Final Gravity: A Beer Zine
Final Gravity is a quarterly print magazine about beer and the culture surrounding it published by David Nilsen and Melinda Guerra.
And that’s the last sentence in which we’re going to refer to ourselves in the abstract third-person and pretend someone else is writing this. Hi, we’re David Nilsen and Melinda Guerra.
We still think beer is cool, and we still think there are amazing stories to be told in this space. We can’t wait to tell them through Final Gravity.
A new avenue for beer publishing.
When we say “zine,” we don’t mean a typical glossy magazine; we mean an old school, staple-bound, 8.5” x 5.5” paper zine produced in the proud DIY zine-making tradition. This format keeps production costs down, allowing us to pay our writers and artists, but despite this grassroots approach, Final Gravity features professional editing and clean and attractive formatting.
Personal & immersive stories.
Final Gravity exists to tell intimate, human-centric stories about beer. The zine mostly stays away from reporting and more newsy, industry-level coverage—there are already several great publications providing that—and features writing that is more focused on people, places, ingredients, sensory experiences, cultural intersections, and the holistic ways we interact with and around beer. Our pitch guide can be found here.
Platform for beer professionals.
In addition to stories like this from writers, the zine also provides a venue for professionals in the beer industry—owners, brewers, bartenders, what have you—to share their own writing. Some of this is about beer, but some of it is fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction about their life experiences. These stories help readers see a side of beer industry professionals they rarely get to. It turns out they do more than brew and serve your favorite beer. (If this is you, send pitches or submissions to davidnilsenbeer (at) gmail.)
Giving back.
For every issue (four per year), we select a different non-profit in the beer or hospitality industries to support. Our hope as readership grows is to be able to donate a portion of each copy of an issue we sell, but we’re aware early on that might be a really small number. Instead, we’re initially making these donations at a set amount each quarter, and sharing the organization we’re supporting with you.
Speaking of support…
How are we funding this whole thing? Great question! This is where you come in. There are a few great ways you can support the dynamic beer writing we publish through Final Gravity:
Order the zine!
The first way you can support us—and yeah, this is kind of obvious—is by ordering the zine. We are also working with breweries, zine shops, and other retailers to stock the zine, so if you see copies out in the wild, please do purchase them there!
2. Subscribe!
Whether you’re an individual, library, taproom, or bar, you can subscribe to receive every issue of Final Gravity as it comes out. We currently offer one-year subscriptions, and you can choose to begin your subscription with our most recent or upcoming issue. If you want to subscribe to make FG available for your library patrons, brewery employees, or taproom customers, you can choose to have the covers laminated—we know how easy it is to spill beer!
3. Patreon!
The second way you can support us is through our Patreon. We’ve never done a Patreon before, and it seemed kind of scary, but we’re grown-ups and we figured it out. Our Patreon has multiple tiers to fit different budgets, and they all come with… *drumroll* ...PERKS! You can get beer-related cards and prints, stickers, exclusive Patreon content (that we actually post, we promise), and more. And they all come with a subscription to Final Gravity!
BIG shout-out to our Sponsor level Patreon supporters—Shan Escobar, Morgan Wright, Honey Coughlin, Susi Halley, Jackie Holsten, and Jorge Torres, and our Pro Sponsors Fifth Street Brewpub, Gravel Road Brewing, The Beer Scholar, and Cincinnati State Brewing Program! You can get mentioned here, in the zine, and on the Bean to Barstool podcast when you sign on as a Sponsor, our highest level of support.
4. Spread the Word!
We know this sounds perfunctory, but we mean it: you can support us by letting people know about Final Gravity! The idea of a staple-bound beer periodical is somewhat new, and we need to get the word out. Share it on social media, ask your local zine shop, bookstore, or brewery taproom to carry it, tell a friend…It all helps.
5. Become a Stockist!
If you own one of those establishments we just mentioned, we’d love to talk with you about stocking Final Gravity! We can work on either consignment or wholesale, and we have no minimums, so get in touch. You’ll be supporting independent publishing, freelance writers and artists, AND craft breweries. Woohoo! Email davidnilsenbeer (at) gmail dot com to get the process started.
