CL-058 Alicia Kennedy Longs for a Martini in a Nick & Nora Glass

Good Beer Hunting

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 Claire Bullen, editor-in-chief here at Good Beer Hunting.

I spent the early days of this year's lockdown subscribing to a flurry of new and thrilling food-and drink newsletters, from Jonathan Nunn's Vittles and Dave Infante's Fingers to Rachel Hendry's J'adore Le Plonk and Katie Mather's The Gulp. My inbox has been full of exceptional writing ever since—and these days, there are few things I look forward to more than receiving a new missive from Alicia Kennedy.

I'm not alone in this sentiment. Kennedy's newsletter, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, has amassed over 10,000 subscribers in just half a year. Kennedy is a food and drink writer, as well as a former bakery owner, who's now based in San Juan, Puerto Rico after relocating from New York. She's got a book in the works about veganism and its relationship to capitalism, and has written for publications ranging from the Village Voice and the Guardian to Tenderly and Pellicle Magazine.

Whatever her subject—from the sustainability of spirits production and the commodification of chocolate to musings on ethical consumption—Kennedy writes with thrilling velocity and probing intelligence, illuminating unexpected connections between topics and fundamentally reimagining what food and drink writing can be. I was thrilled, then, to commission her recent piece for GBH, "Crisis Cava in a Colony, and Other Ways of Coping in Old San Juan," which captures Kennedy's lockdown experience, chronicles the drinks that she used to demarcate her time under quarantine, and shows how tourism to Puerto Rico has so often been at the expense of residents' well being. In this episode, we talk about the process behind this piece, the evolution of her newsletter, and how she'd like to see drinks writing grow and develop in the future.

This is Alicia Kennedy. Listen in.