Alcademics.com

The New Alcademics Banner

My experiments with ice continue. I've got a routine down to make clear chunks of ice and now I'm experimenting with freezing objects into it. As you can see I have some room to improve but I did make a groovy, if a bit large, new banner for Alcademics.

Come See Me at the MCC (Or on your computer)

I'll be speaking on a panel about social media at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic early next week in New York.

Bartenders, Bloggers, and Brands
Event Date: 5/18/2010, 12:15 pm - 1:45 PM
The Study at Astor Center, 399 Lafayette at East 4th Street
with Lindsey Johnson, Jason Littrell, Camper English, and TBD Blogger

This panel will explore how social media can best benefit everyone in the liquor industry. Lindsey, the CEO of Lush Life Productions- the leader in digital media creation in the liquor industry- will explain the best practices for brands as they take their first steps in this emerging marketplace. As a bartender who has taken on and dominated social media, Jason Littrell will explain how his presence online has shaped his career. A top blogger will also tell their story- explaining how social media has effected their blog’s traffic and visibility. This panel will be livestreamed by Lush Life Productions.

Note that the panel will be livestreamed so you can watch it from home.

Content and Social Media versus Traditional Media

Like most everybody, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the new role of social media and the decline of traditional media. But unlike a lot of people my livelihood depends on one or the other. I'm a freelance writer who blogs, hoping that if money stops flowing to one income stream it will flow into the other.

On the journalism end, companies are spending less on advertising. Since advertising pays for the journalism that surrounds it, there are less newspapers and magazines around, and those still around have reduced their size. Thus there is generally less journalism work around for those of us who freelance. (And a lot of unemployed staffers.)

Many companies who formerly advertised in traditional media are "shifting" to social media, but this shift helps create a content-free world. Here's how:

Because with social media companies/brands can now speak to consumers directly, they play in the social media space by "engaging" bloggers and others online. They may make games or have a blogger of their own. They send out recipes and often samples. They join in the conversation about their brand. This is all good.

But what I see as the problem is that conversations usually take place around content: the weather, a feature story, news of the day. Social media, including most blogging, is a conversational space but not a content generator. 

As brands shift their spending power toward social media, they are hiring bloggers and facebookers and twitterers to talk about their brands. This is internal spending; PR. But they're not so much buying ads in this space or doing much (so it seems) to generate content. It's more "Hey we're here. Talk about us!"

Though advertisements in traditional and social media are very static, boring things, they fund journalism and content creation for the content that goes around them.

Thus in the current model, No more ads = No more content. Imagine Facebook/Twitter if it was only internal. It would be all messages like "I had the best sandwich today!" and no sharing links to news stories or other outside content. Awful.

The internet has devalued ads (thanks, Google!) and also devalued content (thanks, copy-and-paste!), so that in the social media space there doesn't appear to be any reason to bother with content generation or advertising if you are a corporation. 

As someone who makes a living generating content, I'm worried about all of this. One one hand, journalists are being starved out of the industry. On the other hand, are corporations morally obligated to advertise to keep journalists employed? Unfortunately not.

I haven't thought of any workable solutions to this, and neither has anybody else that I know of. In the meantime I am hoping luxury brands who can afford it keep buying ads in traditional media and toss the occasional website sponsorship my way. Right now content isn't seen as a necessity because there is plenty of it still floating around for free. But in the not-too-distant future content may become a luxury item again.

Booze Writer Switcheroo in San Francisco

 You may have noticed something funky in this month's glossy San Francisco city magazines. Jordan Mackay, long the wine and spirits writer for 7x7 Magazine, has a piece in San Francisco Magazine. 

 And if you picked up 7x7 Magazine you may have noticed a story by me in it, and I've been writing for San Francisco Magazine for five years. 

 Then again, you may not have noticed at all. People were constantly asking about my 7x7 stories and I have little doubt Jordan was often questioned about San Francisco Magazine. 

In other writer switch news, Eater San Francisco writer Paolo Luchessi also made a switch, and was hired by the Chronicle to do food news on the website. Sara Deseran of 7x7 wrote about it here. Taking Paolo's place at Eater (at least temporarily) is Carolyn Alburger, who was doing a combination of PR and writing for a bunch of different local publications, including SFWeekly and Daily Candy. 

Passing the B.A.R.

This past fall I took the B.A.R., Beverage Alcohol Resource, five-day course in New York. The course has two levels- "Ready" and "Certified", with the only difference in the number of drinks one has to make within a certain time on the practical bartending exam. The course ran for about 12 hours each day for the first four days, with nearly a full day of testing on the last day. It was a real butt-kicker.

People seemed to come away with different impressions of the course, but what stuck out most to me was what you need to know not just to pass the class, but to say that you're at an expert level in the industry. It's a lot. You need to know:

1. The science and history of fermentation and distillation from the dawn of time
2. The history, ingredients, geography, and practical and legal production rules for every major category of spirits
3. The entire history of bartending and individual history and timelines of dozens of important cocktails
4. How to blind taste and identify spirits, quality of distillation, barrel type and age, and other production parameters, down to individual brands and bottlings
5. How to balance drinks, mix drinks, make them fast and of the highest quality possible while providing top quality customer service
6. How to create new drinks and tweak existing ones based on different mixological strategies
7. How to blind taste and critique cocktails

I took 76 pages of notes in those four days, after having read and studied the textbook, attended dozens on lectures by the instructors, read zillions of books, and passed the BAR Smarts course before the course. We sampled a few hundred spirits blind, I practiced bartending until my shoulder ached from shaking, and still tried to find time to study each night before passing out.

I decided to attempt the BAR Ready certification, thinking that I knew so much about the history and production rules of spirits that I wouldn't have to even study for that part of the test. (Boy was I wrong about that.) Luckily if you don't make all your drinks in time to be BAR Ready you can still pass BAR Certified. And I did, which is awesome.

My takeaway from the course is not just the new information and skill set gained during the week, but knowing what it takes to stay on top of things going forward: A great and constant amount of work tasting, testing, practicing, learning, and reviewing what you think you already know.

USB Drives are the New Press Kits

I get a lot of press kits in the mail. Lately the USB drives they put the images and information on have been getting really colorful.

You know how some people have really awesome collections of vintage barware and cocktail books from the 1800's? Maybe in 50 years I'll have the biggest collection of branded thumb drives and novelty muddlers. Then you'll be jealous!

Camper English, Cocktail Internalist

Thursday night at the opening party for SF Chefs.Food.Wine, I was introduced to someone as a "cocktail journalist" but he misheard and said, "Cocktail Internalist?"

That's a pretty accurate job title too.

You know you've made it when...

...Dr. Bamboo draws your picture. Read his report of the Drink.Write 2009 bloggers' conference (and see more drawings). I'll have some thoughts to share on the conference as well sometime in the future.

Camper English, Jay Hepburn, SeanMike Whipkey and Paul Clarke drop some science.
Illustration by Dr. Bamboo.