When I say “started looking,” what I really mean is “started tracking down the Cheez-It options.” Cheez-Its are one of the most perfect foods, and no, I will not be entertaining any disagreements about that assessment. The exception to Cheez-Its being a perfect food is airport Cheez-Its. Airport Cheez-Its are always so stale, I thought to myself, as I nevertheless picked up the biggest bag I could find. Stale airport Cheez-its are still Cheez-Its, after all.

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A few hours into my flight, I opened my bag of Cheez-Its and started snacking. Ugh, stale, I thought to myself. Then I had a realization.

What I realized was that airport Cheez-Its aren’t always stale. Most convenience stores in airports do really brisk business, particularly when they are located in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport. It wouldn’t make sense that a snack as popular as Cheez-Its would be sitting on airport convenience store shelves so long that they would go stale. Further, Kellanova (formerly Kellogg’s, Cheez-Its parent company) is a giant multinational conglomerate - they know how to formulate their products to be as shelf-stable as possible for the longest possible amount of time.

If the Cheez-Its themselves weren’t stale, then why did they taste stale? There are three main reasons why what we eat or drink on an airplane is a different experience than consuming the same things on the ground:

• Dry air: The first thing to be affected when you get on a plane is your sense of smell. The air you breathe on a plane is recycled through a lot of filters, which means it can get incredibly dry. Once you’ve reached a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet, the humidity in the air cabin is less than 12%. For reference, the average humidity of Death Valley - known for having some of the lowest humidity on Earth - is 29%.

  The dry cabin air first dries out your nasal passages, followed by your mouth and eyes. A critical part of being able to “taste” (sense of smell + sense of taste) is the presence of mucus and saliva that transports chemical compounds to their respective receptors. A dried-up nose means that fewer chemical compounds are introduced to your receptors.

• Low cabin pressure: Air pressure at sea level is about 14.7 PSI, whereas airplane cabin pressure is around 11 to 12 PSI. The lower cabin pressure is the tradeoff for our comfort for the structural integrity of the plane.

  Our sinuses and nasal cavities are both hollow, air-filled spaces. When the cabin pressure of the airplane drops, it creates a pressure imbalance because our nasal and sinus cavities are still at the higher ground pressure. The pressure imbalance causes our sinuses to expand and press on the surrounding tissue. Further, the pressure imbalance causes our mucous membranes to become inflamed, resulting in swelling. The swelling happening in our nasal tissue creates a physical obstruction for aromas trying to reach our olfactory bulb.

• Plane engine noise: A plane’s engines expose passengers to about 85 decibels of sound, which is also the threshold for risking permanent hearing damage. Other sounds that make an equivalent amount of noise include vacuum cleaners, heavy traffic, and a police or ambulance siren.

  Besides the risk of hearing damage, the background noise of 85 decibels also decreases your perception of sweetness and saltiness; somewhat surprisingly, the noise level can make food sound crunchier. Our perceptions of bitterness and acidity do not seem to be affected by the background noise. Out of our five taste senses, umami is the only one that seems to have increased perception on a flight.

If you’d like to learn more about what you can do when travel, allergies, or sickness stuff up your nose, you can check out my latest Sensory as Strategy blog post:

Sensory as Strategy

As a reminder, the first 50 people who use the discount code SENSORYINTRO will receive 50% off their first month's subscription.

You can imagine my delight when I boarded another flight a few months later to discover that Delta now offered Cheez-Its as an in-flight snack. A few years ago, Delta partnered with the then Atlanta-based SweetWater Brewing Company to create an IPA specifically formulated for flight, with reduced bitterness and increased perceived hop aroma. I wondered if they had done the same with Cheez-It.

And here we have arrived at the Cheez-It sensory experiment.

I had an upcoming flight to Colorado for World Beer Cup judging, and so did another friend flying in from Montana. I texted her to buy a bag of Cheez-Its at the airport, but not to open them because they were for Cheez-It sensory when we met up in Colorado.

When I got to the airport for my flight, I bought a bag of Cheez-Its in a convenience store. Step one of my Cheez-It sensory was to taste the airport Cheez-Its before I got on the plane to see how they tasted. I opened the bag and tasted a couple of Cheez-Its (the hardest part about this sensory was having to carry bags of Cheez-Its around that I couldn’t eat because they were for sensory). They tasted like what I expect Cheez-Its to taste like.

On my flight, I requested two bags of Cheez-Its - “For science purposes,” I told the flight attendant, who did not seem to care why and handed my two bags over to me. One bag went straight into my backpack to give to my friend. I opened the other bag and tasted a few Cheez-Its. They, too, tasted like what I expect Cheez-Its to taste like. I took the airport Cheez-Its out and tried a few of them. Blech, stale, not nearly as flavorful as the in-flight Cheez-Its.

Between a long lunch break on the last day of judging, I sat down with two friends to conduct our Cheez-It sensory. It should be clear that we were not trying to set up a whole formal sensory process wherein we controlled as many parameters as possible. In another setting, I may have tried to have my friends taste the samples blind and describe their characteristics, then hypothesize which sample was which. But this is a fun, silly experiment, and “doing” sensory does not always have to be perfectly prepared or formal.

We laid out paper towels on the table and made three piles on each towel: Atlanta airport Cheez-Its, Delta in-flight Cheez-Its, and what we deemed our “control” Cheez-Its (a bag we grabbed from the judging snack area). We each tasted through the different samples, and here is a summary of our perceptions:

• Airport and Control Cheez-Its: Obviously, there was very little - if any - difference between the two bags of terrestrial Cheez-Its. Giant companies with globally popular products are pretty good at manufacturing consistently nearly-identical products, especially products that have been around for over 100 years. (Cheez-Its were invented in 1921). The lack of difference between the two samples was not surprising to us.

• Airplane Cheez-Its: The airplane Cheez-Its themselves had several differences from the airport and control ones.

  The first thing we noticed about the airplane Cheez-Its was that the packaging was a different shade of red from the other two bags, which were both identical to each other. The packaging was light in color, although that may be due to the increased UV exposure that comes with being 30,000 feet in the air.

  The second thing we noticed was that the airplane Cheez-Its themselves were also lighter in color than the other samples. We compared the ingredients to see if there were any differences in their order, which would indicate that the ingredient amounts differed from the normal recipe. The ingredient lists between all three bags were identical.

  Flavor-wise, the airplane Cheez-Its that had tasted like normal Cheez-Its to me in flight were now less flavorful than the other samples. They seemed less buttery and less flakier. The cheese flavor wasn’t as strong as the other samples, specifically the sharp cheddar quality. They were also lacking the burnt character that the ground Cheez-Its had.

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I gave my friend the extra bag of airplane Cheez-Its I had heroically managed not to eat so that she could also try ground vs. air Cheez-Its on her flight back home. She texted me later with her findings:

• The ground Cheez-Its were still saltier in flight than the airplane Cheez-Its, but otherwise the ground Cheez-Its tasted more stale in the air than they did on the ground.

• The airplane Cheez-Its tasted more “normal” in flight than the ground Cheez-Its did, with more of a sharp cheddar character than what we perceived on the ground.

• Her flight encountered some weather, so it flew lower than normal for a few minutes. BONUS SENSORY OPPORTUNITY! At 10,000 feet, she tried both the ground and airplane Cheez-its and discovered that they were extremely similar. Is 10,000 feet the Cheez-It equilibrium?

Putting all of this together, the Delta Cheez-It recipe does seem different than the regular Cheez-It recipe and in line with what we’ve learned about how air travel affects our senses of smell and taste. The airplane Cheez-Its didn’t taste as flaky on the ground, which I put into the “things seeming crunchier on planes” category. The sharp cheddar character that seemed to be lacking on the ground was evident in the airplane Cheez-Its, likely due to the umami being reduced in the recipe to accommodate our increased umami perception in flight.

The one thing that surprised me was that the ground Cheez-Its still seemed saltier in the air compared to the airplane Cheez-Its. I would have expected them to seem less salty in the air since the engine noise reduces our perception of saltiness. I’m still noodling on why this may be so.

Even if you’re not a Delta girlie, you can still try this kind of sensory experiment yourself - buy yourself some pretzels, Bischoff cookies, Sun Chips, or whatever snack your airline serves and do a side-by-side on your next flight.

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to:

1. Preparing for Crafted Academy, the newest program under Crafted for Action, which you already know is my favorite industry conference. I’m excited to be teaching hands-on technical workshops, like jockey box setup and maintenance, and troubleshooting draft issues.

2. Also preparing for Homebrew Con 2026, where I will be leading a sensory session on how water affects the flavor of beer. The most common beer competition feedback I leave is for brewers to revisit their water profiles. Particularly in pro competitions like the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival, selecting beers to pass on to another round or even medal often comes down to minor details, and a flabby water profile is almost a sure kick from me.

3. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of my brand and website, underthejenfluence.beer, beginning in May! I started Under the Jenfluence as a beer blog to help document my beer studies and also to support my desire to work in the beer industry. Under the Jenfluence is now an LLC and a trademark. I never would have guessed 10 years ago that this is what my path would look like, but I’m so happy I leaped. Please check it out and sign up for updates while you’re there!

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While I am big on watching reality shows, dating shows are the exception. I’ve never watched The Bachelor or Love Island. The exception to the exception is Love is Blind. I will always watch that heterosexual trainwreck of a microcosm. The one thing I cannot stand about shows like Love is Blind (besides the men who go on there - please get therapy and also maybe learn the basics of a menstrual cycle) is the contestants talking about “finding their person.” During one of the last seasons, I joked to a friend that I may start a drinking game wherein everyone takes a shot every time a contestant says something about “their person.”

The concept of everyone having “their person” is foolish - wow, out of over 8 billion people inhabiting over 57 million square miles in the world, the person who is “your person,” your one perfect match, happens to live within the same 25 miles as you?!? What are the odds? Beyond it being stupid, it is also a tool of - you guessed it! - white supremacy, which is itself supported by capitalism and patriarchy.

Why? Because it frames heterosexual marriage as the one relationship people (women) need to make them whole. All you need is one person for all of your needs, wants, and dynamics for the rest of your life. Who needs friends, family, or colleagues when you’re looking for one single person to take on all of those roles in addition to the roles of spouse, life partner, and possibly parent?

Buying into the concept of your “person” means that your focus becomes inward and extremely narrow. You don’t need to invest in your community or have a variety of people in your life if you’re investing correctly in your marriage - your spouse will provide every sort of relationship you’ll ever need. Additionally, for women, the subtext of this is also that you don’t need to look beyond your home for any kind of enrichment.

But that’s not true. We don’t rely on just one person to be all things to us. We categorize different relationships in our lives because we have different relationships. I extend this to people referring to their parents or their spouse as their “best friends.” Sorry, no. Your parents are your parents. It’s great if you like your parents and have a great relationship with them. Obviously, it’s pretty cool if you like your spouse, too. But those relationships aren’t friendships.

Why are we talking about this? Well, for one, I have ADHD, so this is the way my mind connects things. Two, as mentioned in my last newsletter, I have been on the job hunt lately, so I have been looking at a lot of job listings.

Before we go any further, please allow me this one slight digression:

JOB SEARCHING SUCKS SO MUCH.

Thank you. Now, where were we?

I’ve lost count of how many job listings I’ve seen where the company is named something like "Presence or DynArc Synergies, with no indication of what it is the company actually does or what it is I would be doing. Besides implementing strategies, strategizing implementation, and providing best-in-class, proactive, cutting-edge, cross-functional … something. I’m not exactly sure. But you get to leave at 3:30 on Fridays in the summer!

I have, however, become adept at recognizing some red flags in job listings. Red flags I recognize because I have fallen victim to them. Namely:

“We’re a family here.”

This worked on me once. I can do a whole newsletter on decoding breweries’ stated core values, but I think most of us are now pretty aware that when an employer says its employees are family, you need to run the fuck away.

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Just as you have different dynamics with your friends than you do with your partner, the dynamics you have with your family and with your employer are different. For one thing, you can’t fire your family (as much as some of us would like), and you can’t get promoted in your family from, say, child to grandparent. Your employer is not bonded to you for life, nor will it comfort you on your worst days. Your job is not your family, just like your spouse is not your best friend.

An employer stating that its employees are “family” or that “we’re a family first” leads to a lot of toxic behaviors on the employer’s part. The purpose behind saying “we’re a family,” under the warm-and-fuzzy tone, is manipulation.

Your family requires emotional support and sacrifice in ways that your job does (should) not. Additionally, it’s often harder to say no to family, which means framing the workplace as family can make you feel obligated to take on additional work or unreasonable demands. If your employer can exploit you into the corrosive “we’re a family” myth, then you’ll likely work harder, accept less, and prioritize work over your personal needs.

As the beginning of Anna Karenina tells us: Happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Every family has some level of dysfunction in it, and most can adapt to remain more or less intact. A company, on the other hand, should not have similar dysfunction in it because it’s bad for business - it needs to maintain healthy, sustainable functionality to stay in business. Yet, the work “family” is often dysfunctional.

A big consequence of the “we’re a family” illusion for me was not feeling safe being honest about what I was seeing and experiencing. In the “we’re a family” dynamic, you’re told that you should be honest and then punished for speaking up. You can read my April 2024 newsletter, “Mind the Gap and Keep the Gate,” for more details on some of my experience with this. Suffice it to say, I learned pretty quickly that compliance was what was really valued - honesty was not.

Note that there is a huge difference between a company telling its employees that “we’re a family” and having healthy, positive relationships with coworkers. I have several friendships that have grown out of my past jobs. Heck, I’m married to a former coworker. Relationships that you develop at work are necessary and can be gratifying. There is no bright line rule that you can’t be friends with colleagues and bosses, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your employer is going to protect you or place your relationship above the needs of the business.

Now back to optimizing my resume for a high-performance, fully-integrated, cohesive, synergistic position with multifaceted, collaborative, and fast-paced solution creation.

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Sensory as Strategy

Most of you reading this are aware that sensory, specifically beer sensory, is an area of great interest to me and one that I’ve been able to make more approachable, experiential, and fun. Thinking of ways for myself and others to experience different aspects of beer through sensory exercises is truly one of my favorite things to do. I draw inspiration from a lot of places and have come up with some really cool sensory exercises.

I’ve long wondered how I could make my sensory activities more accessible to people who can’t physically be at a sensory session of mine as well as people who are interested in improving their own sensory skills and/or the skills of others. My main issue has always been with charging for my work. It can be hard for me to balance wanting to make beer education more accessible to being compensated for my intellectual property.

Over the years, I’ve gotten better at recognizing that my work stems from years of experience and training, and, as such, charging for access is not greedy or gross. Also, I’ve gotten better at recognizing when other people are using my work I have provided for free to make money for themselves, which is super not cool.

With that, allow me to introduce my newest subscription-based blog called Sensory as Strategy. Sensory as Strategy is basically me opening my brain and shaking all the sensory information and ideas out. There are a few posts up already, and I will update the blog regularly with new exercises and information. My goal for Sensory as Strategy is to make a one-stop shop for beer sensory.

Like any project, as soon as I started it, I realized I needed to provide a lot more information and context for the sensory exercises. Thus, on the Sensory as Strategy blog, posts are broken down into one of three categories:

• Sensory Exercise: in these posts, I discuss why a sensory exercise is important, why it’s effective, and how to do it. When I say “how to do it,” I mean step-by-step instructions with lists of materials needed, how to prep, discussion questions, and exercise variations.

• Sensory Best Practices: these posts focus on the finer details of setting up sensory exercises for yourself or for a group, like what kind of cups to get and why and how and why to correctly label materials. These posts are basically an anthology of all the wrong ways I’ve set up sensory exercises - I made the mistakes so you don’t have to!

• Sensory Methods: these posts outline different sensory methods that I reference in the sensory exercises, such as the hot steep and hop grind methods. I also pepper in some of my own suggestions based off my experiences.

As a thank you for reading my newsletter (or at least reading to here), the first 50 people who use the discount code SENSORYINTRO will receive 50% off their first month subscription. The Sensory as Strategy subscription is $10 monthly, and you can cancel anytime. As always, if the cost is prohibitive to you, you can reach out via this newsletter or website. If you check out the blog and like what you see, please consider sharing it. If there is a sensory exercise, best practice, or method you would like to learn more about, you can reply to this email with your suggestions.

Sensory as Strategy

And finally…

The Crafted for Action conference is coming up June 4-7 in Atlanta at Wild Heaven Beer. Crafted for Action is my favorite industry conference by far. In its sixth year, Crafted for Action is introducing Crafted Academy. Crafted Academy is a one-day event designed for supporting holistic growth, beverage knowledge, and technical skills.

Crafted Academy has three tracks:

• Hospitality + Brewery Experience Training, with the curriculum designed by The Beery Godmother, LaTreace Harris.

• Sensory + Flavor Language Training, with the curriculum designed by Michelle Turner of Excited to Feast.

• Technical + Operations Skills Training, with the curriculum designed by me.

This year, there will be two separate opportunities to attend Crafted Academy: Monday, June 1, at Atlantucky Brewing, and Thursday, June 4, at Wild Heaven Beer. There are a lot of other cool things being worked on for Crafted Academy, such as onsite certifications and a homebrew competition. AND it’s only $50.00 to register. That is an insanely low price to come away with increased skills, confidence, and marketability.

To learn more and register, go to https://www.craftedforaction.com/craftedacademy

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I’ve started and stopped writing this newsletter at least four times because, as I start to write, something else happens that muddies the trajectory of my thoughts. And, as you’ll learn below, some events have disrupted more than my writing.

January 2026 marked the highest number of layoffs in January since 2009 - employers cut 108,435 jobs.

I’m one of them. Last month, my employer informed me that my position was being eliminated and that I was being laid off.

It wasn’t a complete surprise, but that doesn’t make it any less devastating. I was going to begin this month’s newsletter with an almost apology of sorts. The initial topic of this newsletter was setting boundaries around your job. I was going to tell you how, for the first time in my adult life, I have a stable job that I genuinely enjoy, with coworkers whom I mostly enjoy.

Then I got laid off.

Being part of a DINK household (dual income, no kids) with a partner who is the primary wage earner meant that my losing my sole source of income wouldn’t be financially devastating for us. I assured friends and family that we were in a place where I didn’t need to find a job immediately. It wasn’t the same as if my husband got laid off.

Then my husband got laid off.

In the span of one week, we went from being DINKs to being OINKs to being NINKs.

Well, fuck.

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Let this be my annual reminder to you to update your resume, even if you think you don’t need to. Because if it turns out you find yourself without a job, you are going to be so thankful to past you for giving present unemployed you the gift of one less thing to worry about.

The roles I’ve had in the beer industry have been pretty niche and do not always translate directly into the kinds of jobs I see posted. I want to transition from NINKs to DINKs as quickly as possible, and now is not the time to be meek.

If shameless self-promotion isn’t your thing, I get it - you can keep scrolling down to the other stuff in this newsletter, no hard feelings.

Here are some ideas for roles I am looking for.

• Training and education - a friend asked me the other day what I would ultimately like to continue doing, and it’s providing training and education. I’m good at it, and I enjoy it. It’s one area where I can almost always get into a flow state. Obviously, I would like to stay in beer, but my main talent is education, and I can do that in any industry.

• Writing and research - I’ve long joked that, if I could stay in school forever, I would. I absolutely love researching topics, learning new things, and translating those topics into something interesting to read. I also love writing and think I’m pretty good at it.

• Sensory and quality - You may have heard that I’m pretty good at sensory, too. 🙂 I’ve helped establish sensory programs at two breweries, one with multiple facilities, and am a graduate of one of the top sensory programs in the world, UC-Davis.

• Management and organizational change - I have a degree in management and twenty years of management experience. I like being in charge, and I’m good at it.

