Love Beer, Love Food

Lindsay Bohanske of Love Beer, Love Food

When Lindsay Bohanske moved to Cincinnati three years ago, she was in search of a new creative outlet.

“I’ve always loved to cook, brew and learn about beer and food,” she explains. “I decided to take these passions and create lovebeerlovefood.com.”

Love Beer, Love Food is a blog about Bohanske’s adventures in home-brewing beer, cooking and anything related to beer and food. She’s even a Certified Cicerone®, which is essentially the beer equivalent to a wine sommelier. Because of her hops expertise, she loves to share her knowledge and love for beer.

Bohanske said the inspiration for Love Beer, Love Food came from other, well-established blogs. “I wanted to create something special that represented me,” she says. “Love Beer, Love Food just felt right. The rest is history!”

Posts on Bohanske’s blog fit four main topics: food recipes (with beer pairing suggestions), home-brew advice/recipes, beer education and the occasional beer or brewery focus piece.

What makes Bohanske’s blog unique is her focus on both cooking and homebrewing. In fact, she said she doesn’t know if there’s another blog out there that focuses on both cooking and homebrewing. “There are beer blogs and food blogs, but few that actually overlap,” she explains.

When she started writing Love Beer, Love Food, Bohanske says she had no idea what she was doing. “I’d never had a blog or created a website, so I had a lot to learn,” she explains. “Over time, the site has grown up significantly. At first it was a bite scattered, but over time I’ve really concentrated on topics and found my own voice.”

In addition to writing, Bohanske says that she’s become very interested in photography, which has also improved drastically since Love Beer, Love Food first started and has become a main focus of the blog. She says she tries to use photos with each post so she can paint a visual picture that really catches people’s attention.

Bohanske says her favorite thing about blogging is the creativity, and sharing the things that she loves with people. Since joining the blogging world, she’s become part of a large community of beer and food lovers.

Bohanske also enjoys reading the comments from people who are reading her blog as well as continuing the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

When it comes to favorite posts, Bohanske says that her favorite would be “A Clean, Perfect Glass for your Beer.” The post highlights a variety of issues around beer glassware – everything from what “beer clean” is, how to detect a non-beer clean glass and which style of glassware may be appropriate for your drink.

“It’s the first post I ever wrote that went truly viral, which is funny because it started as a bit of a rant,” Bohanske says. “My husband came home after drinking beer with work friends and described a comment made by a colleague. Apparently his beer was served in a ‘girly’ tulip glass, which in fact, was a completely appropriate glass for the beer he chose.”

It was after hearing this story that Bohanske started to write the post immediately. She says that what really makes the post special is that one of her heroes, Charlie Papazian, the god of modern day home-brew, tweeted the link. “It pretty much made my life,” she laughingly adds.

As for the future of Love Beer, Love Food, Bohanske has been working with Jesse Folk from WCPO to help with a monthly series about local beer styles. The first post was about Imperial IPAs. She adds that they’ll be working in a piece soon about Fall seasonals, which you can check out at www.wcpo.com/beer.

To learn more about Love Beer, Love Food or read the blog, visit lovebeerlovefood.com.