The Fingers Podcast Dave Infante

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Editor’s note: This is Fingers’ last newsletter of the year. Have a wonderful, safe holiday. I’ll see you on the other side!—Dave.
For 2021 and much of 2022, I cohosted a biweekly-ish Twitter Spaces session called Beer Byliners with Kate Bernot (Good Beer Hunting, Craft Beer & Brewing) and Jessica Infante (Brewbound) about the latest headlines and happenings in the American beer industry. It was an opportunity for us to decompress as reporters and shoot the shit as friends in a pretty low-stakes format with a few dozen familiar faces from across the beverage-alcohol landscape—sources, analysts, fellow journalists, et cetera. Byliners was lots of fun, but we all got busy, and eventually it felt like it’d run its course, plus our audience seemed to be less interested in listening to Twitter Spaces than they had been earlier in the pandemic. (Judging by Clubhouse’s nosedive, and Spaces’ own struggles, the feeling was pretty widespread regarding “social audio” generally!) So we let it sorta peter out at the end of the summer. No big deal.
But! For The Fingers Podcast’s last episode of 2022 (and maybe ever; see below), I rounded up my fellow Beer Byliners for one last job/recording, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers. The result, recorded in mid-December, is something of a speedrun through the past year in beer, covering such tectonic shifts, high-dollar lawsuits, and run-of-the-mill shitshows as:
* The social-media crucifixion of Beer Jesus!
* Thank U, Bud Light Next / Hard Mtn. Dew, Look at Those Sales Figures!
* Blue Cloud, human-trafficking, Reyes Rules Everything Around Me, and other middle-tier beer fears!
* Stone vs. Keystone, the trade-dress trial of the 21st century (so far)!
* The “broke Southwest Airlines customer” approach to entering new markets!
* Jordan Peterson, beverage-alcohol litigant?!
* And so much more!
As an added bonus, I also challenged my fellow Beer Byliners to name a now-defunct beverage-alcohol brand that they believe would sell well if it was reintroduced to the American drinking public in 2023. Their answers may surprise you; mine, probably not so much. I had a blast talking to two of the sharpest minds covering the beverage-alcohol business, and feel lucky to call Kate and Jess colleagues and friends. Hope you enjoy our conversation! (NB: if my Jordan Peterson impression knots your stomach with unspeakable dread, good, that means it’s working.)
The Fingers Podcast is a paid-subscriber bonus. Please consider buying a subscription to access the entire episode archive, and to support independent journalism about drinking in America!

As for the future of The Fingers Podcast: it’s up in the air! Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with it. I love the opportunity to get deep and nerdy across disciplines with fascinating people from the booze world and beyond, but based on the pod’s modest downloads, I get the sense that the Fingers Fam just isn’t sure what to make of it, either. From an operational standpoint, publishing long-form interviews every month or so isn’t converting free readers to paid the way I hypothesized it might. As it stands, the work that goes into booking, prepping, and conducting the interviews, then editing the episodes, just costs too much time and effort for the payoff. I also don’t have the bandwidth to increase episode frequency to try to might improve performance and conversions, so it’s sorta stuck in purgatory. I’ve learned that independent media is all about tradeoffs, and my calculus has shifted a lot on The Fingers Podcast since I started publishing it. Hmm.
For the immediate future, I’m going to take a break from recording any new episodes for a couple months and brainstorm some new approaches to audio. I’ve got an idea that I’ve been chewing on for the past few months that I’m excited about, and will hopefully have a pilot episode

You know how like 200 Starbucks stores have unionized since that first one in Buffalo did back in December 2021, and over 100 of those 200 all struck in unison on Red Cup Day this year because the company—which is one of the biggest private employers in the U.S. by the way—refuses to bargain with its workers in good faith and has actually fired scores of them just for exercising their federally protected right to organize on the job? What’s going on there?
So glad you asked. Today on The Fingers Podcast, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got an interview with , a writer and organizer at the worker publication/organizing platform Labor Notes. He’s also the guy behind , a vital, semi-weekly round-up of American labor news. If you spend any time on Twitter… well, first of all I’m sorry to hear it, you should definitely try to stop doing that. But second of all: you have probably come across Jonah thanks to his relentless coverage of the U.S. labor movement. We first crossed paths last year when I was reporting on United Food and Commercial Workers’ six-week strike at Heaven Hill’s Bardstown, Kentucky distillery. I knew he’d be great for The Fingers Podcast because of how well he can get deep in the weeds of this or that union drive, then zoom out on what it all means for the overall landscape for workers in this country, and earlier this year, our schedules finally aligned to make it happen.
The Fingers Podcast is usually paid-subscriber bonus, but this episode is free for all. Please consider buying a subscription to support independent journalism about drinking in America!


