We were lucky to catch up with Matthew Bedford recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Matthew thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of our favorite things to hear about is stories around the nicest thing someone has done for someone else – what’s the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

It took a lot of encouragement from people who love me for me to step out and begin creating.

This holds true for more than just the most recent of my creative outlets. Going back to when I was quite young, it took my parents encouraging me to play piano more publicly, in front of church, at friend’s houses, at retirement or care facilities, to break me out and build that habit. I loved piano (still do), but I was shy, which is pretty normal I suppose, but you’d probably not guess it by my various creative outlets and my personality today. First, making sure that I continued in lessons, in order to learn the art of piano playing better, and then encouraging me to seize the opportunities to share that skill with others, to make art that makes others happy, helped build many of the habits I now have today as an adult.

I still play piano regularly, serving this way in church, playing for my kids and friends, and also just for my own sake. Music is a special language for me. But, in recent years I’ve found another creative outlet: making videos about my experience enjoying beer. This is a very different kind of art, but I still feel that is art. Performance art, in some ways, but not just about the performance, but a way of expressing my “nerding out” over beer in a way that, hopefully, others can appreciate, and can help build in others an appreciation for the things they enjoy as well.

Like with my piano playing, it was encouragement from my family, siblings and parents mostly, that got me started. Maybe they were tired of hearing me talking their ears off about beer any time I saw them and wanted to find some other outlet for that. If that’s so, though, joke’s on them as I STILL talk mostly about beer when I see them, and now I’ve got a broader vocabulary and a lot more experience, but I digress. Regardless their own motivations, it was their encouragement that took this idea from “as if” to “what it” in my own mind, and then that idea became a real, living thing as I, first just holding my camera in my hands, selfie-style, began recording and posting my thoughts about the beers I was drinking with the world.

It is interesting to me, thinking about this, how much encouragement has meant to me. Unrelated to either music or beer, I still remember, and hold close, kind words my older brother said to me once. These are perhaps the most precious things I remember hearing ever, and it surprises me how special they are to me. The words my brother told me were simple: “keep dreaming”. I don’t know if he remembers telling me those words, but I do, and these, among the many other encouraging words I’ve been told, are the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hi, my name is Matthew, and I am a Christian, a father, a husband, a musician, an Information Technology professional, and a beer nerd, among other things.

I’ve played piano since my mother started teaching me at the age of 5, but I became a musician when piano and music became a personal and emotional language to me in my mid-teens. I’d begged to be allowed to stop taking piano lessons when I was about 12 years old, but my parents told me to keep going, and a year or so later it became part of me, and it has never left. There have been years when I didn’t have opportunity to play, but I always came back to it. I tend to play “by ear” and improvisationally, making things up as I go along and playing by memory when I need to play a more organized piece.

I have four children, two of whom are diagnosed autistic along with some other medical and developmental complexities, so I’m a “special needs dad”. That has been a more recent experience for our family, but it has been rewarding connecting with other special needs dads and families, and I think I’m a better person for the humility, the struggle, the pragmatism, and the humanity of these families who have very different lives than many people, and definitely different from what they’d probably pictured growing up.

My wife and I have been married for 15 years, lived in 3.5 states in 3 very different regions of the US, and we recently became “country folk” as we bought a house with a few acres a few miles outside town.

My most recent creative endeavor has been to create mostly video content regarding (mostly) craft beer. This has been a fun experience for me. I tend to really dive into things that interest me. I’ve read a dozen books about beer and brewing, I have a couple different reference volumes, encyclopedias, of beer. I’ve drunk hundreds of different beers across most styles represented in the US craft beer movement and respected international beers. I approach each beer expecting to enjoy it, and even if an individual beer doesn’t end up appealing to me, I still enjoy the challenge of finding aspects of the beer that I can appreciate. From the technical side, this has been an opportunity to learn video editing and how to use things I already have (an old USB microphone and my mobile phone) to create as quality a video product as I can.

I’m also involved in a not-for-profit organization for Christian geeks and Christian geek outreach called Geeks Under Grace. The goals of Geeks Under Grace are to help Christians who are geeks to build and integrate their faith and their hobbies and interests, to help churches understand and reach out to geeks in their family or area, and to share God’s love with geeks. I have worked with Geeks Under Grace for several years now, serving as a moderator for their Facebook group and now as their Community Director, the head of their Facebook group’s admin team.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I believe NFTs are primarily used by people willing to manipulate others in order to enrich themselves. From my technical background, they represent an interesting security principle, but I have not seen many (or any) real-world applications that have not been bold attempts to con or scam: basic pump-and-dumps where something that is questionably art and would have little real value is given significant apparent value through hype, often by already popular voices. Whether NFTs find any legitimate use in the future, I cannot say. Like I said, the concept is interesting, but right now, the applications we hear about seem to all the be same, sad, story.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

We are our own harshest critic. I disliked my voice when I heard it back from recordings, going back to tape recordings of me as a child. I don’t dislike my physical appearance, but I’m no model either, and considering putting myself out as a video creator where 99% of my content is my face and my voice, these two points were difficult to get past.

I shared my videos with a good friend after I’d posted a few, and he commented that what he found most interesting listening to me talk about things was the excitement that I conveyed as I spoke, particularly about things I enjoyed, and as he watched my first several videos he thought I didn’t actually like any of the things I was talking about in those videos. Looking back at those early videos, separate from the phone being held at arm’s length and questionable audio quality, I could see his criticisms were true: I may have been trying to sound authoritative, but I was actually sounding scared, bored, ambivalent. Now I have accepted that my voice is my voice, my face is my face, and what I actually enjoy about recording videos about beer is the beer and sharing it with others. When you find something you enjoy, it is usually easy to talk about it with other people, to share your personal joy with others. I had to remember that, unlearn my attempts at being authoritative, unlearn my dislike of hearing my own voice back and unlearn my fear of seeing my own face, and just share that joy.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chewingthebrew/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@chewingthebrew

Image Credits
Matthew Bedford