Here are some ideas for roles I am not looking for:

• Sales - I am not a hustler by nature, and, having been laid off from two beer jobs in the space of four years, I am not really that interested in hustling for someone else’s business.

• Taproom - I did my time in customer service during undergrad and law school, and do not want to work directly with the public on an extended basis.

• Brewing and production - I am too old. Also, it’s no secret that those jobs aren’t usually well-paid, despite being the literal backbone of breweries.

I am open to contract work, such as one-off projects or trainings, consulting, or a full-time position. I absolutely love living in Atlanta, but am willing to relocate just about anywhere in the U.S.1

Please keep me in mind if you see an opportunity that seems like it may be a good fit for me. I can be reached via this newsletter, my website, or via email at jen(at)underthejenfluence(dot)beer.

Sexy or Stigma?

In April of last year, I presented a topic at the Beer Culture Summit that has long been of interest to me: smell’s role in social hierarchy and who is “allowed” to be smelly. Surprising no one reading this, the culprit of enforcing this hierarchy is the three-headed Hydra of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Our sense of smell has been erroneously regulated to a lesser sense, e.g., not as important as sight or hearing. An often overlooked core value of Eurocolonial cultural hegemony is the olfactory neutrality of those in positions of power, whereas marginalized classes are classified as odorous. Class was one of the first ways smell was used to distinguish the bourgeoisie, who did not exert themselves by working and had access to bathtubs and clean water, from the working class, whose jobs usually entailed sweaty manual labor. One perfumer suggested that different classes be scented differently:

• Royal perfume for the aristocracy

• Bourgeois perfume for the middle class

• Disinfectant for the poor

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For much of our history, Eurocolonial culture typically presents the ideal society as deodorized. Those in positions of power are considered inodorate or neutral smelling. In particular, American nationalism defines itself as inodorate compared to “foreigners.”2

That is not true, of course - no one in the history of humankind has completely lacked any bodily odor. Rather, the way people in positions of power smell is considered to be the default, and people who do not smell that way are othered and considered odorous.

But what happens when those in positions of power decide to embrace odors previously associated with marginalized populations? Is it still smelly? Or is it only considered odorous when it is associated with historically excluded communities?

A current trend in perfumery is scents that are considered “strange,” “animalic,” or “funky.” Instead of rose or vanilla accords, perfumers are creating “avant-garde” scents with notes such as garlic, gasoline, blood, dirt, and burning plastic. Suddenly, smelling like cumin and garlic is a sign of affluence and aspiration. But only if you’re white and possess economic and social capital. If you’re not white and/or don’t possess economic and social capital, you smell like “ethnic” food and are therefore odorous.

As this article on Dazed puts it, these types of scent aren’t per se problematic and may help shift our perspectives of who is allowed to smell like what. Odor molecules are indifferent to the hedonics we assign them. Assigning terms like “clean,” “fresh,” “smelly,” and “bad” is cultural, not natural. The next time you catch yourself thinking, “Gee, that person smells really bad,” I encourage you to interrogate why you associate certain aromas with “smelling bad” and to consider instead that you may be reinforcing marginalization.

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And finally…

If you haven’t already, please check out the new Yakima Valley Residency Program. It is a new program aimed at elevating new and emerging freelance writers, storytellers, and communicators who are passionate about telling compelling stories about the Yakima Valley.

Please consider applying even if you are not yet a member of the North American Guild of Beer Writers (although I highly recommend joining as it is an informative and supportive group of people). Please, please do not self-select out because you are intimidated by either the application process or the residency. For every qualified person from a historically excluded community who opts not to apply for this residency because they feel like they don’t meet 110% of the qualifications, there are probably ten dudes that meet none of the qualifications submitting half-assed applications.

One of the beautiful things about this residency is that it’s open to storytelling in all of its forms - you can be a writer, but you can also do most of your storytelling through social media, a podcast, or a YouTube channel.

If you’re interested in applying for the residency, the deadline to apply is February 28. If you’d like a second set of eyes on your works or application, let me know.3

Another woman in the group and I made eye contact after his comment. This is not the first time someone has said something like this to me, but I am still surprised when it happens. I guess I shouldn’t be, but every time I think “…we’re still saying things like this? To women? About women?”

When we both pushed back about that statement, he doubled down. More than doubled down, actually. He said that it is downright wrong for women to do that.

Weow, sir. First of all, no woman anywhere cares about any man’s sweeping statements on how all women should behave. Second, you’re really going to double down without a hint of irony? You think it’s shameful, yet you follow many of those accounts. Seems like if you really thought women with bodies (as in, all women) who may be holding a beer with some skin exposed or posed in a sexy manner were shameful and wrong, then you wouldn’t be following them.

We all know what’s really going on here, and it rhymes with schmatriarchy. I am also aware that this is not a new conversation or a novel topic. But if I still have to hear men complain about women acknowledging their sexuality - and possibly making money from it - then we need to keep having this conversation.

Additionally, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that this particular conversation about women and beer on social media is centered almost wholly around white women, who have been held up in our Eurocolonial society as the definition of beauty, particularly thin, able-bodied, white women. People who do not fall into those categories have a host of intersectional issues that also significantly impact how society views and treats them. Social media is no exception, especially with the anonymity that comes from being behind a keyboard.

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The Madonna-Whore Complex has been written about extensively. Briefly, this phenomenon presumes that all women fit into one of two categories as perceived by (white, Eurocolonial) men - the women who can be admired (Madonnas) and the women who can be sexually attractive (Whores). The women categorized as sexually attractive are then devalued by men. As a woman, you can be one or the other.

But not both.

Thus, when a woman decides to take control of her body and her talents, as well as the way they are marketed and potentially monetized, this sovereignty makes society - especially men - furious. A woman who exercises sexual agency represents a threat to the social dominance of men.

In short: We have decided as a culture that there is almost nothing worse than a woman who wants attention.

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From a young age, women are taught that their attractiveness is their currency. You learn that you are supposed to perform beauty labor to build that wealth.

However, that labor is only valuable when it is unpaid. If you start to profit from your beauty labor, you are frivolous and vapid. We’ve been taught that being pretty is the most valuable fiat money for a woman, so we also learn that the level of our attractiveness determines how society will treat us. If you can contort yourself into an acceptable societal beauty ideal, then you can rightly assume you will be treated better and have a better quality of life.1

Further, in our Eurocolonial society, we are taught that it is a sanctioned right of all men to sexualize all women, regardless of their age and status. Because of this, few women can completely avoid sexually objectifying experiences.

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One of my roles in a former job was to send beer out to influencers. To facilitate this, I joined a Facebook group for beer enthusiasts, which was run by one of the regional influencers to whom I sent beer. I had chosen this person in part because he ran this Facebook group. I found this group to be refreshingly upbeat, made up of people who not only genuinely enjoyed beer but also seemed to celebrate others’ enjoyment of beer.

I’m betting a lot of us at one time belonged to a social media beer enthusiast group that devolved into mostly toxic grandstanding and chest thumping about “whales” while denigrating newcomers who wanted to post about how much they enjoyed their first Hopslam: “DoN’T yOu meAn HYpEsLaM?” This group was decidedly not that.

Until one day, the influencer/group administrator posted a meme featuring Jeff Foxworthy that said something along the lines of “If your beer pictures are of your boobs and you don’t know shit about beer, you might be a beer influencer.” 🫥

Again, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that this person posted a meme like that in a group like this, but I was. It was such a positive place for beer lovers, I thought. As it turns out, that is not true if you are a woman who dares to acknowledge both her love of beer and her sexuality in the same photo.

I DMed him to express how harmful memes like that are and ask that he take the post down.

His response:

My response:

It’s hard for me to convey the feelings that arise when this happens accurately. First, I’m surprised when it comes from someone I know. Not that I am the arbiter of detecting misogyny, but I also can’t assume every man I meet is just waiting for his chance to show his deep-seated hatred for women, whether conscious or unconscious. That’s not a healthy way to live, nor is it true. On the other hand, I’m also not quiet about these issues, so maybe I take it for granted that someone befriending me implicitly means that we have similar outlooks on things like, I don’t know, not being a sexist dick.

Second, I’m disappointed. Deeply disappointed. It makes it hard to trust the men around me, the people I consider friends and colleagues. How long until they reveal similar sentiments? Are all of them going to demonstrate that, actually, they do hate women, especially women who have taken control of their sexuality for their own means?

Third, it makes me feel unsafe. It creates instability in my personal and professional relationships. Is the guy wearing the “Antisexist, Antiracist, Proequality Beer Club” shirt with whom I just had a great conversation going to go online later to say violently misogynistic things to a woman posting photos of herself holding a beer while in a bikini?2 Is every guy a closeted, disgusted Pygmalion, smiling and making conversation with me while his internal dialogue is calling me a dumb bitch? These rhetorical questions are not hyperbolic - they are real safety concerns with which women have to grapple.3

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Where do we go from here? These are socially ingrained ideas and behaviors, which means that there is no easy fix. Unlearning and extricating harmful patriarchal messaging takes time, and the process is not comfortable.

As with all cognitive biases, becoming aware of your bias is the first step. Pay attention to when you react to a woman who has sexual agency and interrogate that reaction: Why am I feeling this way? Is there evidence to support my beliefs? Am I holding onto beliefs that may no longer be valid?

Look for perspectives that are different from yours. This newsletter may be an entry point for you, but it is only that. There are far more diverse perspectives out there from far more knowledgeable people. Some of my favorite feminist newsletters include Roxanne Gay’s The Audacity, Lyz Lenz’s Men Yell at Me, and Amanda Montei’s Mad Woman and Dire Straights.4

Lastly, be willing to reflect on your actions and beliefs with a growth mindset. We all have biases that we need to unlearn. It’s okay to start somewhere and be open to feedback. When you can do this, people will support your unlearning and learning.

Humoral Medicine Never Left Us

I have a special interest in how remnants of humoral medicine persist in our lives. If you are not familiar with humoral medicine, it is the foundation of medicine and states that all illness stems from an imbalance in one’s humors. There are four humors: blood,5 yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. In the beginning, the humors were linked with the four “elements” of air (blood), fire (yellow bile), earth (black bile), and water (phlegm). Each category of humors eventually expanded to correspond to a time of day, color, taste, patron planet, and astrological signs, among others. Treatment in humoral medicine often involved food and lifestyle changes.

Each humor was some combination of warm, cold, moist, and dry. For example, blood was considered warm and moist, while black bile was considered cold and dry. If your humors were out of balance, you brought them into balance by essentially using the opposite humors. Have too much black bile? Avoid food and drink considered cold and dry; instead, consume warm and moist food and drink. Beer, for example, was considered warm and moist, whereas vinegar was considered warm and dry.

“Beer” in many of these contexts was actually more like gruit in that it was heavily spiced both for medicinal and preservative purposes. Of course, the spices used needed to be considered “warm,” lest their addition to the beer render it useless for treating black bile.

Which brings us to our present setting - the holidays. Three spices that are particularly prominent during the Eurocolonial holiday season are cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. All three are commonly described as “warming” spices, a holdover from humoral medicine.

An interesting thing about humoral medicine is that, while some of it is appallingly terrible (you’ve got ghosts in your blood, we need to drain it all out!), much of it is intuitive and, in some cases, still applicable. Humoral medicine prescribed walking after meals, washing your hands, and getting rest.

This holds true in the case of our warming spices - cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. In the case of cinnamon and ginger, they literally are warming. Well, they are *kind of* literally warming. Cinnamon contains cinnamaldehyde, which triggers our trigeminal sense in much the same way menthol or capsaicin heat does. That is, cinnamaldehyde triggers the same pathways that perceive warmth. Ginger has a similar effect, only its “heat” comes from gingerol.

Cinnamon also helps decrease your blood glucose levels, which means it can help stop your blood sugar from spiking after a meal. Besides being a digestive aid, cinnamon also has antibacterial properties. Ginger, specifically gingerol, is a well-known digestive and anti-nausea aid. In the Middle Ages, ginger was used to mask the taste of preserved meats, which were mainly consumed during the winter months. Like cinnamon, nutmeg decreases your blood glucose levels and also increases serum insulin.6 Nutmeg also has antioxidant, antimicrobial, and insecticidal properties, which came in handy during the Bubonic Plague to keep plague-carrying fleas off of people wearing nutmeg necklaces.

Now you are well-armed with a “well, actually” story about winter warming spices to dazzle and/or annoy your loved ones during this holiday season.

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Creating a 2025 Holiday Book Guide for Sensory Lovers in my bookshop.org shop.7 The list contains about a dozen books that I have found to be beneficial in learning more about sensory.

2. Listening to The Storyteller by Dave Grohl. Nirvana has remained one of my very favorite bands. I highly recommend this book. Dave is genuine, hilarious, and honest. I love hearing stories from people I idolize about them meeting people they idolize. Rock legends, they’re just like us!

3. Reading Smelling to Survive: The Amazing World of Our Sense of Smell by Bill S. Hansson. This book is a lot of fun. It focuses on how other animals and even plants use smell to navigate the world. Because of this book, I’m adding “being able to smell underwater like a fish” to my wish list because UNDERWATER HAS A SMELL AND SOME FISH HAVE TWO NOSES!

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I was once a member of CAMRA, but I do not claim any expertise on its history, dynamics, or politics. I do get the idea that it’s similar to homebrew clubs I’ve been a part of - started decades ago by a group of mostly men with mostly men as members for the better part of those decades. These spaces tend to feel like old boys’ clubs, where new members are “welcomed” in the sense that they are allowed to pay money to join, attend meetings, and volunteer, but are never really welcomed into the inner circle of the club.

Here’s the thing that a lot of the leadership overlooks whilst rending their garments about why people don’t want to join their clubs: people can tell when they’re wanted and when they’re merely being tolerated or allowed in a space. After a while, those people, like me, may find themselves wondering why they are paying money to an organization that has never considered them and will never consider them.

Access without support is not opportunity.1

Two fundamental reasons these organizations are seeing membership declining are that their base of members is usually quite literally dying off and the organization has shown itself to be performative at best towards welcoming members from historically excluded communities. Suddenly they find themselves, proverbial hats in hands, scuffing their shoes in the dirt, asking hey brother can you spare a dime to the people they have declined to support as members for many years.

The truly frustrating thing about this is that I know from my own volunteer experience that there have been people within these orgs advocating for change at fundamental levels. Advocating for understanding why people don’t want to join your organization and then taking meaningful action to address those barriers is necessary to appeal to new members. If you want new membership, you have to meet your members where they are, not try to shoehorn new members into old molds created by your heretofore homogenous membership. From my personal experience, trying to do this advocacy only to be met by opposition that amounted to “we’ve always done it this other way and it’s worked fine” was exhausting.

I think a revival of social clubs, such as CAMRA and homebrew clubs, is possible. As a society, we are becoming increasingly more isolated from each other and often find ourselves relegated to three roles: employee, consumer, and household member. Loneliness has been considered an epidemic in the United States since 2023.2

The revival of social clubs may be one solution. Historically, social clubs began as spaces for higher class men to build social capital. In the United States, the emerging middle class found itself with some extra money and time. They couldn’t join the clubs of the wealthy, but they could form their own clubs with modest dues that afforded them an expanded social circle.

The craft beer industry initially grew out of the homebrew community. Homebrewing is an expensive and time-consuming hobby. To be a homebrewer often means you possess two key things:

• Disposable income that you can spend at your own discretion

• Free time to dedicate several hours to a hobby

Now think about who has historically had access to disposable income and autonomy over one’s schedule. Who can go to a meeting on the first Tuesday night of every month because someone else is taking care of the household? Who can spend a few hundred dollars on homebrewing equipment? Who can spend an entire mostly uninterrupted Saturday in the garage homebrewing?

The same people who could later borrow against their 401(k) or who had generational wealth to invest in opening craft breweries. The same people who could afford the time to create homebrew clubs. The same people who did not necessarily have to go into debt to get a secondary education that then allowed them to secure jobs with breweries.

The tension lies between keeping the old membership happy while substantively appealing to new membership. On the one hand, your older membership3 has kept the organization afloat. This older membership has been around for years, sometimes decades, sometimes since the organization was formed. The older membership oftentimes has all of the advantages I laid out above and, since they’re also typically the societal default, don’t realize or care that others do not have access to those kinds of privileges. Many times, this translates to the legacy membership having the kind of disposable income required to sustain social clubs. Many times, newcomers can bring the passion that may have faded from the older membership, but not the same privileges of time and disposable income.

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What happens when these worlds collide is that the older members love that newer members want to get involved, because they are no longer interested in volunteering, and new members are excited about getting involved. What they soon learn, however, is that the organization may not actually be interested in changing to accommodate new members; rather, it is interested in having new volunteers run the organization the way it has always been run. I can tell you from personal experience that this, combined with the above point that people know when they’re not really welcomed, means that new members burn out really quickly. Some may opt out of the organization altogether or stop contributing their time and effort but still maintain membership for other reasons.

Similar to the “male loneliness epidemic,” I don’t feel sorry for these organizations when they have to announce that, despite refusing to fundamentally change in any way to attract new members, their membership has declined, and they can no longer maintain the programming they once did.

Like...yeah, what did you expect? That your existing members will live forever? That new members will be happy to be relegated to servants tasked to maintain an environment they aren’t really welcome in? You’re surprised that people don’t want to pay money to be treated like shit in their free time?

I really like what Boak & Bailey have to say about CAMRA’s announcement: it’s fine for organizations to cease to exist. Further, they point out that the social club exists to support its members, not to perpetuate its own existence.

There are people out there willing to do the work to make these organizations successful by being more inclusive. The issue is that the organizations have to let them. Or throw up road blocks, stymie initiatives and suggestions, discourage organizational change, and watch membership continue to decline. Because that’s how it’s always been done.

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The next phase

At the beginning of this year, I launched my Aroma: Explore the Wheel webinar series. It was an idea that had been rolling around in my head for several months. Smell training is important for a lot of reasons beyond developing your aroma identification skills and descriptive vocabulary.

The first iteration of Aroma: Explore the Wheel was a really fun experience for me and hopefully a fun and educational one for the participants. By the end of the series, though, I was ready for it to be over, but I still wanted to explore what else I could do with Aroma: Explore the Wheel.

So now, coming to you around the holidays this year is Aroma: Explore the Wheel Beer Master Kit. The kit will contain 100 vials of commonly found aromas in beer. Rather than monthly webinars, there will be an accompanying Aroma: Explore the Wheel online course that is included with the purchase of the kit. The online course will contain on-demand webinars covering a variety of topics related to beer aroma and flavor as well as suggestions for smell training.

To learn more or to pre-order, you can check out this page.

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Reading and watching Frances Tietje-Wang’s new Patreon Fermentable Sugar. Frances is a close friend, and I’m happy to see them begin sharing their insight and work on a public platform. You may have seen Frances’s writing in a variety of places as they are a prolific writer. Frances truly has a gift for connecting seemingly unrelated topics in fascinating ways as well as researching historical topics that you didn’t think you needed to know about until you read their writing. I highly recommend checking it out and considering supporting their work. The beer world needs more non-binary voices and viewpoints.

2. Traveling to Chicago for the Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers (FoBAB) at the beginning of next month. FoBAB is my absolute favorite beer festival and I’ve been invited to judge for the past few years, which was a dream of mine. It’s a good reminder to pause and reflect at the things you accomplish that past you would be so excited and proud to hear about.

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One of the more recent Bottom of TV shows we watched was the Netflix reality show Hitmakers. For the uninitiated, Hitmakers is a docu-reality series that follows a handful of established songwriters and producers through a series of writing camps, where they are tasked with developing hit singles for artists like John Legend, Shaboozey, and Lisa from BLACKPINK. Truly, it was interesting to watch this group of talented people work in different breakout groups to write catchy songs within a few hours. Would I watch a second season of it? Meh. Was it good enough to watch for a couple of nights? Sure.

