In Memory: William Brand
In my opinion, William Brand was the beer writer in the Bay Area. He was everywhere. He knew everyone. Most importantly, everyone knew and liked him. One year ago today we lost our friend. Bill, this is for you.
Bill Brand at 21A's Monk Blood Dinner w/ Sean Paxton (photo by Jesse Friedman/Beer and Nosh)
I’m not the only person to have written about the influence of Bill Brand on the beer scene in the Bay Area. Even if I did try to recap what Bill meant to “the scene,” you still wouldn’t get the full impact. So I’m going to get personal and share what Bill meant to me.
For the longest time, I just read my Northwest Brewing News and was happy with that. I looked forward to some pieces more than others but didn’t pay much attention to who wrote what. Not until one day when I was trying to remember a place mentioned in an issue months prior. It was about a beer oasis on Highway 4 that was regularly overrun with bikers. I wanted to know more so I emailed the writer. He responded and we struck up a conversation. He didn’t shoo me away (as he probably should have) but instead welcomed the conversation.
Soon, I noticed the man I was emailing wrote not just one article I liked, but many. Not just in the Brewing News either, he wrote everywhere. And he kept emailing me. When I started blogging, he was one of the few people who regularly commented on my site.
As time wore on, we would discuss beer but also found common ground and fans of union labor and quick news briefs typically found on page 2 of newspapers (an ancient form of distributing news in a daily printed format).
Bill working hard, identifiable only by the notepad. Taken the day we met.
After more than a year, maybe more, I had still never met William (he wasn’t Bill to me quite yet). So we decided to grab a beer at The Trappist in Oakland and just hang out. I got there early and sat quietly at my table with a Hop 15. I noticed this small man scurrying about, notepad in hand, chasing the owners of the bar around. Could that be him?
It indeed was William Brand. We sat, drank some beer, talked as we always had, then headed out to door, him for the BART, me for my car.
Outside, a woman stopped us and asked if he was my father. If you’ve never met the two of us, you may not realize how humorous this was. Bill was a small man, and I’m well over 6′ tall. We looked at each, politely said no and laughed about it as we walked.
While Bill wasn’t my dad, he was a great influence on my life as a writer. He would tell me to chase down writing jobs, even ones that didn’t exist, and sell myself as a writer to anyone that might listen. Coincidentally, my first paid writing position was Bill’s former position as the Bay Area reporter for the Brewing News.
The week after he passed, I was invited to my first brewer’s interview. I instinctively reached for my cell phone afterward and started sending a text message. Sadly, I realized I didn’t know who to send the message to.
A fee days later a memorial for Bill was held at the Trappist. Many people spoke and I realized how much Bill had affected people. I wasn’t the only person he inspired.
During SF Beer Week 2009 we started toasting Bill at 7 pm every night. I hope tonight you raise a beer to Bill. We drank Anchor Porter that afternoon at The Trappist, but Bill loved so many beers that anything craft would make him smile.
I’ll leave you with a video from the memorial (sorry, no embedding). Shaun O’Sullivan delivered a poem that I can still feel today. The words are a little tough to hear and the video isn’t quite great, but I guess its one of those “you had to be there” type of moments. Read along, listen and raise a pint to Bill. We miss you buddy.
I woke up a couple of Mondays ago in Berkeley when i got the message about Bill I thought of two things
I thought how could this happen, how can you have an amazing dinner from Sean Paxton at the 21A homebrewchef dinner, walk outside and then get hit by a train…how can that happen? After a great meal, looking over there and seeing Bill scribbling away on his note pad, like a machine, never stopping. trying the beers and the food, that amazing dinner one of the best. the real deal. epic night.
And I thought of one more thing, it’s a little heavy but that’s what it’s about. Nobody else reaches across the distance and puts their hand on your shoulder about this shit…nobody. In the past when Bill and I were hanging out at Barclays trying beers with his fingers typing away on that Mac writing a story, that slight smile, listening and typing…taking in everything you were saying. Maybe missing a fact or typo here of there, but we are all human.
The last time we were on the Brewing Network together, where Bill told us stories about living in Mexico, riding horses and then moving to the Bay area, starting a family, becoming a writer, becoming one of the first beer writers when good beer was young and so were we…his wide eyed way of tasting beer and writing about beer, it was as big as time as it gets…and ol’Bill knew it, he knew it. we knew it.
And the other thought, the second thought, the warrior thought, the hard thought, the final thought, which is that we ain’t many, in any given situation there is always going to be more dumb people than smart people and we ain’t many. There is always going to be more bad beer drinkers than good beer drinkers….More macro swill, adjunct brewing marketing company breweries than good craft beer breweries…we ain’t many. No, we ain’t many. And ol’Bill knew it, HE knew it…
And the final thought, the last thought is a poem by e.e. cummings an old poem and it goes.
Buffalo Bill is defunct
Jesus he was a handsome man
he used to ride a white horse and shoot
clay pigeons onetwothreefourfive justlikethat
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy now
Mister Death
(Note: The poem was in part influenced by Ken Kesey’s tribute to Jerry Garcia at the Oakland Collisiuem Dead Show just after Jerry’s death. – Shaun O’Sullivan)
2 Comments to “In Memory: William Brand”
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Thanks, Mario, for this remembrance of a great Craft Beer Man and Writer…
Thanks, Mario. Thought I might have had an embeddable post of that video, but it turns out we didn’t have it. I was fortunate to see Shaun on Thursday and to share a toast to Bill (with 21A’s magnificent Two Lane Black Top strong ale), and he mentioned that he had seen this post. How lucky we were to have had Bill writing here, and to have known him even if it was for too brief a time.