What’s With All the Beer, Scott?

You may have noticed a theme with me and my writing: Beer.

In my profile picture, my face is mostly obscured by a great big pint of beery goodness. My monthly newsletter has a section dedicated to what I’m drinking (spoiler: it’s usually beer). My characters spend an inordinate amount of time drinking beer. Half the GIFs I use on Twitter are beer-themed. When I share a writing update, it’s usually with a picture of my laptop and a beer. I even ran an event for local authors called… wait for it… The Books and Beer Pop-up Bookstore. I’d round up 12-15 authors and we’d sell our books at a brewery for a day.

This may leave you wondering why exactly I’m so hung up on beer, and possibly how my liver is doing.

Honestly, if it weren’t for beer, those book I wrote (and you hopefully enjoyed) likely wouldn’t have been written. I do most of my writing at bars and breweries. Well, my afternoon/evening writing. Morning writing is at cafes and is fueled exclusively by coffee. I mean, come on. Beer in the morning? I’m not that guy. Usually not that guy. Hardly ever. Um, let’s move on.

Back to me, beer, and writing.

I like beer. That wasn’t always the case, though. Back in my college days in the mid-90s, ‘beer’ in Minnesota consisted mainly of the big name American light pilsners: Bud Light. Miller Light. Coors Light. If mainstream wasn’t your thing, you could get locally brewed pilsners like Hamm’s and Pig’s Eye. If you were a fancy-pants beer snob, you’d likely order an Amstel Light and look down your bottle at the plebian swine that settled for an American light beer when they could have ordered a light beer from, um. You know. Wherever Amstel is from. The point is that most of the beer around me when I was in my early drinking years was light light light beer, and I wasn’t a fan. I had decided that beer and me were not going to be friends, and that was that.

Until I tried a Newcastle Brown Ale.

When I realized beer could be more than Bud Light, something shifted deep inside me. No, not my liver, although it probably was cringing a bit at what was to come. It was more of an awakening to a wider world. A realization that maybe there was more out there than my little corner of the globe. I’m not going to go so far as to say that drinking a Newcastle resulted in me leaving my hometown of Minneapolis, MN and heading first to Chicago, IL in 1998 and then to Los Angeles, CA in 2003. But maybe it did. One sip—figurative or literal—of something new can shift the entire trajectory of your life.

In Chicago, I discovered a passion for storytelling. I started acting and even did a little directing. I was awful at both, but I loved the impact a well-told story could have on people. When I landed in L.A., I took a stab at writing a screenplay. I never finished it… as a screenplay… and if I’d stayed in L.A., that might’ve been the end of it. Once again, though, beer changed my life.

When I moved back to Minnesota in 2009, something unexpected was happening. It turns out that the reason why Minnesota had so few beery options was because of a bunch of prohibition-era laws. Those laws made it basically impossible for small brewers to succeed. The biggest hurdle was that you couldn’t sell your beer on premise. You could brew for distribution, but that was it. That meant you had to move enough beer through distribution to turn a profit. No easy task, especially for a new brewery. I won’t get into all the details, but in a nutshell, Surly Brewing was about to change that. The founder successfully advocated for a change to the laws, and the ensuing Surly Bill in 2011 opened the door for breweries to sell their own beer at their establishments. The craft beer taproom explosion started. All over town, entrepreneurial beer enthusiasts were setting up breweries and opening cool taprooms. Unlike the bars of my younger days—usually windowless piles of cinder blocks with drop ceilings and sticky carpet—destination breweries were becoming a thing. These weren’t simply places to drink, brood, and maybe blow fifty bucks cracking some pull tabs. These were hubs for the community. Kids were welcome. Dogs were welcome. They were lively and open and interesting and fun.

And the beer was amazing.

I started to frequent a few close-to-home breweries, and loved it. The people, the energy, and yes, the beer, was having an effect on me. That yearning inside of me to create and to share what I’d created was fermenting. I’m not sure what beer I was drinking when it happened, but I had an epiphany: that screenplay I’d started could become a novel. I gathered up my notes, grabbed a laptop, headed to a taproom, and started to write. Wisconsin Vamp was finished in early 2014, and I became a writer.

Now, I can’t imagine writing anywhere else. There is something indescribably satisfying about heading to the local brewery, ordering a pint, and exploring all the worlds inside my head.

So, that’s what’s with the beer. Cheers!

PS – Just checked in with my liver. So far, so good!