“Kevin Patterson on Doing ‘Research’” 
Town Branch p. 226
https://vimeo.com/103939687

KEVIN PATTERSON: On occasions we’ll have customers that’ll come in, and they’ll see what we do. Uh, they’ll see us talking, uh very intelligently but also very colorful about these beers, and that’s the only part they say, they’ll say “Man, you have the best job in the world, uh, I wish I could do this, or how’d you get into this?” And I, I basically start by saying it’s a homebrew hobby that’s just gotten way out of control. But they don’t understand also that usually when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I’m doing is, after I get my daughter uh, under wraps and get the dogs taken out, and get every, get the day started, it’s usually pretty early, and I’m on my phone, and I’m actually, uh, I’m trying to figure out, what’s happened since I’ve been sleeping that’s changed the culture, or the shifts, or the brews that are doing anything different, that, uh that changes the current trends and precedents, the way we’re gonna think about today versus yesterday. Also I have a library of books and magazines, periodicals I subscribe to and I purchase and those actually for me, it helps ingrain the history of beer, where has beer been and how it relates to either to terawatts or geography to social/political climate, uh anything like that that’s causes beer to exist in the past and change at some particular culture. Those periodicals do a really good job of tying all that together. Also, I’ll enjoy, you know, reading other people’s reviews, and doing those kind of things, and that happens, uh, 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning when I don’t even come to The Beer Trappe until 4 o’clock. So there’s a whole probably 6 or 8 hours worth of research I’m doing. Also it’s what beers are coming out next, what’s the chatter that people are talking about of this new, exciting beer coming out next, so I can recommend to the staff here, ok, “Do we need to order this beer? Hey look for this beer coming down. This is what it’s going to be like. Go ahead and talk it up now.”