I’m beyond chuffed to appear on episode 808 of the Travel with Rick Steves radio show and podcast this week. Tune in live on your local NPR station (and be sure to donate to said NPR station while you’re at it) starting Wednesday, October 8, or listen at your leisure when the podcast drops on October 11.
When Rick’s team contacted me a couple of months ago to ask if I could join him for a beer-centric interview, I considered the idea for approximately four seconds, after which time I got to work adorning the walls of my office with blankets and towels in a crude attempt at approximating a rudimentary recording studio. And before I knew it, I was chatting about beer with Rick Steves, without whose guidebooks I might never have gotten pilloried outside the Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
I’ve always viewed my own book Lager as a bit of a slow burn. It never sold like hotcakes, but it has gradually developed a following that, I think, has paralleled the popularity of craft lager in the United States.
You wouldn’t know it today, but less than a decade ago, it wasn’t all that easy to find decent craft lagers in the US. Of course they were out there, but you had to work at it. Now they’re much more widely available, even if they do largely tend to skew in the hoppy Pils direction (someone give me a year-round smoked Doppelbock, please).
Many thanks to Rick for the delightful conversation and to his production team for making it possible. I’m pleased that writing a simple—and, dare I say, prescient—book would afford me such an experience a few years later.