The Fingers Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fingers.emailEditor’s note: This is Fingers’ last newsletter of the year. Have a wonderful, safe holiday. I’ll see you on the other side!—Dave.For 2021 and much of 2022, I cohosted a biweekly-ish Twitter Spaces session called Beer Byliners with Kate Bernot (Good Beer Hunting, Craft Beer & Brewing) and Jessica Infante (Brewbound) about the latest headlines and happenings in the American beer industry. It was an opportunity for us to decompress as reporters and shoot the shit as friends in a pretty low-stakes format with a few dozen familiar faces from across the beverage-alcohol landscape—sources, analysts, fellow journalists, et cetera. Byliners was lots of fun, but we all got busy, and eventually it felt like it’d run its course, plus our audience seemed to be less interested in listening to Twitter Spaces than they had been earlier in the pandemic. (Judging by Clubhouse’s nosedive, and Spaces’ own struggles, the feeling was pretty widespread regarding “social audio” generally!) So we let it sorta peter out at the end of the summer. No big deal. But! For The Fingers Podcast’s last episode of 2022 (and maybe ever; see below), I rounded up my fellow Beer Byliners for one last job/recording, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers. The result, recorded in mid-December, is something of a speedrun through the past year in beer, covering such tectonic shifts, high-dollar lawsuits, and run-of-the-mill shitshows as: * The social-media crucifixion of Beer Jesus!* Thank U, Bud Light Next / Hard Mtn. Dew, Look at Those Sales Figures!* Blue Cloud, human-trafficking, Reyes Rules Everything Around Me, and other middle-tier beer fears!* Stone vs. Keystone, the trade-dress trial of the 21st century (so far)!* The “broke Southwest Airlines customer” approach to entering new markets!* Jordan Peterson, beverage-alcohol litigant?!* And so much more!As an added bonus, I also challenged my fellow Beer Byliners to name a now-defunct beverage-alcohol brand that they believe would sell well if it was reintroduced to the American drinking public in 2023. Their answers may surprise you; mine, probably not so much. I had a blast talking to two of the sharpest minds covering the beverage-alcohol business, and feel lucky to call Kate and Jess colleagues and friends. Hope you enjoy our conversation! (NB: if my Jordan Peterson impression knots your stomach with unspeakable dread, good, that means it’s working.)The Fingers Podcast is a paid-subscriber bonus. Please consider buying a subscription to access the entire episode archive, and to support independent journalism about drinking in America!As for the future of The Fingers Podcast: it’s up in the air! Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with it. I love the opportunity to get deep and nerdy across disciplines with fascinating people from the booze world and beyond, but based on the pod’s modest downloads, I get the sense that the Fingers Fam just isn’t sure what to make of it, either. From an operational standpoint, publishing long-form interviews every month or so isn’t converting free readers to paid the way I hypothesized it might. As it stands, the work that goes into booking, prepping, and conducting the interviews, then editing the episodes, just costs too much time and effort for the payoff. I also don’t have the bandwidth to increase episode frequency to try to might improve performance and conversions, so it’s sorta stuck in purgatory. I’ve learned that independent media is all about tradeoffs, and my calculus has shifted a lot on The Fingers Podcast since I started publishing it. Hmm. For the immediate future, I’m going to take a break from recording any new episodes for a couple months and brainstorm some new approaches to audio. I’ve got an idea that I’ve been chewing on for the past few months that I’m excited about, and will hopefully have a pilot episode or two to share with you in Spring 2023. In the meantime, paying Friends of Fingers can continue to access every episode via their private feed or the web archive. I love the medium, and I think a Fingers audio component could be really compelling to current and prospective Friends of Fingers alike… but in its current form, it’s just too much of a lift for your fearless Fingers editor to produce with the consistency and quality you deserve. So back to the drawing board we go.🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast* Labor Notes writer and organizer Jonah Furman* James Wilt, journalist and author of Drinking Up the Revolution (Parts One & Two; transcript)* Jack Hamilton, critic, professor, and author of Just Around Midnight* Kim Kelly, journalist and author of 'Fight Like Hell'* Craft labor writer and scholar Ben Anderson* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of Sellout

You know how like 200 Starbucks stores have unionized since that first one in Buffalo did back in December 2021, and over 100 of those 200 all struck in unison on Red Cup Day this year because the company—which is one of the biggest private employers in the U.S. by the way—refuses to bargain with its workers in good faith and has actually fired scores of them just for exercising their federally protected right to organize on the job? What’s going on there?So glad you asked. Today on The Fingers Podcast, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got an interview with , a writer and organizer at the worker publication/organizing platform Labor Notes. He’s also the guy behind , a vital, semi-weekly round-up of American labor news. If you spend any time on Twitter… well, first of all I’m sorry to hear it, you should definitely try to stop doing that. But second of all: you have probably come across Jonah thanks to his relentless coverage of the U.S. labor movement. We first crossed paths last year when I was reporting on United Food and Commercial Workers’ six-week strike at Heaven Hill’s Bardstown, Kentucky distillery. I knew he’d be great for The Fingers Podcast because of how well he can get deep in the weeds of this or that union drive, then zoom out on what it all means for the overall landscape for workers in this country, and earlier this year, our schedules finally aligned to make it happen. The Fingers Podcast is usually paid-subscriber bonus, but this episode is free for all. Please consider buying a subscription to support independent journalism about drinking in America!Jonah and I spoke in October 2022 about a ton of different, related topics: his coverage of the Starbucks union drive, the importance of being honest about the health and strength of American unions, and the best way for customers to show their support for workers organizing a shop they patronize. (Spoiler alert: it isn’t a boycott, because boycotts are way harder to pull off than anybody thinks, and they almost never work!) The upshot, as he sees it: despite the rising groundswell of American public support for unions—an August 2022 Gallup poll found 71% of the country felt positive towards organized labor, for example—“workers have to really want this for this to happen.” Capital has been eating labors lunch in this country for going on five decades, and it was never a fair fight to begin with. Still, Jonah believes the brushfire campaign by Starbucks Workers United is both proof-positive that it’s still possible, and a model of how to do it. I tend to agree. It was a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation about consumer-facing food & drink’s place in the U.S.’s sorta-resurgent labor movement, and I hope you enjoy it. Jonah Furman is a writer and organizer with Labor Notes. He publishes Who Gets the Bird?, a newsletter of American labor news updates. Follow him on Twitter.🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast* James Wilt, journalist and author of Drinking Up the Revolution (Parts One & Two; transcript)* Jack Hamilton, critic, professor, and author of Just Around Midnight* Kim Kelly, journalist and author of 'Fight Like Hell'* Craft labor writer and scholar Ben Anderson* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of Sellout This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this interview is available here. A condensed transcript of Pts. 1 and 2 is available here. This is a paid-subscriber exclusive, so if you haven’t yet, please purchase a subscription to support my independent journalism about drinking in America!