But that’s not why we’re here.

Among the songwriters and producers is a couple, Jenna and Stephen. They are both Grammy-nominated and credited with writing songs like “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion and “Butter” by BTS.

I understand that reality TV is not actually reality and that editing can turn anyone into an archetype. That being said, Stephen sucks. Like a lot.

Imagine a life-size container of AXE body spray dressed up in appropriative streetwear that calls women “females.”

Imagine a scented vape that became sentient and thinks that Andrew Tate has some good ideas, actually.

Imagine an unsolicited dick pic in a snapback talking at you about crypto.

You get it.

Stephen is dismissive of most of the cast, which is made up largely of songwriters who are Black, queer, and/or women or femme-presenting.

In one scene, the cast is having dinner. Jenna is presented as talking a lot, until Stephen interrupts her to say, “Next song,” indicating that he wants her to stop talking. Cameras show cast mates exchanging glances with each other, but no one comes to Jenna’s defense or calls out rudeness in the moment.

In an ideal world, someone at the table would have spoken up in the moment to say that Stephen’s behavior was unacceptable. Given Stephen’s displays of toxic masculinity and misogynoir, it’s understandable that no one in the group of marginalized identities feels safe speaking up.

But then something amazing happens in the following scenes.

1. Two of the castmates, Harv and Tommy, have a conversation about how they were uncomfortable with the way Stephen spoke to Jenna.

2. They decide to talk to Stephen about it.

3. They talk to Stephen about it, which you can watch in the following clip:

I’ve written about the power dynamics that come with privilege, including the privilege of expecting other people to adapt to you because you represent the societal default (e.g., white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, male). Your life is relatively free from confrontation, so any exchange that makes you slightly uncomfortable is viewed as High Conflict. This is a luxury unavailable to historically excluded communities, who are constantly navigating how their mere presence may affect others and closely surveilling their behavior as a safety and survival mechanism. Yet no one screams as loudly as people who are facing the prospect of losing undeserved privileges.

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This clip is an excellent example of several things:

• Sure, maybe the best-case scenario would have been for someone to speak up in the moment. Given the context in which we’ve been introduced to the cast, it’s understandable that no one at the table thought the labor of trying to call out toxic behavior was going to be impactful.

• However, several cast members did find the behavior problematic. Two of them - importantly, both heterosexual men - decided to speak to Stephen privately about it.

• Both men are friendly throughout, even as Stephen gets defensive. They approach the conversation from a position that all men in the industry have a responsibility to hold themselves and others accountable for poor behavior. They’re holding Stephen accountable, but they frame it as a responsibility all of them have.

This scene shows men holding other men accountable in a way that left space for learning. It wasn’t a confrontation - even as Stephen tried to rewrite what happened and got increasingly defensive. It’s embarrassing to have someone name a way your actions harmed others, and defensiveness is the first place many of us go to. The conversation didn’t end with Stephen understanding his harmful actions in any meaningful way, but the conversation still happened.

When we discuss calling in versus calling out, this is what calling in looks like. Through this scene, we saw that play out in real (“real”) life. It didn’t go smoothly. There wasn’t a satisfying character arc wherein Stephen immediately recognizes why his behavior was unacceptable. But the conversation still happened, boundaries were communicated, and professional relationships remained unharmed.

The above clip gives you a wonderful blueprint for recognizing, naming, and addressing unacceptable behavior, in the face of and in spite of confrontation. If they can do it, so can you.

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More About Bitterness

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you may remember that bitterness is (fittingly?) my favorite basic taste to learn and talk about. Currently, it is generally accepted that all of our taste receptors for our five basic tastes in the mouth have been identified. Out of the 40 identified receptors, 65% of them are dedicated to detecting bitterness.

Our sense of bitterness evolved to alert us to ways that nature tries to kill us. It serves as a warning system for something that is potentially poisonous or toxic. As of 2025, 2,250 bitter compounds have been identified, and humans can recognize more than 100 of them.

In contrast, we have two types of receptors that detect salt - one that detects “normal” levels of salt and one that detects very high concentrations of salt, known as hypernatremia. They work independently of each other. The reserve receptor only lights up when it detects a dangerous level of salt.

On the other hand, our bitter receptors actually have two cool features. First, one receptor can be triggered by many different compounds. One receptor, TAS2R14, is triggered by over 150 different compounds. Second, one bitter compound can trigger multiple receptors. Caffeine, for example, triggers five different receptors.

Learning this makes sense, especially when you remember that our sense of bitterness evolved to alert us when we may be poisoning ourselves. We have so many different receptors to detect so many different bitterness compounds. It follows that our receptors are capable of being triggered by different compounds, and multiple receptors can be triggered by the same compound. It was essential to the survival of humankind that we evolved built-in redundancies for bitterness detection.

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And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Traveling to Yakima for the hop harvest for the First! Time! Ever! I have been to Yakima before, but it was in November - still lovely, but I’m excited to see the hop harvest in all of its glory. I will also be getting there in part via a dreamy train ride I’ve been wanting to do for years.

2. Listening to Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women by Ellen Atlanta. I really can’t overstate how much my mental health has improved in the past two and a half months that I’ve been off social media. I found the first few days frustrating and uncomfortable. Most of it stemmed from me realizing how often I would reflexively reach for my phone for no other reason than … to look at it, I guess? Listening to Pixel Flesh has reminded me of exactly how damaging social media can be in a lot of ways, and makes me thankful I decided to leave.

3. Rereading Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, for a new YouTube series I am developing. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to my Under the Jenfluence YouTube channel so you get notified of the series when it releases.

Question everything.

There’s so much out there in the beer industry that just gets repeated over and over again, and no one seems to investigate where that information came from. No, caramel malts are not good for foam or head retention, even if a company calls them carafoam. No, American lagers don’t purposely have low levels of detectable acetaldehyde2 in them. No, cohumulone doesn’t have a “harsher” bitterness than humulone.

To paraphrase Richard Priess of Escarpment Labs (more on my love for Escarpment Labs below) - most of what we think we know about brewing science is based on an English translation of a German text3 and some guy’s Ph.D. thesis from the 70s.

Which leads me to why questioning everything has been on my mind lately. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has read this newsletter or been around me for more than five minutes, I’ve been specifically thinking about descriptive language and my blind spots in interrogating where we get our descriptive language. Nay, it’s more accurate to say that my thoughts about descriptive language have been challenged. The sensory nerd in me is thrilled.

First, I had done a presentation for the Beer Culture Summit entitled “So Fresh & So Clean: Examining Smell’s Role in Societal Hierarchy.” The presentation focused on how smell had been relegated to being animalistic and barbaric, not something that men, specifically white and/or moneyed men, should be concerned about. Reverse-engineered scientific theories explained that vision was the most important sense and that our olfactory bulbs were relatively smaller than the olfactory bulbs of other mammals because we had evolved free will.4

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Then, I read this piece from Frauke Gaulia about how we describe scent from a visual standpoint because our language has been developed to talk about objects from a visual perspective.

This was one of those essays where reading it exploded my brain a little bit. The concept that we describe smell from a visual perspective, and that one of the reasons we have a hard time describing smells is because we can’t see them, had never occurred to me. It was so obvious when I read it, though. I even felt a little sheepish. Here I am championing our sense of smell while explaining how it has been relegated to a lesser sense, all while not thinking about where our descriptive language comes from, sense-wise.

Dang.

Then, I traveled to South Africa to judge in the African Beer Cup. While there, I was finally able to meet an online friend in person - Jessi Flynn of Kweza Craft Brewery, located in Kigali, Rwanda.

During a presentation on alternative5 grains for brewing, Jessi told the audience that she was excited to have a group of beer judges taste their sorghum beers and discuss descriptors specific to sorghum. Not, she emphasized, how sorghum tasted different from barley and other brewing grains, or trying to shoehorn sorghum flavors into the existing flavors for barley.

Sorghum is its own grain, commonly used in African and Asian brewing as well as gluten-free brewing. She advocated for the development of better flavor descriptor criteria for African grains, which also included millet and fonio. A new grain standard, rather than relying solely on the barley standards.

Up until that point, I think the only time I had tasted a 100% sorghum beer was when I tried Redbridge a few years ago. That’s kind of the equivalent of only tasting macro light lager and then trying a Pilsner made by a craft brewery. The flavors were indeed different from the flavors imparted by more Eurocolonial malted grains, which made it challenging to think of descriptors.

This is not insurmountable, though. I vividly recall learning about an ingredient called hops in beer and how they make beer bitter. I remember asking someone, “So when I taste bitterness in beer, that’s from hops?”

And look at me now.

Beer in Eurocolonial societies remains monocultural. “New” beer styles are still largely homogenous within established beer styles. IPAs can be anything now! But they’re still IPAs. The industry is still extremely hierarchical, and the Sainted Men of Brewing are still trotted out as the pinnacle of skill, even if the expertise they developed 20+ years ago may sometimes be a little tarnished, a little out of style, and maybe even a little embarrassing, like when one of your Boomer family members posts a declaration on Facebook that Meta does NOT have their permission to use their photos.

There is relatively little patience given to alternative perspectives or practices. The very small space that is sometimes begrudgingly ceded to new voices and practices becomes infested with armchair brewers who are more dedicated to denouncing and presenting strawman arguments than to understanding.

Which leads me back to the title of this month’s newsletter and my “question everything” advice. Taking a more multicultural approach to descriptive language is a big lift, but not an impossible one. On an institutional level, it requires fighting the idea that building a lexicon necessarily requires the solicitation of experts in that particular field. On an individual level, it requires us to identify our own blind spots and biases and work towards broadening our understanding of different cultures.

As I noted a couple of years ago, I frequently brought this up while completing the UC-Davis Applied Sensory and Consumer Science program. How would sensory science look different if it were more inclusive? The pushback I received was that outcomes were largely the same when “more diverse” sample populations were used. Sure they were - I look forward to seeing this finding written up in Convenient Theories for You magazine, along with “Did You Ever Think That Maybe Women and Black People Don’t Apply Because They Don’t Want to Work in Beer?” and “Actually, One of Our Female Employees Came Up With The Name So It’s Not Sexist.”

I continue to mull this topic over in my head, thinking about how much opportunity there is to expand our descriptive language and wondering what descriptive language I’ve accepted as doctrine without examining where that language arose. Or that I’ve accepted because it’s based on what we can see versus more ephemeral bases like emotions.

I challenge you to do the same, particularly when you find yourself trying to fit the round peg of global flavors into the square hole of Eurocolonial flavors. And let me know what you find!

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

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And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Leaving social media. It’s such a millennial thing to make a grand announcement about leaving social media. It also seems like white women’s essays about their changing relationship with the internet and social media are the grown-up version of the college application essay. The Lunchables to charcuterie board pipeline. I know I get at least two newsletters weekly about the subject. However, this one really broke me, and I’ve revisited it almost every day since I read it:

   all my friends and i talk about is getting rid of our phones

2. Listening to The Escarpment Labs Podcast by Escarpment Labs. I am a HUGE fan of the education that Escarpment Labs puts out. Having spent a not insignificant amount of the last ten or so years studying beer, it’s not often anymore that I hear new-to-me knowledge, and their first episodes on pressure fermentation and pitch rate have so much great information explained in an approachable way. Yeast is the ultimate NIMBY? GTFOutta here with that amazing metaphorical example.

3. Preparing to undergo a hysterectomy. This may seem a little TMI for a newsletter, and I vacillated on whether it’s appropriate to include it here. However, I live in a state that kept a dead woman “alive” as an incubator against her family’s wishes to extract a baby from her corpse, and also prefers to let pregnant people bleed out in hospital parking lots rather than giving them lifesaving medical care. In my waning fertile years, I chose to make certain there is no way I can get pregnant. If you’re the kind of person who views these stories as somehow not real life or thinks that it doesn’t affect you, now you know someone who has chosen to get organs removed from her body because she knows her life is worth less than a clump of cells in the state where she resides. Abortion is healthcare.

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Most of the time, these conversations occur when we drive by a commercial building for sale that looks like it would be a good space for a brewery. We’ve been having this conversation for years, across all the different places we’ve lived.

Aside from my dream of owning a brewery where I don’t have to deal with divorced Untappd dads, homebrewers, and the entire population of the world in general, one of my non-negotiables is that I live in the community where my brewery is located. Not the city or its suburbs, but the actual neighborhood and community where I do business.

Breweries became a cornerstone of community redevelopment and revitalization projects in the 2010s. This may still be happening here and there, but given ::gestures to the hellscape we currently live in::, I’m guessing that has slowed down in the last few years. Towns looking to bring their citizens into refurbished mills or warehouses often had space set aside for a brewery. A brewery’s second location went into an old industrial building alongside a coffee shop, a natural wine bar, and a brunch restaurant with retro, sassy advertising.

City neighborhoods with authentic hipness came into the crosshairs of real estate developers. Rents in those neighborhoods went up, and the genuinely cool places, the places that made the neighborhood cool - used bookstores, tiny ethnic restaurants, dive bars - were forced out. Developers gobbled up the properties and either razed them or retrofitted them for social media-ready boutiques, niche fitness studios, and cheugy restaurants.2 The streets began to be lined with beige and gray 5-over-1s, townhomes, and condos, mostly full of empty AirsBnB or perhaps housing a Netflix reality show.

And, of course, no neighborhood is properly gentrified unless and until a brewery opens up in it. Gleaming stainless, chalkboard beer menus, pothos and spider plants abound, and lumbar-destroying Lancaster chairs.

Coming soon! BlackRock Brewing brought to you by The Carlyle Group and WeWork.

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But are those breweries actually part of the community?

Does the ownership/leadership get in their cars at the end of the day and drive home to the suburbs or across town?

Can employees afford to live in the area where the brewery is, or do they have to endure commutes that can stretch into an hour plus each way?

How much money and other investments are being returned to the community, rather than online shopping or the chain restaurants and big box stores that litter the suburbs?

Do their customers live in the same community? Or are they ride-sharing into town to day drink on weekends?

How far away and widespread is their supply chain and procurement? Do they utilize local vendors more than a couple of times a year?

I can continue to ask a bunch of hypothetical questions, but I think you get the point. Many breweries opened in areas targeted by cities and other local governments for revitalization. Because breweries are “cool” and can act as anchors to attract other small businesses that exist for a very narrow slice of the population.

And by a very narrow slice of the population, I mean (mostly white) people with money and economic mobility.

The target audience, more times than not, is decidedly not the people who already live in the neighborhood, some of whom have lived in the neighborhood for years.

Why is/was this happening? I’ll give you one guess, and it’s racism. As part of FDR’s New Deal, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation created maps of “residential security” that indicated how safe an investment would be in a particular neighborhood. This practice is now commonly referred to as redlining. These maps were created on the basis that the race3 of the people living in a neighborhood indicated the quality of the neighborhood. Redlining led to the incentivization of developing suburbs, where white people were moving to.

Another major reason gentrification is occurring is the U.S.’s steady march toward the oligarchical consolidation of power and gutting of social safety nets. What has emerged are systems of support that benefit people with money. Not just money - a lot of money. Now, very few individual people have the capital to participate in gentrification or even in actual economic development projects like community land trusts. Who has that capital? Real estate developers and our current economic boogeyman, private equity.

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Please know that if you live in one of these areas or own a business there, I am not demonizing you. Yes, you’re part of the problem, but so am I. And so are most of the people reading this.

We now find ourselves in this predicament, so what can we do about it? There are large-scale economic possibilities, such as improved public transit, fairer housing, and more equitable schooling. These all rely on people who want change to get involved in local governments, which can range from attending zoning meetings to running for an office. You can and should look into how you can get involved in your local government. As we’ve seen, telling people to vote harder doesn’t work.

You, as an individual, can do several things to help support the community. You can purchase from businesses in your gentrified area that are owned by historically excluded communities. Maybe head to the halal restaurant at lunch instead of the white-owned franchise. Use public transit - if governments cared about reliable, safe public transit for non-white people, we would have reliable, safe public transit. But they don’t, so leverage your white privilege and social capital and take the bus.4 Find neighborhood organizations and causes and get involved. Making your space available to them for functions and meetings for free is a nice start, but it’s only a start. Gentrification inordinately affects older, low-income, and disabled adults. How can you support them? Find out what community services are available to them and donate your time.

A key point in getting involved in your brewery’s neighborhood is to find out what the neighborhood needs and support those needs. It’s NOT just advocating for bike lanes, holding animal shelter adoption events, or participating in neighborhood cleanups once a year. It’s understanding that there needs to be safe crosswalks, better community resources for harm reduction that aren’t calling the cops, and well-lit streets and public areas.

And for fuck’s sake, get rid of your cashless policy. I get it, I get it - during the pandemic, cashless made sense. Being cash-free is a great way to ensure that the 25 million unbanked and underbanked households in the U.S. can’t patronize your business. I’m betting you can guess the demographics of unbanked and underbanked people,5 but here are stats to help:

• 23.8% of Black households are underbanked, and 10.6% are unbanked

• 21.7% of Latino households are underbanked, and 9.5% are unbanked

• 10.75% of Native households are underbanked, and 12.2% are unbanked6

Hmmm, those demographics sound an awful lot like the demographics of communities being displaced by gentrification, don’t they? People of color and immigrants with undocumented status typically have less access to credit and formal financial institutions. People with fixed incomes, such as seniors and disabled adults, many times use cash to track spending and budget.

Don’t want people of color, seniors, and disabled adults to patronize your business? Keep your cashless policy. But maybe remove the “Everyone is welcome here” sign from your brewery window.

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And finally…

Thank you to those of you who commented, emailed, DMed, and texted me about last month’s newsletter. That was a big fucking scary thing to share with the world, and I was extremely anxious about publishing it. Hearing from people about how they can relate made me feel less alone in my experiences. The support and affirmations I’ve received from you have helped me start to move through the world differently, with more confidence, compassion, and strength.

Wednesday, October 20, 2020

I woke up with a pounding headache and sour stomach, dreading getting out of bed. I was extremely hungover, extremely confused, and extremely freaked out.

Had I tried to die by suicide last night?

I couldn’t remember, and that freaked me out. Imagine waking up, not knowing if you should be waking up.

Worse still, imagine not waking up.

The night before, I had gotten very drunk. Extremely drunk. Like at least 7 high-ABV beers drunk. And it had been a Tuesday night. And that behavior was not unusual for me. It would have been more unusual if I weren’t very drunk.

Most of the time when I drank, I was a happy and silly drunk. Sometimes an angry drunk, but not often. Sometimes - more often than I care to admit - I became a hateful drunk, but only to myself and only when I was alone. The night before was a hateful drunk night. I stayed up too late, drinking too much, and berating myself for being unlovable, ugly, fat, a burden. Telling myself that everyone around me was embarrassed to be associated with me and that they would be so much better off if I weren’t in their lives.

This isn’t new for me. For as long as I can remember, suicidal ideation has just been part of my thought process. If you haven’t experienced suicidal ideation, this is a foreign concept. The only way I can really describe it is that suicide is just …always an option for me. Since being diagnosed as neurodivergent, I’ve learned that over 60% of people who are diagnosed with autism in adulthood have reported having suicidal ideation.

I also learned early on that saying out loud that you were suicidal meant that the police would be called, you would be carted off to a mental health facility, and everyone you know would know that you were “crazy.” I learned early on that these feelings were shameful, wrong, and dangerous, so they needed to stay inside. As long as I kept these feelings to myself, I was safe.

Well, safe from everyone except myself.

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That night, after berating myself, I stumbled upstairs to go to bed. I glared at myself in the mirror and saw the hateful face sneering back at me.