6. Advertise or Sponsor!
Final Gravity reaches a passionate and engaged audience of beer writers, brewers, and beer lovers. It’s a small audience for now, we’ll admit, but they love beer. We offer advertising in the pages of Final Gravity and audio ads on the Bean to Barstool podcast, and we offer pro-level sponsorship opportunities through Patreon that include both advertising avenues and social media mentions. If you believe craft beer benefits from independent beer journalism, consider having your brewery, ingredient provider, or related business advertise or sponsor with us! Email davidnilsenbeer (at) gmail dot com to get the process started, or sign up for sponsorship directly through Patreon.
Meet our editors. Us. Meet us.
We’re going to drop the whole editorial “we” thing for a moment—it’s been an ergonomic nightmare typing all of this with four hands anyway—to share who we are as individuals and why we’re excited to publish Final Gravity.
Melinda Guerra
Hello! I’m Melinda, and I’m very excited for you to enjoy the content we’re pulling together for Final Gravity.
A bit about me: I’m a Mexican-American woman, the grandchild of immigrants who settled in Chicago to start their families. To start my own family, I left Chicago for “the more rural Midwest” several years ago, but still love the city that raised me. With some years since my departure, I’m finding myself less afraid of being murdered in a cornfield and more able to appreciate the “small enough that you can have a real favorite bottle shop, because you’ve been to them all” places we call home these days.
I make money by reminding people to breathe, breaking their seemingly overwhelming problems into smaller pieces, and creating the plans and paperwork to make those pieces manageable. I’ve done that for teenagers away from home for months, college students in foreign countries, business owners with the delayed realization that they need an actual business plan, and a range of clients with crisis communications needs.
Currently, I do that by day mostly at a law firm and by evening mostly at my own office: planning my clients’ special events, helping them shape their company identity, coaching them through TV appearances, and fixing their websites and resumés.
I live with two humans, a cat, and the house spiders we try to protect from said cat. I spend most of my free time reading books, essays, and really in-depth news pieces. I love stumbling across stories so compelling that everything else fades away for even just a few minutes, and then sharing those stories with everyone I know. Final Gravity is a chance to do that in a new (to me) format, with interesting people, and around subjects that connect to a beverage I really enjoy: beer.
When I first started drinking, beer felt inaccessible to me. Even after I discovered there was a world beyond the cases of mass-produced beers at family parties, I still had no idea how to begin to figure out what I liked. I found my way to pubs and breweries, and to a world not only of flavor, but also of heart: brewers working hard to tell a really good story, pour it in a glass, serve it to you with pride, and watch you enjoy every sip.
The stories we’re curating and presenting to you aren’t the kind we can pour in a glass, but we will serve them with pride and hope you enjoy every page. And we promise: they all pair well with beer.
David Nilsen
Hi! I’m a full-time beer writer and educator. I’m the host of the Bean to Barstool podcast, and the author of Pairing Beer & Chocolate. I’m an Advanced Cicerone and a member of the North American Guild of Beer Writers and the National Book Critics Circle. I’ve been told I make a pretty good paper airplane (note: no one has ever told me this).
Craft beer has changed a lot since I started doing this, and it’s in a difficult place right now. It’s no longer the cool new kid—it’s what the cool new kid’s parents drink. Sales are down, breweries are closing, and most of the industry is exhausted from three years of a pandemic that has permanently changed the landscape for hospitality businesses. It’s also at a critical place as it seeks to grow and learn from recent reckonings around race, gender, and other aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This industry is trying to figure out who it is, who it wants to be, and how to get there.
And I still love it and believe it can grow into something sustainable and holistically positive. Beer brings people together, offers a dazzling array of sensory experiences, and has a rich history rooted in most of the world’s cultures. It’s worth celebrating as a beverage, and maintaining as an industry even as necessary and sometimes difficult lessons are learned.
I’m excited to launch Final Gravity as a venue for sharing thoughtful stories about beer, specifically offering a platform for stories that might not find an easy home elsewhere, as well as providing a space for beer industry professionals to share their own stories—about beer, about life, about themselves. I hope Final Gravity does what a great beer should do—make you pause, take note, and then have a great conversation.
We’ve been around the country and around the world together in pursuit of great beer and—more to the point—great experiences shared around beer. We’ve met amazing people, tasted amazing flavors, seen amazing places. And we know you have too. Come along with us as we share those stories together in the pages of Final Gravity.