—Dave.You know how parts of the United States have state-run retail networks for selling beverage alcohol, via which they hold partial or full monopolies over the pricing, sale, and profit of booze? What’s up with that?So glad you asked. Today, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got the second half of my interview with James Wilt, author of Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy. (Here’s Part 1.) The book, which came out earlier this year, confronts the profit-driven practices of the world’s biggest beer, wine, and spirits producers and argues for a radical alternative system that puts drinkers before shareholders.My interview with James took place a bit earlier this fall and lasted nearly two hours. We talked about everything from the ways in which global booze capital flexes its political muscles, to how craft beverage producers inadvertently give cover to their corporate counterparts, to his vision for a fairer, safer system for distributing drink without the profit motive dictating the terms of engagement. “It’s about reducing the density of liquor [stores], increasing pricing, doing all these things that are very contested, but ultimately evidence-based ways of reducing industry profits, and reducing harms,” he says of his (admitted radical!) proposal for regulating the beverage-alcohol business. That’s not to say James is a prohibitionist; not so. “The world sucks for most people…. so it’s really necessary to come up with alternatives, which is why I [argue for] degrowing Big Alcohol and regrowing these community-owned and controlled alternatives” to the production, distribution, and sale of booze. How would we get there as a society—if we ever even decided to go? “I think at the end of the day, it really has to come down to owning, controlling, and retailing alcohol as a public good, as opposed to something motivated primarily by private profit,” he argues.I highly recommend you grab Drinking Up the Revolution at the Fingers Reading Room or your local library. Even if you’re a diehard free-market anti-Marxist type, I think you’ll find it really thought-provoking. (Also what the hell are you doing reading Fingers with those politics? Drop me a line, I’d genuinely love to know!)James Wilt is a freelance journalist, Ph.D. candidate, and the author of two books, Drinking Up the Revolution and Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars. Follow him on Twitter.🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast* Part 1 with James Wilt, journalist and author of Drinking Up the Revolution* Jack Hamilton, critic, professor, and author of Just Around Midnight* Kim Kelly, journalist and author of 'Fight Like Hell'* Craft labor writer and scholar Ben Anderson* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of Sellout This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fingers.emailDave interviews James Wilt about the profits, politics, and power of the global alcohol industry—and his radical vision for a better system that puts drinkers before shareholders. Episode 1 of 2.

You know how there’s a stereotype of people—usually urbane, knowledge-worker white guys—who make craft beer or whiskey or wine into their entire personality, and even though it’s obviously a pretty broad generalization, it still rings totally true to you and seems really familiar for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on? Me too. What’s the deal with that? So glad you asked. Today, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got an interview with Jack Hamilton about conspicuous consumption, cultural commodification, and so much more. Jack is a bit of a polymath, and he wears a bunch of hats, though not in the toxic start-uppy sense of the term. He files regular dispatches as Slate’s pop critic and teaches as an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia (wahoowa, et cetera.) He’s also the author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. This past spring, Jack went a little bit viral on Twitter with a post about a movie called High Fidelity, which came out in the year 2000. (It’s based on a 1995 novel by the same name written by Nick Hornby.) Here’s what he posted:As someone who loved both the book and movie versions of High Fidelity, and covers the rapidly shifting cultural landscape of American craft beer, I was intrigued. So I slid into Jack’s DMs and invited him on The Fingers Podcast.🎁 This episode is exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers like you. Know a friend who might enjoy it? Hook ‘em up: 🤝 I depend on readers to fund the boozeletter’s independent journalism. Thank you so much for your support!—Dave.This interview, which took place in late March 2022 but I just recently got around to editing because being an independent journalist is hard when you’re as bad at time management as I am, still totally holds up today. That’s because we spoke about a lot of concepts that are pretty much timeless, including the great poptimism vs. rockism debate, the greatest trick record labels and later streamers ever pulled, and why people seem determined to define themselves by the things they consume, even when it costs them a ton of money and heartbreak along the way. Throughout our conversation, Jack graciously tolerated me trying to map my own theories about the waning cachet of craft beer onto his field of study (thank you, Jack) and overall, I think we put together a really thought-provoking episode that bridges the gap between two rich cultural disciplines. I hope you agree. Listen in the player above, on the Substack iOS app, or via your preferred podcast platform using your private RSS link. 📬 Good post alertSorry to call my own number here but c’mon!!! See a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about? Please send me that good post via email or Twitter DM.👀 More #content for further inquiryFrom Jack:* Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press)* Spotify Has Made All Music Into Background Music (The Atlantic)* Kanye Doesn’t Want You to Watch Netflix’s New Documentary About Him. Here’s Why You Should. (Slate)Mentioned in the episode:* Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh (Penguin Press)* The Day the Music Burned by Jody Rosen (New York Times)* The Fingers Interview with Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of ‘Sellout’ (The Fingers Podcast)* High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books)🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast* Kim Kelly, journalist and author of 'Fight Like Hell'* Craft labor writer and scholar Ben Anderson* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of ‘Sellout’📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or latelyDon’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

You know how there seem to be a lot of union drives at coffee shops, craft breweries, and artisanal bakeries these days, and you don’t really get it because you always figured that since their products were so much more delicious than their corporate counterparts, they must treat their workers much better, too? What’s up with that?So glad you asked. Today on The Fingers Podcast and exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got an interview with Benjamin Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ben studies the labor movement in the so-called contemporary “craft” sectors—breweries, distilleries, coffeehouses, and so on. Basically, if it’s local, artisanal, or farm-to-table, he’s probably researched the conditions of the people that make it. His work has been published in a variety of journals and collections, and he’s finishing up his doctorate as we speak. 🤝 Paying subscribers get access to this and every full-length interview on The Fingers Podcast. I depend on reader support to fund the boozeletter’s independent journalism. To unlock more reporting, buy a subscription today!—Dave.During our recording session in mid-March, Ben and I got into a ton of tactical and philosophical questions about the labor movement’s role in the craft brewing business, including the unique challenges of unionizing small shops, how the “we’re a family” myth at work keeps many employees from realizing their collective power, and the ways workers of different backgrounds are able to organize based on shared conditions in “craft” contexts. We also talked about the misleading myth of craft brewing’s “twisty-mustache fantasy;” I snuck in a garbage reference to the Avett Brothers and the Aughts’ short-lived “stomp, clap, hey” cultural aesthetic, which Ben graciously pretended to understand. It was a wide-ranging and super-informative conversation, and if you care about worker power, or the health of the craft beer business—or both—I think you’ll find it fascinating. I sure hope so.Benjamin Anderson can be reached at bja19@sfu.ca. If you’re interested in checking out the Craft Brewery Workers Alliance of Canada, find it here. 