I’ll remember the winter of ’23-’24 as a difficult time for me – professionally, not personally.
This turbulence, which seems to be gradually receding as temperatures rise, has derived primarily from professional uncertainty.
To begin, it’s important to understand that Pints&union was always more than just another job to me. It didn’t matter that I was a hired hand with no direct financial stake as an owner, and about as little say over daily affairs as a dishwasher. P&u was a logical extension of all my previous lives in the beer business, and I took my position there very seriously.
In terms of working for others, I always believe in what I do – and I believed fully in P&u. During my tenure, the beer program there was both financially and artistically exemplary given the available resources, and it blindsided me to be forcibly cashiered in November, which was neither my choice nor a decision I somehow “shared” in making (as seems to have been mistakenly reported in some circles).
And so that word again: “Professionally.”
Since this is my first go-around as a 63-year-old, trying to make sense of the past few months includes sorting through all sorts of feelings about the meaning of another suddenly relevant word, namely “retirement.”
How the hell did I get here?
On the one hand, signing up for social security a bit early would mean accepting less than a full cut. However, it actually would be more money than I was being paid at P&u (which was my choice). I enjoy my job at Food and Dining Magazine, which is the kind of part-time gig ideally coupled to “retirement.” Ideally I’ll be able to wait another year, maybe two, before opting for my “retirement income.”
Concurrently, I haven’t given up on the notion of a beer-related job comparable to the one I held at P&u, as offering another (and perhaps final) chance to demonstrate the advantages of purposeful and intelligent design, as these annoyingly rare qualities of thought and organization pertain to sourcing, stocking and selling better beer.
At P&u, beer consistently accounted for 35-40% of weekly gross sales, and I kept the mark-ups right where directed by management. In short, I easily paid for my own modest salary, and made money for the company. It was an artistic and fiscal triumph.
But I’ll readily concede that a measure of realism slowly is eroding my optimism, the most sobering aspect of which is the realization that ageism is quite real in the better beer biz.
After all, why pay an older man hovering within spitting distance of retirement to provide reasoned structure to beer offerings when so few local bar managers regard intelligent design as necessary, and when there are legions of 28-year-olds able to lift kegs, if not display a coherent semblance of beer education, who are fully capable of ordering those kegs by throwing darts blindfolded at an untappd computer screen, secure in the assumption that customers are likely to possess just as little useful curiosity about beer as he or she does, even after 40 years of better beer education in America?
It’s genuinely difficult to accept this devaluing of beer education, meaning that after all those years teaching beer, I’ll be damned if we haven’t entered the era of pervasive beer school dropouts.
In many respects we’ve circled back to a 1970s-vintage cluelessness, with increasingly truncated information amid up and coming consumers exploring the realms of flashy hard this or artificially flavored that – when they’re not rejecting alcohol entirely for NA and mocktails.
Social media flashcards for toddlers rule the roost as dumbing down again becomes the order of the day, while I contemplate the legacy (if any) of the past 42 years spent urging consumers to wise up.
True, I cannot change a world of willfully truncated attention spans; nor am I able to roll the planet back to pre-digital timekeeping. The King Lear-level, clenched-fist yelling into the tempest alongside the Fool on the heath is fun, and it relieves stress, but in the end achieves little.
It seems to me there is a good news/bad news paradigm at play.
Happily, there remains a responsive demographic fully appropriate for my skills as an educator, as comprised of beer drinkers roughly my own age; call it Elder Beer Hostel, or some such. Older customers like me are almost display loyalty, and they possess discretionary income.
What’s more, they learned how to learn long before the advent of the internet, and consequently, they are as yet capable of assimilating and appreciating detail.
However, it seems to me that older beer consumers also find themselves marginalized by ageism, especially as daily judgments tantamount to profiling pertain to a great many service sector managers and employees. Those of us approaching our dotage are considered ill-tempered, demanding and incapable of properly calculating gratuities.
I’m greatly bothered by ageism of this sort.
Yes, there’ll always be bad actors, representative of all demographics, and not only older farts; yet surely management can grasp that there’s a huge problem with stereotyping about age in the hospitality industry because it too easily leads to a level of pre-emptive indifference toward older guests, which makes self-fulfilled prophecies inevitable.
At my most recent position at P&u, far more often than not my ideas for an overall beer marketing strategy proved successful, as calculated to attract grounded, older, reliable customers with money to spend by offering them consistent, daily, session-strength drafts intended to promote an ethos of having two pints rather than one; conversation as opposed to cacophony; and the sort of word-of-mouth solidarity that still trumps most fly-by-night advertising expenditures.
And yet success defined in this manner was too often regarded with palpable suspicion and occasionally even dread – by management, for heaven’s sake, from whom the shop floor takes it cues. I’d be exhorted to bend over backwards in an effort to appease the portion of the clientele that’s generally incapable of loyalty.
More cosplay and craft cocktails – those were what we really needed.
Then I’d look at those sales percentages, which do not lie, and wonder why we even bothered buying so much liquor in the first place. I stuck to my guns by maintaining a specific and principled beer experience, unlike the majority of our competitors, and a program from intelligent design to which guests would be drawn by the quality of our presentation.
As for generational concerns, yes, there always are younger customers speaking the language of better beer. The older ones had been socialized and educated in a different way, to be sure, and could be relied upon to steer the ship as we cherry-picked the younger beer drinkers exhibiting an interest in the experience we had to offer.
Sadly, whenever management (of any business, not only food and drink) begins to regard intelligent design as an unattainable goal, not because the potential expense to upgrade is too great, but because wising up is a great deal more difficult than dumbing down (for management itself, I might add), then this attitude can be relied upon to pursue “achievably” low common denominators rather than a policy of elevation.
That’s when, among other conceivable conclusions, Roger is rendered unemployable. Paraphrasing Meat Loaf, “I’d Do Anything For Beer (But I Won’t Do That).”
And, because stupid human tricks aren’t a facet of my repertoire, it is unclear whether I have a future in beer insofar as the context is a familiar one, which is another way of saying that it’s back to the drawing board in an ongoing process of re-education, looking for a revised formula.
In turn, the preceding “state of the beer guy” message helps to explain why I’ve gotten behind with the “40 Years in Beer” series. Sorry about that; obviously I’ve been preoccupied, and the decade of the 1990s is proving to be a more difficult “tell” than I anticipated, primarily because the personal and the professional are so stubbornly intertwined.
But I’ll get back to it soon. In the interim, check out The Pubcast, undertaken with three good friends, and my first foray into podcasting.
Beers with a Stoic closes a circle that dates to 1978, when my first college class was “Intro to Philosophy.” Later, philosophy and history were my major and minor, respectively. Stoicism comes to us from ancient Greece, positing that to embrace the virtues of wisdom, courage, justice and moderation, we can attain “ataraxia,” or a sense of inner tranquility and harmony in our own lives, focusing on matters we can control — thoughts, emotions, and actions — while accepting the things we cannot, like the actions of others, or the natural course of events taking place in the world around us. No one is perfect, least of all me. But we all keep trying, pausing here and there for a beer. For more: Stoicism.
