Restructuring, management new ideas of eficiency etc sound very familar and are so short sighted but unfortunately the norm now in the industry (and it seems that SD got its extra dose of incompentent management compared to ither major hubs. I don’t know your exact line of work and company but if you are willing to take risks there are still small companies starting from time to time but they are often run by inexperienced people (the majority of experienced people for start-ups went to Boston (and to a much lesser degree SF) so the chance of the company closing after 2-3 years is rather large. If one is not lucky to find the right spot very fast I think it is often now a decision between career (you have to move east coast or at least SF) or living (but often with a hit in salary and/or career level)
I will still post chef tastings - a long list of recent ones with two very positive surprises - Marine Room and Mille Fleur
With schools and cost of living (if one thinks SD is expensive I recommend just looking to Boston prices) I doubt it will be Cambridge/Back Bay but most likely West Newton, Watertown, Brookline, Arlington to have a decent commute and good schools and housing
Yeah I went to work for a brewery haha. I no longer work 50-70 hours a week, don’t spend 6 hours a day in meetings, don’t have pre-meetings for those other meetings, and generally don’t have stress anymore. I also took a massive paycut though, so…
Don’t venture to far…
BOS is very expensive…but I found the outer boroughs can be sketch, so pick and chose wisely.
Make sure as soon as the red light turns green, you haul ass!
I am currently in Boston house/school hunting and so far thought that the winter time would be the biggest change to SD until I tried to buy some beer in a supermarket and we started to realize how different the alcohol laws are compared to California. Yes, we make jokes about craft beer in SD everywhere but I am afraid I will seriously miss the selection and didn’t expect it to be this bad.
Until you go to an Italian or a seafood joint. Then you will realize how bad things actually are here (respectively).
So has the grandfather of microbreweries, Sam Adams, crushed the craft competition? I haven’t been in many years, but would have figured a thriving craft brew scene happening in Boston.
I don’t think it is that simple. Though Jim Koch has been know to eschew strong IPAs, sours, and a lot of the other beers that have gotten big in the most recent craft beer era, I don’t think he likes crushing the small competition.
Craft beer has had two distinct eras in recent years, I believe. Samuel Adams was part of the revival, and during the first era that peaked in the mid 90s, Boston did have a handful of decent microbreweries/brewpubs, but they never had a thriving scene. There are certainly a few breweries of note (e.g. Trillium) and the northeast beer scene in general is a major player. There are many, many noteworthy sours, and east coast IPAs (with Heady Topper being their grandfather) are still all the rage.
Part of Honkman’s experience may not be that he is not as familiar with the craft beers in the northeast. I suspect, however, that he is seeing poorer selection because the distribution market in Boston may be a lot more constrained, controlled by only a few major entities. He’ll probably have to go to bottle shops to find a better selection.