👀 More #content for further inquiryFrom Ben: * The Forgotten Labour of Craft: Exploitation and Organizing in Artisanal Industries (Journal of Canadian Labour Studies)* The Forgotten Labour of Craft (lecture transcript) * Refining Creative Labour: Precarity and Autonomy in Cultural and Craft Industries (Journal of Canadian Labour Studies)* “Beers and Fries, Please Don’t Unionize!”: Your Favourite Local Haunt is Anti-Worker (Mainlander)* Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (this book is actually by Christopher R. Martin, but Ben recommended it in our interview)From me: * The Fingers interview/podcast with Dylan Lancaster, worker and organizer at Nelson's Green Brier Distillery (Fingers)* What can craft beer workers do about bad brewery bosses? (Fingers)* Striking against "corporate greed" at Kentucky's biggest bourbon distillery (Fingers)* How the Twin Cities became a hotbed for craft beverage unionizing (Fingers)* As Allegations of Harassment and Abuse Send Shock Waves Through the Craft Beer Industry, Will Workers Take Action? (VinePair)* Craft beer's "99% asshole-free" myth (Fingers)* Anchor Union, One Year In: Lessons Learned at the Legendary Brewery (VinePair)🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of ‘Sellout’ This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

You know how earlier this year, Heaven Hill workers went on a six-week strike against their employer, which is one of the largest bourbon distilleries in Kentucky, and therefore the world? Well, about 2.5 hours to the south, across the Tennessee state line, workers at a very small whiskey distillery with a very big corporate overlord took notice. Here’s the deal.Today on The Fingers Podcast I’ve got an interview with Dylan Lancaster, a tour guide and organizer at Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery in Nashville, Tennessee. Last week, Dylan and around 35 of his coworkers went public with a union drive at their workplace, a historic Nashville whiskey maker that in 2019 was acquired by Constellation Brands, the major beverage conglomerate behind brands like Corona, Mondavi, Casa Noble, and many more. The Nelson’s Green Brier employees’ grievances are pretty familiar: low pay, bad working conditions, and unaffordable and/or inaccessible healthcare. But the way they’ve decided to address them—by forming a union with the United Food and Commercial Workers—is less so in Tennessee, a right-to-work state with one of the lowest labor union densities in the country. “Not only are we fighting a giant, multi-billion dollar corporation, but we're also doing it within a state that is not kind to unions or to workers more broadly,” Lancaster told The Fingers Podcast. “It's a bit of a David versus Goliath situation.”🎧 This full-length interview is FREE to all subscribers on The Fingers Podcast.Interviews are usually for paying subscribers only, but I’ve unlocked this one for the whole Fingers Fam. I need your support to continue this work. Consider purchasing a subscription: In our interview, Dylan and I discussed why he and his colleagues decided to form the United Distillery Workers of Tennessee. They believe it’s the first distillery union in the Volunteer State, and they’re petitioning Constellation to voluntarily recognize the union. We got into the challenges of organizing quietly in a small shop, the perils of the American healthcare system for rank-and-file workers, and how the United Distillery Workers are hoping for good-faith treatment from their booze-biz bosses, while also bracing for the union-busting campaign that may or may not come.Dylan also told me that part of their inspiration for the drive was seeing Heaven Hill’s workers—represented by the same union, UFCW—strike their bosses over healthcare and overtime provisions. Comparing the conditions, and wages, across state lines convinced Nelson’s Green Brier workers that collective bargaining was the way to go. “They were hiring people off the street for $21.50 an hour, when our lead bottler is making just under $20,” Dylan told me, comparing the wages Heaven Hill offered scabs to those that his colleagues earn at Nelson’s Green Brier. “Those are things we definitely took into account.”Editor’s note: This interview was conducted via video call on 12/13/21. Neither Nelson’s Green Brier nor Constellation responded to Fingers’ requests for comment. The below transcript has been edited and condensed. The full-length interview is available on The Fingers Podcast.Meet Dylan Lancaster, worker & organizer at Nelson's Green Briar DistilleryDave Infante, Fingers: OK, Dylan Lancaster! Welcome to The Fingers Podcast. How you doing, man?Dylan Lancaster, Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery/United Distillery Workers of Tennessee: I'm doing fantastic. How are you?Doing well, man. You’re in Nashville, and you and your your colleagues made a little bit of news last week. What's going on in Nashville?I work at Nelson's Green Brier Distillery in Nashville, who produce Belle Meade bourbon and Nelson's Green Brier Tennessee whiskey. Me and a majority of my co-workers got together and we are in the process of forming a union with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1995. On Friday, we filed for recognition with our corporate parent company, Constellation Brands, who owns Nelson's Green Brier. So we made a bit of a splash on Friday. So it's been pretty exciting.As someone who's organized in the past, the day you go public is kind of one of the most the brightest spots in the entire campaign. What was the reception like in the community? We actually had a pretty fantastic launch day. Morale was very high at the distillery. Some of my coworkers joked that they've never seen me interact with customers quite [so] enthusiastically in a long time. On on social media, we had an Action Network campaign that went live as soon as we filed; we did that in collaboration with the Central Labor Council of Middle Tennessee, who have a pretty extensive email list. I think something like 6,000 people, [an email] went out live to all of their followers. And then we had social media push as well on our social media. As of the recording, I think we're somewhere in the ballpark of 8,000 emails sent to higher-ups within Constellation, the CEO, the executive board of directors, all the way down to our direct supervisors at the distillery.The company proved that it could pay us more, but then decided that they were not willing to do that.So you’re asking people to sign a petition calling on Constellation Brands to voluntarily recognize your union. The best case scenario is Constellation Brands wakes up tomorrow and says, These workers at Nelson's Green Brier have the right to organize, we respect that they've made a decision here, so we're going to voluntarily recognize the union and meet them at the bargaining table. Some companies do actually take that route. But if they choose not to voluntarily recognize the union, what's your understanding of what happens at that point?Then they are going to take it to an election, all we need to win the election is a simple majority of 50% [of ballots cast by eligible workers] plus one vote. So in between the day that we filed, which is Friday, the 10th of December, and whenever the election will happen, which is sometime within the next 40 days, I believe, the company is going to try to single out people and try to get votes to beat us at the election. [This] is when typically union busters are hired in outside firms, to help sway workers who have signed authorization cards into voting against the union. There was actually one branch that did organize, which was very exciting. So solidarity to the Starbucks workers, but you might know better than I but I think there was two other stores that voted on the same day and lost their elections.So how big is the proposed bargaining unit that you guys have organized down there?It's a pretty small operation. I think there's some something in the ballpark of 35 to 36 eligible workers to join the union. 