire, described his discovery of World Guide to the writer Stan Hieronymus as “like a heathen discovering the Bible. It answered all those questions that I had about top and bottom fermentation, about hops, about years, about the nature of beer and the history of beer, and traditions of beer and beer culture.”

While Jackson saw little to no profit from World Guide’s original run—Quarto continued without him and is still a nonfiction publisher—its success among industry people and aficionados opened doors. By the mid-1980s, he was writing regularly about beer for the Washington Post, Playboy and Britain’s Guardian as well as trade publications such as All About Beer Magazine and Zymurgy.

By the end of that decade, Jackson was drawing his income from writing about beer (and whiskey, another topic dear to his palate). And his biggest success was yet to come: A six-episode television series called The Beer Hunter that dropped in the early 1990s in North America and Europe. In the U.S., it aired on the Discovery Channel, which then reached about 38 million households.

The working-class high-school dropout from Leeds had not only all but invented the role of beer critic, he had also brought beer to potentially tens of millions of eyeballs—all at a time when it looked like certain types of beer, and certainly many breweries, were simply disappearing forever.

How did he do it, exactly?

“If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style.” That was Jackson toward the start of World Guide.

With a generation’s hindsight, it’s an unremarkable statement. But in 1977, it was positively revolutionary. Jackson was the first critic to write for a consumer audience about beer styles in much the same way that wine critics had long written of wine styles. Before Jackson, beers were fitted into “divisions,” “species,” “types,” “varieties” and “classes,” but never styles.

That etymological flourish by itself would have made his contribution to the beery canon memorable. But he spent the next three decades refining and expanding it, putting on quite an intellectual performance for a subject not used to the scrutiny.

The painter Bruegel might come up in a discussion of lambic, or topography in an examination of the origin of lager, or immigration in the rise of beer in the U.S. Throughout, too, Jackson dove into the technical nitty-gritty of Plato, IBU, ABV, etc., as well as the back stories of breweries and brewers, hop farmers and beer merchants.

Others had touched similar shores. James D. Robertson, an engineer who discovered the possibilities of beer while working in West Germany, began writing guides in the late 1970s, and his 1982 Connoisseur’s Guide to Beer enjoyed updated editions. Fred Eckhardt, whose beer epiphany came while serving as a Marine in East Asia in the 1950s, wrote extensively on the drink beginning as early as 1968, with a particular emphasis on West Coast breweries.

None did it with such depth as Jackson, though, nor did they lead with that idea about styles.

And that was the other thing about Jackson: timing. During a presser for his World Guide to Whisky, a 1987 book almost as influential for that beverage as its counterpart was for beer, a Scottish journalist asked where an Englishman got the nerve to write so authoritatively about Scotland’s de facto national drink. Another Scottish reporter piped up immediately: “Because none of us did, dummy!”

Jackson hit beer style hard and often. For 30 sustained years, his word on the subject was often the last word—and an enduring one. Jackson didn’t live to taste an imperial session IPA, for instance, but it’s impossible to discuss such iterations without at least, consciously or unconsciously, referencing his writing on IPAs in general.

The critic’s impeccable timing also benefited from events in the American marketplace entirely beyond his control: a 1976 excise tax cut in the U.S. that fostered the rise of smaller breweries, legalization of homebrewing at the federal level the following year, the formation of the American Homebrewers Association and the precursor to the Brewers Association the year after that, and just the general first stirrings of what came to be called craft beer in the U.S. and Canada.

In Europe, meanwhile, small brewers looked with wistful eyes toward anyone and anything that might reverse beer’s increasing homogenization and invigorate some of the old ways.

It didn’t hurt that once he had the timing down, Jackson never let go of the beat. Martyn Cornell, a British beer critic, once recalled Jackson dropping in on a group of fellow critics at a Brussels pub. Fresh in from judging a beer festival in Finland, he set about “taking extensive notes on every beer, photographing those bottles he hadn’t already got pictures of, while the rest of us were happy just to slurp and trough.”

What finally curbed this work ethic came to light one winter evening in the late 1990s. Jackson and his longtime partner, Paddy Gunningham, were walking through London. It was cold, and they held hands in one of the pockets of Jackson’s Crombie coat, which he had inherited from Gunningham’s father.