It was already late, I was very drunk, and I had to go to work in the morning. I knew I would have a monster hangover, so I dug the ibuprofen bottle out of the bathroom drawer. I shook three into my hand, paused, and shook almost all the contents of the bottle out into my hand. I stood (swayed) there, contemplating whether to take three painkillers or thirty.

And I woke up the next morning not knowing if I had taken three or thirty. Using context clues, I decided I had only taken three because 1. I woke up and 2. there was no evidence that I had been violently ill during the night, which is what I presumed would have happened if I had taken the entire handful.

My head was pounding. My skin felt tight. My stomach was sour. My breath still reeked of beer. There was a dull ache under my right ribs, an ache that was almost always there now and got much worse when I drank. I online-diagnosed myself with some kind of liver issue, the result of heavy and sustained drinking for most of my adult life. That pain didn’t stop me from drinking, though, even as I worried that I might someday have to get a liver transplant, and how ashamed I would be to have to tell people that.

I got ready for work and drove into the brewery. I still felt like shit and was still freaked out, but I smiled and joked with everyone like I normally did. I jokingly told a couple of coworkers how massively hungover I was until I realized that showing up to work on a Wednesday morning with a massive hangover was probably not a great sign.

Like so many times before, I swore that I would take a break from drinking, and this time, like every other time, I promised myself I would really do it. Not drinking the day after you got incredibly intoxicated is pretty easy to do - you feel like shit, you look like shit, and the results of your actions are right there and undeniable. But the day after the day after, I usually wasn’t hungover anymore, and it was easier to drink than it was to not drink. But this was the first time (that I remember) not remembering whether I had tried to die the night before, so my resolve was a little stronger this go-round.

I found an app called I Am Sober and signed up for it. I Am Sober is an app designed for people trying to get sober. It acts somewhat as a social network but also does daily check-ins to ask how your day was, if you drank, what your mood was, etc. I remember introducing myself by saying that I had woken up scared and in physical and mental pain. I read stories from people who had fallen off the wagon and beaten themselves up for it. I read stories from people who had been sober for weeks or months, and their encouragement to others that we, too, could reach those milestones.

For about four months, I stayed sober. A very small group of people (like literally maybe two) knew that I wasn’t drinking because I felt I had been drinking too much. Eventually, though, I started drinking again - not as much at first, and I switched from beer to hard seltzer - but within a few months, I was drinking at about the same level I had been.

Fast forward to the fall of 2022, and I was again experiencing massive suicidal ideation. I was crying all the time. I was back to thinking how much better off everyone in my life would be if they didn’t have to deal with me. When someone high profile dies by suicide1, I see all the beseeching social media posts that you aren’t alone and, if you think you don’t have anyone you can talk to, you can reach out to them, that one random friend from high school who you sat next to on a band trip once. Sometimes I would see someone talk about how selfish the person who died by suicide was.

In both instances, I would always think, “That’s not the case.”

For the first instance, I understand the intent behind the message and truly hope that statements like that are helpful for someone somewhere.

“Not you, though,” my brain would tell me. “They’re not talking to you.”

In the second instance, sometimes I would feel myself getting angry about being misunderstood. I would think about how I wasn’t being selfish; rather, I felt I was actually being selfless because I truly believed in my deepest core that those closest to me would have a much better life without me in it. I would be doing them a kindness by removing myself from their lives. I was coming from a place of love and mercy. Sure, some people would be sad for a while, like we’re sad when a pet dies, but eventually everyone would move past the sadness and go about their lives. I was convinced that someday they would look back and say, “She was right. It sucked for a little bit but boy are our lives improved now.”

I was at one of the Great American Beer Festival judging sessions in Louisville, Colorado, in September. I was still highly suicidal, but happy that this year I would be judging with one of my closest friends. Again, it’s hard to explain the constant presence of suicidal ideation because I could be thinking how everyone would be better off without me, but also be super happy that I got to hang out with faraway friends.

We happened to be in Colorado on my birthday. My friends and I decided to go for a hike and then have lunch. During lunch, as we clinked our glasses together, one of my friends said, “We’re really happy you were born.” I smiled and then looked away quickly, thankful that I had my sunglasses on so no one could see the tears welling up in my eyes. Someone was happy that I had been born, even if I wasn’t.

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Soon after I returned from that trip, I found a psychiatrist and a therapist. I decided that I did not want to keep feeling the way I was feeling and trying to self-medicate with alcohol. I had been to therapy before, with varying results, but I also knew I was never completely honest when I did go to therapy. It sounds ironic, but telling a therapist that I was suicidal seemed like a dangerous thing. Would the EMTs be knocking on my door by the time our telehealth appointment was over? Would they find a way to contact my husband and tell him?

As a late-diagnosed autistic who happens to be a woman, I learned to mask at a very young age and have been high-masking ever since. No one knew I was feeling this way, not even - especially - the people closest to me. I am extremely good at hiding my emotions and acting like everything is fine.

I have not had a suicidal episode since then. I don’t know if I will ever have one again. It’s been a part of me for as long as I can remember, so I’m skeptical that it is just gone without a trace. I’m happy that I’m here to tell this story and all the others. Sometimes I think about what I would have missed had I decided that night to take thirty pills instead of three. Beyond my accomplishments, I would not have been able to surprise my mom on her 70th birthday. I wouldn’t have seen my only niece graduate from high school. I wouldn’t have seen places I never thought I’d see, like Munich, London, and Prague. I wouldn’t have met some of the people I consider my closest friends.

I wouldn’t have had all of those moments, big and small. All those times someone I loved made me laugh so hard that I cried and couldn’t catch my breath, only to catch it and exhale in a loud, gleeful squeal until I dissolved into giggles again. All those times I snapped a picture of something random because it made me think of someone, and all those times someone did that for me. All of those times.

May is mental health awareness month, which is why I’m sharing this story now. The beer industry is notorious for a lot of things, being quiet about alcohol abuse and mental health being among those things. I also think a lot of neurodivergent people end up working in beer because it can be creative, not necessarily follow a traditional 9-to-5, and for other reasons.

Four people inspired me to share this story, even if none of them knew about it until I told them. Eugenia Brown is a good friend of mine and the first person I had ever seen talk openly about having suicidal ideation. Not only talk about it, but she also reassured people she was fine and didn’t need to talk about it. I understood that to my core - like I mentioned, for some people, suicidal ideation is just always there, always present. You learn to go about your life despite it being there because you learn that it will always be there, the same way the birthmark on my left shin is just always there. You can go out and laugh with friends and excel at work, and do cool things, and still have suicidal ideation.

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TJ Crieghton is another friend who began openly sharing his struggles with suicidal ideation on social media in hopes that he could help other people. Before Eugenia and TJ, I had never heard anyone discuss their suicidal ideation as matter-of-factly as I thought about mine. I didn’t know other people had done things like casually think, “If I jumped off this building, where should I aim my body to make sure that I die?”

The third person is fellow beer writer David Nilsen. I wrote the first draft of this newsletter a few weeks ago and have been wavering ever since about whether I could actually hit publish and let the world know about something that had been so shameful to me for so long. Then, just a few weeks ago, Pellicle magazine released an article written by David about Brad Etheridge, a brewer who had died by suicide in 2023. In the article, David also shared his experiences with suicidal ideation. His experience was so similar to mine, and he eloquently described the same feeling about suicidal ideation that I share. I reached out to David to express my appreciation for him sharing his experience, as it lined up almost exactly with mine. Without reading his words, I may have gotten too scared to send this newsletter you are reading.

The last person who inspired me is not someone known to me personally, but all of us are familiar with the movement she began in 2009 - Tarana Burke, the creator of #MeToo.2 When I read her book, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, I recognized some of my own struggles in hers.

Too ashamed to tell anyone how she had been sexually abused, and then seeing people who needed to hear her story, who needed to hear that they were not alone and that it wasn’t their fault. She talked about times when she felt she had failed someone because, to truly support them, she had to share that she, too, had been sexually assaulted and was unable to. Finally, she was able to tell someone about her abuse - her child, after her child told her they had been sexually abused.

I felt this story rising in my throat as I finished Unbound. I knew it was time to share because I know everyone is struggling with issues seen and unseen, known and unknown. Realizing that sharing could potentially help someone else who is struggling, I suddenly felt compelled to write it. I had to get it out and into the world. Although I’m always a bit surprised when someone says they listen to my podcast or thanks me for my advocacy within the beer industry, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have visibility in the industry.

I know my words have weight, and I know my words have sparked conversations and change. I know my words have comforted some and made others uncomfortable. I hope this story, these words, can help someone, too.

A couple more things before we leave each other. First, most importantly, diagnoses save lives, meds save lives, and therapy saves lives. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, and there is no shame in any of them. For late-diagnosed autistic adults, over 60% have reported having suicidal ideation, compared to 4.8% of neurotypical adults. Getting diagnosed as neurodivergent and going on meds for ADHD have absolutely changed my life for the better. Understanding that there is nothing inherently wrong or unlovable about me, but rather I’ve been living undiagnosed on the spectrum, struggling to get by without adequate knowledge or support for my entire life. Learning about my diagnosis helped me understand so much more about why I respond to the world the way I do, as well as communicate and advocate for my needs.

Second, I am okay. I have a wonderful support system and am fortunate enough to have access to quality health care. Also, please know that it is okay to talk to me about this. It’s an uncomfortable subject to be sure (hi, I just shared this with hundreds of people, most of whom I do not know personally), and I think that can sometimes make people think they shouldn’t address it or they need to avoid the topic.

To be clear, when I say it’s okay to talk to me about it, I do not mean it’s okay to center yourself in this narrative and expect me to help you work through your feelings about my story. It’s already scary and vulnerable to share this, and I don’t need the added burden of being expected to make you feel better about it. Please do that emotional labor yourself.

If you would like to talk to me about what I’ve written, know that I will probably cry. But also know that I cry all the time about everything, so I’m cool with crying. I’m like the Tammany Hall of criers - I cry early and often.

I’m thankful that I am still here to cry over anything and everything. I don’t want to end this with something trite like “It gets better,” because the reality is that it doesn’t get better for some people.

Still, in case no one has told you today:

There are people out there whose lives are unequivocally better because you are in them.

Infinite Ingredient

It seems a little weird to wrap this up with a fun sensory topic or telling you what I’m up to, so here are some pictures of things I’m grateful to have experienced since October 20, 2020.

In for 2025: Being public and proud of your unbridled dismissiveness for vulnerable populations

Out for 2025: Accountability and justice

It’s not uncommon for someone to reach out to me about a problematic person or company in the industry to ask whether I know if they have made positive changes. It’s also not uncommon for me to reach out to people to ask the same. Did that association ever apologize to you personally? Did that brewery hire that guy knowing of his well-documented violence against women? Did that person really leave their position or did they just lay low for a while only to quietly return later?1

I appreciate those inquiries. I really do. When I’m asked, I tell the person what I know that is sharable, if the information I have is recent, and who else they may want to ask for an update. Those are good inquiries that show me someone is being deliberate about how and where they spend their money, where they seek employment, and who they choose to support or fraternize with.

“Good” here is relative, of course - I think these are good inquiries. One person’s good inquiry is another person’s cancel culture cry sometimes. Another “Beer is supposed to be fun” apologist who does not want to be burdened with thinking critically or - horror of horrors! - being uncomfortable.

What I’m seeing more of, though, is people who demonstrate by their actions if not their outright words that they would prefer that we all just move on. Just get over it. Why are you still talking about something that happened five years ago? How long do we need to punish this poor man who only committed a few assaults or racisms or only made his own employees uncomfortable? Those employees aren’t even there anymore!

How long am I supposed to pretend that I don’t still buy beer from breweries known to have abusive and dangerous practices towards their employees and patrons? Ugh, can’t we all just agree that yeah, yeah, yeah, sexism is bad and racism is bad but also that brewery, that guy, makes beer that I really like and want to keep purchasing? That guy “seems like a good guy,” even though I have never met him, much less worked for him.

What is the motivation behind expecting people to move on? Are they concerned with making amends with the victims? Or are they impatiently wanting the victims to move on and for the public to forget the victims ever existed?

Are they truly concerned about the victims or are they wanting to avoid the cognitive dissonance of knowing they’re supporting problematic men and companies?

Are they wanting you to tell them that it’s okay for them to post those Hill Farmstead pictures or that selfie of them with an industry star who also has a long past of complicity in abuse?

When they don’t get moral permission from victims, do they get frustrated and say that #MeToo and “cancel culture” have gone too far? Do they ask how long this poor man is expected to be punished for something that they don’t think was that bad? It seems to them that this was all a misunderstanding and that she’s just bitter and doing it for attention.

Let’s say the quiet part out loud and complete the thought that victims should be “over it” by now or have moved on because you want moral absolution. What are you really asking for? What burden does your implicit or explicit request place on victims?

When a victim feels they have not been made whole by the perpetrator and the systems that allow the behavior to continue, demanding they move on and forgive is demanding that they meet you where you are - that you think what happened to them wasn’t that bad, that the wrong done does not matter, that they don’t matter.

Similar to the kinds of people who cry cancel culture when held accountable for their actions, the only people who really seem to be lectured to about the virtues of forgiveness are women and other marginalized groups. Non-forgiveness and expressions of anger and hurt make it much harder for the wider community to pretend everything is fiiiinnnee, we all posted about how we were listening and learning and we all purchased ally merch that one time when it was popular to do so. What more do you want?

When we now remind people that hey, that wrong was never addressed, we’re often met with DARVO behaviors. Suddenly the victim is the perpetrator of the harm because she dares to ask that her peers please acknowledge what happened to her.

I know plenty of “nice guys,” “good guys,” “the guys who would NEVER do that and neither would their friends,”2 who express their condolences that something bad happened to a person they know but never want to hear the details or get too deep. Plausible deniability and all. Sometimes the perpetrator’s wrongdoing is woven into their lore and, rather than correcting or even acknowledging their behavior, his victims are fridged as part of his redemption story.

When we experience the cognitive dissonance of knowing a person or company is problematic and has caused someone(s) harm but we really like their beer or he’s “such a nice guy,” most of the time we seem to land on expecting or even morally blackmailing the victim(s) to forgive and move on. If we can get them to give us permission to support problematic behavior - even if we coerce it out of them - then we can get back to not having to complicate our idol worship and perceived proximity to power. We don’t have to be burdened because someone had the gall to make us inconveniently aware of misconduct.

Apologies are not transactional, and admitting to misconduct does not absolve anyone of committing it. Apologies don’t count from a vague social media post or a press release. Apologies only count when they are in person, to the person, with no passive voice and no conditions.

Also, no one else has the prerogative to forgive on the victim’s behalf. I am not going to debate with anyone “how bad” what they did to their victims was. There is no grey area when it comes to inequitable treatment - there is a bright line between what is equitable and what is inequitable. Everything that falls below the line of inequitable treatment is inequitable treatment. Full stop. Period.

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I really don’t give a shit if you think my or anyone else’s lived experience wasn’t “that bad,” nor do I care that you have forgiven them because forgiveness is not yours to give in the first place.

Rather than expecting the victim to resolve our cognitive dissonance by minimizing the harm done to them, what if we instead tried to resolve our cognitive dissonance by holding the perpetrator accountable? Rather than pushing the victim to forgive, why not push the perpetrator to change his behavior?

When presented with the choice of righteously browbeating a victim into mollifying our moral dilemmas or holding a man accountable for the harm he has caused, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand what the best path forward is. And we do know what the better choice is, but it makes us uncomfy for a short time, so we take the easy route and rely on old faithful patriarchy instead.

Justice doesn’t look like demanding the perpetrator be eternally flagellated in the proverbial town square. It doesn’t look like demanding that everyone boycott a business for all of time. One hundred percent ethical consumption is impossible under capitalism.

I can accept that the men in my story are never going to get fired or held actually accountable for cultivating a culture of white supremacy and patriarchy that not only empowers but rewards abusers for their wrongdoings. It’s much, much, much harder to see people who proclaim to care about me, cozy up to said men and ask for selfies with them rather than asking why they continue to stay silent in the face of inequitable and harmful behavior.

Many people - myself included - say that the biggest betrayal is not the wrongdoing. The biggest betrayal is in seeing people who call themselves allies and friends not acknowledging that they are supporting someone they know has harmed you.

When asked what justice looks like for them, many victims don’t say apologies or even punishment. Most say that acknowledgment is what they want the most. Sure, acknowledgment from the perpetrator. More than that, though, most say that acknowledgment from others is more important. Not acknowledgment in the form of blanket social media posts, acknowledgment in the form of a personal interaction.

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Thinking that you’d get nothing else done if you spent all your time acknowledging that you support men you know have harmed women, BIPOC, and others?

Wow, imagine if instead, you were spending your time being retraumatized or trying to figure out how to pay for therapy. Or seeing people you thought were on your side literally embracing those responsible for your pain and trauma. Or still dealing with the same fucking shit because we are and it never really stopped.

I’m not being hyperbolic here. Almost four years later, I still have several people who were responsible for my experiences blocked on social media - and their wives and other family members whom they asked to look at my social media after realizing I blocked them. I have action plans currently in place with my husband and friends on what to do if we are somewhere and see one of those people. The night before a local industry event last year, I got less than three hours of sleep because I was so anxious that one of them would be at the meeting. I walked into the event shaking, headed straight to the front of the room so I couldn’t see who else may show up, and spent the entire time staring straight ahead at the speakers, afraid to look around.

As I mentioned above, when people reach out to me about a particular company or person and whether actual changes have been made, I’ll tell them the information I have and then that information is theirs to do what they want with.

When I’m evaluating whether actual changes have been made - and there are a few examples of companies and people making positive changes and doing the work of helping deliver justice to their victims - here are a few questions I ask:

1. Has the victim’s personal truth been acknowledged?

2. Has the harm they have suffered been acknowledged?

3. Was there a full apology, with remorse and without excuses?

4. Was the apology heartfelt and informed by reflection and education?

5. What work has the perpetrator done to ensure they don’t repeat the harmful behavior?

6. What acknowledgment and work have the people who enabled the misconduct done?

7. Were the apologies directed to the victims or was the apology vague and for social media purposes?

8. Are they asking for forgiveness or demanding that forgiveness be given?

The bottom line is that I will not absolve you from continuing to support people in the industry who you know are problematic. No one else will either, so don’t ask. You can make your own choices and you can deal with the consequences.

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And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to.

1. Escaping to Belgium for a week. I’ll be spending the next week consuming beer, frites, chocolate, and waffles.

2. Preparing for my CBC presentation with thee Beery Godmother, LaTreace Harris. If you’ll be at CBC, please come to our presentation on Tuesday, April 29, at 2:45 p.m.

3. Reading Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates. Hint: it’s white supremacy and patriarchy! It always is and it affects guys, too. Sadly, some of the “extreme” misogyny is already considered acceptable ways for men to act. See footnote 2.

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You’re not quite sure if you’re hearing anything at all. If you are like me, your millennial birthright of tinnitus may be masking it sometimes.

But it’s there.

A low but noticeable sound like a gust of wind.

That sound you hear?

It’s the sound of the relieved sighs of many brewery owners, leadership, and others up and down the chain of command that they don’t have to act like they care about “DEI” anymore.

“Finally!” I can almost hear them proclaim, “Finally, someone is thinking about the white men. They have not been the center of conversation for…well, never, the industry has always been centered on them. But still! At least now we can go back to just taking annual pictures of our female staff throwing hops into the boil to celebrate just how much we care about women. We did it, boys.”