80% of them have signed authorization cards.That’s an overwhelming majority.Yeah, and you only need a third to file [for union recognition.] So we did our due diligence there. Frankly, it was a pretty easy conversation… People were pretty down and ready to join up and to try and work together to increase wages and benefits. We have been, as a lot of places have been, short on staff. And so there's been a lot of burnout, a lot of long weeks and not a lot of breathing room in between shifts. So that's something that has been wearing on a lot of these workers as well. Something that's unique about this particular struggle is we could be the first unionized distillery in the state of Tennessee. And as I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, Tennessee is a “right to work” state, and they have probably the most draconian labor laws in the U.S. Or at least up there. [Tennessee must] be one of the worst on labor. So not only are we fighting a giant, multi-billion dollar corporation, but we're also doing it within a state that is not kind to unions or to workers more broadly. So it's a bit of a David versus Goliath situation. I'm recording this podcast from South Carolina… I don't know which state is worse for labor, but they're both pretty bad. Being in the South, where unions have traditionally struggled, what was your experience with organized labor? How much did you know what you were getting into, before starting this?I actually grew up in Michigan. So I come from strong labor state. But no one in my family actually ever worked for a union. I've never worked for a union. And it wasn't until I moved to Nashville and got involved with the Democratic Socialists of America, and started doing organizing through them and learning more about unions and becoming friends with union organizer, I learned a little bit more of the nuts and bolts. The conversations that I had with a lot of my co-workers, there was a lot of mystification around unions and what they do. So I had to really study up to answer a lot of those questions. I was pretty surprised. People just didn't know generally what unions did. And it wasn't ‘til after we had those conversations that it just kind of clicked and it was like, Why would we not do this?Totally. I grew up in New Jersey, and there's certainly a union presence there, but I wasn't exposed to it as a kid either. I didn't come from a union family or anything. So when I first started organizing, I had a similar experience, which is like… I felt like I was “unlearning” a lot of what I learned in like school from like the history books. There's very little labor history taught, and it's made to feel kind of like ancient history as though unions aren't relevant anymore. Exactly. Yeah, a lot of deprogramming needs to happen.There's money going somewhere, but not into the pockets of the people who are producing the products and creating the profits.So tell me how this thing came together. What are some of the major grievances that you guys organized around as you were putting together this drive?So during the beginning of the pandemic, they actually paid the front of house workers to shelter at home. So they bumped up our hourly rate, because a lot of our income is tipped. The house receives tips from the people comin

Enjoy this subscriber-only episode of The Fingers Podcast with Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of the new book Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk Emo and Hardcore 1994-2007. As a paid-up Friend of Fingers, you can access these subscriber-only episodes wherever you get your podcasts in the future by using your private RSS feed. Instructions on how to do that are at the bottom of this post under the heading “Private feeds”:It should be fairly simple, but if you have any trouble with that, let me know, and I’ll try to help!Music credit: The intro/outro music to this episode of The Fingers Podcast is SKA Podcast / YouTube / Channel Intro by NaturesEye, sourced via Pixabay. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Editor’s note: Happy Friday, Fingers fam! Welcome to the 26 new Friends of Fingers who have subscribed since last week. We’re glad you’re here! 🎙️ Bonus pod: Big Beer's disturbing, deeply American vision of work and leisureFirst up: for your listening pleasure, I recorded an audio read of Monday’s newsletter. Check it out in the player above, or on your preferred podcast platform:Remember to subscribe to The Fingers Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss new episodes as I publish them. All previous episodes can be found on those platforms, or in The Fingers Podcast archive. And if you missed Monday’s edition, catch up on it right here: 📬 Good post alertAs this week comes to an end, please remember: it really can happen to anyone. 🔝This week’s top commentThe stickers I offered to the first 50 people to buy yearly subscriptions to Fingers have all been claimed, which is incredible! Shout-out to those hair-triggered Friends of Fingers who jumped on that bonus. You know who you are! I sent out a Google Form to collect mailing addresses from the Fingers First 50, and included an optional, open-ended question in the survey: “Anything else I should know?” This field, I quickly realized, was just an open invitation to Friends of Fingers with shitposting tendencies. Some choice responses (anonymized to protect the shitposters, god bless ‘em):* “I spent almost 2 years keeping a spreadsheet of every unique beer I bought at my local bottle shop. I’ve done absolutely nothing with that data…”* “Dad?”* “hi dad”* “I probably won’t finish How to Kill a City”* “Are you my dad?”* “Sometimes I just like to sit in the yard and listen to the birds for a little bit.”* “The children are drinking so much ranch water their little tummies can't handle any more beer.”* “No :)”Good work all around, everyone. Not to get too sappy but I think it’s pretty cool that we’re building a little community here where some of my long-running in-jokes (the “dad?” thing; no I will not explain) are mixing with general wise-assery about drinking culture, being online, and… ah, birds, I guess? If you haven’t bought a subscription yet, but like the idea of joining and supporting that community, there’s still time to score a sweet deal on a whole year of Fingers! Anyway, to those Fingers First 50 folks that haven’t filled out the form yet: get on it! I’m mailing stickers out soon. Wanted a sticker but didn’t get one? Don’t sweat it—there will be more opportunities for Fingers swag in the near-ish future! Stay tuned. 🧾 The Bottom ShelfThe Bottom Shelf is a round-up of headlines from across the beverage landscape (plus some stray items from everywhere else) that caught my interest since last Friday. Think I missed something the Fingers faithful should know about? Drop it in the comments!From the workweek that was:* Cannabis Cocktails Will Be Everywhere—But Are They Even Any Good?: Fingers is institutionally pro-legalization but I’m not much of a “weed guy” myself. But this new-to-me Munchies piece from Adam Rothbarth asks the question I’ve often wondered myself: is this something drinkers actually want? One bartender he quoted thinks this space will evolve like the craft beer business has. So expect cannabis kettle sours for $27 a 4-pack in a couple years? Maybe? God help us all. * Another lawsuit for Vitamin C Seltzer: Vizzy, Molson Coors’ biggest hard seltzer brand, is facing more class action for making claims that are allegedly “misleading and dangerous to consumers” regarding its products’ Vitamin C and superfruit content. It’s illegal to promote flavored malt beverages, or any booze, as healthful; thank the feds for that. This is like the third class-action Vizzy has dealt with about this, and it seems like a weird hill for the brand to die on. Does anybody actually buy Vizzy for the vitamins? Couldn’t you simply… change the branding a bit? Molson Coors marketers reading this: I’d love to know what sort of 4D FMB chess you’re playing. Get in touch!* The Future of Work Should Mean Working Less: Monday’s newsletter about Busch Light’s TreeWork promo was pretty widely read according to my metrics dashboard here at Fingers HQ. This recent column in the NYT Opinion section (of all places!) mirrors a lot of the points I was driving at; if you liked my piece, you’ll like this one even more, I bet.* On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: Not as recent, but even more relevant, is anthropologist David Graeber’s 2013 essay defining and condemning “bullshit jobs.” I read both this essay, and the book the late LSE professor expanded it into, during the pandemic. I highly recommend them both, but the essay is definitely the easier place to start.From Monday’s newsletter:* Is Hard Seltzer Killing the Classic College Kegger?: New from me at VinePair, a feature about what everyone’s favorite FMB is doing to the venerable campus tradition of keg parties. I won’t spoil the story for you but I will say that I was shocked by the number of college drinkers I spoke with who claimed they’d never seen a keg, period. Kids these days, etc.