Jonah and I spoke in October 2022 about a ton of different, related topics: his coverage of the Starbucks union drive, the importance of being honest about the health and strength of American unions, and the best way for customers to show their support for workers organizing a shop they patronize. (Spoiler alert: it isn’t a boycott, because boycotts are way harder to pull off than anybody thinks, and they almost never work!) The upshot, as he sees it: despite the rising groundswell of American public support for unions—an August 2022 Gallup poll found 71% of the country felt positive towards organized labor, for example—“workers have to really want this for this to happen.” Capital has been eating labors lunch in this country for going on five decades, and it was never a fair fight to begin with. Still, Jonah believes the brushfire campaign by Starbucks Workers United is both proof-positive that it’s still possible, and a model of how to do it. I tend to agree.
It was a wide-ranging and illuminating conversation about consumer-facing food & drink’s place in the U.S.’s sorta-resurgent labor movement, and I hope you enjoy it. 
Jonah Furman is a writer and organizer with Labor Notes. He publishes Who Gets the Bird?, a newsletter of American labor news updates. Follow him on Twitter.
🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast
* James Wilt, journalist and author of Drinking Up the Revolution (Parts One & Two; transcript)
* Jack Hamilton, critic, professor, and author of Just Around Midnight
* Kim Kelly, journalist and author of 'Fight Like Hell'
* Craft labor writer and scholar Ben Anderson
* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’
* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman
* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines
* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of Sellout


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this interview is available here. A condensed transcript of Pts. 1 and 2 is available here. This is a paid-subscriber exclusive, so if you haven’t yet, please purchase a subscription to support my independent journalism about drinking in America!—Dave.
You know how parts of the United States have state-run retail networks for selling beverage alcohol, via which they hold partial or full monopolies over the pricing, sale, and profit of booze? What’s up with that?
So glad you asked. Today, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got the second half of my interview with James Wilt, author of Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy. (Here’s Part 1.) The book, which came out earlier this year, confronts the profit-driven practices of the world’s biggest beer, wine, and spirits producers and argues for a radical alternative system that puts drinkers before shareholders.
My interview with James took place a bit earlier this fall and lasted nearly two hours. We talked about everything from the ways in which global booze capital flexes its political muscles, to how craft beverage producers inadvertently give cover to their corporate counterparts, to his vision for a fairer, safer system for distributing drink without the profit motive dictating the terms of engagement. “It’s about reducing the density of liquor [stores], increasing pricing, doing all these things that are very contested, but ultimately evidence-based ways of reducing industry profits, and reducing harms,” he says of his (admitted radical!) proposal for regulating the beverage-alcohol business.
That’s not to say James is a prohibitionist; not so. “The world sucks for most people…. so it’s really necessary to come up with alternatives, which is why I [argue for] degrowing Big Alcohol and regrowing these community-owned and controlled alternatives” to the production, distribution, and sale of booze. How would we get there as a society—if we ever even decided to go? “I think at the end of the day, it really has to come down to owning, controlling, and retailing alcohol as a public good, as opposed to something motivated primarily by private profit,” he argues.
I highly recommend you grab Drinking Up the Revolution at the Fingers Reading Room or your local library. Even if you’re a diehard free-market anti-Marxist type, I think you’ll find it really thought-provoking. (Also what the hell are you doing reading Fingers with those politics? Drop me a line, I’d genuinely love to know!)
James Wilt is a freelance journalist, Ph.D. candidate, and the author of two books, Drinking Up the Revolution and Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars. Follow him on Twitter.
🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast
* Part 1 with James Wilt, journalist and author of Drinking Up the Revolution
* Jack Hamilton, critic, professor, and author of Just Around Midnight
* Kim Kelly, journalist and author of 'Fight Like Hell'
* Craft labor writer and scholar Ben Anderson
* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’
* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman
* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines
* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of Sellout


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fingers.email

Dave interviews James Wilt about the profits, politics, and power of the global alcohol industry—and his radical vision for a better system that puts drinkers before shareholders. Episode 1 of 2.

