Final Gravity Subscription Drive

Publishing a print beer zine in 2025 is, as you might guess, not lucrative. We do, however, believe it can be sustainable, but we need your help for Final Gravity to reach that point. So we're having a little informal subscription drive, because that's what the cool kids do.

Final Gravity is a quarterly print zine about beer and the culture surrounding it. We publish personal, human-centered beer stories, rather than more technical, industry-focused articles (we like those too, but lots of other publications already do those and do them well). We still think beer is cool, we still think there are amazing stories to be told in this space, and we’re going to keep publishing them as long as we’re able.

If you believe in independent food and drink media, we're asking you to consider subscribing to the zine or signing up for one of our Patreon tiers.  

Since launching Final Gravity about two years ago, we have averaged out to about breaking even from an issue-to-issue income/expense standpoint. That breaking even has not, however, included paying ourselves or covering start-up costs.

We saw a lot of initial growth in our first year—Patreon supporters and shop subscribers (thank you!)—but that has leveled off quite a bit in the last year. To some extent, that's to be expected after initial excitement dies down, but we're a little concerned about the lack of recent growth.

We know everyone is exhausted, scared, distracted, fill-in-the-blank about... *gestures around*. So are we. There are days we wonder what the point is in writing about beer. It's hard to care about hops and styles when everything is on fire. But beer has always been about way more than what's in the glass, and now more than ever we need real stories about real humans, written by real humans. AI doesn't write our stories, and it doesn't create our artwork. People do. 

Our largest expense, by far, is paying our contributors, and we want to be able to raise our rates further. We currently pay $200-300 for most stories, and that needs to go up. We'd like to increase that by about 25% per year over the next few years. We need more subscribers to fund that.

Final Gravity is a very unique beer publication. We're print-only, and we're telling stories you'd be unlikely to find elsewhere, stories that illuminate corners of the beer experience that are fascinating and unexpected.

We’ve published articles on:
- How beer spaces can be more hospitable for hard of hearing folks.
- Handling the stress of brewery ownership through roller derby.
- Dealing with perimenopause in the beer industry.
- The family ties of brewing Umqombothi in South Africa.
- Finding camaraderie with beer lovers in the wake of a tornado.

…and a lot more.

We also refuse to "keep politics out of beer." We take beer personally, and the personal is political. We've published stories on beer businesses leaving Meta post-election, how to protect employees/patrons in an ICE raid, and finding trans identity through brewing, among others, and there are more on the way.

But just because we publish heavier topics, doesn’t mean we’re all doom and gloom. We all need escapism too. Every issue has a pet spotlight, a four-page art feature, and a few silly little details we come up with for each (we're still giggling about the beer names for our Logical Fallacy Brewing Co. from Issue 04).

So. How can you help? What we need more than anything is paying readers, so you can purchase a single issue (here’s our most recent), subscribe, or sign up for one of our Patreon tiers.

If you subscribe through the shop, you save versus ordering each issue as they come out. You can choose to start with either our most recent or next issue, and covers can be laminated if you want them to be more durable (for a taproom, say). 

Our Patreon tiers get lots of fun perks, and every tier comes with a subscription. The lowest tier is only $6 per month, and you get to hear me complain about our office printers in members-only posts, which is worth the cost by itself.

If you run a beer-related business, you can also support us by advertising. We have a small but very invested readership, and a lot of our readers are in the industry themselves. It's a good group to reach. You can find all the advertising info here.

We believe passionately in this project, and believe there’s a space for it in the beer world. In the aftermath (and ongoing reality) of beer’s #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter reckonings, the fallout of the new presidential administration, and the business challenges that have slowed craft beer’s growth and led to brewery closures, we believe beer needs a publication that celebrates what is beautiful in this space and challenges what is not.

We want Final Gravity to be that publication, and we’d love your help to make that happen.