The Importance of Telling My Story

It’s finally time. I’ve waited years to start writing about this. I mentioned about the absence of my opinions in my last post, and it’s finally time to talk.

I usually post a “Year In Review” type blog post at the end of every year, and this is the first year that I missed that. Frankly, I’ve missed out on writing many posts.

For my “Year In Review” post, I always do a format outlining my Untappd statistics from the past year, listing my most consumed beer that year, what percentage of total beer consumption was that year compared to the last, etc., etc. And I always outline the number of new breweries I visited that year, and I talk about that year’s beercations.

I went back and forth in my head about what I should relay to you all about 2017. And I decided to finally give my blog its voice back.

So this time, it’s different.

No stats. No beercation lists. No brewery lists.

I’m ready to lose this damn filter and go back to telling you my story. That’s why I started this whole thing in the first place.

Many times last year (and frankly, the last 2 years), I went back and read old blog entries. One entry always struck a nerve with me. “In The Beer Business And The Importance of Telling My Story”. Many times I would go to write. I would take 10 minutes to type out a sentence. Twenty more minutes would often pass with no more words on my screen. And it always ended the same.

Backspace.

Don’t save.

I’d return to my blog entries many times, looking for the answers I already had.

I would read things like the following, all excerpts from past posts:

“Whatever you are, be a good one.”

“…what do we have if we don’t have a voice?”

“The world would be a boring place if we all just played it safe and didn’t challenge anything.”

“…be your own unstoppable person…”

“You will always hear my story.”

It was staring me in the face. I knew I couldn’t write what I wanted to write. So, for the most part… I just didn’t write. The phrase “…The Importance of Telling My Story” resounded in my head in unison with the soft blinking of the bar on the Word document where my words waited in my head, never to make it to the screen.

I never imagined I would have that voice taken from me. But I did. And that is the story of much of 2016 and 2017.

My story has never been unimportant. But I now knew the answer to, “What do we have if we don’t have a voice?” And I don’t even know that I can successfully put the answer to that in words. But for the next few months, I’m going to attempt to give you the answer in a series of blog posts.

This is a story about beer. This is a story about love. This is a story about lies, deceit, and devastation. This is a story where the bad guys are real, and where the good guys are probably the last people you expected them to be. This is the story about why I left Devils Backbone Brewing…