The hunt for 2025's "multicultural LDA Zillennials" starts now

Editor’s note: Your fearless Fingers editor is taking a breather after a week of reporting on the road. Check out my dispatches from the 2025 Craft Brewers Conference if you haven’t yet, and/or enjoy the special edition below. Regular programming resumes next week!—Dave.

Last year, for the first time in its nearly five-year publishing history, Fingers issued a Buzzwords of The Week of The Year award for excellence (derogatory) in bev-alc corporatespeak. The winner was “Multicultural LDA Zillennials,” which first appeared in these digital pages on July 14th, 2024 and never looked back. Second place went to “Over-indexing on GenZennials,” from an edition of the Weekender that was published on October 27th of that year. Nice to see the top spots in the inaugural Buzzwords of The Week of The Year (BoTWoTY) outing taken by such jarring trade jargon. Really impressive stuff.

In 2024, I selected the top contenders from each half of the year, and asked Friends of Fingers to vote in a head-to-head match-up. But we’re doing it even bigger and better in 2025. Today, Fingers publishes its first ever quarterly recap of Buzzwords, with 10 mind-melting entrants from the first fiscal quarter of the year—January through March (alright, technically early April.) Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to evaluate each weekly winner against its contemporaries and vote for the best/worst Buzzword of The Week of The Quarter. Please accept it.

There’s been a tremendous amount of palaver flowing forth from the booze industry lately, so each weekly BoTW segment is reprinted in full for you to get reacquainted. Take a scroll down memory lane, then come back up and vote in Fingers first-ever quarterly run-off:

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