CL-014 Carla Jean Lauter will tell you all about lobster and beer

Welcome back to the GBH Collective, a special series of interviews where we have the chance to dive a little deeper with Good Beer Hunting contributors and friends on topics of writing, beer and the stories you read and hear from GBH. In this episode, we’re joined by a name you may be familiar with if you’re a beer fan, especially if you’re on Twitter, and very much so if you live in New England. For years, Carla Jean Lauter has shared stories from Maine on her blog, beerbabe.com, and more recently through the weekly Tap Lines column in Maine Today. She’s been an outspoken voice on a variety of issues in beer, from pushing breweries to simply publish their hours of operation on their website, to discussions of inclusion and diversity. Carla and I have known each other for some time, and in addition to interactions on social media, shared emails, acting as a voice in stories, and even acting as a tour guide to proper drinking in Portland, Maine, I got to see her again this summer when we were both in Virginia as part of the annual Beer Bloggers and Writers Conference. Amongst presentations, we sat down for a bit to talk about what it means to cover beer, and more specifically, what it’s like to do so in her home state. Portland, let alone Maine, already has a great reputation among beer enthusiasts, but I hope that hearing Carla talk about it all gives you new or renewed interest in exploring what the state says in its slogan is “the way life should be” … just with a little more beer along the way.