Homebrewed lit

This morning I and my brewing colleagues received an email from Kevin & Alicia of Beer Loves Company.  They had some questions about statements I made in my recent "Brewing fetishism" post.  After reading their questions, I realized that I should explain better what I'm doing here on this blog.

Rough Drafts is not the official blog of either Rocky Point Artisan Brewers or Secret Engine.  Official news and announcements about RPAB can be found on the brewery web page.  And Secret Engine has its own web page.  Rough Drafts is a work of literature and an expression of my personal views and interests.

Eight or so years ago when Mike and I started talking about launching RPAB as a commercial enterprise I stipulated two requirements: (1) I wouldn't do it to make money in the capitalist sense of creating an entity whose primary motive was profit, and (2) I would get to write about the experience.  Mike agreed.

While I've been writing about our brewing experience and the struggles of our little brewery, I haven't posted that story on a blog or a web site.  The story exists in written form as drafts of four yet-to-be published "beer novels."  The first installment I self-published as A Year in Beer four years ago.

Rough Drafts is also the title of the nanobrewing novel that I've been working on since RPAB was first conceived.  So at the heart of Rough Drafts (the blog) is a brewing adventure told in the first person by one of the participants in a collective experience.  In short, the views here expressed are my own.  So don't blame, Mike, Yuri, Other Mike, Matt, or Dave for what you read here.

I am a writer and a brewer; the two activities are difficult to separate.  I've come to view the brewing life as an extension of the writing life.  We brewers make our own beer.  What I think is that we readers and writers should take responsibility for the books we read.  If we have to write those books to get something we want to read, then so be it.

Read this blog in the spirit in which it is created.  Rough Drafts is a writing experiment and the text is like what you might find written in a laboratory notebook.