* A Community Over The Barrel: Friend of Fingers, fellow newsletter operator, and food journalist par excellence has a new story about a dog-friendly Charleston beer bar that proved itself to be very unfriendly to its neighbors. It’s a great piece, and one that speaks to a bigger debate about who typically gets to decide how Southern cities grow and change, and for what reasons.* The Bartender Who Quit Cocktails to Become a Mortician: If that headline doesn’t make you click, I don’t think anything I can write here will, either. But I enjoyed the hell out of this piece from Grub Street’s Chris Crowley.* Out of Character: Can Lager Masquerade with an IPA Brand?: Here’s BeerCrunchers’ Doug Veliky with a smart, fun little piece of analysis on whether New Belgium’s Voodoo Ranger line—the country’s best-selling IPA family—has room for a new lager extension. Semi-related: Veliky has also leaned heavily into beer-themed TikToks lately. Follow him there or on Twitter, if you’re into that sort of thing!📲 Everyone’s favorite Fingers meme this weekPerhaps inspired by the tale of Portland State football tailgaters rejecting Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA for Coors Light en masse, Fingers fam this week double-tapped this meme more than any other posted to the boozeletter’s official Instagram in the past seven days. If you haven’t followed Fingers on Instagram yet, you’re missing out on free daily original content about the booze business. Don’t do that! Do this instead:Your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Enjoy this audio read of the Fingers newsletter published on 9/20/21, titled:Remember to subscribe to The Fingers Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss new episodes as I publish them. All previous episodes can be found on those platforms, or in The Fingers Podcast archive.Music credit: The intro/outro music to this episode of The Fingers Podcast is SKA Podcast / YouTube / Channel Intro by NaturesEye, sourced via Pixabay. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Enjoy this audio read of the Fingers newsletter published on Labor Day, 9/13/21, titled:Remember to subscribe to The Fingers Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss new episodes as I publish them. All previous episodes can be found on those platforms, or in The Fingers Podcast archive.Music credit: The intro/outro music to this episode of The Fingers Podcast is SKA Podcast / YouTube / Channel Intro by NaturesEye, sourced via Pixabay. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

You know that thing where you’re at a bar and there are a lot of people around, and some of them are probably pretty interesting, and you’re drinking, but you’re alone, and you don’t know any of those people, so instead of talking to them you just ignore them and bury yourself in your phone? Me too. Why do we do that? So glad you asked.Today I’ve got an interview with Joe Keohane, author of the new book The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World. Joe is actually an old editor of mine; we worked together on some features at Thrillist and then again when he was editing at Medium. Joe and I spoke at length about The Power of Strangers. It’s a fantastic book, one that combines thorough research with narrative first-person reporting to answer a deceptively simple question: if scientists know that talking to strangers is good for us—and they do, neurologically and physiologically speaking—then why don’t we do it more often? Having read the book this summer, I think Joe answered that question with humor and wit and humility and all that good shit. He also came up with a brilliant way of describing the antisocial posture we all assume when we’re alone at a bar, scrolling through our phones: “lowercase r’s.” I really like that. Good one, Joe. Editor’s note: This newsletter is long, so it may get cut off in your inbox. Click the button that says “view entire message,” or just read it on the website. This transcript has been edited and condensed. The podcast version of the interview has a lot more banter and in-depth discussion, so listen to that too, if you’re interested. For a complete archive of Fingers interviews, click here.Meet Joe Keohane, author of The Power of StrangersDave Infante, Fingers: OK! Joe Keohane, the author of The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in A Suspicious World. For someone who's never heard of this book, what's the logline?Joe Keohane, author, The Power of Strangers: It's a book that asks why we don't talk to strangers, what happens when we do, and how we can get good at it. So that's the three-point pitch, basically. I started because I had an amazing conversation with a cab driver one night, and it kind of occurred to me that I used to do this more. I used to talk to strangers more. And for some reason, without really choosing to do it, I just stopped doing it. I stopped talking to people in bars, I stopped chatting with the barista, or whatever. Which I never did, like, habitually, but I did it enough to enjoy it, and to find it as a source of interest, you know? Sometimes it could be poignant, sometimes it could be hilarious, sometimes it was just a good way to pass the time. But I had stopped, and I hadn't chosen to stop. And I was wondering: what were the forces at work that made me stop talking to people I didn't know?For me, it was like twofold. On one hand, I had a young kid and I had a demanding job. So I was just tired and stretched thin. And I didn't hang out as much as I used to, I didn't have as much time to just hang around the city. And so that put a real dent into my ability to socialize. And the other thing was just having the phone. So having an iPhone meant that on the rare occasion I did go into a bar, I would just look at Twitter and feel my soul rot. Do that for an hour and then leave without talking to anyone, which is like a really grim thing to do. Partly because social media is just it just makes you feel bad about the world and about yourself. But also because I'm surrounded by people I don't know. I'm sure they have good stories, and I'm sure they're good company. And I just put my head down like an idiot. You have an incredible line in the book that speaks directly about being in the bar hunched over your phone. You describe people as “lowercase r’s.” Right, it’s like a whole row of them. You walk into a bar, and it's like, everyone's just like [brain-dead zombie noise]. I felt really bad about that, because I really did have a lot of great experiences. Some chance encounters I've had with strangers have changed my life, they've charted a course for me. A lot of what I've done, what I've attained, has been the result of random interactions with people. There is a passivity to the art of talking to strangers that I was fundamentally uncomfortable with.So I wanted to solve it for myself, and I wanted to try to rebuild myself as a social animal, I wanted to start from zero, almost like I was running a marathon or something. And you can't run a marathon by getting up and running a marathon. You have to get off your ass and go for a walk first. So I wanted to replicate that training process, but for socializing. After years of withdrawing because of technology, because of COVID… recently, we've all kind of withdrawn from the world, and I think our social skills have gotten rusty. I wanted to get better at it, but I also wanted to understand every moving part of these interactions, from the things that keep us from talking to strangers, to the actual interaction itself. For the book, you traveled to various seminars and workshops around the world to to teach rank-and-file civilians how to talk to strangers. At one of them, in the UK, you kind of tripped yourself up. Tell me about the difference between having an engaging conversation with a stranger vs. extracting information from them. It's like a question of control. When you're in a journalistic context, there's goods that you need to get, right? You have limited time, you have to get what you have to get in order to get your story. So that means having an idea of what you're looking for going into it, and trying to find it. It's very active, and if you're a good interviewer, you're in control of the process. You have to be a little open and like, allow yourself surprise. But for the most part, like it's a “leaning forward” kind of kind of conversation. So, I took a class in London from this woman, Georgie Nightingall, who's a communications guru who's very talented and brilliant, for three days to learn to talk to strangers. One of the exercises was a listening exercise. It's supposed to be an exercise about relinquishing control of a conversation. So your conversational partner, one of the other students, says something about their day, like: I like to make tea at nine