RIP 'All About Beer': Beer Industry's Leading Magazine Appears To Have Folded

Educated craft beer drinkers are a singing a dirge called “The Day Beer Journalism Died” after a noted contributor to All About Beer (AAB) magazine penned a blog post Tuesday declaring the venerable 39-year-old publication dead. After spending two weeks chasing a tip that the magazine’s days were numbered and confirming that editor Daniel Hartis had left, author Jeff Alworth, whose most current relationship with the magazine was to record podcasts for the website, concluded that the title would be no more.

“It was a pleasure for me to write for the magazine,” he wrote on his Beervana blog, “and I’m deeply disappointed that it’s all ending this way.”

Though Alworth acknowledges he last heard from publisher Chris Rice in early October when he received an email chirpily reassuring him that all was well and that he was piloting a “significant shift in the business,” Alworth documents the facts that led up to his unwavering assertion:

• Reporters and editors have complained for years about late and missed paychecks, and recent editor John Holl and at least ten other staffers left their positions because of bounced checks and failure to make vendor payments.
• After buying competitor Draft Magazine in 2017, issues began to arrive sporadically. Only a few came this year, and I see the company last posted online or on social media in late September. Draftmag.com, however, has posted within the last week.
• Rice has promised refunds to Draft and AAB subscribers that never came.
• Rice remains the only personnel listed on the website’s masthead.

Alworth told me Wednesday that he felt comfortable publishing without final confirmation because, “I think the failure to announce the obvious—that AAB is defunct—gives the owner room to maneuver with creditors. I wrote the piece because, while Rice is the only one who can confirm the magazine's actual status, silence has been damaging to those connected to the magazine."

One former contributor calls Rice a con man, while others worry about outstanding checks. Former partner and longtime editor Julie Johnson says on top of feeling deep sadness, fury and relief at Alworth’s pronouncement after four “grueling” years under Rice, “I have open invoices dating back to 2014 for writing and editing. Personal loans. Magazine purchase. You name it.”

I emailed Rice Wednesday afternoon and received no response.

In a mournful trend for journalism, too many beer magazines have cut back production or folded in recent years, leaving precious few in circulation. But two factors elicit much more hand-wringing than usual over the collapse of this particular one.

To dispense with the quickest first, a lot of stakeholders feel this could have been prevented.

Johnson, who resigned “long after I should have” says Rice’s leadership didn’t go as intended. After her ex-husband retired and sold him the company in 2014 after two decades of ownership, “Chris took over AAB, then sold the World Beer Festivals—also part of our company—to fund the purchase of Draft. He envisioned an ambitious beer communication ‘hub,’ for lack of a better word. I was not in the loop, but it appeared that he over-extended.”

Holl, now senior editor at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine and an occasional editor of mine, puts the situation into larger context by telling Alworth, “What happened with All About Beer is not so much about the current state of print, but more because of mismanagement by the current ownership.”

Alworth agrees, telling me, “We are at a moment of media transition, and it is harder for dead-tree media to survive. That said, the business model for All About Beer was sound and its failure came about because of mismanagement. This is not a social-media-killed-print story.”

That leaves room for the hope that someone with more business acumen can buy and revive it. So the true heartbreak for most, including me—a sometimes contributor to AAB and a student of craft beer history—harkens back to 1979, long before social media brought its upheaval to journalism or anything else.

In 1979, home-brewing became legal in the United States. The first ground-up craft brewery turned three. The number and quality of American breweries hung at an almost all-time low, no thanks to the lingering effects of Prohibition along with mass consolidation within the industry. By my count, seven or eight independently owned breweries had emerged in California, Colorado and New York. Today, only one, Boulder Beer Co., remains.

In 1979 there was no internet and practically nothing in the way of modern beer books or publications. When indie beer lovers and home-brewers, who’d been practicing their hobby illegally for years, wanted to trade news or gossip, they talked on the phone, got together in person or clung to two, maybe three, typed newsletters a few renegades scrapped together and circulated by hand or mail.

