About The Beermudgeon

A little about me: I’m Jon Brandt, a native Midwesterner who’s lived in the DC area since 1993. A trained and former working journalist, I spent more than a dozen years as a press secretary on Capitol Hill before tiring of the political world entirely. I then enrolled in cooking school, graduated at the top of my class and worked in the kitchen of a well-respected Capitol Hill restaurant before realizing that being the 40-plus-year-old father of an infant (now toddler) wasn’t really meshing well with the schedule and demands of being a line cook.

Cheers!

While in school, I also worked part-time at an Arlington, Va., wine shop where the owner encouraged her staff to become well-versed in wine knowledge, through the Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW) program though the Society of Wine Educators. She also gave me the opportunity to manage the store’s small-but-respectable beer department as a part-timer. Then, I was given the opportunity to take a full-time job as beer manager at another wine shop, this one in Alexandria, Va., where I now manage an inventory of more than 400 brands of beer.

So, I love beer, food and wine — probably in that order. And I know about politics and the media. There’s already a lot of people out there writing about those things, so does the world need another blog from me? Maybe not, but we’ll see if I can add a new perspective on things.