Beer writing legends Fred Eckhardt and John Foyston are scheduled to speak in duo-keynote speech at the 2011 Beer Bloggers Conference in Portland. Blogger Jay Wilson will wrap up the conference with a talk on “Standing Out From the Crowd”.
As described in Ken Wells’ Travels With Barley, “Fred is [an eighty-five] year old former Marine Buddhist . . . . He wrote a book on how to homebrew lagers in 1969, ten years before homebrewing was relegalized. His 1989 book, The Essentials of Beer Style, has become a kind of Rosetta Stone for homebrewers and those who judge homebrew competitions.”
Fred will be joined on stage by John Foyston, beer columnist and blogger for the Portland Oregonian. According to his biography, John was in a newspaper “redesign meeting in the mid-1990s where editors earnestly pondered what the entertainment section needed to be more Portland-centric. ‘We need to write about craft beers,’ Foyston said. The rest of the room, being wine drinkers and worse, essentially said, ‘OK — you do it’.” The led to The Beer Here.
Fred and John will be holding a sort of “fireside chat” without the fire, expounding on all things beer, Portland, and writing.
In addition, we are pleased to have beer blogger Jay Wilson of brewvana who recently received a ton of mainstream press for his creative experiment in which he lived on beer and water alone for 46 days, replicating the fasts of ancient monks. You can see details of the experiment on his other blog, Diary of a Part-Time Monk.
In addition to blogging, Jay is an award-winning homebrewer, BJCP Certified judge, full-time dad and writer, and semi-professional beer drinker. He recently secured a publisher and the Diary of a Part-time Monk book is scheduled for publication in late October.
Jay will be speaking about his fast, the resulting media coverage, and how you, too, can stand out from the beer blogging crowd.
We will be announcing the final content for the conference soon!
Twisting beer bloggers’ arms into coming to Beervana for this should be as easy as…wait, I derailed my train of thought in erroneously trying to think of a witticism about crappy twist-off caps.
It’s looking like the Portland beer bloggers are swinging into action to try to enrich everyone’s experience in Beervana, too. (We gotta live up to the name we’ve bestowed on the city!)
Nice! Both keynotes sound like they’ll be quite enjoyable.