"Raindrops make oceans"

I spent much of the past week in Philadelphia reporting on the 2026 Craft Brewers Conference for VinePair. You can read my full dispatch from the annual confab right here. As I noted briefly in Wednesday’s edition, the Brewers Association hired Unreasonable Hospitality author Will Guidara as its keynote speaker for the 42nd iteration of its flagship trade show, which unfolded against a backdrop of palpable optimism despite another year of volume declines over three days in Philadelphia. The Eleven Madison Parker-turned-Tony Robbins of restaurants was a polarizing choice: every media type I consulted thought he was varying degrees of full of himself and/or shit, whereas brewers categorically seemed to dig it. Hey, it’s their conference, and there’s no accounting for taste.

But I would hope that everybody would agree that Guidara was radiating corporatespeak like a LinkedIn Chernobyl on stage Monday, because he objectively was. Among mind-numbing jargon (“systematize graciousness”) and platitudinous advice (“It’s never about how much you spend, it’s about how thoughtful you are”) he dropped this absolute filth:

This is a nearly perfect Buzzwords of The Week formulation. You can do it with basically any two nouns from the biological lexicon! Acorns make forests. Snowflakes make avalanches. Feral cats make mass toxoplasmosis psychosis. Crucially, stuff like this sounds smart unless you think about it for more than two seconds. At that point, it collapses under the weight of its own delusional grandeur (high-end restaurant hospitality is nearly the diametric opposite of natural phenomena), and leaves you wondering how much a guy like Guidara gets paid to spout this replacement-level MBA palaver. That way danger lies. As I reported at VinePair, his going rate is $75,000-125,000. Talk about unreasonable.

If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!