Gunningham felt Jackson’s hand shake, and not from the chill. She implored him to visit a doctor. A Parkinson’s diagnosis followed, and Jackson’s health soon started visibly deteriorating.

In late 2006, after the Denver heart attack, he disclosed his Parkinson’s publicly, including in what turned out to be his last column for All About Beer, published in November 2007. He wrote of the episode in Denver and plans for the future. Those plans included a memoir on the battle with Parkinson’s called I Am Not Drunk—“many friends had been concerned that my profession had taken its most obvious toll.”

Those who knew Jackson well knew he wouldn’t slow down, that the memoir would happen if he was given the chance.

He wasn’t. On Aug. 30, 2007, he collapsed in his Hammersmith office.

“My previous travels had taken me from Poland to Patagonia,” Jackson wrote in that final column. “Now I had pursued a journey almost to the end of my life. As occasionally happens, I had missed the plane I had intended to take.”

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition, and the new Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.

The post Remembering the Bard of Beer: Why There Will Never Be Another Michael Jackson first appeared on All About Beer.

It is good to see Ralph Steadman in America.

Because had the venerated painter of beautiful grotesqueries made good on his threat to never return, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would be weaker for it.

In the early 1970s the Englishman Steadman, now the go-to artist for Flying Dog Brewery, found himself in Newport, Rhode Island, with a new friend. One night he clambered into a rowboat, propelled by this friend, with the purpose of spray-painting “Fuck the Pope!” in red onto the white hull of an America’s Cup yacht. Spotted by armed security, the pair escaped only after the friend blasted orange volleys from an emergency flare gun to terrify their pursuers. Then the friend smuggled Steadman onto a jet to New York City. He landed penniless, shoeless and crazed.

“I got a letter saying he’d never come to this country again, and certainly not as long as I was here,” the friend told an interviewer in 1974.

That friend, of course, was Hunter S. Thompson, the late, hysterical Gonzo journalist whose searing embrace of the freest of free expression found its perfect visual pairing in Steadman’s art.

Steadman, 80, was guest of honor on the Upper East Side of New York City in September for a career retrospective at the Society of Illustrators. He wore brown loafers, a sport coat and a striped dress shirt with talismans hanging around his neck. All four floors of the cozy and well-lit gallery’s walls were adorned with his phantasmagoric images. So were the bottles of Flying Dog beer handed out from buckets of ice at the opening gala.

The beer was tribute to Steadman’s unintentional late-career turn from more than just inimitable illustrator, now also First Amendment crusader.

“It’s fatuous nonsense, a prissy approach to something,” he said in a warm English accent when asked about the Flying Dog lawsuits.

In 2009 the Michigan Liquor Control Commission banned Flying Dog’s Raging Bitch IPA because of the word “bitch,” which in Steadman’s hands became a red scrawl above an image of a hallucinogenic, devilish canine. The label was, the commission ruled, “detrimental to the health, safety and welfare of the general public.”

Jim Caruso, CEO of Flying Dog, which is based in Frederick, Maryland, said at the gala that he had reflected on the fact that Michigan is a state whose musical contributions to the First Amendment domain include such raging acts as the MC5, Iggy Pop, Ted Nugent and Eminem. This line of thinking led him to wonder if a state could yank from liquor stores a beer called “Raging Bitch,” might it next pull from record stores the classic Miles Davis record “Bitches Brew”?

“Freedom of speech is always under attack,” he said, a sweating Raging Bitch in hand. He added that his grandparents had fled Russia for the freedoms offered in America. “You’ve got to push back; regulators have to operate within the constitution.”

But the Michigan case was not even Flying Dog’s first Steadman-involved dust-up with censors.

Fifteen years earlier, Caruso asked Thompson—a regular he became friends with at the Woody Creek Tavern in Pitkin County, Colorado—to introduce him to Steadman. He wanted a striking logo for his new brewery. Steadman painted the V-image that looks like a butterfly from hell or a bat through a kaleidoscope that is now the official emblem of Flying Dog.

“This was breakthrough art for the beer industry in 1995,” Caruso said. “We see it and we were like, ‘We love it!’ It was just so entertaining and funny.”

But Steadman added more. Musing on a Celtic quote often repeated by Thompson, “Good People Drink Good Beer,” he painted the words, “Good Beer No Shit.”

