I’ve been unable to disengage entirely from the Reyes wholesale beverage conglomerate (“Monarch” in archaic Indiana beer dialect) and still receive an e-mail each Sunday reminding me that orders are due the following day.
Blocking Reyes or unsubscribing from the notifications are options, and yet they’re a reminder of how my working weeks were organized at Pints&union from 2018 – 23: weekly beer inventory, wholesaler order days, receiving deliveries, putting everything in its right place, updating the chalkboards, and so forth.
The Reyes emails reinforce a valuable lesson from the past 16 months: cherish the good times. When people you trusted turn on you — and we’ll all experience this at some point in our lives — the betrayal merely helps us appreciate all the more those friends and acquaintances who’ve stuck around.
On a happier note, tomorrow is the first deadline in the ongoing book project.
I’m set to write a book about beer, or so this impending contract suggests
Today I’ve been checking and rechecking what amounts to a broad outline of the narrative in the form of a table of contents with headwords. It’s the first step toward a projected destination of 110,000 words, and if this sounds like a lot, trust me when I say that the major challenge will be what to omit.
The final deadline is 18 months away, and the clock is ticking; this being my first book, emotions of terror and excitement are alternating for attention.
Here’s a peek at other items on my writing agenda for the coming months.
Food & Dining Magazine: Production of the summer edition is underway, and my assignments so far are a double-length “Hip Hops” column about Monnik Beer Co.’s new Rose Hill Lagerhaus, and a profile of Bourbons Bistro on the occasion of the restaurant’s 20th anniversary.
40 Years in Beer: I appreciate my regular readers for their support of a narrative that proceeds on the basis of when-spare-time-allows. The compendium has been updated, and once I’m finished with F & D deadlines the postings will resume.
1985 European Summer: The 40th anniversary of my first European trip arrives in May, and I’ve been updating and amending a travelogue first published at the NA Confidential blog a long time ago. In 1985, it had been 40 years since the end of WWII; now it’s 40 years since then, and given the current climate in America, Reaganism seems like a walk in the park. Most of these these segments will be around 2,000 words, and will be posted regularly through the summer of 2025.
Today’s cover photo: bottles of the excellent Peja Pils from Kosovo, photographed in Tirana in February, 2025.
