Did I Write the Most Viral Drinks Story of All Time?
Back in 2014 I was still trying to find my way as a booze writer. Like the few dozen or so of us in the field then, I’d kind of gotten into the business accidentally.
I had once wanted to be a screenwriter, spending — wasting! — my 20s and the bulk of the aughts writing spec scripts in the hopes they would get optioned, sold, made, and become the next “American Pie” or “Good Will Hunting.” It took me way too long to realize that that era of Hollywood was long over.
But I needed to make money, so I started picking up gigs writing capsule reviews of new bar openings at the rate of, I shit you not, $25 per venue. Even at that rock-bottom salary, the startup nightlife site I was writing for quit paying me and I had to take them to small claims court. I won the case, but they had gone bankrupt so I still didn’t get paid.
And then! I stumbled upon a freelance gig with Esquire.
You have to recall, this was back in a time when publications that exclusively focused on drinking mostly didn’t exist. Thus, it was the men’s magazines like Esquire, GQ, and, believe it or not, Playboy that offered most of the quality coverage of the hottest bars, trendiest cocktails, and best whiskeys of the moment. Esquire already had in their stable David Wondrich, the man who, starting in 1999, had begun reinventing cocktail writing in their very pages, but they lacked significant beer coverage. And by the 2010s, craft beer was becoming far too big for a men’s magazine to ignore.
Luckily, I knew craft beer, could string a few sentences together, and — see above — accepted insultingly low article rates; around 2012 I became their de facto craft beer writer.
My earliest stories were on things like New Jersey breweries, the craft lager revival, and the latest laws surrounding growlers. Thrilling stuff, I’m sure. I was still learning how to find a good story that normal people actually wanted to read.
Little did I know that when Jim Koch’s publicist invited me to have a beer with him, it would lead to the most viral story in drinks-writing history.
Brewing the Dream
Of course, back in 2014 any beer drinker would have been thrilled to meet Jim Koch.
Along with a few other luminaries like Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewing and Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada, Koch was one of the pioneers most responsible for the craft beer revolution.
In 1984 this man with three Harvard degrees, and lineage dating back to immigrant brewers, launched Boston Beer Co. and began selling his Samual Adams Boston Lager literally door to door. He also put himself in his own commercials, a skinny, affable man clad in a Leno-esque amount of denim, hyping up his own product often to a shameless degree. The year before we met, Koch had officially become a billionaire.
By any standard, he was craft beer royalty. But he was also the sort of royalty still willing to pound a few beers with the hoi polloi. I’d met him before, said hello and shook his hand at beer festivals, but this would be the first time I ever had a legitimate sit-down with him.
On a Thursday afternoon, I walked into The Keg Room, an overly lit sports bar in Midtown Manhattan. It was the post-lunch, pre-happy-hour period when only the unemployed and/or heavy drinkers were currently in there. Still, Koch was very much recognized and spoken to by everyone in the bar in a way I just don’t think he would be these days.
“You wanna know my secret? How I can drink beer all night long and never get drunk?”
As I had no specific assignment from Esquire, I came in pretty unprepared. I wasn’t recording the conversation nor was I even taking notes. I was just drinking beers and shooting the shit with the always-excitable Koch. That, in itself, was pretty fun. He complained about tap lists having become overwhelmed with IPAs and only IPAs — a complaint that would become mainstream over the next decade — and brought his own branded Perfect Pint glassware he considered superior to standard shaker pints, forcing the bartender to use them.
His publicists sat a few tables away in the empty bar, trying to give us space, while also discretely listening in and trying to keep the always-rambling Koch on task. They would occasionally butt in:
“Jim, maybe you should tell Aaron about Brewing the American Dream…”
This was his brewery’s “Shark Tank”-like micro-lending program designed to help food and beverage startups. It was what I was ostensibly there to talk about and, hopefully for the publicists, report on. It was a worthy program, it still is a worthy program, but it wasn’t something I really wanted to write about nor anything I could imagine Esquire being interested in.