o'clock in the morning. And you're supposed to just ask open questions about making tea, and let them get to something that tells you more about themselves without pulling it out of them. But me, coming from the background I come from, I dug in, and in five moves, I had an existential statement out of her about like, what the tea represented to her. I was just like, There it is like! Got it! Only took me five minutes to get this! And then I went back to the teacher, and she was like, “Yeah, that's, you know, that's great. That's true, it seems, but um, I was watching, and you were like leaning over and interrogating [your partner].”You were putting the fucking squeeze on this woman.Right! So it comes down to control. For me, it's hard not to look for opportunities to control or steer the conversation. And the trick I found, and this has been found in tons of studies that have been replicated throughout the world, with all different types of people, that the way to do it is to let the other person lead. And to get comfortable with the fact that you don't know where this is gonna go. Don't make it about yourself. Don't editorialize. Don't try to solve their problems. Don't judge Don't interrupt. Make eye contact, actually listen, and actually ask questions, and then just let it go. There is a passivity to the art of talking to strangers that I was fundamentally uncomfortable with. Learning to do it was really difficult. And I would imagine that it's really difficult for a lot of people to relinquish control. The professors I spoke to, they all teach to they all teach in college. And every single one of them would remark on how hard it seems for their students to talk to each other. Their social skills just are not there. They're really uncomfortable with in person interaction. And the working hypothesis for why that is tied to technology. I think it's probably more complicated than that, but when you increasingly interact with the world through technology, you have a lot of control over the interactions you have. So the belief with like young people struggling with in-person communication, is that it's because they just don't do it that much. And they don't have the skills, they're necessarily and so it's, it's daunting, and they need to kind of rebuild those skills in order to do it.A lot of people (including me, at times) might just be like, Well, what's the point of having a conversation just for the sake of having a conversation? That’s not immediately apparent to someone who hasn't read your book. So what are some of the upsides to talking to strangers?Over the last 15 years or so, there have been a raft of studies by a dozen or so psychologists. They would send out study participants, and they would just tell them to talk to strangers. So you'd have two groups: one is instructed to do what they always do, and one is instructed to talk to strangers on mass transit and coffee shops, all these different venues. We are hyper-social animals. When we're not social, we are unhealthy.They've done this in Chicago and London, Istanbul, and lots of places. Overwhelmingly they find that though people are really pessimistic about doing this—people think it's gonna go badly, they're going to be rejected, they’re going to be boring—overwhelmingly, people have a positive experience. They find that people are much more receptive than they expect them to be, they find that the conversations tend to go much longer than they expected them to. They found that it came more naturally to them than they thought it would. It was more pleasant. Then there were kind of bigger effects. They would come away from these interaction

Happy Friday, Fingers friends! Today I’m proud to present an audio read of the Fingers newsletter published on Labor Day, 9/6/21, “How the Twin Cities became a hotbed for craft beverage unionizing.” If you missed this story the first time around (no judgment; Monday was a holiday, after all) I hope you’ll check it out now. You can listen above, or read via the link below. There’s a really exciting labor movement happening in Minneapolis/St. Paul craft breweries and distilleries, and I was glad to be able to spotlight it.Remember to subscribe to The Fingers Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss new episodes as I publish them. All previous episodes can be found on those platforms, or in The Fingers Podcast archive. A note on the episode: I relied on sources on the ground in the Twin Cities to report this story, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to splice the audio from my interviews into the podcast episode. So you’ll hear me reading my sources’ quotes. I tried to make it very clear when it was a worker talking, rather than me writing, but if you’re confused at all, I recommend referencing the original piece. I’ll work on a better solution for future episodes, promise! Anyway, if you listen to this episode and have feedback for me, by all means let me know in the comments: This Labor Day story went wide on social media (more on that below) because many Friends of Fingers shared it with their followers. Thanks so much to everyone who did that—I appreciate the hell outta ya. 📬 Good post alertLuv 2 b horny for designer amaretto with all my hot friends from the Aughts! Semi-related: Molly recently interviewed me for an upcoming multimedia zine she’s producing called “Party Rock Vol. 1.” We talked about Four Loko, Sparks, and lots of other stuff, too. I can’t wait to see the finished product, but in the meantime, here’s a teaser video featuring your fearless Fingers editor. 🔝 This week’s top commentInspired (?) by the release of Bud Light Seltzer’s Fall Flannel variety pack, I asked Fingers readers to tell me about the worst hard seltzer they’d ever tasted for this week’s comment thread. In a shock to no one (or at least, not me) there are a lot of terrible hard seltzers out there! Of all your graphic tales of malt-based woe, I found Samer Khudairi’s report from the front lines of foul FMBs to be the most detailed/distressing (emphasis mine):The worst hard seltzer I had was actually a THC infused seltzer. Tasted so chalky. Pretty expensive ~$8/12oz can and I don't think the 5mg hit me in fluid form as it usually does as an edible.The second worst was the Blue Raspberry Warheads Artisinal Hard Seltzer. It poured a dirty coolant blue and tasted like something you shouldn't ingest. Mixed 4pk for $14 and the other flavors were more tolerable.Overpriced, under-filtered weed seltzer? Candy-flavored solvents of dubious potability? Harrowing stuff. Thank you for your hard seltzer service, Samer.📈 Ye olde boozeletter smashes traffic recordsLike I mentioned above, Monday’s feature on craft beverage workers organizing unions in the Twin Cities was very popular, particularly on social media. Substack (the platform I use to send Fingers to your inbox) shows me how much web traffic the site receives, and basically immediately after publishing this piece, a shitload of people began visiting the page. Here, look:It doesn’t take a media brain genius to see that the story performed really well, which is for the best because media brain geniuses are all grifters anyway. But the reason it performed well is because Friends of Fingers and other internet users, presumably feeling particularly labor-friendly on Labor Day, boosted the story hard on social media, helping it spread a lot farther than the email list alone could take it. I even got a retweet from Sara Nelson, the prominent, outspoken international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO. In other exciting news, Fingers’ original reporting will also be republished by two Minnesota outlets: Racket, a new, writer-owned collective borne from the ashes of the Twin Cities’ unceremoniously shuttered City Pages alt-weekly; and Workday Minnesota, a union-funded publication that has covered labor issues in the state since 2000. This introduces Fingers to new audiences, and helps carry Minnesota craft beverage workers’ story in their home state. This is all extremely tight, and it can’t happen without your support. Thanks always for reading Fingers. I’m so proud of this community we’re building here, and looking forward to telling more stories like this in the future.