When those words appeared on beer labels, the Colorado State Liquor Board banned them. This meant pulling from shelves bottles of Doggie Style Pale Ale and Road Dog Scottish Ale. Caruso sued the state and was joined in his lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. Meanwhile, he tweaked his labels to read, “Good Beer, No Censorship.”

In 2001 a court ruled in favor of Flying Dog over the State of Colorado. In 2015 another did the same over the State of Michigan.

“This is about so much more than a beer label,” Caruso said. “It’s a huge, big fucking deal.”

Steadman, meanwhile, with the bemused and creative kookiness that made him both great company and a perfect artistic foil for Thompson, rambled about the mad dog bureaucrats who tried to censor him.

“How stupid they were,” he chuckled. “They seem to think you can’t possibly put that on a beer label. That was quite actually a bit of fun, ‘Good Beer No Shit.’ ‘What? I’m a shit expert you mean?’ I try not to say the word too much, any more than I like to say ‘Trump.’ That word was a fart once! Donald Fart. All dogs show their private parts, don’t they?”

A pair of teens approached Steadman and asked if he would try a new artistic medium with them—a selfie. “I thought I was a bit of a visual polluter,” he told them. Then a last tangent of questions. Could we soon expect from Flying Dog, say, a barley wine called “Fuck the Pope?” He laughed. And what did he remember about climbing in the boat that night with Thompson?

“Hunter asked, ‘Are you religious?’” he said. 

The post Ralph Steadman: Flying Dog Artist and First Amendment Crusader first appeared on All About Beer.

Beer Dave pulls a can of Uinta Trader Session IPA out of his cooler, flips it upside down, looks around and shakes his head.

“Need a church key,” he says, heading off to borrow one.

Opening it from the top, using the tab Uinta thoughtfully provided, is not an option. Church key—a device otherwise known as a beer can opener—in hand, he pops two triangular holes in the bottom and fills a glass. This is how beer can collectors do it. And Dave Gausepohl, more often simply called Beer Dave, is a collector of all things beer. Beer Dave is also a beer tourist who has visited more than 3,400 American breweries. Beer Dave brewed beer for a living before he began selling beer for a living. Beer Dave’s various hobbies and jobs look much like a Venn diagram, independent but intersecting.

“This was good,” he says on another June day, en route to his home outside Cincinnati after visiting White Squirrel Brewery in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He took a picture of the front, as he always does; drank pints of two of the house beers on tap; toured the brewhouse; and bought a glass with the brewery’s logo on it. The guest taps included two beers that he represents as specialty beer manager for Heidelberg Distributing in Kentucky. “So I got to call on an account,” he says.

It was the 3,375th brewery he visited since his father took him to the Geo. Wiedemann Brewery in Newport, Kentucky, in 1977. He was 12 years old and had already been collecting cans for three years. He has about 15,000 now, just a small portion of his collection of roughly three quarters of a million brewery-related items.

“Not Haydockian,” Beer Dave says, referring to his friends and sometimes traveling companions, Herb and Helen Haydock, who have acquired two lifetimes’ worth of breweriana.

The numbers are something beyond impressive, but they are not how Beer Dave became Beer Dave. When he went to work as the specialty beer buyer for the Party Source, a package store, in Bellevue, Kentucky, in 1995, the store already had a wine buyer by the name of Dave. The office manager suggested he take the name Beer Dave, and two days later a Beer Dave name tag arrived. Friends in his various circles had no problem embracing it.

He already owned the name, but a few years ago a collecting friend, Don Johnston, decided he and others would trademark Beer Dave for him. That got put on hold when Johnston became ill, and eventually died. Now Johnston’s son, a trademark and patent attorney, has resumed the process to acquire the mark, because it was important to his father. “It’s not like I’m going to put a circle after it when I sign my name,” Beer Dave says. (He, thankfully, does not speak of himself in the third person.)

What mattered is that it was important to Johnston. “He was like a second father to me,” Beer Dave says. “The hobby means a lot to me,” which is why he wrote a column about beer collectibles for this magazine for five years. “The hobby is my family.”

