Given that I built this place and can visit any time, it’s a little strange to say “I miss being here” — but I do. I know why I haven’t been around more often; a mix of factors internal and external that’d be familiar-enough to anyone else who does this kind of thing: timing, distractions, self-doubt, and difficulty gathering the energy to do the work on a deep-dive, or to brace for the blowback on something critical, or push past feelings of futility. It’s oddly comforting the reasons are so mundane — they’re all addressable (if not actually solvable) problems. So I’m going to try.¹

Timing is the main thing I’m trying to give myself a break on, and it’s what put the image of the neon sign above into my head. I have a bad habit of procrastinating in that frustrated-perfectionist kind of way,² as well as a fondness for weird projects that spiral into a lot of work (like my beer awards analyses). The result is that the lag between an instigating moment and a response-in-progress often stretches out to where it feels “too late” and so isn’t ever finished.³ But I like that I take the chance to chew over something rather than spit out a half-baked hot take — and time often feels more like a loop than a line, anyway; issues recur, patterns repeat.

The closest I’ve been to keeping up with the “news cycle” lately was my commentary on the Epic liquidation — which was easy to write quickly, since it was built from observations already accumulated over time. I’m proud of that piece, but it’s a good totem of another roadblock: the toxic positivity that has calcified around craft (or “indie”) beer, and its demand that we all “support” the industry by not saying a bad word about it. A post like that can feel necessary to make, but comes with a predictable amount of butthurt reaction that is basically ridiculous⁴ though it still saps a lot of energy. The answer isn’t to maintain a false choice between some Big Contentious Polemic and nothing; it’s to keep my fitness up by regularly taking a moment to celebrate good things, or even just the peculiar little frivolous curiosities that catch my eye. Being in a new place is a refreshing opportunity for that.

The bleakness of the times shouldn’t shut down all frivolity; it is necessary to human flourishing, and there has always been bleakness, even if it seems — or is — pointier in different times and places. As I try to find a way to usefully contribute to my new in-person community, reconnecting with this one online feels like a useful aid in helping maintain my sanity. Besides, beer is a world and a mirror of worlds;⁵ you can look through it to see new angles on history, politics, culture. I have a post I’ve been wrestling with for ages (partially for impending-blowback-related reasons) about the excise levy on beer, where my main point is that people are being disingenuous about tax to further their own selfish interests, whipping the public into a frenzy with (at best) half-truths — and if that isn’t a point of general application, what is?

And it seems like a retreat / return to the internet-that-was⁶ isn’t an uncommon reaction. The Session has been resurrected, and I’ve seen more than a few long-dormant blogs light up again in my RSS reader⁷ — and we all owe a debt to the few who persisted at a regular tick and kept the whole scene from sputtering out entirely. We’re lucky there was a place to come back to. I appreciated the nudge, and even though it took me until the second edition to contribute I really enjoyed the responses to the first “new” round, which asked: What is the best thing to happen to good beer since 2018?⁸ So, in the spirit of serving Ice Cold Takes, here’s my belated answer:

The shine has continued to come off “craft beer” — and we’re all better for it. It’s not complete, and it certainly was already underway, but flicking back and forth by six years in my mind the difference is stark. I moved to Melbourne in late 2018 and left Australia in January 2025, so there’s a coincidence of timing that helps me see the change more clearly. “Craft” was a mystery, a magnet, a minefield. The breathless coverage of it as some kind of oddity has faded; I sometimes get invited on the radio as a beer correspondent, and the brief has evolved from “explain this weird thing for us” to general discussions more akin to other niches like music or movies — still a subculture, sure, but not an alien one. And now that it no longer seems like “easy money”, it attracts fewer hucksters and bandwagon-jumpers pushing shallow nonsense. Admittedly, a pretty brutal contraction over those years is largely what reset expectations, but it was probably a necessary correction.⁹ Cold comfort, I’m sure, but growing pains mean growth as much as they mean pain.

In 2018 itself I was working at Golding’s in Wellington. On the wall was a poster from when the place opened in 2013, announcing it as the city’s new Craft (in fancy script) Beer Bar (in all caps). Over the years, my comrades and I talked about “outgrowing the adjectives” — being careful to be welcoming to people who felt no affinity for “craft” and also making sure that non-beer things were given equally careful attention. To be a good bar, full stop. If the beer industry as a whole is shrugging off its “craft” phase, I’m on board.¹⁰ There are worthier adjectives to chase. I’m sure it’s no accident at all that Alan said “good beer” and not “craft beer” in his prompt. There’s still plenty of bullshit, but it’s the ripened bullshit of normal business: dodgy marketing, bad bosses, illogical regulations and the many perverse incentives of capitalist enterprise. And that, oddly, feels like progress — they’re all addressable (if not actually solvable) problems. So let’s try.

1. This one’s therefore partially just me talking to myself, or giving a peek behind the curtain to anyone who wants one. Stay tuned — if you need a reason — for what is effectively a belated entry in the round of The Session which I mentioned missing last time; these are the rest of the reasons why.
2. Ironically, writing about beer was originally a way to jump-start my brain with something “light” when I was finding it hard to actually start (or indeed finish) writing my papers at university. But my fun little diversion soon became something I cared more about, so it fell into the same loop of stalling out. Winning an award early on was actually unfortunately de-motivating, as it raised the stakes.
3. There are ninety-two draft posts sitting in the system here. Some of them are just a title and a few thoughts, granted, but most aren’t and plenty represent several days’ effort.
4. The essay On Smarm from a decade ago resurfaced recently and was pretty reinvigorating to read white thinking about this. In this specific case, it was funny to observe the industry dinosaurs who were outraged (mostly on Facebook) while a flood of support came privately from folks in the business who I respect, but who didn’t feel able to stick their neck out publicly (and fair enough).
5. I’d been reading the Terry Pratchett biography when I recently rewrote my bio on here, and this phrase lodged in my brain. So it’s not mine, but I’m keeping it.
6. Or rather, its ideals; those of us who thrived in the old internet came from some pretty narrow demographics, let’s face it. What we need to do now is keep the accessibility-expanding elements of the last phase, while rejecting the enshittification of its business model.
7. Please use one, if you don’t already — I’m on Feedly, which is fine, if starting to bloat a bit with features I can’t imagine wanting — it’s a quietly radical technology that really helps push back against platform misbehaviour and algorithmic nonsense.
8. That being the final running of the first edition.
9. See Dave Infante’s take on the phenomenon in the U.S., specifically. The numbers and details are different in Australia and New Zealand, but the main points stand.
10. I feel like Matt Curtis (host of the next Session, coincidentally, and with a very apt topic) was thinking along similar lines in his response, ‘I’m Glad Beer Is Boring Again’, and Jeff Alworth’s recent reaction to the American Craft Brewing Hall of Fame rang similar bells — and itself linked back to an earlier piece about leaving “craft” behind.