Eventually, we’d run out of conversation, but Koch’s publicists had allotted us an hour together before the next writer arrived in this cattle call of interviews, so I figured I’d drink down the clock and keep chatting. By this point, Jim had already had me taste a good half-dozen different beers, many of them of the high-ABV variety like Tetravis, the brewery’s version of a Belgian quadruple, when I joked that I was pretty soon going to be wasted.
And that’s when Jim said the two magic sentences that would — yes, I now believe it’s true — change my professional life as a booze writer:
“You wanna know my secret? How I can drink beer all night long and never get drunk?”
Dry, Active Yeast
My story ran on Thursday morning April 24, 2014.
“How to Drink All Night Without Getting Drunk.”
What a title!
If the title was about as clickable as an internet story could possibly be back in 2014 (the deck wasn’t bad either: “Jim Koch knows beer. He also knows a beer trick that may change your life.”), rereading my story now I’m kind of stunned at how slowly I unravel the tale to get to the damn point. (I’m also stunned how much cleaner the internet looked in 2014 before pop-ups and videos and giant ads dissected every part of any feature story.)
This was back when I was still in my ‘New Journalism’ phase, a wannabe Tom Wolfe, and I took forever painting the scene of who Jim Koch is and where we are drinking before I even get to the crux of the article and then finished my piece with a childish conclusionary paragraph.
You see, Jim Koch had told me, back on that Thursday three weeks earlier, that the secret to drinking all night and never getting drunk was yeast. Dry, active yeast.
Like those paper packets of Fleischmann’s you can get for 99 cents at any grocery store. Koch told me that his late friend, Dr. Joseph Owades, the literal inventor of light beer, had taught him the trick. Owades claimed dry, active yeast had an enzyme in it that could break down alcohol and that, if you had that enzyme in your stomach before the alcohol first hit it, the enzyme would break it down before it ever hit your bloodstream and you got drunk. Thus, Koch had been swallowing a teaspoon of dry, active yeast, usually mixed into Greek yogurt, before going out drinking every night.
“I see Chartbeat go vertical to the point where it is completely maxed out. It hit the top of the screen and it couldn’t go up anymore.”
As a writer, you never quite know what stories are going to hit, but with this story I knew.
I knew Jim Koch had gifted me a hit.
Had he ever told anyone else this story? I had no clue. But he had told me. And I was going to be the first to write about it.
Still in shock, I shook hands as quickly as I could and sprinted out of The Keg Room, running to a Bank of America kiosk down the block where I rewrote our entire conversation from memory on several deposit slips using that cruddy pen connected to the table by a wire. Then I went home and passed out from all the beers Jim had served me.
Go Viral, Young Man
The story didn’t take off immediately.
By mid-afternoon it had still gotten very little online traction and I had begun to question my ability to actually spot a good story and whether I should ever be in this silly booze-writing business.
And then, around 3 p.m.… it fucking exploded.
Mike Nizza, Esquire’s head of digital at the time, recalls sitting in a meeting with a woman from parent company Hearst who was chiding him for not yet hitting the website’s traffic goals for the month. As this was occurring, he looked over her shoulder to the large, real-time traffic monitor on the wall in the newsroom.
“I see Chartbeat go vertical to the point where it is completely maxed out. It hit the top of the screen and it couldn’t go up anymore,” Nizza recalls. It did well over 1 million unique views almost immediately.
“This article was massive for Esquire,” recalls Eric Vilas-Boas, Esquire’s food & drink editor at the time, who also handled the social media rollout on the piece. “It was the heyday of Facebook, social [media] traffic, and buzzy headlines.”
Hundreds of comments were left on the article.
Tens of thousands of Facebook shares. And then it began to get written about and reported on by other publications, major publications.
Time, ABC News, CBS News, CNBC, NPR, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Boston.com, Yahoo!, Forbes, Business Insider, HuffPost, Gothamist, The Week, The Independent, Serious Eats, First We Feast.