He treats every gathering of collectors like a reunion. “Hey, how are you, Anne?” he asks on the first Saturday in June, offering her something from a carefully packed cooler that contains both interesting cans and interesting beers. He’d been on the road before dawn to drive five hours to Swap-O-Rama just outside of St. Louis. “How you doing, Charley?” he says, starting a conversation about an upcoming event. “I’ll help you in any way, shape or form.”

After a Brewery Collectibles Club of America (BCCA) board meeting, his cooler becomes a natural gathering spot. He knows who is more likely to want to try an IPA and who prefers cider. He often also knows what special cans they are looking for.

“You’ve got to see this,” he says at mid-afternoon, heading around the corner where a large pile of beer cans sits that will soon be under attack. This is called a “can dump.” BCCA members donate cans that they are tired of hauling around, then all who want to wade in to grab whatever catches their eye. He should have said, “You’ve got to hear this,” because cans bouncing off of each other create an eerie metallic chirping sound. “There aren’t going to be any $500 jewels, but maybe you’ll find something that is a little bit better than a can you have, an upgrade. Or maybe a placeholder,” he says, excusing himself when he spots a can—from Rahr Green Bay Brewing Co.—he’ll end up taking home with him.

His collection includes half a hand-decorated wooden crate from New Albion Brewing. He particularly treasures it because Don Barkley, who had worked at New Albion and then helped start Mendocino Brewing, gave the crate to Beer Dave and Herb Haydock when they visited Mendocino in 1991. Gausepohl and Haydock carefully pulled the nails from it to split it into two parts. They have a deal that the first to die bequeaths his half to the other.

“Now you have a brewery starting up, they don’t have nearly the things to go through that (New Albion founder) Jack McAuliffe did,” Beer Dave says. “They say, ‘Oh, how am I going to pick a wholesaler?’ How about when nobody wanted your beer?”

Beer Dave’s boyish looks—accentuated by an impish turn of the mouth when he delivers a pun he is particularly proud of—would fool most carneys, but he turned 50 last December, and it has been more than 40 years since one of his sisters, Sally, handed him an empty 7-ounce can of Pabst that put him in the middle of this Venn diagram.

The range of his experience is evident on a Friday evening in May. He sits on one side of the expansive patio of Lexington’s newest brewery, Ethereal Brewing, choosing a spot where he can take it all in. The brewery is located on a former distillery campus, and there is plenty of space for other businesses to fill in around it. Owner John Bishop—who earlier simply identified himself as the father of one of the brewers—is busy rounding up empty glasses. Beer Dave has seen “the dad” chip in plenty of times, but this still makes him smile.

“Belgian (style) beer in Lexington. Who would have thought it?” he says, soon talking about the lagers from Blue Stallion Brewing, then a collaboration beer from Country Boy Brewing and West Sixth Brewing released earlier in the day, kicking off Lexington Beer Week. He is people watching.

“There’s another dad,” he says.

“Hipster.”

“You’d see them at Country Boy.”

“Not them.”

Of course Beer Dave has been there. That’s why he’s Beer Dave. Well, one of the reasons.

The post Beer’s No. 1 Super Fan first appeared on All About Beer.

Each year All About Beer Magazine publishes a feature on people in the industry. This year we asked our regular contributors, industry insiders and readers to tell us about the “Unsung Brewers”: the heroes of wort, barrel aging and general production. The following profiles reflect just a small percentage of the many talented professionals who make beer but may be largely unknown by name.

The post The Unsung Brewer first appeared on All About Beer.

The spirit and diversity in the beer industry come from its people. The men and women who do more than just make beer: They inspire, educate and innovate, and they elevate the beverage beyond the glass. Several months ago, we asked the journalists who work for All About Beer Magazine to nominate people in the beer world who they believe are making a difference. There are brewers included, of course, but there are many others who rarely venture near a mash tun, but rather are finding ways to promote beer, create new inventions or advance beer culture.

You can read all of the profiles in the November 2014 issue of All About Beer Magazine, and we’ll also be sharing some of the profiles here during the coming weeks.

Interviews and profiles by Tom Acitelli, Jeff Alworth, Erika Bolden, Randy Clemens, Stan Hieronymus, John Holl, Ben Keene, Tara Nurin, Dan Rabin, Adrienne So, Heather Vandenengel, Gerard Walen and Brian Yaeger.

