sOmE pErSoNaL nEwS

[extremely Robin Williams in a dark comedy set in Southeast Asia voice] Gooooooooooooood evening, Fingers Fam!!!

I hope you’re doing well. Really well. Swell, even. Why not? The weekend is almost here, and nothing is happening here in the United States or abroad to fill you with unspeakable dread for both the near and distant future. Right? RIGHT?!?

Just kidding. Things are B-A-D BAD out there right now, reader. I won’t kid you. But I do have some good news to share with you, and in the spirit of “celebrating the wins”/“temporarily blocking out the waves of existential despair,” we should probably get to it.

Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to win not one, but two awards from the North American Guild of Beer Writers (NAGBW) for my reporting on the beer business. One of my columns at VinePair, “The Cowardly Kind of Beers Bends the Knee to Bigots,” won first place in the “Best Commentary or Criticism” category, while the podcast about the modern beer business I co-produce and host, Taplines, took home second place in the “Best General Podcast” category.

These are my first wins at the NAGBW Awards (The Naggies? Workshopping this…), and I’m very honored and flattered. There are so many people I’d like to thank, including Jack Owoc, and the reporter who figured out Bud Light’s studly Spuds MacKenzie was actually a female dog named Honey Tree Evil Eye. Also Joanna Sciarrino, Tim McKirdy, Josh Malin, Adam Teeter, and the rest of the VinePair gang for the hard work they’ve done to put me in position to create this type of work. Thanks folks!

Last but not least, I’d like to thank you, reader. Technically, I won these awards for VinePair, not Fingers. But that distinction obscures the basic reality that I use the same sources, skills, and brain to produce all my work, across any publication it appears. For example, I first wrote about the then-nascent conservative backlash to Bud Light here on April 4th, 2023, sharpening my thinking on the situation and monitoring its various twists and turns in subsequent editions before filing my column at VinePair on April 21st. And years before we launched Taplines in May, I was ~*~finding my voice~*~ with longform interviews on The Fingers Podcast.

The point is, the work I do here informs the work I do everywhere, and I can’t do it without your support. As a token of my gratitude, I’m bringing back the subscription-drive deal for an extremely limited time. For the next 24 hours only, a year of Fingers is 25% off—just $60 instead of the normal $80:

Thanks so much to everybody who bought a subscription during the drive (more on that below), to all the paying Friends of Fingers who were already on board, and to each and every one of you for reading my independent journalism about drinking in America. Onward, Fingers Fam.

📬 Good post alert

If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email or Instagram DM.

📊 Fingers Drive 2 Survive results

As you (hopefully?) know, Fingers recently celebrated its third anniversary. To set ye olde boozeletter up for three more years of success, I conducted a three-week subscription drive (hereby retroactively christened the Fingers Drive 2 Survive), which concluded October 13th. My goals were to sell 33 annual subscriptions and 3 Fingers Founding Memberships in that period, and sadly, we fell short of both targets. But frankly, those goals were incredibly ambitious, and we still came pretty close to hitting them!

The final tally:

• 27 new paying Friends of Fingers

• 1 new Fingers Founding Member

That’s pretty damn good, folks, and it gives us great momentum to build on as we finish out 2023. I don’t know whether the boozeletter’s Drive 2 Survive will ever truly be over, given the constantly imploding media business, runaway costs of living, and like… everything else, too. But I do know that we’re 28 steps closer to wherever we’re going, thanks to all the newly minted Friends of Fingers who stepped up during this year’s subscription drive. And for those of you who slept on the year’s best deal, you’ve got 24 more hours to fix that mistake!

📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately

Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.) Also sorry for the screenshot. Apparently Instagram embeds, like Twitter embeds, are also broken on Substack (the platform I use to publish Fingers.) Thank you to our billionaire website oligarchs for destroying the internet’s basic functionality in pursuit of infinite profit!