In summer of 2016, Bill Vanderburgh moved to San Diego during a year-long leave from his job as a philosophy professor at CSU San Bernardino. It was planned as temporary, but he fell in love with the county and its breweries, making it a personal mission to visit them all and document his findings on his blog, craftbeerinsandiego.com. That documentation led to the The Coast News hiring him as their bi-weekly beer columnist, a position that came this January due to AB5, which limits opportunities for freelance writers and others lumped (often unfairly) under a broad “gig worker” header. Then came another monkey wrench—COVID-19. The pandemic all but eliminated Vanderburgh’s ability to do what he enjoyed, so he decided to hang it up and, in the process, sell his domain and its contents to another interest. We caught up with him to look back on his blogging adventure and what awaits him beyond #SDBeer.
What are some of your fondest beer-writing memories?
There have been plenty of highlights, from meeting other beer lovers, brewery owners and employees, to getting to see pretty much the whole country, to trying some truly awesome beers. Winning the 2018 Beer Blogger award in a national competition sponsored by BrewDog was awfully nice, especially when my work was also judged the overall winner of the seven categories and the prize turned out to be a trip to GABF (Great American Beer Festival) plus a trip to Belgium. I’ve been to GABF twice now, once for the prize and once on media credentials, and both trips were real highlights. After nearly four years and more than 300 posts, it was a nice vindication that someone wanted to buy the site.
Were there any lowlights?
I’m happy to say that truly bad brewery visits were extremely rare and, not coincidentally, I think, the ones that come to mind are now out of business. At certain periods when I was visiting three or five breweries per week, it started to feel like a real grind. Anytime you have to do something, it stops being quite so much fun. Perhaps my biggest disappointment was when Benchmark Brewing closed down. If any brewery deserved to thrive, it was them: great beer, great people. It shows you that success in the beer business—or anywhere for that matter—does not depend only on merit.
How did you keep up your list of operating brewhouses and brewery-owned venues?
Soon after I discovered the San Diego Brewers Guild’s map, I realized that it left off all the non-members of the SDBG So, I turned to West Coaster’s list, but then I realized that list had lots of errors and wasn’t being kept up-to-date. In order to try to complete my quest of visiting every brewery and tasting room in the county, I had to create my own list. For a while, I just kept it privately, occasionally sending long lists of corrections to West Coaster, but then I realized I might as well just post my list for the benefit of others. That led to doing monthly updates, which ended up being one of the most popular features of my site. It was a lot of work, probably 10 or 20 hours per-month, including scouring local beer news daily (Brandon Hernández’s articles in West Coaster were the best sources, of course), maintaining the spreadsheet and writing the monthly posts.
Who took over the site?
By late 2019, I had been blogging for three years and had only three locations left to visit. That’s an illusion, of course…more will be opening soon. Those locations were very distant and hard to get to, given their hours, and I found myself not very motivated. Especially given all the time I was devoting to The Coast News. If you look back at the site, you’ll see my posting frequency got less and less. By 2020, I was going months posting almost nothing but the monthly updates of the numbers. Then COVID hit, making it pretty much impossible to do the reviews. This spring and summer, I was trying to decide between keeping the site open but not updating it or shutting it down altogether. Just at that moment, I got an email from someone who wanted to cross-post between my site and his. In my answer, I mentioned that I was pretty much done with the site and he offered to buy it. He has taken over the site’s Twitter and Instagram handles and I am no longer involved in any way.
San Diego Beer News reached out to the new owner of the site, Chris Cagle, asking how he will utilize his newly acquired web property. The following is his response…
We will be rolling the properties into our new site called Beer Maverick, which is a site about homebrewing and the love of craft beer. While we are located in Pittsburgh, we were planning on starting city-centric sections on the site within the year centered around the reviewing of craft beers, their breweries, and finding and developing homebrew recipes that mimic some of their most popular beers. We were not expecting to be presented the opportunity to get into the San Diego area so soon, but with craftbeerinsandiego.com coming available, we will be given a head start on that city’s section with our site way ahead of schedule.
What are your intentions moving forward?
I’m doing more academic writing these days. I have two academic book projects in the works and several articles in development for journals. One book is on what philosophy of religion tells us to do about the separation of church and state. One of the articles is about the philosophy of scientific cosmology. Once this COVID thing is over—like, when the vaccine has been widely disseminated sometime in late 2021—I plan to become a regular at some bar or brewery near my house and just enjoy drinking beer without having to worry about writing about it, and without having to travel all over the country to drink it.