CL-035 Evan Rail Questions a Budweiser by Any Other Name

For this Collective episode, I’m talking to writer Evan Rail. Evan is based in Prague, and has become more active with Good Beer Hunting as we increasingly look beyond the U.S. beer market and bring you stories from around the world.

Evan has a unique perspective, having grown up in Fresno, California, and later relocated to the Czech Republic. For us he’s an essential voice: both because he has an endless curiosity about European beer history, but also because his work ethic motivates him beyond the obvious headline—and pushes him to look for the thing that’s just out of sight, around the corner, or behind the next door. His interview technique pulls out remarkable stories from people you’d otherwise rarely hear from.

And in the end, he understand a story’s place in a publication like Good Beer Hunting, which is still, and probably always will be, a U.S.-minded publication to one degree or another. Not many writers can do all that. And that’s how we ended up talking today—because all those factors came together in a recent piece about the long, weird, and newly complicated story of the Budweiser trademark. It involves a tiny town in the Czech Republic, and the world’s largest-ever brewing conglomerate, AB InBev. We discuss the process of writing that piece, Evan’s approach to interviewing, and mention a couple other things coming up with Evan that you’ll want to look out for.

This is Evan Rail, GBH contributor and beer writer based in Prague. Listen in.