Bob Pease (Brewers Association)

Julia Herz (Brewers Association)

Gayle Goschie (Goschie Farms)

Lisa Zimmer (MillerCoors)

Jesse Friedman and Damian Fagan (Almanac Beer Co.)

Ting Su (Eagle Rock Brewery)

Governor Andrew Cuomo (New York)

Mariah Calagione (Dogfish Head Craft Brewery)

Ray Daniels (Cicerone Certification Program)

Greg Avola and Tim Mather (Untappd)

Sarah Johnson (Mandalay Bay)

Patrick McGovern (University of Pennsylvania Museum)

Tom Shellhammer (Oregon State University)

Kate Baker and Suzanne Schalow (Craft Beer Cellar)

Tom Nielsen (Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.) 

Gary Spedding (Brewing and Distilling Analytical Services)

Alastair Pringle (Pringle-Scott LLC)

Jay Lesher (Cigar City Brewing)

Tom Griffin (The Barrel Guy)

Linus Hall (Yazoo Brewing Co.)

Tom Hennessy (Frankenbrew)

Denise Ratfield (Pink Boots Society and Stone Brewing Co.)

Craig Hendry (Raise Your Pints)

The post Beer Innovators: Meet the People Impacting the Beer World first appeared on All About Beer.

Today, Andreas Bogk won’t name the employee who let him in, and he won’t tell you exactly where this took place: What they did was more or less illegal, after all, and Andreas is nothing if not cautious, rarely saying more than he really has to. In all likelihood he could have just broken into the lab himself, cracking the lock on the door or performing a clever bit of social engineering to scam his way inside, but Andreas likes to make things easy when he can, and having a friend with a key is a lot simpler than hacking a passcode or picking a lock.

Once it was clear that nobody was going to spot them, the intruders set up shop. They borrowed a state-of-the-art clean bench—a futuristic, glass-enclosed laboratory work station that was guaranteed to be free of foreign contaminants, thanks to a process known as “laminar flow.” They prepared agar plates for culturing microbes and carefully sanitized the bottle that Andreas had brought in with him: a 25-year-old Berliner Weisse from a long-defunct brewery in what used to be East Germany, pouring two small glasses to drink while carefully leaving the precious sediment behind. “It had that cheesy character from oxidized hops,” Andreas recalls, though he keeps the other details of that night to himself. “But it had a nice and complex aroma like a well-aged wine.”

As the trespassers sipped their well-aged brew, they spread the sediment out on the agar plates. With any luck, it would still contain a few living cells of a wild yeast that had disappeared some two decades earlier.

Saving Berliner Weisse

Like a lot of people, I first heard about Andreas Bogk through his crowdfunding project a year or so ago, coming across a link to a German-language Kickstarter-style site that boldly described his plan to “save” Berliner Weisse. One of the rare German sour beer styles, Berliner Weisse had just about gone extinct in its hometown, falling from 20 producers in 1920 to just one regular commercial example today. The last holdout, Berliner Kindl Weisse, is currently owned by the Oetker food conglomerate. To say that Kindl has lost a lot of character since its prime is fairly vague, but you get a better sense of what that means when you consider that Oetker is most famous as a producer of frozen pizzas.

Andreas left off the part about frozen pizzas on the online description of his crowdfunding project. He did note, however, that the celebrated beer from his hometown had been turned into a typical industrial product without much flavor, despite a celebrated history. In Europe, the term “Berliner Weisse” is limited by law to brews that are made in Berlin, much like “Champagne” is limited to a specific kind of sparkling wine from Champagne in France, though there are plenty of beers called Berliner Weisse coming out of craft breweries in the U.S. Andreas didn’t mention that many of the American versions had strayed far beyond the beer’s historic parameters: Traditionally, it’s a low-gravity wheat brew, usually containing less than 3% alcohol, which is fermented with regular brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces, as well as Lactobacillus, the kind of bacteria that is used to make yogurt and other sour foods. In his fundraising pitch, Andreas had two chief complaints. One was that the brewers of Berliner Kindl Weisse were now doing the Saccharomyces and Lactobacillus fermentations separately, instead of the mixed fermentation they had used originally, with both microbes working together, reducing the beer’s complexity. And more importantly, no modern version of the beer contained the original Brettanomyces yeast strain that was native to Berlin, something that Andreas was convinced was essential to the taste of a true Berliner Weisse.