And in 1979, after spotting a sign in liquor store window that boasted, “We have FIVE imported beers!” a group of Californians from the publishing business launched All About Beer as the first consumer periodical on the subject. Through nearly four decades and two ownership changes, the glossy magazine chronicled beer news and culture.

Among other groundbreaking moves, it featured women in the industry early on and frequently put women on its covers. In opposition to the beer advertising standard that sexualizes women as props, AAB displayed them holding and serving beers in full dress and non-compromising positions. One brief monthly contradiction came in the form of a bikini-clad “Beer Mate of the Month” posing in photos alongside reviews. That indiscretion got axed in 1984 after one too many subscriber complaints. (Before you dismiss this as outdated '80s obliviousness, consider that the Rupert Murdoch-owned British tab, The Sun, still runs daily Page 3 pictures of bare-breasted models.)

As Johnson, whose ex, Daniel Bradford, purchased the title in 1993, emailed me Wednesday, “Good writing about beer was easier to find than the beer itself. Our subscribers (and this is before Daniel Bradford bought the magazine) read in those pages for the first time about Sierra Nevada or Samuel Adams—back when they would have to travel to Chico (California) or Boston to taste the real thing. (The late beer writing pioneer) Michael Jackson wrote for AAB for 23 years. (Russian River Brewing cofounder) Vinnie Cilurzo made a first, boyish appearance in an article before he even opened (brewpub) Blind Pig. So, yes, for our audience, it was very influential.”

As Alworth writes, “It was the leading news source documenting the rise of craft brewing in the U.S.”

Maybe the timing of this presumed ending fits. As we beer scribes lament in our (shrinking number of) respective outlets of late, the shine seems to be wearing off craft brewing, at least for the foreseeable future. Big Beer is buying small beer interests and media; cocktails, legal weed and, to a lesser extent, wine are edging out beer as the cool kids on the block; and younger millennials are limiting or shunning alcohol altogether.

Johnson muses, “We’ve left the crusading phase—news flash, the good guys won, and there’s good beer available at the local C store. … We’re all grown up now.”

“But losing All About Beer hurts,” Alworth writes, to which I painfully agree.

 As an institution spanning the entirety of the American craft beer era, it functioned as a reflection of the American beer industry. The late Michael Jackson and Fred Eckhardt, writers who helped launch beer journalism, were stalwarts in its pages. All About Beer covered every business story, new style development, personality clash, and all the trends and development in craft beer since its beginning. From mustaches to goatees to lumberjack beards—as well as the increasingly common faces of women who subvert the facial-hair stereotype—AAB captured brewers in all their phases.

It’s truly a sad way for the magazine to end. Folks like Julie Johnson and Daniel Bradford have put decades into the business, and writers and editors sweated out tough stories and late nights making deadlines… It was a pleasure for me to write for the magazine as well, and I’m deeply disappointed that it’s all ending this way. Holl ended his note to me with a comment I think captures the way everyone involved with this feels. “These were two great publications staffed by dedicated workers, filled with great bylines and articles, and both publications deserved better than this.”

I was six in 1979, and though I think my dad had already started letting me sip from his cold cans of Bud, I obviously had no knowledge of the simultaneous craft beer and beer writing revolutions breaking out on the west coast. Now, they encompass most of my work and social life, and that’s how I like it. Despite only writing for its print and web pages three times, AAB represents the intersection of my career, my community and my quest to chronicle early craft life.

So many of the foundational voices introduced on its pages have gone silent, quieted by death or disappearance from the world it covered. And though I can’t speak for anyone else, I’m certain most of us in the trade press grieve as we announce and interpret the present-day barrage of collapses by seminal breweries like Smuttynose and Green Flash that weathered decades of market fluctuations but couldn’t withstand the storm that is 2018. As we write obituaries for traditional beer journalism, my colleagues and I reflect on everything else we’ve eulogized over these 39 years.

I wonder what we’ll have to eulogize next.