CL-049 Lily Waite Tells a Story Years in the Making

Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.

Lily Waite is unstoppable. She’s one of our most prolific writers at Good Beer Hunting, contributing everything from food-driven chronicles of seaside adventures and profiles of classic breweries with storied histories and crooked floors to candid essays about the importance of online community-building during the current global pandemic.

Her newest long-form feature on GBH is a Signifier profiling Duration Brewing in Norfolk, England, which Lily gradually compiled over the course of several years. Along with this wonderfully revealing and intimate profile, Lily also recently launched a new blog on our website called The Pull of Joy, chronicling the pushes and pulls of beer culture. In this interview, I wanted to know what inspires Lily to tell stories, and how she thinks both about the storytelling process and the structure of her articles—you can see this really clearly in the Duration piece, which feels like a story in motion. The narrative itself swoops through time and space, and that effect is very intentional on Lily’s part.

We also jump into Lily’s other endeavors. She runs the Queer Brewing Project, which is a non-profit that raises awareness of and support for LGBTQ communities in the brewing industry. She also just released a photo zine capturing the London pubs that have been closed because of COVID-19. You kind of have to throw the script out when talking about projects and getting things done during a global pandemic, and the work that Lily is putting out now is contextually tied to this current moment but also stands on its own.

It’s funny that her last profile is of a brewery called “Duration,” which is a topic we touch upon during our conversation—what remains relevant, how do we decide what’s important, and how do we take time to step away from the current global situation and tell stories that still feel true to us? Here’s Lily.