Below find a special edition in place of the standard Fingers Weekender. But first, check out:

And that’s about it. As ever, if someone forwarded this to you, buy a subscription to get next Sunday’s edition straight in your inbox.

I started publishing Fingers on Memorial Day Weekend 2020. More than half a dozen years later, the boozeletter continues to publish award-winning independent journalism about drinking in America. Please join me in celebrating Fingers’ sixth birthday!

The past 12 months here at HQ have been huge in both journalism and business. I laid all that out below. I couldn’t have done any of it without your support. Thanks as always for reading.—Dave.

Based on an analysis of email open rates and web traffic, the top-read newsletters of the last 12 months were, in reverse chronological order:

The list above doesn’t include one-off scoops published directly to the website, which I began experimenting with midway through 2025 due to the sheer volume of news reshaping the beverage-alcohol industry, and the uptick in inbound tips I received about the same. The results of that experiment have been mixed. On one hand, those special reports tend to attract disproportionate amounts of web traffic, and get picked up/linked to by trade outlets, but free readers upgrade to paid subscriptions from that type of coverage at a good-not-great rate. Hmm.

For the 2025 holiday season, I launched a small trial run of boozeletter branded merch, which sold out in relatively short order. Fingers’ foray into ecommerce has generated a small but meaningful amount of incremental revenue most months since. While I don’t expect The Fingers Shop to become a transformative source of income, it’s relatively cheap to operate, fun to offer, and helps fund the enterprise. Check out the full inventory and buy something today:

I pack and ship everything myself, and every purchase helps to underwrite more of the coverage and commentary about drinking in America you love.

One of the publishing functions I lost when moving Fingers to a new email platform was the ability to easily publish a podcast of longform interviews with interesting people from within the wild world of booze and beyond. Earlier this year, I resurrected this paid-only boozeletter offering; even more recently, Beehiiv (the platform I currently use) introduced its own native podcast tool, which makes things much smoother. Tune into interviews with:

I’m still dialing in the workflow and cadence for the pod, and trying to figure out how to get the full archive back online. Thanks for your patience on that. But people seem to dig them, and I enjoy the format, so I’m excited to have The Fingers Podcast in the mix.

Over the past few months I’ve been dabbling with video essays of the reporting and analysis I publish here and at VinePair. It’s going… fine? I think? I’m publishing the videos on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but I’m only really focusing on Instagram for now because it’s where Fingers has a dedicated account and the most followers.

As I told a concerned reader this week, the vast majority of my work will always be published in text, if for no other reason than video journalism is insanely time-consuming to produce by comparison. I am a writer first. But the unfortunate reality of the contemporary media landscape is that most social-media platforms are heavily pushing video posts over text (and certainly over links), and most people are getting their “news” from social media. This recent report from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism was a pretty bleak read! Here’s a chart from it:

Fingers’ videos seem to perform decently on Instagram, reliably racking up more engagement and views than the images (memes and article teasers) that I post to the platform. Nothing has really broken out yet, and maybe never will—six years into this, it is very clear to me that critical reporting on the American booze business is a small, deep niche. I’m fine with that! I also genuinely enjoy adapting my coverage into a different format. But because I have no interest in becoming a full-time influencer, and Fingers’ primary revenue stream comes from selling newsletter subscriptions, these videos must ultimately convert viewers into readers in order to be worth doing. At this point, whether they will at a scale that matters is still an open question.

About six months ago, I began including interstitial announcements in editions of Fingers explicitly advertising my availability for speaking engagements. You may have noticed. I love speaking to groups inside and outside the beverage-alcohol industry, and developing new revenue streams is imperative to hedge against the vagaries of subscriber churn and recessionary readership cutbacks, so I decided to get a little more deliberate about this part of the business.

Thanks in part to those ads, and to generous referrals from colleagues (you know who you are!), I’ve already landed a few bookings, and I’m currently negotiating two more engagements for the back half of the year. There have been some one-offs, but the most consistent interest this year has come from brewers guilds: I delivered a keynote address at the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild’s annual conference in April, and I’ll be doing likewise at the Ontario Craft Brewers’ meeting come November. I have a great time doing gigs like this, and audiences seem to appreciate the unorthodox mix of original reporting, rigorous data analysis, and inscrutable industry memes. In-person engagements are fairly time-consuming, and take me away from the beat, so my goal for the next year is to a) book more engagements overall while b) mixing in a few more virtual ones. (I did one this past year, it was fun!)

To that end, if you’d like to book me to present my award-winning reporting on the beverage-alcohol industry to your conference/retreat/team/etc., get in touch at [email protected] to discuss further. See Fingers’ ethics statement about speaking engagements here.