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BeerPulse caught up with Bernard from The Beer Snobs, a half-hour audio podcast featuring blind taste test beer reviews.
Why did you start The Beer Snobs podcast?
A few years ago when I was living in Palm Springs, I came to a crossroads in my life. I decided I needed to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I came to the conclusion that I would be truly happy if I could get paid to drink beer and listen to live music. The music part I figure I could achieve if I be an on-air personality (dj for a radio station). So I got a few jobs in the desert flexing my vocal chops but I couldn’t quite figure out how to get the beer part of my master plan down. Now, at the time I was getting knowledgable in beer and I knew that was where my heart was. I always believed beer has a much bigger audience than wine only due to the fact that, from the most expensive beer to the cheapest beer may only be a 8 to 12 multiplier in cost, unlike wine where that mutliplier can be 100s. Now, I had some experience recording my own atempt of a jazz podcast. But I knew the idea I had would be a much bigger undertaking.
So I contacted Hef. He and I sat over beers to discuss the feasibility of creating a show all about beer starring our friends. We launched a show with 8 different voices and watched it crash pretty hard. A little over a year ago, Hef approached me and said he wanted to relaunch the show. So we sat over beers again and decided to make the new show a leaner version of what what had. Old show featured four beers and 1-1.5 hours long and the new show featured two beers 15-30 min long. Also from 8 voices to 3-4 voices maximum.
How would you describe The Beer Snobs in three sentences to prospective listeners?
A show that blind tastes all of our beers so we can keep the integrity of our show.
Far from experts in beer but we do know what we love and especially know what we hate.
We do our best to make sure were entertaining; we don’t want you to feel like we’re talking down to anybody; we are just some folks who love beer and think our opinion is witty.
By my estimate, there are more than 100 hours of beer-related audio and video podcast footage released each month. How do you differentiate from the rest of the pack?
You know, Adam, I am riding that blind tasting thing pretty damn hard but that’s what makes us different. I don’t know of any other show with the balls to blind taste. And I understand why. They want to get free beers and have the breweries love them. I don’t. I would love if breweries loved what we did but I doubt that will happen. A lot of brewmasters are very proud of the beer they make. To have some jerks on the interwebs come along and tell them it is crap probably won’t make us the guys they would want to give free beer to or sponsor.
I would prefer if the regular beer drinker liked us more because they know of our integrity. When we love it, we love it. When we hate it, we really hate it. And that has brought on some problems in recording when a snob finds out that a beer they loved before the blind taste is the one that they just ripped into…it makes for a quite awkward reveal.
What is your goal with The Beer Snobs podcast? A hobby or more than that?
My main goal of this is to have a great time trying out new beers. And to turn this show into a sustainable business where the profit we make goes right back into making the show better… Yeah that profit thing sounds nice. Right now this is almost all out of pocket for me so if anybody wants to donate or advertise, contact us at [email protected].
You are now 30 episodes in and have probably learned some things. What advice would you give to others that are interested in podcasting?
Number one: invest in quality of your sound or your camera. The one thing that will turn people off when listening to your show is bad quality. My only other advice I am willing to give for free is to make it fun for you and your friends. When you start to take yourself too seriously, then the fun ends.
You said in a post that all of the beers that you review are purchased and that you will hold nothing back in your reviews. Why have you drew those particular lines in the sand?
The whole point of our show is to give honest opinion on the beers. I feel that if someone were to give us free beer that our reviews may be swayed by the fact that we were given a donation. And if we want to keep up the donations, we may have to give favorable reviews. I am not willing to sell our intergrity for 12 free oz of beer. If it was one keg, then I may be more open to negotiate.
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Thanks, Bernard!