“And they all had their own little take on it,” says Vilas-Boas. “They were asking questions like, ‘Does it actually work? We talked to somebody else.’”
The New York Daily News claimed, on their front cover no less, that two of their reporters had “taken one for the team” in trying Koch’s methodology, without even crediting me or Esquire for giving them the idea. You see, at a certain point, the story had become such common knowledge that it seemed to have originated from nowhere.
Countless aggregators of a past web era also covered it like Gizmodo, Mental Floss, and Laughing Squid. Reddit had at least two dozen different threads on the article, many with several hundred comments themselves. It also ascended to the top of the page on Hacker News, Digg, and Fark (remember those?). People began to shoot videos testing it themselves, videos that are still being made today.
Koch’s claim was fact-checked, tested, and put under intense scrutiny by Skeptics, Medical Daily, WAMU, and Snopes, which deemed Koch’s claim “inconclusive,” writing, “For now, a definitive answer awaits empirical evidence gathered through properly controlled studies.”
My story got international press in places like the U.K., Denmark, the Netherlands, China, and Japan, where it appeared on the evening news.
“That it’s the most viral drink story of all time is particularly notable, as drinking was one of the tentpoles of Esquire’s digital audience. They had a lot of credibility in the space, but had never gotten anything close to that level of audience for one piece.”
“Jim Koch” and “Sam Adams” literally trended on both Twitter and Facebook throughout the entire weekend, when trending on social media was a big deal and not just something for weird MAGA conspiracy theories like Cracker Barrel becoming too woke.
Meanwhile, Esquire turned my story into its own little cottage industry, immediately redesigning the story with its own special graphics and then commissioning a 7-minute video I was barely used in that even mispronounced Jim’s surname. (It nevertheless still got 300,000 views.) And it was the top headline on their entire front page for four whole days in a row.
“I remember it sitting at the top of our Chartbeat board, unchallenged at No. 1, for days and days,” says Vilas-Boas.
In fact, I was told that it had become the most read story in all of Esquire.com history.
“That it’s the most viral drink story of all time is particularly notable,” says Nizza, “as drinking was one of the tentpoles of Esquire’s digital audience. They had a lot of credibility in the space, but had never gotten anything close to that level of audience for one piece. Then you broke through the ceiling.”
Did I mention I got just $150 for it?
How Trendy
My friend and fellow journalist Marty Beckerman told me now was the time to capitalize on all the hooplah and to ask for a pay raise.
I did. And got my rate immediately doubled. 300 bucks!
At that point, it started becoming very easy for me to get my emails answered, pitches read, and freelance stories sold to Esquire. Ambitious stories. Ridiculous stories. I ate and drank an entire hotel minibar — that went viral, too, though not as insanely so.
As I was still a freelancer, I was also able to now pitch any publication I wanted. A new breed of food and drink publications were popping up at the time and I pitched them all. They didn’t know me, of course. But they knew The Story. They thought — hoped! — I could do for them what I had just done for Esquire. They wanted to be in the Aaron Goldfarb Business.
For the first time ever, at age 35, I felt like I had a real job and was making enough money to file a respectable tax return.
For several years after that, any time I was at an industry cocktail party, someone would inevitably introduce me as “Here’s the guy that wrote the most viral drinks story of all time.” I disregarded that; surely it couldn’t be true, but in retrospect, a decade later, I’m now pretty sure it is. What else could be?
Maybe Eric Felton’s 2014 Daily Beast report on the then-unknown MGP providing the liquid for most “craft” distilleries; that led to law-school scholarship and changed transparency in the industry for the better. You likewise have Clay Risen’s 2016 New York Times piece on the enslaved man who taught Jack Daniel’s how to distill; that went so viral it eventually launched its own whiskey brand.
My viral story didn’t change anything — save for maybe the pre-gaming rituals of certain frat boys — but, check the numbers, and it was way more viral than those other two.