You know how there’s a stereotype of people—usually urbane, knowledge-worker white guys—who make craft beer or whiskey or wine into their entire personality, and even though it’s obviously a pretty broad generalization, it still rings totally true to you and seems really familiar for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on? Me too. What’s the deal with that?
So glad you asked. Today, exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got an interview with Jack Hamilton about conspicuous consumption, cultural commodification, and so much more. Jack is a bit of a polymath, and he wears a bunch of hats, though not in the toxic start-uppy sense of the term. He files regular dispatches as Slate’s pop critic and teaches as an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia (wahoowa, et cetera.) He’s also the author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination.
This past spring, Jack went a little bit viral on Twitter with a post about a movie called High Fidelity, which came out in the year 2000. (It’s based on a 1995 novel by the same name written by Nick Hornby.) Here’s what he posted:
As someone who loved both the book and movie versions of High Fidelity, and covers the rapidly shifting cultural landscape of American craft beer, I was intrigued. So I slid into Jack’s DMs and invited him on The Fingers Podcast.
🎁 This episode is exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers like you. Know a friend who might enjoy it? Hook ‘em up:
🤝 I depend on readers to fund the boozeletter’s independent journalism. Thank you so much for your support!—Dave.
This interview, which took place in late March 2022 but I just recently got around to editing because being an independent journalist is hard when you’re as bad at time management as I am, still totally holds up today. That’s because we spoke about a lot of concepts that are pretty much timeless, including the great poptimism vs. rockism debate, the greatest trick record labels and later streamers ever pulled, and why people seem determined to define themselves by the things they consume, even when it costs them a ton of money and heartbreak along the way. Throughout our conversation, Jack graciously tolerated me trying to map my own theories about the waning cachet of craft beer onto his field of study (thank you, Jack) and overall, I think we put together a really thought-provoking episode that bridges the gap between two rich cultural disciplines. I hope you agree. 
Listen in the player above, on the Substack iOS app, or via your preferred podcast platform using your private RSS link.
📬 Good post alert
Sorry to call my own number here but c’mon!!! See a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about? Please send me that good post via email or Twitter DM.
👀 More #content for further inquiry
From Jack:
* Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press)
* Spotify Has Made All Music Into Background Music (The Atlantic)
* Kanye Doesn’t Want You to Watch Netflix’s New Documentary About Him. Here’s Why You Should. (Slate)
Mentioned in the episode:
* Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh (Penguin Press)
* The Day the Music Burned by Jody Rosen (New York Times)
* The Fingers Interview with Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of ‘Sellout’ (The Fingers Podcast)
* High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books)
🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast
* Kim Kelly, journalist and author of 'Fight Like Hell'
* Craft labor writer and scholar Ben Anderson
* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’
* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman
* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines
* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of ‘Sellout’
📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately
Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will tha

You know how there seem to be a lot of union drives at coffee shops, craft breweries, and artisanal bakeries these days, and you don’t really get it because you always figured that since their products were so much more delicious than their corporate counterparts, they must treat their workers much better, too? What’s up with that?
So glad you asked. Today on The Fingers Podcast and exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got an interview with Benjamin Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ben studies the labor movement in the so-called contemporary “craft” sectors—breweries, distilleries, coffeehouses, and so on. Basically, if it’s local, artisanal, or farm-to-table, he’s probably researched the conditions of the people that make it. His work has been published in a variety of journals and collections, and he’s finishing up his doctorate as we speak. 
🤝 Paying subscribers get access to this and every full-length interview on The Fingers Podcast.
I depend on reader support to fund the boozeletter’s independent journalism. To unlock more reporting, buy a subscription today!—Dave.
During our recording session in mid-March, Ben and I got into a ton of tactical and philosophical questions about the labor movement’s role in the craft brewing business, including the unique challenges of unionizing small shops, how the “we’re a family” myth at work keeps many employees from realizing their collective power, and the ways workers of different backgrounds are able to organize based on shared conditions in “craft” contexts. We also talked about the misleading myth of craft brewing’s “twisty-mustache fantasy;” I snuck in a garbage reference to the Avett Brothers and the Aughts’ short-lived “stomp, clap, hey” cultural aesthetic, which Ben graciously pretended to understand. It was a wide-ranging and super-informative conversation, and if you care about worker power, or the health of the craft beer business—or both—I think you’ll find it fascinating. I sure hope so.
Benjamin Anderson can be reached at bja19@sfu.ca. If you’re interested in checking out the Craft Brewery Workers Alliance of Canada, find it here. 
👀 More #content for further inquiry
From Ben:
* The Forgotten Labour of Craft: Exploitation and Organizing in Artisanal Industries (Journal of Canadian Labour Studies)
* The Forgotten Labour of Craft (lecture transcript)
* Refining Creative Labour: Precarity and Autonomy in Cultural and Craft Industries (Journal of Canadian Labour Studies)
* “Beers and Fries, Please Don’t Unionize!”: Your Favourite Local Haunt is Anti-Worker (Mainlander)
* Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (this book is actually by Christopher R. Martin, but Ben recommended it in our interview)
From me:
* The Fingers interview/podcast with Dylan Lancaster, worker and organizer at Nelson's Green Brier Distillery (Fingers)
* What can craft beer workers do about bad brewery bosses? (Fingers)
* Striking against "corporate greed" at Kentucky's biggest bourbon distillery (Fingers)
* How the Twin Cities became a hotbed for craft beverage unionizing (Fingers)
* As Allegations of Harassment and Abuse Send Shock Waves Through the Craft Beer Industry, Will Workers Take Action? (VinePair)
* Craft beer's "99% asshole-free" myth (Fingers)
* Anchor Union, One Year In: Lessons Learned at the Legendary Brewery (VinePair)
🎧 Other recent episodes of The Fingers Podcast
* Low Culture Boil's Rax King, author of ‘Tacky’
* Hugging the Bar's Courtney Iseman
* Bryan Roth, journalist and news editor of Good Beer Hunting's Sightlines
* Dan Ozzi, music journalist and author of ‘Sellout’


This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fingers.email/subscribe