🧾 The bottom shelf* Starbucks Is Blatantly Trying to Crush Its Union: Starbucks workers in Buffalo, NY, are organizing, and the coffee Giant is throwing the union-busting playbook at them. Seattle execs in “expensive suits” have “swarmed local stores, pulling aside workers to chat one-on-one during their breaks, at peak hours, at night, and even on Labor Day weekend, helping baristas make coffee, clean up, and take out the trash.” Sounds very normal and not at all like coercion! * BrewDog agrees to tie-up with Japan’s Asahi to boost sales (paywall): Fresh off a summer of workplace and marketplace scandals, the Scottish craft brewer announced a new joint-venture with Asahi that it hopes will goose its Japanese sales by 600% over five years. Cofounder James Watt says the company is still headed for an IPO; I say best of luck to all the “equity punks” that have bought shares in the company over the past decade-plus. One last thing: as a Twitter follower pointed out, BrewDog’s 6x-in-5-years Japanese sales target may sound like a lot, but not if current sales are small: * This Is What A Craft Brewing Union Contract Looks Like: Speaking of craft beverage labor organizing, workers at Fair State Brewing Cooperative recently ratified their first collective bargaining agreement with management. In keeping with their commitment to help their colleagues in the industry get educated about how unions work and what they can do, they’ve posted their contract online for all to see.* The Incredible American Rise of Modelo Especial: I read VinePair colleague Tim McKirdy’s deep-dive on dominant Mexican import while I was on vacation, but forgot to tell you all about it. Sorry! Especial is going gangbusters in the U.S. these days, trailing only Bud Light in dollar sales and spanking other imports like Heineken and Corona Extra. Read Tim’s smart story for the how and why. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Today I’ve got an audio read of the Fingers newsletter published 8/30/21, “The culture wars come for Chardonnay.” For the past few bonus pods, I’ve just read the lead essay from a given edition, but this time around I tested out doing the lead essay plus other items, to give it a little bit more of a newsletter feel and a longer runtime, to make it more “worth it” for you to queue up while you’re slugging Madeira and dusting off your Waterford crystal stemware. Or… whatever it is you do when you’re not reading Fingers. None of my business!But seriously: I’m really enjoying experimenting with audio storytelling lately, and production quality aside—I’m still learning!—I hope you’re enjoying listening to them, too. In one of our recent open discussion threads, Friends of Fingers had some great suggestions for how to shape and expand The Fingers Podcast, and more audio reads was one of ‘em. So I’ll be doing these more regularly, plus cooking up some new approaches for your listening pleasure, too. If you have suggestions, please comment on this post: I’d love to hear from you. But enough about what I want! If you want to hear this bonus pod, you can listen using the player above, or subscribe to The Fingers Podcast on Apple and Spotify to get it, and all future episodes, directly through your preferred podcast app.PREVIOUS EPISODES OF THE FINGERS PODCAST* So a Republican walks into a brewery…* The Summer of Loko* Dive bars and building community with @PicturesofDives' Brandon Hinke* Craft Beer’s “99% Asshole-Free” Myth📬 Good post alertIvermectin? More like Bon & Viv-ermectin, amirite?!? (Please clap.) 🤳Good poster alertDid you know Fingers is on Instagram? Fingers is on Instagram! Ive been posting stories there casually for the past year, but have lately been ramping up on that sweet, sweet OC (“original content,” in the parlance.) So if you’re looking for shitposts about the beer business, drinking culture, and the existential crisis of hangovers after 30, follow Fingers today. 📚 The Fingers Reading Room summer book reportLike books? Want to support Fingers? Shop The Fingers Reading Room! I have a Bookshop store to catalog my personal reading list and give fellow book-lovers a place to shop the titles I’m reading. In the future, I’ll be publishing interviews with authors who have written some of the books you’ll find here, as I’ve already done with authors Jason Diamond, Benjamin Lorr, and Allyson Brantley, Ph.D. Some of the books I read this summer: * The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane (I’ll be dropping an extended interview/podcast with Joe in a couple weeks, stay tuned)* Citizen Coors, Dan Baum* The Ice Storm, Rick Moody* The Alienist, Caleb Carr* Strip Tease, Carl Hiaasen* Tourist Season, Carl Hiaasen* The Nightingale, Kristin HannahSome of these titles are about drinking directly or indirectly, and some have nothing to do with it. I contain multitudes, people! If you’ve got recommendations for books that should be on my list for the future, sound off in the comments below. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

This right here is an audio essay based on the lead story in the Fingers newsletter published on 8/23/21. You can listen using the player above, or just read it if you missed it the first time around, whatever you’re into man: Check out previous audio essays I’ve published: * The Summer of Loko* Craft Beer’s “99% Asshole-Free” Myth You can also subscribe to The Fingers Podcast on Apple and Spotify, so, y’know, do that if that’s how you prefer getting your pods. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

I wrote a short essay last month called The Summer of Loko. Here’s how it started: The year is 2010. Obama is two years in and about to get clowned by the Tea Party. In the next few months, “Airplanes" by B.o.B. feat. Hayley Williams is poised to receive 3.2 bajillion minutes of play on your iTunes account alone. Vaping is in its fringe-y, pre-Juul phase, and Big Tobacco still hasn't totally given up on capturing America's lungs of tomorrow with innovative new combustibles, so if you frequent the right (read: wrong) bars, you might score a few promo packs of Camel Crush, those cigarettes that allow you to downshift from regular to menthol from one drag to the next.Enter Four Loko…Today being Memorial Day, Summer 2021 is underway in earnest. Will the post-pandemic party energy match the caffeinated chaos of Loko’s seminal moment? Who knows! But in any case, I’ve recorded an audio version of the essay for those of you that prefer listening to reading. You can listen to it in the player above, or on Spotify. Enjoy the summer, folks. May your immune systems be vaccinated, your Four Loko tallboys full, and your minds as empty as Amazon’s gestures towards giving a shit about its workers’ well-being. Onward.“We don’t celebrate 9/11 that way”A bar in a Fort Worth strip mall made the rounds on Twitter the other day, see if you can figure out why: Hmm! The New York Post (I know, I know) followed up with the bar in the wake of its viral moment to ask “what the fuck, man?” and did not get very far. Basically bar owner Brent Johnson opened his restaurant on 9/11/01, and 13 years later he heard a “sobering statistic” that a “‘high percentage’ of Americans would wake up 15 years to the day of the attacks and not remember the tragedy” so he decided to rename the lounge area of his restaurant after the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil to… help remind everybody, I guess? (No word on where that catalytic stat came from, but we simply mustn’t get caught in the weeds.) More from the Post: “We don’t celebrate 9/11 that way, but when I heard those figures, I just thought you know, that’s kind of a tragedy,” [Johnson] said. That’s when he decided to rename the lounge area, previously dubbed “Charlie Bar” after a former employee, after that fateful day. Bar 9Eleven also includes decor with a narrative timeline of Sept. 11 that compares Rio Mambo’s opening morning with the events in New York, Pennsylvania and in DC.My favorite detail of this very strange saga is the branding choice to stylize the bar’s name as “bar9eleven.” Makes it sound like one of those amenitized apartment buildings that named after their mailing addresses that always have like 17 furnished units listed on Zillow for egregious rents but hey there’s a movie room and a common space with a pool table that you might use at some point so maybe it’s kind of worth it? Anyway, back to Fort Worth. “If you don’t have all the facts, you probably going to have a negative reaction,” Johnson told the Post. “I may lose a few customers on this… But what will not happen to people who come in my restaurant — this restaurant that opened that day — what will not happen is they won’t forget.” (Don’t worry, that double-negative is probably just a transcription error.) Mock and condemn all you want, but it seems like there’s a market for getting drunk while never-forgetting (never-forgetting drunk?), as according to the Post, bar9eleven has been doing business under this name for over five years. Make of that what you will!Happy birthday to Fingers!That’s right folks! Ye Olde Boozeletter is one year old this weekend. I published my first story on Memorial Day Weekend 2020, a meditation on the boozy, intergenerational American horror story of pool parties and suburbia. I’ll have a more proper anniversary post in the next week or so recapping How Far We’ve Come™. But considering I’m typing this poolside in the South Carolina sun, and my laptop fan is ripping and snorting like a two-stroke leafblower that someone filled with diesel by mistake, I’d better just leave it there for the time being. Thanks as always for reading and supporting this project. I appreciate you. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Programming note: Thanks to everyone who joined me, Jessica Infante (Brewbound) and Kate Bernot (Good Beer Hunting/Craft Beer & Brewing) on Clubhouse the other week. We’re doing another edition of BEER BYLINERS this Wednesday (5/12) at 7pm EST on ***Twitter Spaces*** to talk about the beer industry’s latest headlines, trends, and whatever else comes up. Follow me (@dinfontay) and mark your calendars. See you there!There was a dive bar by the old Thrillist offices in Soho called Milady’s. It closed in 2014 and everyone was pretty bummed about it, but as the New York Times pointed out in its eulogy of the joint, the neighborhood had long since turned into “a high-priced outdoor shopping mall.” How’s a lovely, unremarkable little corner bar like Milady’s supposed to make rent selling $2 Genny Creams when there’s a Prada flagship up the block and most of the people who live nearby are too rich and tasteless to deign drink in such a hole in the wall? It’s not supposed to, is how. This line from the NYT piece, a dispatch from Milady’s last night in business, always stuck with me:Some patrons dropped in briefly to genuflect and then left. Others vowed to stay until closing time at 4 a.m. Where they would go afterward, or tomorrow, or next week, was anybody’s guess.Anybody’s guess indeed. Things have not been great for America’s dive bars in the intervening seven years since Milady’s closed, and the pandemic has of course not helped matters. There are a dozen reasons why dive bars are in distress all over the country, but they all ultimately point back to a simple capitalist reality lurking beneath the surface of that NYT line. Dive bars just aren’t built to survive in an economic system like ours that prioritizes profits and property over people. This is particularly true when those people are the type that would rather drink $3 boilermakers than “participate” in the “job market” in order to make enough scratch to shop at the Prada flagship. If you consider dive bars vital threads in the social fabric of American civic life (I mostly do), then their “uncertain future” (as Conde Nast Traveler diplomatically phrased it in August 2020) poses a threat to that fabric. Because: where do those people go when their neighborhood joint closes? There simply aren’t that many free or nearly-free third places where any- and everyone can get a little drunk and temporarily ignore the relentless anxieties of the American experience. A good dive bar is all that and more to its neighborhood: a place where people can go and just be. It’s a vision of spirited (booze pun!) egalitarianism worth documenting and celebrating even if—especially if—it’s not “optimized” for the meat-grinder of late capitalism. Which brings me to the subject of this edition: Brandon Hinke, the amateur archivist behind the wonderful Twitter/Instagram account @PicturesofDives. The account, which Hinke started on a whim during the early months of the pandemic, has since become a go-to repository for user-submitted photos of beloved dive bars (both still-operating, and since-closed) across two continents. “Maybe we wouldn't love [dive bars] as much if there were more community centers or more public spaces,” Hinke speculated recently in an interview with Fingers. But: “every aspect of our lives has just been absolutely atomized, and we're all kind of stuck in our own places. That was true before COVID hit, but it became so apparent and so obvious. I think this romanticism of dives comes out of that.” I think so, too. I spoke with Hinke in April about Pictures of Dives — how and why he started the account, the folly of trying to explicitly define what constitutes of a dive bar, and the role these institutions play in people’s lives after sifting through thousands of their stories and photos of the bars they love. The interview is about a month old (sorry it took me awhile to edit it, I’m slammed and also bad at editing podcasts!) but it still holds up. You can listen to it as a podcast via the player above, or on the site right here. If you like it, let me know what you think: RELATED: * Check out the Pictures of Dives website, subscribe to Hinke’s occasional PoD newsletter, and follow @PicturesofDives on Twitter and Instagram.* A big factor in the disappearance of dive bars is gentrification/displacement and the attendant rent-raises that accompany those forces. A few months back I interviewed an expert about the role craft breweries play in gentrifying the neighborhoods they enter, check that out right here. * For more reading on how and why gentrification happens, I highly recommend How To Kill a City by P.E. Moskowitz. I wrote a Fingers mini-review of the book here; you can buy it via the Fingers Reading Room here. * Check out my first solo podcast effort, an audio read of my recent essay about craft beer’s “99% asshole-free” myth, right here. * This is the first time I’m publishing an interview without a transcription. Are you OK with that, or do you prefer reading to listening? Please let me know in the comments, or simply by replying to this email. The reason I didn’t include a transcription is because they take awhile to produce; I use an A.I. transcription service, which works OK if you just want a sense of the conversation, but really requires another pass from a human ear to be fully accurate. If enough readers want a transcription, I’ll figure out a way to keep doing those, otherwise maybe we’ll just keep these as podcasts moving forward. HELP ME DECIDE!If you have a friend you think would enjoy this piece, please forward it to them and encourage them to sign up for future editions:All comments, questions, lavish praise, and vicious criticism on Fingers can be sent to dave@dinfontay.com.Buy your books via The Fingers Reading Room to avoid Amazon and support this project. Big thanks to Friend of Fingers, the very-talented Daniel Fishel, for this newsletter’s logo and banner art. Commission him to draw things for you at o-fishel.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Welcome to Fingers, a newsletter by me, Dave Infante, about drinking culture, being online, and beyond. If you haven’t already, please sign up for future dispatches, OK?Follow @dinfontay on Twitter & @its.fingers on Instagram. Send tips, praise, and pictures of barroom graffiti to dave@dinfontay.com, thank you very much.Last week at Fingers, I published an essay about one of the most enduring and annoying myths in American craft beer: that the industry is 99% asshole-free. If you missed it, the story is live on the site, and you’re welcome to read it… OR you could listen to me read it and offer additional commentary on it in the first-ever episode of The Fingers Podcast! This is my first solo podcast episode, and I edited it myself, so I’m really curious to hear what you think of it. I know the audio quality is not superb but it’s listenable, I think, and I’ll get better as we go. Comment your reactions—good, bad, whatever!—via the button below. I would truly appreciate some feedback. Introducing a podcast is a way for me to experiment with new storytelling techniques for Fingers, and strengthen the pitch for when I ask you—yes, you, dear reader—to pony up some money for a paid subscription. That’s coming soon. But for now, just pop into the comments and let me know what you think about the boozeletter’s maiden podcast voyage. And as ever, tell your friends, enemies, and drinking buddies to subscribe to Fingers. Your ol’ pal Dave would genuinely appreciate the support. If you have a friend you think would enjoy this piece, please forward it to them and encourage them to sign up for future editions:All comments, questions, lavish praise, and vicious criticism on Fingers can be sent to dave@dinfontay.com.Buy your books via The Fingers Reading Room to avoid Amazon and support this project. Big thanks to Friend of Fingers, the very-talented Daniel Fishel, for this newsletter’s logo and banner art. Commission him to draw things for you at o-fishel.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe