2024 has been my most successful and my most prolific year as a freelancer. In fact it’s the most I’ve earned since 2018, when I was still on the editorial staff at Good Beer Hunting. Coincidentally, I’ve also turned in more work this year than in those previous—96 commissions and counting, beating my previous best of 83. Don’t get me wrong it’s not big money, but I’ve worked hard for that extra cheddar this year. More importantly than anything it's a living I cherish.
I’ve also broken what I consider to be the awards hoodoo that caused me so much unnecessary stress in the past. My book, Manchester’s Best Beer Pubs and Bars picked up three awards—two silvers from the British Guild of Beer Writers and a gold from the North American Guild of Beer writers. I also picked up a further three nominations for my feature writing, and Pellicle, the crown jewel in my professional life, attained several more. Most significantly among these was a nomination for magazine of the year from the British Guild of Food Writers. For reasons some of you will know I try not to put too much stock in awards, but it’s nice and a feeling worth holding onto, I reckon.
One of the reasons I feel like I’ve managed to produce more work this year is because I’ve figured out what I like to call my work-work-life balance. I use the term work-work because, essentially, I have two jobs. In fact it would be better to say I run two separate businesses. Pellicle being one, and my freelance writing, photography and whatever else hopefully comes my way being the other. Not only have I managed to split my time equally between the two, but I’ve also got a lot better at switching off and taking time for myself. There’s nothing like the power of giving yourself a bit of room to help find the missing motivation that stops you from thinking about packing it all in for the forty-first time.
The great disparity is that I still make 90% of my income from my freelancing and 10% from Pellicle—and trust me when I say I’ve worked hard to even get that to 10%. That includes working through several guilt trips about paying myself money I could use to pay other people, but I think this is part of the process of learning to run a business they don’t tell you about when you’re applying to register a limited company. Let’s consider figuring out how to make Pellicle a better part of my living a goal for 2025, then. If you read it, then it would be a big help if you subscribed.
I’ve written a lot about what we’ve achieved at Pellicle this year on the site itself. Here I’d like to put that to one side and wrap up my personal achievements. I enjoy putting a full stop on things almost as much as I love the carte blanche that a new year feels like it offers. There’s something about the promise of January 1st that feels like you have all this new time and space with which to create stuff, and you haven’t yet had the chance to squander a second of it. To make the best of that, it’s good to take a look back at all that work I did over the past twelve months before pressing on.
Far and away my biggest client for not just the past year, but since the end of the pandemic, have been the wonderful folks at CAMRA. They’ve commissioned not one, but two books from me, both of which have now paid off their advances, which means I get royalties every time someone buys a new copy. For stats fans, it took Manchester’s Best Beer six months to achieve this, and Modern British Beer about four times longer than that… But that’s wonderful, isn’t it? There’s even less money in book writing than there is in feature writing, so this has been a huge boost for me in 2024.
In addition to the photography they get me to do that you’ll see regularly across social media, CAMRA regularly commissions me to write columns for their What’s Brewing online platform—which anyone can read—and for their members-only quarterly print magazine BEER, which is a criminally underrated publication. I’ve really enjoyed writing my monthly column for WB, because it’s a space where I have a bit of freedom to dig into topics I wouldn’t otherwise. So far so good, too. I’ve only had two angry phone calls from brewery owners and one shitty email as a result. Let’s not talk about my DMs, though.
Among this year’s columns it’s hard to pick a couple of favourites but I really enjoyed writing this piece on Independence versus Authenticity prompted by the launch of the (very good) SIBA Indie Beer campaign. I also enjoyed doing a bit of reporting on the closure of the Hawkshead Taproom near Kendal and chatting to some locals about how its loss will impact their community. Another piece I really enjoyed writing but forgot to share at the time was this feature on the history of Stockport CAMRA’s Mild Magic for BEER. You need to be a member to access it, but if you like beer and aren’t a CAMRA member then I don’t know what else I can say to convince you. (It starts on page 38 of the Autumn 2024 issue FYI.)
