Meet the Editors
Melinda Guerra
Hello! I’m Melinda, and I’m very excited for you to enjoy 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.
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 British Guild of Beer Writers. 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 the after effects 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.
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.
I’m excited to share 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. Final Gravity does what a great beer should do—make you pause, take note, and then have a great conversation.
