Reading comments about the New Yorker cover where someone with a hat on his head and a smirk on the face presents a beer to someone else is a bit depressing; it’s the New Yorker for a start, which is one of those magazines that I didn’t know was still going (and besides who has the time to read it?). I think it’s great. It’s beer and it doesn’t look fusty. It’s not got people getting legless and it represents beer as something more than wallop. However I don’t understand why it needs to be dissected and its inaccuracies pointed out with such a weird fervour. The magazine is not part of beer culture, and those people who see the cover won’t realise that there exists this tribe of people who weep over beer style inconsistencies and argue with themselves late into the night over beer; on seeing the cover they might start thinking about beer for themselves and although they might not go for a beer whose hop constituent compares to the amount of ordnance dropped on Dresden they might be encouraged to invest in something other than a beer that vaguely resembles something ants spray over each other for fun (however I just realised that beer Mormons will want their addresses so that they can knock on the door and ask them if what they are drinking is craft or whatever and can they have their dead relatives names for inclusion on the craft register?).
So the next thing — does this mean that craft beer or whatever you want to call it is recognised? Possibly but there seems something needy in the necessity of so many people who blog about beer to make clear their displeasure about it — it’s as if they want to censure every independent media’s comment on the ‘craft beer community’. I presume the NY is independent and doesn’t seek to show its comments or cartoons on various events to every ‘community’ out there? I must admit, given the hysterical response to the Let there be an app out there or whatever it’s called (which I haven’t seen not because I’m against it but because I’m rather busy and it also has no bearing on the writing on beer that I do — I’m quite interested in people rather than ad campaigns) and the raft of complaints about the New Yorker cover, it feels like those in beer want to be treated special, that they should have the right to look at every ad campaign and mag cover that mentions beer. Hey we’re a community (everyone’s a community these days, even the cannibals down the road). It makes beer people, of whatever intensity they inspect beer with, whether it’s flighty and flirty or with the devotion of a monk looking for angels on a pinhead, look rather strange. For the record I thought the NY cover great, but it’ll be forgotten in a week or so, apart from those who communicate about beer.