“We can go back to holding company events at places like Topgolf. We can stop the bare minimum of posting our job openings on the Pink Boots website because we’re just going to hire a dude whose dad was a fraternity brother with the CEO. We can go back to ‘participating’ in International Women’s Day by buying the Pink Boots hop blend and never donating any of the proceeds.”1

“We can create problematic beer labels and names because they’re ‘just a joke.’ At last, the days of ‘you can’t say anything to anyone anymore’ are over and we can go back to - well, continue because we never really stopped - just being guys being dudes because that’s what this industry is all about, right? It’s just beer. Beer is supposed to be fun.”

“Finally, we don’t have to be frustrated anymore because someone from a historically excluded community asked us to please not do sexisms or racisms or microaggressions.”

“Rise up! We no longer have to fear being ‘canceled.’”

Let’s be very clear: “cancel culture” is not an actual thing. If you think you know of an example of cancel culture, I would love for you to send it to me and explain why it’s cancel culture and not accountability. Explain to me how it’s cancel culture and not people in positions of power being held to the same standards they demand everyone else be held to.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Ever notice how people crying about cancel culture usually live at several intersections of privilege - white, male, powerful, cis-gender, heterosexual, monied, able-bodied, and access to large platforms. A veritable buffet of privilege where the sneeze guard is presumed tacit immunity.

Who don’t you see proclaiming they are being canceled when their actions are called into question? Literally everyone else. Because everyone else is not given multiple chances. At best, they are given *A* chance. One chance that you may not even be aware of is your only chance.

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So we’re going backward and I’m betting what little ongoing equity work is still going on will dwindle off. I’m guessing most of it already has. Social media grids have already gone back to mostly white faces. White women will probably still be held up as exemplars of breweries' diversity initiatives.2

But not given support, only access. Because the deal wasn’t that you would prosper or even be happy. The deal was you got hired so we could parade you around in public while undermining you in private. We set it up so that the opportunity for historically excluded people is so compromised that it’s designed for them to not want to show up. That way, we can wring our hands in public that “diverse” applicants aren’t applying and it’s probably because they’re not interested in being involved.

Speaking of white women, when was the last time you had to pause doing your actual job to attend your brewery’s “diversity team” meeting so you could do the unpaid labor of educating your bosses how to treat you like a human? I will be shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you! - if those meetings lasted past mid-2022.

But back to cancel culture, as misguided belief in it is partly responsible for where we find ourselves today. To cry “cancel culture” in the face of being asked to be accountable for your behavior fits into the RVO of DARVO.

DARVO, if you are not familiar with it, stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender Roles. Please become familiar with it, because it is all around us and will continue to get worse as the world around us continues to get more delusional. Once you learn to recognize it, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of it you see.

If you would like to see stunning examples of DARVO in the beer industry, check out literally anything James Watt has been involved in, such as the repeated sexual harassment of employees and customers.3

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If you haven’t already read Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi, please consider this essential reading. Faludi does an excellent job of tracing the backlash to the feminism of the 60s and 70s through the media, entertainment, and politics of the 1980s. Remember all those awful mean “career women” in movies with big shoulder pads who only cared about their careers and didn’t care about being married or having kids? They either end up as lonely villains who got their comeuppance or learn their true role in life is to give up their careers and belong to a small-town man.

I bring this up now because I want you to pay close attention to what is going on around us. Learn to spot DARVO when it is happening. Even if you feel powerless to confront it, there is still value in understanding what is happening. And it’s going to continue getting worse.

There are people who want you to stay silent. They’re going to try to make you feel isolated. They’re going to try to make you feel ashamed about your response to their abuse so that you’ll be afraid to speak up. They’re going to try to gaslight you into thinking that actually, when you think about it, you’re the one who is the aggressor, and why are you trying to cancel them?

When you feel pressured to stay silent, whose voice is applying that pressure?

Who benefits when you have no questions?

These questions also apply to allies. Maybe especially to allies, because to be an ally means that you are not part of the group being attacked. Particularly if you can hide behind your whiteness, it is time for you to actually step up.

We are not powerless but we do have to be brave. You are not powerless but you do have to be brave.4 Which you can do, because you can do and have done hard things.

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Smell Loss is a Warning Sign for Medical Conditions

In a previous newsletter, I wrote about the rise in awareness about anosmia and the impact losing our sense of smell, mostly due to the pandemic. We get regular vision and hearing tests, as well as routine dental visits. Why aren’t there routine smell tests?

Recent research has determined that smell loss can be an early warning sign of 139 medical conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and anxiety disorders. Smell loss is linked to virtually every body system from cardiovascular to metabolic. One thing all the diseases linked to smell loss shared is increased inflammation.

The researchers proposed three mechanisms behind the connection of smell loss and disease: a common factor affecting the olfactory system and body systems; substances produced by medical conditions causing damage to the olfactory system; and that the olfactory system may generate compounds that increase vulnerability to disease.

On the flip side, there is a ton of research out there that shows how effective olfactory training is in mitigating some of these diseases. Smell training doesn’t just make you a better evaluator of beer - it can improve your memory among many other benefits.

Imagine if we established routine smell tasting that could provide a baseline measurement of your sense of smell and help validate any loss of smell you experience. What if that routine test could be used with other risk factors and biological information to screen you for hundreds of diseases?

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few things I am up to these days:

1. Having a blast with my Aroma: Explore the Wheel webinars. If you haven’t already registered for one, do it now! It is very cool to see this project come to fruition, but I was surprised by how excited doing the webinars and interacting with the participants has made me. These webinars are really fun, and I’ve gotten really positive feedback from participants. As a reminder, I aim to make all of my projects as accessible as possible, so there is a (very brief) fee waiver request form on my website, too.

2. Listening to Scam Factory, a podcast about those scam emails and texts we get. No, you probably don’t have unpaid tolls. No, “Michael from HR company,” you may not send me job opportunities. As it turns out, the people behind those messages are often trapped in “scam factories” and forced to scam people. The podcast is literally only days old, so you can catch up pretty quickly.

3. Attending my first Bier Omekase in Chicago. I am admittedly very biased about how awesome this project is because I am friends with the creators, Jenny Pfafflin and Shana Solarte. HOWEVER, Bier Omekase is such a cool concept and, of course, I absolutely love learning about beer culture outside of the Eurocolonial beer cultures we all know.

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The toxic one.

At a previous brewery, there was an employee who I’m still not exactly sure what their exact job title was - maybe bar manager? - but what I do know is that they spent an inordinate amount of time during their workday in the office I shared with two other coworkers. Mostly complaining. Mostly complaining about work. And hey, I get it. A reality for most of us is that we have to exchange our labor for money to survive and live a life outside of work. I love my job and some days I still feel like I hate it.

But you know this type of person. Always complaining. Rarely, if ever, taking any concrete steps to improve the situation or at least their attitude toward it. This includes declining to take opportunities to make improvements or attain a desired goal. I saw this particular coworker clash with subordinates and with supervisors. I saw their managers giving them opportunities to do things like invest in good quality draught cleaning equipment and them never following through with it.

It was easier to complain than to put in an effort. Because they knew what complaining got them, even if it was nothing. But getting what they asked for was an unknown and therefore an uncomfortable thought.

I have been the toxic one at a job before—the one who comes in with a face that conveys displeasure and irritation. The one people tiptoe around because they don’t want to upset me or be on the receiving end of that displeasure and irritation. WHICH ONLY EVER IRRITATES PEOPLE MORE. I’ve been the one who complains about any and everything. The one for whom no minor improvement is enough.

A few months ago, I was at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens with friends. While we were in the Tropical Rotunda, we could hear the sounds of the tropical frogs that lived there. Against their trilling soundtrack, we read more about the frogs, particularly the phantasmal poison frog.

The toxicity of the frogs is contextual and environmental. The poison frog is not, by itself, poisonous. Rather, the frog eats bugs and those bugs in turn eat poisonous plants. The poisons from the plants that the bugs eat eventually make their way to the frog’s skin, which then makes the frog toxic. At the botanical garden, the frogs ate a diet of bugs that eat non-toxic plants. Hence, the frogs in captivity were still presumably well-fed but were not toxic.

My friends and I talked more than once about that frog and its toxicity and how that applies to our lives. Obviously I have continued to think about it for the better part of the year. Like I mentioned above, I was absolutely the toxic frog in some of my workplaces. At some jobs, some days I was the toxic frog and some days I wasn’t. My toxicity, like the frog’s, often depended on the environment around me.

When I reflect on my toxic frog workdays, most of what I recall feeling was frustration that I wasn’t being seen, or validated, or that my work mattered. Sometimes it was feeling undermined and like I was being placated, that everyone else was following a different gameplan that I wasn’t allowed to know about. Digging even deeper, most of those feelings boiled down to me spending 40+ hours a week feeling unseen, alone, and unappreciated.

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Being toxic can give you an edge over threats. In the physical world, poison frogs developed a gene mutation that made them toxic to predators while not being toxic to themselves. In a metaphorical world, being toxic typically reflects a need to protect oneself from perceived attacks.

It wasn’t until I really reflected on my past jobs that I realized I was repeating a pattern. Those of us with a predisposition to overwork generally grow up in chaotic homes. When it comes to our jobs, we repeatedly and unconsciously seek out chaotic work environments. Why? To maintain a high level of stress to keep their brains in an activated state. It’s the only mindset we’ve known. I continued to mostly choose jobs where I ignored red flags during the interview and hiring processes. Additionally, those jobs typically paid me an artificially low salary, which added yet another layer of stress to my days. So in a way, I was setting myself up for toxicity even though I didn’t realize it.

Not everyone has the ability and privilege of being able to bounce from a toxic job. Just being aware that I was repeating a pattern and then getting to the core of why that pattern was creating toxicity in me made it easier to at least recognize what was going on. Even if I couldn’t extricate myself from the situation right away, I better understood what was happening to me in those environments. Once I became more cognizant of this pattern, it was easier to evaluate opportunities for jobs and projects that came my way. If you’ve never been in a situation like this before, then it probably seems really obvious that you shouldn’t ignore red flags anywhere in life. It took some of us (🙋🏻‍♀️) close to twenty-five years of jobs that sometimes made us toxic to come to that conclusion.

Aroma: Explore the Wheel

If you follow me on social media, then you may have already read a little bit about my next project - Aroma: Explore the Wheel. It begins this month, whether I’m ready for it or not. A few months ago, I wrote about the importance of starting ugly - just doing the thing, worts and all, because you can’t just think about it forever. So here is a real-world example for you about starting ugly.

Like many of my projects, this started as an idea a few months back. I’ve spoken a lot about the importance of descriptive language and how to be both evocative and specific. I also recognize that not everyone has the time and resources to do things like spend $60 on different citrus fruits at the grocery store. Then throwing away roughly $58 of that produce because 1. I underestimated the time it would take to process that many citrus fruits into peel, pith, and pulp, and 2. Once I realized how long it would take, I ignored the rest of the fruit until it rotted.

What could I do that helps bridge the gap between accessibility and improvement? I know how advantageous smell training can be for a myriad of reasons, so I set out to find a way to deliver smell training directly to people.

Here’s how Aroma: Explore the Wheel will work. Each month, we’ll blind-smell vials that contain a selection of aromas based on various aroma wheels and flavor maps. We’re starting with beer, but it’s easy to expand beyond beer. There will be a live webinar for participants wherein we’ll discuss that month’s aromas, how they may arise in beer, and other fun beer sensory topics, like how to read a spider chart and what role your memory plays in sensory. You’ll be able to track your progress and I’m hoping to be able to offer more bespoke reporting, like letting you know your strengths and weaknesses.

Aroma: Explore the Wheel begins this month! We’re starting in the “Fruity” section of aroma wheels and working our way through that section from berry to stonefruit. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure when registration will open up, but it should be in the next couple of weeks.

Will this idea work? We’ll find out! You can visit the Aroma: Explore the Wheel page on my website for updates.

It’s an excellent point and the topic of our newsletter today. At the time, however, I didn’t quite grasp what she was saying. I remember thinking to myself that that message may discourage people and that we should try to encourage women rather than discourage them.

Now I look back on that thought and cringe at it. My white feminism had reared its head. A big part of unlearning antiracist and white supremacist ideas is being able to look at yourself in another light and evaluate how your actions contribute to systemic racism. It’s uncomfortable and it sucks to realize that you’re committing the same kinds of sins you are preaching against, but it’s a necessary part of being antiracist.

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Here I was, a white woman, internally tone-policing a woman of color because I thought the message was too negative. Here I was, a white woman, discounting the lived experience of someone who was much more intimately familiar with the oppression we were discussing.

I may as well have said, “Have you tried asking nicely? Maybe you’re being too negative.”

Geesh. I don’t even want to write about this, I’m so embarrassed.

Now that we’re a couple of years down the road and I’ve unlearned some harmful ideas and learned more about what it means to be an advocate, I finally understand what Michelle was saying. While I didn’t believe we could entirely eradicate sexism in the beer industry, I thought we could at least make some Big Moves that would change the industry. Instead, I learned that what we really make is small moves that are still meaningful. Small moves become part of big moves. The small moves we can make will make a big difference to some people.

And sometimes we don’t win the battles. And maybe we won’t win the war. But we’ll keep going because we want to make it better for the people who come after us.

This concept is known as cathedral thinking. Cathedral thinking means pursuing an ambitious goal or idea that might require several generations to complete. This type of long-term approach to goals became known as “cathedral thinking” because cathedral builders began their work building cathedrals knowing they would never see the finished product and neither would their children and maybe not even their children’s children. But they did it anyway because they believed in the goal. There are a few cathedrals out there that took over 600 hundred years to build. Some still aren’t finished.

Learning about cathedral thinking felt like a weight being lifted off my shoulders and helped me see the bigger picture. Cathedral thinking is long-term and necessarily involves thinking about future generations. Because I’m not going to see true gender equality in my lifetime, but maybe my niece’s kids will. Or maybe your children’s children’s children.

Cathedral thinking is a difficult concept to grasp, particularly when you’ve been raised in a capitalist, white supremacist society that touts individual exceptionalism above community building. After all, If you are only an individual and not part of a larger community, you are much easier to control.

Further, it’s difficult for us to think about the future beyond a few years. The rate at which society is being changed by things like climate change and technology is staggeringly fast compared to the past. It was reasonable for a person living in the 1200s to expect the world to look the same in 100 years. Now, it’s not even reasonable to expect the world to look the same in 10 years.

Do you remember what the world looked like 20 years ago? I remember a computer technology course being required during my freshman year of undergrad and learning about a new technology called “electronic mail.” Twenty years ago I still had a landline and had to put a tape into my car radio if I wanted to listen to a CD. I still knew how to write a check properly.

Change is happening now at a rate that makes it difficult to predict the future, which makes long-term thinking risky. If your great idea for change could become obsolete with a single innovation, why take the risk? We’ve also adapted to expect instant gratification, which makes predicting and imagining the future hard.

So how do we switch our mindsets from instant gratification to longer-term goals?

There are three steps to cathedral thinking: purpose, mastery, and autonomy. Projects that tap into the heroic and aspirational sides of our nature can allow us to see ourselves as part of humanity rather than individual humans. This is where we see the big picture.

The mastery step is where you can show off a little. Cathedral thinking mastery means you get the personal reward of demonstrating your mastery. What are projects you do where you find yourself fully immersed, where you engage in a flow state and lose your sense of time? That’s what mastery means - you don’t have to be the best in the world, just dedicated.

Finally, autonomy means that everyone involved has a sense of personal agency. When you reach a certain point or accomplish a certain goal, you can then pass the project on to the next wave of cathedral thinkers. You can inspire others with a worthy purpose and offer guidance, but you have to allow each generation to complete their stage of the project however they want, utilizing new technologies and ideas.

This is the step the beer industry stumbles on, over and over. Organization founders and leadership become adversarial when newer members want to change the organization. We have to be willing to step aside and let the next generation of beer industry people pick up the mantle. We have to be okay with them picking up the mantle however they deem the best way, not the way it’s “always been done.” If not, by the time we pry the industry from the cold, dead hands of the old guard, the industry will also be dead.

We, as a human race, are not built for permanence. Do everything you can now and be ready to pass the stick to the next generation.

Seek out and listen to the voices of the future. As I’ve written about before, I find it frustrating that people keep returning to the same wells of information over and over rather than making space for new voices to step in. Sure, the information may not change drastically, but the audience does.

Leave behind vanity projects. Instead, leave behind something that can be stewarded. Think in heirlooms, not static fixtures.

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This Sensory Fact Lives in My Head Rent-Free.

I think about it daily.

It’s happened to all of us. You open your clothes dryer and begin pulling out the warm clothes.1 They feel warm to the touch. As you’re folding them, though2, you start to realize that they’re still damp, not quite dry. How could you miss that when you pulled them out of the dryer?

BECAUSE WETNESS IS AN ILLUSION.

This is not some red-pill, plandemic, flat-earther bunk. This is science.

Humans do not have sensory receptors to detect the concept of wetness. Rather, “wetness” may be something we learn based on previous learning about what stimuli are considered “wet.” This is known as perceptual illusion.

Perceptual illusion creates the feeling of wetness on our skin. Even if you don’t know the definition of perceptual illusions, you’ve almost certainly experienced it. I recall my ‘90s mallrat days of being frustrated that my friends could figure out the magic eye posters but I couldn’t. Is the dress blue and black or white and gold? Is the voice saying Laurel or Yanny? Is this two faces or a vase?

Researchers speculate that we perceive wetness through our trigeminal sense of cold temperature and tactile sensations such as pressure and texture. During their studies, they found that we are better able to sense wetness as the temperature of the stimuli decreases. As the temperature increases, our ability to perceive wetness decreases.

This explains why clothes fresh from a warm dryer may feel warm only to reveal themselves as actually damp as they cool off.

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And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Writing seminar proposals. ‘Tis the season for conference submissions and I’ve got several I’m working on. If you’ve ever wanted to present on a topic about which you’re passionate, please submit a proposal to a conference. The industry needs to hear your voice. If you need help with your proposal, reach out and I can send you the template I use. Also, I’m always happy to act as a sounding board or to review proposals.

2. Reading White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind by Koa Beck. I’ve found myself getting uncomfortable at times while reading this because I recognize some of my own actions (see above) and the actions of organizations to which I’ve belonged. But, that’s the point of unlearning some ideas. If I didn’t find myself getting uncomfortable, then I wasn’t really paying attention.

3. Listening to the This American Ex-Wife podcast by Lyz Lenz. I’ve already read-listened to the audiobook of This American Ex-Wife and am a big fan of her newsletter, Men Yell at Me. In an environment that is increasingly hostile to women and non-binary people and stripping us of our rights, I find podcasts like This American Ex-Wife to be a helpful resource for reality- and fact-based research and informed opinions.

Second, I opened my inbox to see a Root Kitchens newsletter from thee Julia Skinner, Ph.D., with the subject line “Not all food preserving resources are good resources.”

YES THANK YOU WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS.

I will let you read Julia’s thorough advice on evaluating sources yourself - please read it, because it’s filled with valuable information. Subscribe to all of her writing while you’re at it.

Lyz Lenz has also discussed the rise of AI-generated rewrites of actual books written by actual people. In one of her essays discussing the topic, she describes scrolling through Amazon and finding a biography. Of her. That no one consulted her about. And the book cover was almost identical to a book she did actually write, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America. 

The account behind the original “Getting to Know Beer” post (which looks like it’s since been deleted), Cook’s Country, maintains that the post was written by a real person and not AI. If that is the case, big yikes, does anyone there do basic fact-checking? The account has over 700,000 followers and is part of the America’s Test Kitchen metaverse.

While sharing beer “facts” such as “wheat beers taste of clove, banana, and citrus,” is fairly innocuous, there is information out there that is dangerous. For example, Julia discusses how many AI-generated books on mushroom foraging are now for sale on Amazon. Several people have fallen ill due to the misidentification found in those books.