“Our attention spans have gotten even shorter while the rate at which stuff happens keeps accelerating and, as such, nothing stays on our collective radar.”
When I finally ran into Jim Koch for the first time after the story published, sometime in the summer of 2016, he came up and hugged me:
“You made me trend! I’ve never trended before!” he told me with glee.
Unfortunately, Boston Beer Co. passed on a chance to comment on this story, seemingly disowning Koch’s past antics. If their revenue was up 6 percent in 2014, their most recent earnings report showed them posting an 11.2 percent decline with their stock price down 30 percent.
They are trending no longer.
What Happened?
“It’s such an exemplary moment in the history of digital news,” says Nizza. “Because we were working at a time when social media was just vastly expanding the reach of every publisher.”
Back then a good story with a good headline could get shared across various social media, written about on a wide ecosystem of blogs and other traffic sources. That was how virality was built.
“There was a whole media environment back then of ‘Oh, a buzzy piece has come out. Let’s all do our version of that,’” says Vilas-Boas.
In many ways that era of journalism is over.
Print is dead, so they say, the men’s magazines don’t have the social and journalistic cachet they once had, and mainstream media still covers drinks, sure, but only in the most facile way.
But there are positives!
The launch of drinks-specific publications has been incredible for drinks lovers and writers like me.
Still, you have to wonder if it’s further fragmenting the possibility of virality. With so many stories, so many articles, so many listicles going out into the world every day, it’s hard to differentiate them, though I try my best. The enshittification of Twitter and Facebook has made disseminating stories and making them trend much harder, too.
“Our attention spans have gotten even shorter while the rate at which stuff happens keeps accelerating and, as such, nothing stays on our collective radar,” Brian Yaeger, a longtime beer writer and the author of “Red, White, and Brew: An American Beer Odyssey,” tells me. He feels only political stories seem to go viral these days. “That said, I find myself discussing your story from time to time (and how freakishly well it works).”
Today
VinePair launched in 2014 and I began writing here in 2017. Today I’m our writer-at-large and spirits editor.
And while, in my opinion, we have become the industry leader in drinks writing across the entire spectrum of beverage alcohol, as well as the most read digital drinks publication on planet Earth, I’m still not sure it’s possible for a drinks story to ever go uber-viral in a way it once could — in that way mine once did.
This will be the 200th feature story I’ve written for VinePair over the last decade and I think many of them are quite good, and quite clickable!
How a Cheap, Artificially Colored Rum Became the Tiki World’s Secret Ingredient.
The Winery Wedding Industrial Complex.
Why Is Screaming Eagle’s Winemaker Making $90 6-Packs of Lager?
Let’s just say none of these are getting reported on by Japanese television.
I think even multinational mass media like Esquire realizes that the past era is over and that the ability to create stories that go so viral they become a point of conversation for an entire week is through. Why else would they continue, like clockwork, to re-promote my Jim Koch story once or twice every year? (Perhaps testing whether it was Koch and not me that led to the virality, they even gave the then-sexagenarian a kinda weird makeover for an article in 2016.)
“I can’t say the media ecosystem was healthy back then,” says Vilas-Boas. “But what media ecosystem has been healthy over the years?”
I’d say drinks writing, at the least, is certainly healthier than it once was.
Instead of worrying about clicks, shares, and retweets, today’s drinks journalism can worry about diving deep into a topic for an increasingly more educated audience, like the rise and fall of sour beer, a strange cult liqueur from Grand Marnier, and the ubiquity of 95/5 rye.
Yet, I still think about my Jim Koch story on occasion and why it went so viral.
Was it the insanely juicy headline? The transgressive concept?
Was it service journalism par excellence?
Was it because it stirred a debate near impossible to prove?
Was it because it demanded giving it a try yourself?
Whatever the case, I accidentally discovered the secret sauce for making a booze story go viral, but never again have I been able to tap into it in such a way.
Maybe no one can any more.
I’ll keep trying.
The article Did I Write the Most Viral Drinks Story of All Time? appeared first on VinePair.