I've made the seemingly backwards leap from digital to print and am now the monthly beer columnist for the Dayton City Paper, the local alt weekly (backwards because for many years, I worked with educational publishers, trying to push them from print to digital). My first column highlighted the joy of discovering great beer and the communal nature of beer-geekdom in the Miami Valley and featured quotes from two staples in the Dayton Craft Beer community, Mike Schwartz (owner of Belmont Party Supply and Miami Valley BrewTensils) and Joe Waizmann (founder of AleFest, Cask AleFest, and AleFeast).One interesting aside that didn't make the article was a story that Mike Schwartz told me in my interview with him. I've always thought of Mike and his shop as an epicenter of craft beer but when Mike bought Belmont Party Supply back in the 80's, it was originally just the liquor store. In fact, at the time, Mike had pretty much stopped drinking beer. He was bored by the macro-lagers, which tasted terrible and left him feeling awful.
But it was Joe Waizmann who showed Mike the right direction. Joe was working for a local distributor and one day, he brought Mike a bottle of Old Peculiar, the legendary British Old Ale. Once that first sip passed his lips, Mike was a man transformed. Like a sinner who found religion, Mike's epiphany drove him to build out his craft beer temple, evangelizing to the hoards of unknowing masses, sharing the gospel of flavor and aroma.
Yet another example of one enthusiastic craft beer drinker sharing his discovery with another so that, as Mike notes, "we all grow together."
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