This last part was a bit of a head-scratcher: Although Brett strains like bruxellensis and lambicus are celebrated components of many Belgian brews, the conventional wisdom had long said that wild yeast did not belong in Berliner Weisse, which was thought to be a simple sour wheat beer, without the fruitiness or funky notes that come from Brettanomyces. However, in 2008 Berlin’s VLB brewing institute had published a book which argued that the traditional aroma of Berliner Weisse was actually due to Brettanomyces. The problem was that this ostensibly wild yeast had not been included as an ingredient: The strain of Brettanomyces that created the correct aroma had appeared in Berliner Weisse naturally, simply by being present in the environment. For most kinds of beer and wine, Brettanomyces is considered a major spoilage agent, in part because it’s very hard to kill, often surviving for decades in equipment, barrels or bottles. Now that the traditional breweries of Berliner Weisse were gone, the only way for Andreas to get the original strain of Brettanomyces was to find an old sample of Berliner Weisse and see if anything was still alive inside.

On his crowdfunding page, Andreas offered one bottle of his new Berliner Weisse to anyone who pledged more than 20 euros; larger pledges would get the backer a full case or even a complete batch of beer. He needed the funding, he explained, to buy equipment and set up a small microbrewery, Bogk Bier. (One of Bogk Bier’s tag lines is that it’s “pronounced with a long O,” and in English the name roughly rhymes with “oak.”) Once he got his funding, Andreas promised to produce Berliner Weisse with a mixed fermentation, employing Saccharomyces and Lactobacillus together, as well as the original strain of Brettanomyces. His stated goal was a small brewery with a batch size of just 36 liters, or about nine-and-a-half gallons, and to do that he was trying to raise 3,000 euros in total, the equivalent of about $4,000.

This story appears in the July issue of All About Beer Magazine. Click here for a free trial of our next issue.

The post Born Again in Berlin first appeared on All About Beer.

Early last June of 2012, Brian Purcell, CEO and brewmaster of the soon-to-open Three Taverns Craft Brewery in Decatur, GA, took a seven-day beer tour of Belgium with his wife. He and his partner and CFO, Chet Burge, had almost reached their funding goal to open a Belgian-beer-inspired brewery, and the trip served as inspiration—in more ways than one.

“While touring breweries, I started to have this vision for bringing a Belgian brewer to the U.S. to work for us,” he says, calling from the brewery, which in early April was still a construction zone.

“I felt like there’s something in the DNA of Belgian brewers that you just can’t reproduce in an American brewer. At least it’s very hard, and I wanted to make as authentic Belgian-style beers as we can make, with an American creative twist or flair.”

Brewing Belgian beers had become an obsession for Purcell. As a homebrewer of 10 years, he dedicated himself to mastering Belgian-style brewing and learning as much as he could about Belgian beer. After four years of planning, his production brewery brewed its first batch in June.

“I learned that there are techniques, sensibilities, a philosophy or approach that Belgians have for brewing that is unique to that country, and I wanted to learn that and I wanted to discover it more,” he says of his Belgian trip.

Purcell’s pursuit—to bring a Belgian brewer to America to brew the best Belgian-inspired beer possible—raises questions of origin and its influence. How much does a brewer’s native culture influence his brewing? And what happens when a brewer makes beer in a brewing culture far different from his or her own?

The global brewing scene has become a melting pot, or mash tun, of beer cultures, styles and techniques. While Americans have always taken inspiration from other cultures and brewed styles that originated abroad, the relationship has grown stronger and shifted in a different direction. More and more, American brewers are drawn to the wild side of Belgian brewing, even investing in koelschips and isolating native yeasts, while some small Belgian brewers are brewing American-style IPAs and coming to the U.S. to brew collaboration beers.

It’s cross-cultural beer pollination, and nowhere is this more clear than in the stories of the pioneers—the brewers who were born, raised and trained in Old World brewing cultures of Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom and then came to brew in the States. While backed by tradition, they’re inspired by the potential for change and the chance to be immersed in America’s craft beer culture. Here are a few of their stories.

The post Roots Abroad, But America Calls first appeared on All About Beer.