Like Julia also points out, humans can generate incorrect and even dangerous information and put it out into the world. While I haven’t seen any beer-related content that poses a clear and present danger to the public, I have seen plenty of incorrect information related to beer put out into the world and repeated.

A few:

No, American Lagers and American Light Lagers do not contain low levels of acetaldehyde.

The BJCP Guidelines have evolved their description of American Light Lagers and American Lagers from saying they have “perceptible levels of green apples due to acetaldehyde”1 to say they have a “light amount of yeast character (particularly a light apple fruitiness)”2 to saying that “a light amount of yeast character is not a fault.”3

I get how people can read the 2015 guidelines and conclude that “light apple fruitiness” means acetaldehyde. However, let’s explore that idea a little further. Ninety-five percent or so of the world’s beer consumption is macro lagers. Companies like Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors brew and package so much on a daily basis that it is almost beyond comprehension. They’ve got their brewing process down, friends. Their products do not have detectable levels of acetaldehyde.

Also, the goal of macro lagers is, presumably, volume. They do that by making the flavor profile as neutral as possible. Additionally, the companies have sunk a ton of money into figuring out how to get people to drink more macro lagers. Acetaldehyde contributes to hangovers. A company interested in making their products as inoffensive as possible will take every necessary step to ensure there is no detectable acetaldehyde.

A light apple fruitiness is not the same as green apple. Rather, American lagers may have light levels of unripe apple fruitiness. This is also a good reminder that the words we use matter, and having specificity in flavor descriptions is no exception.

No, witches weren’t actually women brewers wearing tall hats at markets.

People want this to be true so badly, but it’s just not. There’s no evidence of this being true. It may make for a fun story, but it’s more a fairy tale than a historical fact.

No, caramel malts do not help with head retention, even if they’re called CaraFoam or CaraPils.

The science is still not settled on why caramel malts don’t help with head retention, but some research has shown that caramel malts act more like lipids in beer.

One thing that gets me really excited about the industry now is the new research newer companies are doing. As shown above, there is information out there that we’ve mostly just taken for granted or accepted as canon without really questioning it. One of the most lasting statements that I think about often is from Richard Preiss of Escarpment Labs: Most of what we think we know about beer is based on English translations of German brewing texts and some guy’s Ph.D. thesis from the 1970s.

We touched on a similar theme in the Bias on the Dais4 newsletter. As I went further in my beer studies, I started to realize that there is a small number of people who are given an assumption of skill that they do not appear to have. Now, when evaluating resources, I add the following to my screening process:

• Is this person a knowledgeable beer writer or is he a guy who started writing about beer in the late 90s-early 2000s?

• Is this person a reliable source for brewing information or is he a guy who was brewing in craft beer in 2007?

• Is this person a good beer judge or is he a guy who owned a craft brewery in 2010?

• Does this person’s credentials reflect their expertise or did they create the credentials they hold?

That’s not to say that being a guy writing about beer in 1999 or brewing craft beer in 2007 means they have no authority or knowledge. They definitely do. But I have run into plenty of men in the brewing industry who are happy to let people think they have a far greater skillset than they do. As Julia says in her newsletter, popularity does not mean expertise. Just because someone has an active social media account or is beer industry famous doesn’t mean they’re automatically right.

The Reason for the Season

In the United States, daylight saving time has ended, which means it’s getting darker earlier. Which also means it’s time for me to dig out the S.A.D. lamp I got as a Christmas gift.

Have you stepped outside in the fall and taken a deep breath of the crisp air? The smell of fallen leaves and the feeling of cold air going into your nostrils?

Have you wondered why you don’t have the same experience in the summer? It turns out the reason why we don’t have the same scent association with all of the seasons is heat and humidity.

Summer’s heat and humidity capture a lot of smells, more smells than the less humid, cooler fall weather does. Summer air creates a jumble of aromas, whereas fall air contains less volatile aromas.

Because the air contains less aromatic volatiles, we are better able to smell the scents of fall. The scents are largely decay occurring from the fungi and bacteria in the soil digesting the fallen leaves.

So tuck this away for a fun fact when you hear someone say how much they love the smell of fall.

And finally…

It is election time in the United States and somewhere around 70% of Americans are worried about it. Please remember that your local and state governments have a much bigger impact on your life than who the President is. Please also remember that “being the change” doesn’t stop at the voting booth - it starts at the voting booth.

Take care of yourself and check in on your community. When I am feeling particularly stressed out, I find that taking a few deep breaths or completing a short breathwork exercise on my meditation app, Aura, to be incredibly helpful. If you find yourself needing to calm your nervous system, try following this breathing exercise:

As I’ve aged, I’ve tried to train myself to care less about the amount of space my body physically takes up in a world that only encourages women to take up less space, physically and metaphysically. I try not to care about what size the labels on my clothes read. Realistically, I know they’re all made up and don’t really indicate how clothes will fit me. However, again being raised in a world where smaller equals more valuable and desirable, I still care, even though I hate that I care. As someone who also has a history of disordered eating, I have to be extra careful not to let inconsistent sizing send me into a shame spiral that awakens all of my disordered eating habits.

It does get easier to care less about your physical size as you get older, in large part because society is taught that women are their most valuable when they’re young. In the United States, our current political climate enables people to debate my worth in society as a middle-aged, child-free woman. Should I have fewer voting rights? What purpose do I serve if I am not forced into birthing drones for the capitalist machine? 

ANYWAY. 

Being aware of all of this still didn’t help my ego when I started my job at a brewery and headed to the merch section of the taproom to buy some brewery-branded shirts to wear for work. Although I wasn’t required to wear brewery-branded shirts at work, it was an unspoken understanding that all employees should be wearing some brewery merch some of the time. While I was standing in front of the t-shirts, a host came over to chat. 

“So all the women’s shirts are toddler-sized. I recommend the unisex shirts instead.”

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Somewhat skeptical, I headed to the women’s shirts anyway and found a t-shirt labeled extra large. Holding it up, it did indeed seem toddler-sized. How on earth would anyone think this was an XL? Truly, in other situations, I think this shirt would be labeled a medium. A kind of small medium at that. If I wanted a shirt with a femme cut, not a boxy unisex shirt, I had to buy a 2XL. Even a 2XL shirt was on the verge of being too tight. If I wanted to wear it, I had to do the thing where you stretch out under each arm so it would fit across my chest and then stretch out the hem so it wouldn’t cling to my stomach. And even then it was still uncomfortably tight so I wore it very rarely. I also dejectedly purchased a unisex shirt (in a large) even though I knew it would be unflattering in a different way. Gotta wear brewery gear, right?

Deciding on and ordering brewery merchandise fell to my manager in the marketing department. One day, shortly after resigning myself to the presence of a 2XL shirt in my wardrobe, I brought up the sizing on the women’s shirts to him. He assured me that he had “several women” try on different shirts in different cuts from different vendors and that the shirts he ordered were the best option. Thinking of the femme cut, soft fabric t-shirts and flowy tank tops I had purchased at other breweries, I knew this wasn’t the case.

 I continued to bring up the ridiculous sizing of the shirts and learned that the “several women” he asked to try on shirts were a handful of the young front-of-house staff. Almost everyone is thin and hot when they’re young without really trying all that hard, and the staff at the time was no exception.

As time went on, I realized that the decision to purchase these shirts in these sizes with these cuts was deliberate. The kind of women the brewery wanted to be wearing their merch were the kind of women who could fit into artificially small shirts. A woman my size (which is about average for women in the United States) was never intended to be a walking billboard for the company, although my body shape and size were arguably more representative of most of our customers. 

If I couldn’t fit into the tiny-sized women’s shirts, then I was relegated to the shapeless, stiff unisex t-shirts made of material that felt an inch thick. The kinds of branded shirts you order as an afterthought. Or maybe hand out at events. 

Since I wasn’t a sexy baby, I deserved to be an amorphous blob.

This sent a very clear message to me: the issue wasn’t with the cut or sizing of the selected shirts. The issue was the size of my body - I was too big for the shirts. Being too big to fit into the shirts was a moral failing on my part. If I wanted to wear a women’s shirt from my brewery, I needed to fit into the sizes they deemed appropriate for women.

When I tell this story to other women in the industry, I am met with stories of similar frustrations. Women wanting to rep their brewery as part of their job or as a fan are unable to find femme cut shirts in their size. One friend shared that she told her brewery that, if they wanted her to rep their brand during television appearances and festivals, then they needed to start selling better options for women. All of us, it seemed, were fed up with having to choose between too-small women’s shirts or unflattering unisex shirts.

So let’s talk a little bit about clothing and sizing. If you are a man, this conversation may be new to you as men have to worry very little about it. Up until the late 19th century, all clothing was handmade and fairly androgynous. Until a certain point, clothing wasn’t just handmade - the fabric had to be woven, the thread had to be created, etc. Hence, most people wore loose, pretty sack-like clothing. 

War sparks innovation, so when Napoleon needed more men to fight as soldiers, they needed to find a way to mass produce a lot of uniforms. Eventually, it was figured out that you could roughly figure out a man’s measurements by measuring his chest. Making lots of uniforms was pretty easy when you could standardize sizing that fit well enough. The US military modified the approaches, particularly during World War I, and what we know as standard men’s sizing remains pretty much unchanged to this day. 

Trying to standardize women’s sizing is a much more difficult task because boobs, hips, thighs, butts, and hormones all play a role in getting clothes to fit. Having a woman’s chest measurement tells you nothing about the proportions of her body. When ready-to-wear clothing became available, manufacturers tried to standardize women’s sizing. The result was that women returned poorly fit clothing in droves. For a while, women’s clothes were sold 75% completed so women could tailor the clothes to their bodies themselves. Other systems have been attempted in the past and it seems like sometime in the 1970s, everyone just gave up on the idea. Since then, manufacturers have been able to make up their sizes based on whatever they want. Therefore, there is no consistency in women’s clothing sizing. I may be a 14 in one brand, an 8 in another, and an 18 in another. Sometimes the sizing isn’t even consistent within the same brand.

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that unisex-sized shirts could be the answer to clothing women. I can promise you this person was not a woman. Unisex shirts are, by definition, meant to be worn by a man or a woman.

And yet.

Unisex sizing is still based on men’s measurements. Unisex shirts typically have a slightly wider body and sleeve than men’s shirts. Femme-cut shirts often have more stretch and are more form-fitting. They’re also usually cut for a tighter fit and have shorter sleeves than men’s shirts. 

You may be asking yourself how a unisex t-shirt is “unisex” for women when its cut is not only based on men’s sizing but also has a wider body and sleeve than even a man’s shirt, let alone a woman’s shirt.

Welcome to the club. Unisex shirts are not made with women in mind and do not typically fit femme bodies well. If your merch is limited to unisex shirts for women, you need to do a better job of sourcing merchandise. Even if it drives your price point up a bit.1 While I’m not representative of all women, I will pay a little more to be able to wear brewery merch cut for my body that I feel good in. Please let me pay you money to turn myself into a walking billboard for your brewery. 

If my options are toddler-sized women’s shirts or bulky unisex shirts, guess what? I’m taking my bonus third option, which is not buying any merch at all.2

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The Power of Routine

This week, I participated in the administration of the Master Cicerone exam. It was a little surreal being on the administration side and not the candidate side. I had no nerves, slept pretty well, and actually got to eat my lunch both days of the exam.3 Being more of an observer of the exam reminded me of a skill I’ve developed over the years and encouraged others to do as well.

Ya gotta have a routine.

By that, I mean you should develop a routine that you perform at the beginning of each tasting session, whether it’s doing practice tasting panels at home, taking an exam, or judging a flight of beers. Create a ritual that helps you calm your nerves, focus your mind, and signal to your brain that it’s time to taste mindfully.

Creating routines is beneficial in a lot of ways for humans. When it comes to tasting sessions, having a routine is no less beneficial. First, performing your routine signals to your brain and body that you are about to mindfully taste beer, usually with a specific goal in mind. This not only helps you focus on what you’re doing, but it also keeps you from being distracted by external things in your environment. I’ve been in plenty of testing and judging environments that have been noisy or had random loud noises like kegs being dropped or delivery people Kool-Aid Manning through the room.

I’ve also been in plenty of environments where the people around me are irritating by doing things like bouncing their knees, tapping their pens, or clearing their sinuses repeatedly. If you have an established routine to begin your sensory sessions, then it’s much easier to focus faster, better, and longer. Unexpected noises, bodily or otherwise, won’t jolt you out of your concentration. This is particularly important during high-pressure times like exams.

Your routine should also help reduce tension and anxiety. If you take a few seconds to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders, and loosen up your neck, you’re already releasing anxiety physically from your body. If you use breathing techniques like alternate-nostril breathing, you can reduce your stress and anxiety as well as improve your brain function.

For me, I view my pre-tasting session routine as almost a religious exercise. It’s a moment I take for myself to quiet everything around me, focus on relaxing my body, and encourage myself to trust the process.

Using the Master Cicerone exam as an example, I can tell myself that I may not know exactly what is going to be on, say, an off flavor panel, but I do know what my options will be and I also know that I won’t be tasting anything for the first time. Doing that little pep talk in conjunction with physically relaxing as much tension as I can and doing some alternate-nostril breathing has had a significant positive impact on my mental state going into tasting exams. When the timer starts, I’m much calmer, with a clearer mind and a more confident approach.

Establishing a routine does not have to be a lot of work and it doesn’t have to be intricate. In fact, I would encourage you to focus on creating a routine that you can perform while sitting in a chair that won’t make you feel self-conscious or disturb people around you. You don’t need a lucky troll doll or to wear the same pair of underwear every time - although if those things help you go bananas. You can develop your routine over time and change it if you find that something about it isn’t helpful for you any longer.

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Judging at the Great American Beer Festival. If judging in a professional competition is a goal of yours, go ahead and apply. Don’t talk yourself out of it because you feel like you don’t have enough experience or are too intimidated. The beer judging world needs you and I’ve sat across the table from plenty of dudes who got their seats at the table by simply existing as dudes who work in a brewery.

2. Reading Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces by Laura Winkless. I’ve started a fun (for me) habit of browsing through a bookstore IRL with no real goal in mind other than picking out books that seem interesting to me. Which is the purpose of bookstores, I get it, but I typically order books online and usually purchase books for specific reasons or interests. I never really thought that much about surfaces until I saw this book and suddenly all I wanted to learn about was surfaces.

3. Listening to “Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.” This is a fairly new podcast, so you can get caught up pretty quickly. “Empire City” traces the roots of police work from slavery (police in the US originated as slave patrols) to police gangs and more, focusing on the New York City Police Department, which is the largest police force in the world. So far, it’s super informative and a good reminder that “history” doesn’t always happen that long ago.

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This may be an uncomfortable discussion for some of you, unrelated to the above trigger warning. I get it, I really do. Hello, I’m a white, able-bodied, cis-het woman in the United States. It’s a weird position to be in sometimes. 

You can educate yourself on intersectionality, but long story short - I understand the struggle of striving to be a good ally and advocate and falling short. Not falling short because I’m not trying, but falling short because some of my identities put me in a more privileged position. Falling short because I have more things to unlearn from our society and my upbringing than I’m even aware of. Falling short because being the default in a white supremacist society means that I’m rarely asked to be uncomfortable.

Sometimes those of us with several positions of privilege expect praise for doing the bare minimum. Sometimes we expect praise for doing a lot more than the bare minimum. Because we are not used to feeling uncomfortable, frustration sets in when our efforts aren’t heralded or we’re told good start, but there’s a lot more work to do. If you feel yourself getting frustrated or defensive while reading this, resolve to sit with the discomfort rather than getting your hackles up or throwing your hands up in the air in exasperated defeat. 

Keep in mind that there is a difference between calling out and calling in. Calling out is bringing public attention to a person or organization’s harmful behavior with the urgent goal of preventing future harm. Calling out also typically occurs after attempts at calling in have been unsuccessful. 

On the other hand, calling in is an invitation to have a conversation about a person or group’s harmful words or behavior. Calling in creates a safe space for tough but necessary conversations to happen.

This month’s newsletter is a calling in, an invitation to consider the actions we’ve taken thus far and what actions we can take going forward to strengthen our commitment to creating a safer industry. Read with the intent of learning and reflecting.

Safety is Not One-Size-Fits-All

Rather than burying the lede, I’ll say it outright: initiatives such as the Angel Shot or Ask for Angela are ineffective safety measures for the craft brewing community. However well-meaning, they are mostly performative and place an undue burden on victims. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the Angel Shot or Ask for Angela, here is a primer. Ask for Angela is a non-profit organization founded in England in 2016 as a way for someone feeling vulnerable or unsafe to ask for coded assistance or support from bar staff. The person asks the bar staff for Angela, a fictitious team member. A properly trained staff will then help the person by discreetly getting them a ride home, asking the perpetrator to leave, calling authorities, etc.

An Angel shot is derived from Ask for Angela and involves giving the bar staff a coded drink order to signal that they are in an unsafe situation and need assistance. There are variations to the Angel shot, such as ordering it neat, on ice, or with lime. 

If this sounds a little complicated, it’s because it is. Let’s dissect some of this to see why these initiatives, which are a great start and certainly effective in some environments, are not really a good fit for the beer industry.

First, part of the reason why I don’t consider these initiatives as effective as they used to be is because of their popularity. There likely weren’t very many of you who learned about these initiatives for the first time reading this newsletter. Which means that perpetrators also know what they are. This makes it harder to ask for assistance. Even using coded language, the person who’s making you feel unsafe may know exactly what you’re doing when you ask for Angela or for an Angel shot. It can escalate an already dangerous situation.

Second, while some states have updated their alcohol laws to allow for things like selling liquor and other alcoholic, non-beer drinks in taprooms, by and large, the bulk of your business likely (hopefully) comes from selling the beer that you brew. And I’m guessing you probably don’t sell shots of beer. So why would someone randomly ask for a shot when all you’re selling is beer?

Third, initiatives like this can work great when you have a busy bar or packed club with lots of noise and thumping music. They don’t work so great when you have a handful of people in your taproom and 2000s hip-hop playing moderately low in the background so as not to be too loud to inhibit conversation. They don’t work so great when you have a 1000-square-foot space (or smaller) with terrible acoustics that allow conversations to travel. 

Fourth, many times the Ask for Angela or Angel shot information is found only in the women's restroom. Admittedly, I have not been in many men’s restrooms so maybe I’m completely off base with this argument, but I’m betting that I’m not. Do only cishet people patronize your brewery? If so, uh, big yikes and I’m genuinely curious how you came upon this newsletter. Sexual violence doesn’t only happen between men and women in romantic partnerships. People feeling unsafe are not always and exclusively women. If you still have gendered restrooms,1 this information needs to be in both restrooms because anyone can feel unsafe and deserves to know that there is assistance available for them. 

Fifth, and most importantly, initiatives such as these require people in unsafe or vulnerable situations to make themselves even more vulnerable and potentially even more unsafe. Asking for Angela or asking for an Angel shot means the person needing assistance has to trust a few things. They have to trust that the staff has been properly trained and can handle the situation with the utmost seriousness, respect, and urgency. That’s a lot to ask of someone already feeling unsafe. 

How do you know you can trust the bar staff? How do you know you’ll be taken seriously? Will they get you the help you need? Will they doubt that you need help? What if the person making you feel unsafe knows the bar staff? Has the staff been trained in what to do? Or, did the business simply place a sign with the protocol typed out in cursive font in the women’s restroom? These are very real questions one might find themselves asking. 

The protocol that people are told to follow to get assistance can get complicated. Do you need your Angel shot neat or with lime? You’re already in an elevated emotional state, you feel unsafe, and time is of the essence. Will your bartender know what you need if you mess up your “order”? What if they called the police when you thought you were asking for a cab? This is also a good place to mention that the police do not represent safety for many people and communities. Even if a person is in an unsafe situation, that doesn’t mean that the presence of the police makes the situation safer for them. Seeing the police as protectors of you and your identity is a privileged position to have.

So what can we do here? First, invest in training yourself and/or your staff in bystander intervention. I’ve participated in both the Safe Bars and SAFE Bar Network trainings. Both programs showed me that I have a lot of the intervention tools needed in my toolbox. If you’ve worked behind the bar, I can guarantee you will learn how to reframe your existing people skills to intervene in unsafe situations. You probably already employ some of these skills! What if your employer won’t provide bystander intervention training? There are free trainings out there - Right to Be provides awesome free, online bystander intervention training. 

Second, here are three books I’ve found helpful in learning to be an informed person as well as reinforcing how to intervene safely:

• Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability, & More by Blair Imani (also follow her exceptional IG account: @blairimani)

• I’ve Got Your Back by Jorge Arteaga & Emily May

• Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play and Gather by Shawna Potter

If you’re going to buy one book, make it Making Spaces Safer. While all three books above will help you be a better ally and intervener, I found Making Spaces Safer to be the one most easily applied to the beer industry. Written by the singer of the punk band War on Women, it covers a lot of practical information that arises in the unique environments of places where alcohol is involved. 

While we’re here on the topic of alcohol being involved, let’s be very clear about one thing. Ingesting alcohol or other intoxicants does not make anyone less of a victim, nor does it make anyone less of a perpetrator. Correlation is not causation. There is no “right” kind of victim.

Alcohol does not make people commit sexual violence or any other type of violent or unwanted behavior. An analogy that exemplifies this well is that alcohol does not cause you to commit sexual assault any more than putting gas in your car causes you to drive to the airport. Gasoline makes it easier to get to the airport, and alcohol makes it easier to do what you want to do.2 To think or argue otherwise is rape culture.

Third, figure out a solution that will work for your taproom or business that doesn’t require victims to know complex drink orders or names. What tools do you have that enable customers to communicate with someone to ask for assistance that doesn’t require them to walk up to your bar and audibly ask for help? Obviously, train your staff so that people feel comfortable and safe asking face-to-face for help, but understand that that is the bare minimum option.

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An example of a brewery that has done this effectively is Pilot Brewing in Charlotte, North Carolina. Pilot Brewing has two single-stall restrooms. This sign is prominently displayed in both restrooms:

There is a comprehensive SOP behind the bar and on the taproom’s iPads. The SOP contains hypothetical scenarios with step-by-step instructions on how to handle each situation. The texts go to the iPads so only the people behind the bar know that someone needs help. They can then communicate with the person needing assistance in private and remove any need for face-to-face conversation, which - as outlined pretty extensively above - has several issues.

If you’ve got an Ask for Angela or Angel shot protocol in your taproom, ask yourself if it’s the most effective way you can assist people. Also, please don’t conflate the lack of anyone requesting Angela or an Angel shot with your taproom being a place where everyone feels super safe all the time. Again, correlation is not causation. We just outlined a ton of reasons why either initiative may not be the best fit for a taproom. 

You also don’t have to do this on your own. Brainstorm with your team. If you’re part of a state guild or other industry group, start the conversation about what has and hasn’t worked for other places. Be wary of anyone who replies “We use [Ask for Angela/Angel shot] and it works great!” 

To reiterate my message at the beginning of this newsletter, this is a call-in, not a call-out. When I see an Ask for Angela or Angel shot sign in a restroom, it signals to me that the establishment I’m in understands their responsibilities to keep their customers safe. It’s a good start, but it’s not the most effective solution. We can only go up from there.

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And finally…

Life is lifing for me right now, everyone. Between being horrified over my excitement about the banalities of home ownership despite the hassle of interacting with contractors (but my power-washed soffits do look really good now!), and one of my giant breed dogs incurring a $7000.00 injury that will require a three-month recovery, I’m not thinking about or doing much else these days. Next month I’ll have some exciting stuff, I promise!

What if it does work out?

About 8 years ago, I was working a legal contracting job for hourly pay, next to no benefits, or even paid time off.

There were some perks to the job, namely that I got to space out and listen to podcasts or audiobooks all day. The work was not challenging and was certainly not the courtroom drama filled with obscure legal arguments I had spent three years of my life learning.1 It was a job you worked for straight cash and few people there pretended otherwise. Less “The Good Wife” and more “The Office” - if The Office was cast entirely of the Island of Misfit Toys and Parrotheads wearing court-mandated ankle monitors.

All of this is to say that my legal career did not turn out the way I envisioned lo those many years ago when I was applying for law schools and prepping for the LSAT.

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Some of you have probably heard the Fascinating Story of How Jen Blair Got Into the Beer Industry /s but here is a summary for those who don’t. I decided I wanted to work in the beer industry (hey, it was circa 2014, “99% asshole-free,” and any homebrewer could open a brewery and maybe be the next Sam Calagione.2) because it looked fun. I had been homebrewing for a couple of years but wasn’t interested in brewing or sales jobs, which were most of the job openings I saw.

I decided to start my beer blog in 2016, a little after I started down my Cicerone path. I wanted to have a place to document what I was learning about beer and a place for people to come to learn about beer. I took several SkillPop classes on topics such as social media marketing, how to create content, and how to build a successful blog. I spent nights and weekends building my website, learning how to do basic things like inserting hyperlinks and less basic things like inserting an API. I carefully planned out what my content calendar looked like and created lists of topics to write about.

I figured that trying to jump from the legal world to the beer world wouldn’t be easy, particularly because the beer industry was just starting to be leery of people wanting to work in beer because it looked fun. Especially when you were trying to come from an industry that is made to look glamorous and thrilling and lucrative. Although let’s take a moment here to acknowledge the leeriness from craft beer at the time was rooted in hypocrisy and gatekeeping - so it’s okay for you to cash in your 401(k) to stop working in IT but you’ll make sure to pull the ladder up behind you to prevent others from doing the same? Coolcoolcool got it.

For me, the blog was a way to show that I was passionate about beer and brewing, that I was willing to put my learning experience into the world, and that I could consistently create something around a hobby that I hoped to turn into a profession. I really enjoyed working on the blog, from researching and scheduling posts to learning how to customize my website. It assisted me in getting my first paid beer job as a part-time bartender3 at a local beer bar.

A few years later, I was frustrated by the lack of representation in homebrew competition awards ceremonies. I knew I became much more confident and pragmatic about entering competitions as a brewer when I started judging and saw the range of quality in the beers I was judging. Working backward, I decided that if I could get more women and nonbinary individuals interested in judging, then perhaps more of them would feel confident in entering homebrew competitions and maybe even winning awards. At the very least, there would be more diversity at judging tables, which also made me happy as I was frequently “the only” at most judging tables.

The idea rolled around in my head for a few months. Finally, I sat down and wrote an outline of what I had in mind. I shared the outline with a few trusted friends and loved ones and solicited feedback. I brainstormed with them about the resources I already had and the resources I would need. I realized that I already had a bunch of resources at my fingertips to make the idea a reality, such as my own website and training in things like email marketing. And, most importantly, the empathy needed to create a fun, safe, and doable approach to becoming a beer judge while being an only.

With both the beer blog and the judge training, I didn’t have everything lined up and a lot of ideas either fell apart or by the wayside. In preparing for both, there came a point where I couldn’t just talk about it anymore. I couldn’t just plan for it anymore. I had to make the leap.

I had to start ugly. You have to start ugly, too.

What do I mean when I say to start ugly? Stop waiting for everything to fall into place and be perfect because that’s a handy way of ensuring it will never happen and that you will not have to be vulnerable. Most of the time, no one will know that things didn’t go as planned, or that there were some ideas that didn’t make it to the final version, or that maybe plans changed once your idea was out in the world.

Take the leap. Do it anyway. And you’ll probably learn a lot of ways not to do things and even more ways to make things happen, even if they don’t always look like how you thought they would. If it doesn’t work, now you know.

BUT WHAT IF IT DOES WORK?

What if it turns out even better than you imagined?

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I’ve actually had this newsletter sitting in my drafts for several months. It’s making its debut now because I have a couple of projects that have been rolling around in my head for a few months - one has been rolling around for a couple of years. A couple of weekends ago, I had a breakthrough about how to make one of them a reality. That breakthrough led to me typing out the outline of how it would work. That led to a spreadsheet to estimate costs. That led to me sitting on our bed while my husband was folding his laundry to tell him about the idea and ask whether he thought people would find it valuable. That conversation led me to ask some friends to look at the outline and give me their feedback. That feedback led to me ordering supplies and meeting with a graphic designer. In a few weeks, that will lead to me starting ugly and releasing my idea into the world.

If you are going to put an idea out into the world for public consumption, I can promise you there are people out there already with misplaced confidence doing it way worse than you can ever imagine. More importantly, there are also people out there opting out of whatever you’re doing. They’re opting out because they don’t see themselves represented or feel safe being vulnerable with the people who are visible.4 Those people may opt-in when they see someone with lived experiences similar to theirs doing the damn thing. When they see you doing it and inviting them to do the same.

Pour your idea out onto paper. It doesn’t need to be organized cohesively, nor do you need to have the final idea in mind. It’s fine not to know exactly where the idea ends because the end product isn’t going to look like what you thought it would when you started. Neuroscience backs up why you need to write down your goals.

Brainstorm what resources you think you need, how you can leverage the resources you already have, and what resources you can access for free. For instance, it’s free to create a YouTube channel, use Google Forms for sign-ups and surveys, request books from your local library, etc. Who in your network can help you? Solicit feedback from people you trust and put your ego aside when receiving that feedback.

One thing I want to make very clear is that I am not girlbossing you. I’m not saying that there’s only value in what you want to do if there’s an audience for it or a way to monetize it. I’m saying the cerebral equivalent of “If you want a bikini body, put a bikini on your body.” If you look around and see an opportunity you like, fucking take it, start ugly, and figure it out along the way. I promise you will not be sorry that you started ugly because it’s way better than never starting at all.

I’ll wrap this up with a quote from Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson that I think about a lot, especially when faced with the vulnerability of putting my ideas out into the world:

“Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

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And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few things I am up to these days:

1. Working on my newest venture, which I hope to release into the world in September, but more than likely it will be in October. It naturally involves sensory and I’m super excited to tell you all about it. If you’d like to receive email updates about it, you can sign up here (using this Google form I created for free 😉)

2. Listening to Ambition Monster: A Memoir by Jennifer Romolini. I’m actually re-listening to it for a third time because it struck such a chord with me. While I’ve always absolutely loved reading, there are only a couple of books I would say that have truly changed my life because I read them exactly when I needed to. This is one of those books.

3. Reading The Chiffon Trenches, a memoir by Andre Leon Talley. Fun and possibly surprising fact about me given my Untappd Aunt wardrobe of free beer t-shirts and leggings or shorts, but I love fashion and fashion history. Like many xennials, I first learned of Andre Leon Talley through watching America’s Next Top Model, so I’m excited to learn more about his life.

My brain is never not on. In a lemons-into-lemonade twist, I inadvertently turned one of my greatest weaknesses - sensory overload - into one of my greatest strengths - sensory overload but in a fun way. (Still, don’t turn on overhead lights around me, and please for the love of god do not wear scented products around me.)

One of the most frustrating aspects of my sensory journey, specifically beer and specifically specifically tasting, has been my lack of confidence in my style discrimination skills. I’ve enviously watched people around me confidently blind taste samples and correctly identify the style. I’ve wondered how they do it. How can they be so sure of something that seems just out of my grasp? Even through studying for my final attempt at the Master Cicerone, I would narrow down my style choices to two options and almost always seemed to switch my answer to the incorrect option at the last minute.2

Want me to memorize dumb stats that I can look up in a second with the small computer I have on my person at all times? Sure, no problem. I have an excellent memory. I have the kind of memory that I can remember which book page the information I’m looking for is on. I’ve also learned that my neurodivergence plays a part in this - I often remember minute details of a person that can come across as creepy. I promise I’m not obsessed with you, I just remember that you told me once that you hate red onions and your cousin broke your finger during a game of tag.

So how does neurodivergence come into play? In the same way gender comes into play. You didn’t think I wasn’t going to bring sexism into this conversation, did you? C’mon, you know me better than that.

As I wrote in my Like Other Girls newsletter, girls are socialized to be “good girls.” We have to be agreeable, polite, and nice. This is known as “Good Girl Conditioning” and reinforces gender roles and stereotypes. We seek external validation and approval from others, especially men and people in positions of power. Included in the laundry list of good girl conditioning effects are people pleasing, perfectionism, feelings of self-doubt, and “imposter syndrome.”3

When we’re called “good” as children, it usually means we’re compliant, quiet, and meeting other people’s needs before our own, i.e. “listening to instructions” or “being a pleasure to have in class.” We’re taught not to listen to our intuition because doing so might mean that someone else will be upset that we’re not doing what they want. We’re taught to put aside our feelings and our gut instincts to make others feel comfortable. We train ourselves to undermine ourselves so we’re less threatening and more agreeable. 

We’re taught that validation is an external pursuit, not an internal pursuit. Men are taught to be confident and self-assured. Women are taught to be timid and humble. We’re taught to fall in line and get rewarded for it. We internalize good-girl laws such as not showing too much self-esteem and centering the needs and feelings of others at the expense of our comfort and safety. After a while, our brains learn that we are not to be trusted. Our decisions, thoughts, and needs are to be second-guessed, to be framed not as what’s best for us, what our intuition tells us, but rather what’s best for those around us.

The messaging is similar for neurodiversity. Maybe you’re not good at reading social cues. Maybe you act in a way that society deems improper. Maybe you’re pressured into enduring social niceties that feel like torture to you, such as eye contact and small talk. The list goes on. Eventually, you internalize that your instincts can’t be trusted, even if you’re not aware those are the lessons you’ve learned.

For me, developing my style discrimination skills brought all of this messaging to a head. The intersectionality of gender and disability was more of a collision between all the ways I had been taught that I shouldn’t trust my instincts. This is a relatively recent realization for me, and I don’t think I’ve fully grasped the extent to which I’ve limited myself in other areas of my life by ignoring my instincts and lived experiences.

Being able to name the problem is a powerful first step. Learning to recognize the ways that problem shows up in your life is a good next step. I know I’m not the only woman out there who struggles with tasting confidence, partly because I’ve had women say that they think their roadblock is not relying on their instincts.

The struggle can be in changing those internalized behaviors. I often remind people that developing sensory skills is not a linear process. Some days I’m the best taster in the world who can’t be beat! Some days I know nothing about beer and am just the worst taster in the world. Neither of these is true, of course, and they’re not true for anyone else in the world either.

What are some steps we can take to reprogram ourselves to trust our instincts when it comes to blind-tasting beer? First, reframe it. If you’ve managed to narrow down a blind sample to two or three potential styles, that’s pretty fucking awesome. Even if you don’t select the correct style, take a moment to celebrate that you got super close. 

Second, reflect on your progress. One thing I wish I had done from the start was keep track of my tasting notes in one central place, such as a spreadsheet. That way, I could look at what flavors I ascribed to beer styles and specific brands, how my descriptors changed over time, and identify key flavor components for me in specific brands. For example, if I perceive white pepper every time I blind taste Saison Dupont and Anjou pears every time I blind taste Westmalle Tripel, then that builds my confidence that when I blind taste a sample and perceive white pepper, the sample is more likely to be a Saison, specifically Saison Dupont.4

I highly encourage you to catalog your tasting notes somewhere, not only as a study aid but also as a way to document your progress. If anyone is into tedium and wants to catalog my years of blind-tasting notes, let me know.

Third, name it. Decide on what you think the style is and why. If you are tasting with someone else or a group (or even alone, for that matter), say it out loud. Declare it with confidence. The purpose of this is twofold. One, you get used to making declarative statements about your conclusions, so you learn that speaking up about your instincts is not as scary as it seems. Two, sometimes you will be wrong and you’ll not only learn what it feels like to be wrong out loud but you also learn that being incorrect is not the end of the world. Being wrong doesn’t erase all the work you’re putting in. It’s part of the process and it presents you with the opportunity to delineate between styles based on your perceptions.

Being good at things like style discrimination and blind tastings are not innate traits for anyone. No one is born with the perfect combination of genetics to make them a taster superior to other tasters by nature rather than nurture. I would argue that no one is born with the almost perfect combination of genetics to make them a superior taster.

Expertise is not perfection and is based on experience, not genetics. The more experience we have tasting beer, the better we are at learning to associate specific sets of features as synthetic objects. Connections between neurons change with experience so increased discrimination activity leads to long-lasting increases in subsequent discrimination activity.

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Earthy? More Like Dearthy (get it)

From time to time, oft-used flavor descriptors will make me stop and think, “But what does that mean exactly? What are we trying to convey? What does it mean to me when I use it?” More recently, that descriptor has been “earthy.”

The thought popped up when I was recording a podcast episode with my cohost and owner of Pilot Brewing, Rachael Hudson.5 We were discussing hop growing regions and flavor descriptions of hops when I briefly derailed the conversation by asking Rachael what she thought “earthy” conveyed. Like me, she had a hard time breaking it down further. It’s not geosmin, exactly. It’s not necessarily mushroomy or moldy. Is it decay? I’m not sure.

Huzzah, it’s an opportunity to improve my flavor description skills! Kind of.

Before I dive into the research I did, I’d like to point out something that I think a lot of us get stuck on, including me. Aroma is adiaphorous - it is neither good nor bad. Its molecular structure is neither good nor bad. Aromas are - for the most part - neither beneficial nor detrimental. Some exceptions, like the smells of decaying animals (including humans) or ammonia, trigger our revulsion as an evolutionary protection against certain harm. But for the most part, aromas are like our pets - we ascribe personalities to them but at the end of the day, those are projections and not reality.

I’ve mentioned before how the concept of “clean” arose during the Black Plague and that different cultures ascribe “clean” to different aromas. In Eurocolonial cultures, it’s linen or lemons. In other cultures, it may be musk. Further, an often overlooked core value of Eurocolonial cultural hegemony is the “olfactory neutrality” of those in positions of power and the “odorous” nature of marginalized groups.

All to say that words have meaning, but aromas do not abide by them simply because we say lavender is relaxing, chamomile makes us sleepy, or skunks smell bad. Priming and the placebo effect have a lot to do with how we interact with aroma.

ANYWAY

The first place I usually go for projects like this is Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells by Harold McGee. It is a 600-page field guide, so it can be read like a regular book, but I’ve found it more digestible when I want to learn specific information, especially specific information about beer world aromas that aren’t the same descriptors and explanations regurgitated throughout beer literature.

I read through chapter 14, which is all about the aromas of soil, fungi, and stone. I encountered a lot of descriptors that go deeper than “earthy,” such as the aforementioned geosmin and mushroomy, as well as petrichor, potato, camphor, and leather.

The geosmin and mushroomy descriptors were what got me thinking about ascribing “good” and “bad” to flavor descriptors because I learned about both in the context of flaws in beer. When I say that I pick up geosmin in a beer, that usually indicates that the beer contains contaminated water. However, when I smell fresh beets, I don’t think there’s something wrong with the beets. They just smell like …beets.

The section on mushrooms was educational because it broke down the common aromas for mushrooms, breaking “mushroomy” into ammonia, acetaldehyde, almond, and geosmin. However, when I thought about describing a beer as having aromas of ammonia, acetaldehyde, almond, and geosmin, three of those four descriptors are typically associated with flaws and the other can be associated with age.

The conundrum is that there is a fine line between describing flavors in an evocative and specific way and breaking the aroma components down so much that they don’t convey the message I intend. Culturally, we do ascribe good and bad to descriptors like earthy (usually good, like English hops), geosmin (usually bad, like contaminated water), mushroomy (usually bad, like musty malt), and ammonia (duh).

In the case of a descriptor like earthy, is the sum greater than the parts? Perhaps, but I find that when we have a hard time describing what *exactly* we mean when we use a term there is usually an opportunity to be more specific.

On the other hand, intent versus impact is also a consideration. For example, if I enter a Strong Bitter into a competition, what is my reaction to receiving a scoresheet back that discusses the style-appropriate earthiness of the English hops I used? What if instead, the scoresheet discusses the (still technically correct) geosmin and mushroomy aromas from the English hops? Taking the hypothetical even further, what if the scoresheet is even more specific and discusses the geosmin, ammonia, acetaldehyde, and almond notes of the English hops?

With one scoresheet, I’m pleased that my selected hops had the intended impact. With the next scoresheet, I’m a little confused and think that maybe I overlooked an issue with my ingredients. With the last scoresheet, I’m wondering how I could have missed these obvious flaws.

I don’t have a pithy conclusion for how to handle this. I think it boils down to knowing your audience. If your audience is a brewer who has entered a beer in a competition, then maybe sticking to earthy is the way to go. If you are trying to drill down your understanding of what “earthy” entails to improve your descriptive skills, then I say drill away and get as specific as you can. Then, like me, decide for yourself whether the completely deconstructed descriptions are useful or not to share with others. There may be times when earthy is all you need and other times when you feel it’s necessary (or more fun) to dive deeper.

And finally

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Preparing for my sensory presentation at Barrel & Flow in Pittsburgh in August. This will be not only my first time presenting at Barrel & Flow, but also my first time attending! I’ve been wanting to go to Barrel & Flow for a while and I’m excited to go back to Pittsburgh, which is a really cool city.

2. Reading Eyeliner: A Cultural History by Zahra Hankir. This book focuses on the role eyeliner has played through time and culture, from signaling religious devotion to Gen Z beauty influencers.

3. Listening to I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol. We need more books about women over 40 enjoying themselves as grown-ass women. Enjoying themselves in ways that don’t still center on marriage and children. And being single and childless by choice and not in the tropey pursuit of “having it all.” Just …existing and doing things solely because they feel good.

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In my April newsletter, I discussed pay transparency and its benefits to both employees and employers. I suggested that industry job boards start requiring job posters to include compensation information in their job posts. I also emailed the Brewers Association (BA), Pink Boots Society (PBS), the Master Brewers Association of America (MBAA), and the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) to ask that they consider requiring employers to disclose compensation information on their job boards. 

All of the organizations responded to my email pretty quickly. PBS shared that they just launched a new website and added the salary field to their job post, but the field is not required. As of mid-May, eleven of the twelve jobs posted on their website included pay ranges. Which is great! And hopefully employers continue to include compensation information when posting on the PBS job board.

The Brewers Association responded that their forum is a “non-ideal technical solution” for jobs. According to the BA, its forum is a member benefit and not accessible to non-members, and a portion of it (i.e. the Jobs forum) can’t be put outside of the paywall. They may be moving away from the platform entirely in the future, meaning the BA likely will no longer have a job board going forward. The forum manager will be pinning a best practice template for job postings in the forum that strongly encourages posters to include salary ranges, although that message has not been added as of the writing of this newsletter.1

The MBAA and ASBC are both managed by Scientific Societies, which means that Scientific Societies acts as the associations’ headquarters, manages daily operations, and creates the public face of both organizations. The MBAA added the following statement: “MBAA promotes pay equity through transparent compensation disclosure for both current and prospective employees, and we urge all job postings to include this information.” They also shared that the ASBC will have a similar statement added to their job board. 

The MBAA and ASBC have the ability to make compensation information required but have chosen not to. The reason they gave was that, because posting salaries is not a legal requirement in many states, they think employers will not post on their job boards if they are required to disclose their compensation information. Big yikes and a big missed opportunity to support the industry. 

Overall, some progress was made, but not enough.

It’s frustrating to hear messaging from these orgs that they care about its membership and about equity, but when asked to walk the talk (a relatively easy walk, more of a stroll), they decline and instead counteroffer tepid responses that don’t move the needle enough because… deepest pockets, I suppose?

To paraphrase a joke, we’re saying “Abolish prisons!” and these orgs responded, “We hear what you’re saying so we’re hiring more women guards.”

This is a great time to remind you that, if you are a member of any of these organizations, you are also paying money to support them. You have the right as a member to push them for progress and change. And no, I’m not recommending you join subcommittees to “be the change” you want to see in the organization because that tactic is usually used to control and silence people advocating for change.

It’s also a great time to let you know that I found the people to email by visiting their Contact Us pages. Which means you can do it, too. You don’t have to rely on others to advocate for change. You can advocate, too.

November 2021

It was about six months in when I said out loud the thing I never wanted to say out loud. The statement I’ve never wanted other people to know that I said. The statement that I’ve struggled with whether I should ever share it in this newsletter or elsewhere.

“Maybe I should never have spoken up.”

The preceding six months had been a roller coaster of high highs and the lowest of lows. I resigned from my job at the height of the industry’s 2021 #MeToo movement. I had gotten another job shortly thereafter, only to be laid off three months later due to the fiscal irresponsibility of the CEO. 

I had two potential jobs on the horizon and had multiple interviews with both jobs. I had just returned from a cross-country trip for an in-person interview. I interviewed with several people throughout the day, retelling the fascinating story of me (/s/) and providing thoughtful answers to all the stupid situational questions you get asked during an interview that are somehow supposed to predict your performance at a new job.

I mean, does anyone ever really answer a question like “Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a co-worker and how you handled it” with an honest answer like, “I bitched about it to my work friends and crafted hypothetical ways to undermine their work without ever taking any action or addressing the issue”? 

Throughout the day, I was repeatedly asked how I would handle a coworker who is “difficult,” how I would resolve an issue with a co-worker, and how I approached management with issues. The difficult coworker question was posed to me so many times that I finally asked a potential future coworker for the tea over lunch about who the difficult person was at the company with which it seemed everyone had issues.

A pause. “You,” they replied. “They’re worried about you being a difficult employee.”

They explained that they understood why I had left my previous job and that the team I would be working on understood, but that management was wary. I appreciated the honesty as well as the support. 

But I still cried in my rental car driving back to the next round of afternoon interviews. 

And I cried when I got back to my hotel. 

And I cried the next morning.

And, to be honest, I cried as I wrote this. 

It still hurts, even after almost three years. Workaholism runs in both sides of my family, particularly with my parents. Although they are both retired now, I think if asked to describe themselves, both would start with describing their careers. Like a good capitalist drone, I learned that your career and your productivity within that career are the most important things in your life, aside from your credit score. 

I have always prided myself on being a Good Employee. I’m punctual, reliable, and rarely miss work. I’m still friends with coworkers I haven’t worked with in 10-20 years. I’ve done some major work in unlearning the “rise and grind” mindset and resolved years ago to not let my career define me. However, like most people, I still want to do a good job at work and be liked by the people I work with. To have a potential employer ask me, “How do I know that you’re not going to have a bad day at work and blast us on social media?” was devastating and damn near made me leave the industry altogether.

To be clear, I understand why employers would be on the qui vive about me. Here is someone who resigned from a job without notice and shared it publicly. Employers absolutely should ask me about it during the interview process. In fact, when an employer didn’t, I found it odd because either 1) they thought they understood the situation and, as the above story illustrates, they often did not or 2) they didn’t know that I had resigned and was pretty publicly advocating within the industry. Honestly, I’m not sure which is worse - that you presume you know the story or that you hadn’t paid attention to what was happening in the industry because you didn’t think you needed to.

Also, to be fair,2 it hadn’t occurred to me that a potential employer would see my resignation as anything but taking a stance on sexism in the industry. I assumed that an employer who would see my resume come across their desk knew what my expectations were for being treated as an employee (pretty simple - please don’t discriminate against me on the basis of my gender) and that scheduling a job interview with me implied we were on the same page.3

May 21, 2021

Multiple people knew I was resigning from my job before it happened. I worked on my resignation letter and sent it to a handful of trusted friends for their feedback. I was so nervous about overlooking some detail of my resignation - such as writing “please see my resignation letter attached” and forgetting the attachment - that I made an infinitesimally detailed list of steps to take.

The day before I planned to resign, I fucked up at work. Big time. Like an all-hands-on-deck kind of crisis that required a bunch of leadership and vendors on multiple phone calls. It was not on purpose or malicious, it was an innocent mistake made with incomplete information that had big consequences.4

I knew that if I resigned the next day, it wouldn’t matter what I said or what was going on in the industry or what I had been advocating for during my employment - leadership was going to insist I had quit because of the mistake I had made.5

I stayed up late writing a list of all of my ongoing projects, their status, and, when relevant, who the contact person was or who internally could take over the project. I tried to sleep, which lasted for maybe an hour before I got back up and checked and double-checked my project list and felt my stomach churn. I obsessively refreshed Instagram to see if other stories had been shared. I felt a knot deep in my stomach every time I saw the notification that Brienne had shared another story. Three years later, I still recall that visceral feeling of dread but also validation but also rage but also sadness.

As night turned into morning, I started drinking (too much) coffee, which only made my jitters worse. We had a 9:00 a.m. call with the app vendor to make sure my mistake from the day before had been rectified. 

Yes, I am such a Good Employee that I attended a meeting minutes before I resigned to make sure the problem I caused was taken care of, so I didn’t leave anyone in the lurch. One of the web contractors said he and I would meet back in an hour to confirm the issue was solved. I agreed, knowing full well that an hour later, the company and I would look quite different.

Shaking, I followed my detailed list. I meticulously checked that my resignation email in fact had both my resignation letter and project list attached. I pressed send, slammed my laptop shut, and went downstairs. My husband was out on our deck and, when I came outside, he asked if I had done it. Crying and shaking, I nodded my head and he swept me up in a big comforting hug, telling me he was proud of me.6

I waited a few hours before saying anything publicly because the leadership at that brewery is well known for not only being very quick to threaten to sue employees who spoke out critically of them but also liked to brag about the wealth and basically limitless resources of themselves and their investor. I had discreetly asked a local attorney friend for referrals to employment lawyers in case I needed it. I stated in my resignation email that I had every intention of completing the necessary offboarding but said that I would be taking a few days away from my computer. No one threatened legal action, although there were several nefarious actions taken to silence others from coming forward.7

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When the year anniversary of my resignation was approaching, I wondered how I would feel about it. By that point, I had (still have) a job that I really love and was continuing to do advocacy work within the industry. The day came and passed and I was surprised by the lack of emotion I felt. I observed the day somewhat indifferently like I was in a doctor’s waiting room watching HGTV. Two years later, I actually had a little more emotion about it, which surprised me. But it was more so “Wow, look at what I’ve accomplished since then. Look at what I went through and came out stronger.”

This year, I didn’t think about it at all until I opened Facebook and saw that my resignation letter was in that day’s memories. That evening, as my husband and I were sitting on the same deck where he had given me that big hug three years ago, I said in passing that it had been three years since I had left. He said that it seemed really long ago but not that long ago at the same time and I agreed.

So much has changed in the past three years, but so much hasn’t. I’m not sorry I spoke up, but I’m also not sorry that at one point I was sorry. 

True advocacy means that you are uncomfortable. If you are not uncomfortable, you are performative. I’m still learning what it means to be an advocate and show up for others and I don’t plan on reaching a point where I feel like I’ve learned everything there is to learn. I still commit white feminism from time to time but resolve to sit with the discomfort and learn from it. It has gotten easier to have difficult conversations and push back against unsatisfactory actions. It’s not all wins, which sometimes makes continuing hard. Sometimes it causes me to wonder if I should have spoken up. Sometimes it feels hopeless. 

But sometimes I meet someone who asks if they can give me a hug and thank me for the advocacy I have done. Sometimes, I’ve had people randomly message me to let me know that they applied for a job or a scholarship or some other opportunity and got it, that they wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for something I did or said that resonated with them. Thankfully and fortuitously, many of those times came during the darkest days when I found it hard to get out of bed, let alone advocate for myself and others. When I felt lost and misunderstood and like everything I stood for was a waste of time, someone would unknowingly pull me out of it by reaching out.

It seems like this year, a lot more people are being retrospective about the 2021 #MeToo movement in the industry, which makes me happy because we’ve been here this whole time, working in the background and sometimes the foreground to push the industry to improve.

We’ve wished people would pay attention again. Pay attention without expecting marginalized people to bare their wounds for consumption as trauma porn, for entertainment purposes only, just to declare themselves satiated and push their chairs away from the table. We’re also trying to do this in a world where there are genocides and other atrocities happening right now that demand that we not look away.

I had been working on another topic for this month’s newsletter, but decided to share my story instead because I haven’t told a lot of this story before and I’m feeling strong enough to share some of the most vulnerable moments of my life with an audience. It’s important to me that you all know that advocacy, for yourself and others, is not a linear process and there will be setbacks. At the risk of sounding like a class valedictorian graduation speech, how we respond to the setbacks is the thing, not the setbacks themselves.

Stay strong, but it’s okay to feel weak sometimes. Keep pushing forward, even when you feel like you’re not making progress. But also, be aware of the sunk cost fallacy as well as toxic positivity. Know that you can quit at any time to protect yourself and that’s okay. Wear sunscreen.8

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I felt it bubbling up. I tried to choke it back down because I hate being that person but out it came. It was during a particularly exhausting week of hearing men’s takes on issues affecting people who aren’t men and seeing other men jump up in agreement. 

“Posting to your story saying ‘This is problematic’ with no explanation.”1

“I cringe if I’m ever referred to as an ‘influencer.’”2

Cool stories, bros.

I hate being the person who says that organizations and businesses are interested in allyship as long as it’s performative and doesn’t require them to give up power or be uncomfortable in any way. Truly, I hate when I’m in that frame of mind because then I also have to face saying the quiet part out loud:

Then why bother? 

It’s pointless. 

Nothing is really going to change.

Why am I wasting my time? Why should others waste their time if I’m out here saying it’s pointless?

I’m bitter.

Or, in the words of Lyz Lenz - Am I bitter or am I just seen as bitter because I won’t be quiet?

Calling someone bitter is similar to using a thought-terminating cliche - it’s meant to cut the conversation short by shifting the conversation away from the behavior at hand and toward the choice of expression used by the person. It shifts the responsibility away from the people who have the ability to do something about the issues expressed to the person expressing the concerns, making them account for their behavior.

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The purpose of framing someone as bitter is not to challenge but rather to silence. Not to engage in productive discourse but to focus on respectability politics: “We would be willing to help you if only you were nicer about it.”

Guess what? We’ve tried being nice about it. We’ve tried using broken reporting systems to hold organizations accountable only to have the line moved when we get closer. We’ve tried emailing companies to personally ask for accountability. When all of that fails, occasionally people take to social media in a last ditch attempt to make people pay a-fucking-ttention. And what do we hear in response?

“Not like that.”

“Thanks for your feedback. While we aren’t going to change anything now, we maybe might think about possibly changing it in the indeterminate future.”

Also in the words of Lyz: “The truth is there is no tone that I could use to say what I have to say that would ever make my message more palpable, more acceptable to the power and the patriarchy I am trying to change.”

Why are we still fighting the same battles? Remember when white people found out racism was real in 2020 and when men in the beer industry found out sexism was real in 2021? Because Pepperidge Farms remembers. And so do I. And so do a lot of people.

Consider that being bitter and refusing to “forgive and forget” is rather the failure of others to listen and act. 

When we react to someone by calling them bitter or angry rather than listening to them and acting on what they say, we’re deflecting from the issues. We’re shifting the burden of proof from inequitable behavior to having to defend the legitimacy of feelings.

If you’ve relegated someone to the “bitter” pile, the following message is for you:

We’re not bitter, you’re not listening.

If you’ve been relegated to the “bitter” pile, the following message is for you:

You’re going to be called angry or bitter anyway, so don’t waste your time trying to nice up your message to make it more agreeable. To summarize Moira Donegan, any progress is going to be met with resistance, so we have just as much to lose with small steps as big ones. If people are going to lash out anyway (or share their hot takes on social media), then stand ten toes down and demand the change you really want.

Old Number Seven

Out of our five basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami), bitterness is hands down (tastebuds down?) my favorite to research and talk about. While I love learning about all of our basic tastes, bitterness holds a special place in my heart.

While some tastes, such as sweet, salty, and umami, evolved to alert us to needed nutrition (energy, fluid balance, and protein, respectively), bitterness evolved as a warning system for something potentially poisonous or toxic. While we have only about three genes to detect sweetness, we have at least twenty-five different genes that detect bitter tastes. Why? Because there are a lot of things out in the world that can poison us, whereas a sweet taste receptor’s only job is to find sugar.

Bitterness can occur naturally, such as endive or Brussels sprouts; however, it can also occur due to chemical changes, such as heavily burnt or charred foods. Bitterness doesn’t have a unifying concept, either, like an amino acid or a sodium ion. Rather, bitterness can come from nitrogen-based alkaloids, sulfur-based glucosinolates, triterpenes, and more. 

One of the original forms of testing people for bitterness sensitivity is a compound known as PTC. Its use for this purpose was discovered by accident at Dupont in 1930. Two chemists were working close to each other when one of them fumbled with the PTC he was pouring into a container, which sent a puff of PTC powder into the air. The other chemist inhaled some and tasted a sharp bitter taste. This reaction surprised the chemist who had caused the accident as he had also inhaled some of the powder and tasted nothing at all. A spontaneous experiment began as other chemists and technicians were asked to taste the compound – some could taste the bitterness and some could not.

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In 1999, a Columbia graduate student discovered the gene responsible for detecting bitterness, and it was later named TAS2R38. This gene is in a strand of DNA on chromosome number seven and is responsible for bitterness sensitivity. 

People can be broken into three bitterness sensitivity groups: non-tasters, tasters, and supertasters. Tasting status is actually really easy to determine and relatively inexpensive. Tasting status can be determined by using N-Propylthiouracil test paper, colloquially known as PROP (pronounced as “prope” not “prop”) paper. You can buy PROP paper on Amazon and you get 100 strips for about $6.00.3

The actual test is just sticking a test strip on your tongue. If all you taste is paper, you’re a non-taster. If you taste bitterness, you’re a taster. If the bitterness is overwhelming, you’re a supertaster. Overall, tasters make up about 50% of the population, whereas non-tasters are about 30% and supertasters are about 25%.

Non-tasters are not sensitive to bitterness. Tastes are sensitive to bitterness. Supertasters are extremely sensitive to bitterness. The name “supertaster” is a bit of a misnomer because supertasters don’t have exceptional tasting abilities. Rather, they are very sensitive to bitter compounds as well as other things, such as capsaicin. 

If you’re working on developing your palate, I highly recommend finding out your taster status. It won’t completely change your life or your tasting skills, but it is another parameter to know about yourself and your palate. If you lead sensory panels, it can also be helpful to know the tasting status of your panelists. Besides knowing who is sensitive to bitterness and who isn’t, non-tasters seem to be less sensitive to compounds like diacetyl.

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Preparing for the Crafted for Action Conference. Buy! Your! Tickets! If you’ll be in Atlanta for the in-person events, let’s meet up!

2. Reading (still) Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor by Dr. Arielle Johnson. This book is PACKED with information, so it’s taking me a while to get through it. I also get excited about what I’m reading and drop the book to text friends, do more research, etc.

3. Listening to Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. I grew up in one of the poorest counties in Missouri, so I was exposed to poverty throughout my childhood, i.e. classmates who only saw their siblings at school because county family services had removed them from their home, kids who came to school with their heads shaved because their families couldn’t afford lice shampoo, etc. I have no patience for the individual exceptionalism bootstrapping rhetoric and if you’re wondering why, I recommend this book as a good primer.

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