This year I wrote twelve more articles for Ferment as I have been doing for almost ten years. In fact, I checked. My third ever commission was in May 2015, so I’ll be celebrating a huge milestone with them in a few months time. I’ve worked with three different editors there during this time, all who have been wonderfully supportive and I owe a great deal to my career because of this. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown to me, they no longer publish articles online, but you can buy the mag in WH Smiths if you look for it hard enough. My favourites include a look at the origins of the brewery collab and how I think they aren’t really that cool any longer, questioning why you can’t find any normal porters these days, and an article about why I hate pub quizzes. Most recently I wrote a little ode to Liverpool, one of the UK’s best pub cities, and that will be out sometime in the new year. I’m very grateful that this mag still exists, shout out to Rich and Robyn for all the hard work they put into it.
This year was my second year of working for my pals at Get ‘Er Brewed in Northern Ireland. I was brought in to write engaging content to drive traffic to the site and help boost SEO—good, stable work for a freelancer if you can get it. More than this, however, Johnny, Deborah and the team have become really good friends, and it's a working relationship I have come to cherish. I even picked up a couple of awards nominations for some of the work I did including this piece on no and low alcohol beer, and this piece that breaks down different sustainability initiatives within the brewing industry. Perhaps my favourite piece I wrote for them, however, was this fun guide to my favourite beer cities within the United Kingdom.
I enjoyed getting to write for a couple of US-based publications this year, starting with Final Gravity for whom I wrote about how cask beer is a great method for showcasing modern beer styles and ingredients. It’s also a bit of a whistle-stop tour of Manchester, and my home in Stockport. This was aimed at a US-audience who I assumed were under the impression that cask in the UK was all about bitter and mild and that sort of thing, and I hope they got as much out of reading it as I did writing it. You can find it in issue four, which you can purchase here. I highly recommend a subscription if you haven’t already got one, as it's a great source of grassroots beer writing.
I also wrote a couple of bits for Craft Beer & Brewing and its new sister publication Craft Spirits & Distilling. This was hugely exciting for me as it's a publication I’ve admired for a long time, and I think the sense of privilege at getting to write for them helped motivate me to produce what was one of my favourite features to write this year, which also happened to be about one of my favourite subjects, heritage malt.
One publication I write for intimidates me far more than the others. It’s called Pellicle. This might sound silly, but as an editor I can be pretty tough to work with. I have a strong sense of style, tone and narrative flow in my head that I want our writers to adhere to, and although I’m getting better at it with experience I fear I often struggle to convey this when I send back a marked up draft full of edits and comments. When it comes to writing my own work for Pellicle I get The Fear. If I am asking some of beer writing’s most prodigious talents to make lots of corrections and changes, then I too must hold myself to my own rigorous standards. Thankfully I have the wonderful Lily Waite and Katie Mather to hand my work off to, and neither of them are scared of being liberal with the red pen.
I really enjoyed writing about one of my favourite breweries, Macclesfield’s RedWillow, at the very start of the year. I know it’s not the most exciting of stories, but for me the desire to write it came from the fact that their beer excites and delights me, and I want to share it with everyone. That’s why, when you read it, I spend a lot of time talking about their beers in detail.
Then I got really self indulgent, pulling all the weight my self-appointed editor-in-chief title belays. First I wrote a 3000 word piece of fiction about getting abducted by aliens. Partly because I wanted to, and partly because I wanted other writers to read it and think outside the box in terms of what we’re looking for in the magazine. I’m not sure the experiment worked, but lots of people read it, and I hope they also enjoyed it. If we do fiction again, however, I’ll get someone else to write it.
But the piece of writing I am most proud of this year is my essay on reconnecting with my birthplace, Lincoln, through its pubs. I had to pull my big boy pants on for this one, as it meant unlocking the door in my mind behind which I keep all of my childhood trauma, and after writing it I got quite depressed for a few weeks, having let all of those skeletons out of my closet. The result was a piece that was way too long, and way too self indulgent. But now it’s out there I feel like I can move on. In the editorial schedule are all the articles I have intended to write for Pellicle for two or more years. Now, at last, it feels like I can crack on with them.
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I also did lots of photography this year that I am very pleased with, and have posted a bit more about that on my Instagram page. If you would like me to write or take photos for you next year, perhaps both, please drop me a line via the contact page. Happy new year!