EP-118 Peter Frost of Crain's Chicago Business

Beer Writer is a term that gets tossed around a lot these days, but it’s
used to describe a wide variety of amateurs and professionals alike.
Everyone from a personal blogger to a freelancer writing for magazines, to
an author with half a dozen books under their belt, to people who cover the
business of beer for established outlets like the Tribune or the New York
Times. But each of these kinds of beer writers has their own audience and
their own angle on the beer world, which of course is also incredibly
diverse in terms of the types of beers being made, business models they
support, and the markets those brands are active in. Everything is changing
all the time.

One of the writers I like the most here in Chicago is Peter Frost who
writes for Crain’s, a business focused publication that  has increasingly
written about smaller breweries over the years as they collectively started
to occupy a sizable portion of the market, which makes them a factor in the
lives of investors and entrepreneurs - the heart of a business
publication’s audience.

But there’s also clearly a personal interest being expressed by Peter as
some of the writing he’s produced around smaller breweries isn’t about the
business angle at all — at times it’s been a bit personal and review-like.
Something quite uncommon for a publication like Crain’s.

I wanted to sit down with Peter and get the wider view on how he ended up
writing about beer for a place like Crain’s and how a reporter like him
thinks about the industry at large. But also, what motivates him and his
publication to keep doing it at all.

Peter is a beer writer, but also a business and food industry writer.
Before that he wrote about healthcare and a host of other things. He’s one
more fascinating part of our world.