I have been a professional brewer of sorts, for more years than I care to think about, mainly making beer for other people and rarely for my own drinking, add to that I have spent a lot of years travelling and drinking with people who genuinely innovate. Hell, I even sold beer. Some of them are ex-homebrewers. Talented so-and-sos who now stand in front of vessels either enormous or tiny and coax remarkable flavour out of exactly the same four ingredients I have in my garage.

Which brings me to a question I keep hearing in one form or another: what should you spend three hundred pounds on to become an innovator in beer?

A flight somewhere. A road trip. A stack of books. A small homebrew system. Brewing every day for four years. A day brewing with me and a curry afterwards. All reasonable answers, and all beside the point, because if you intend to actually innovate it is going to cost you considerably more than three hundred pounds. Not in money necessarily. In miles, and in years.

My own curiosity about beer wasn’t cultivated. It was forced. I was trying to make my parents’ business work, not to make it hugely profitable, but to make it different and survive, which meant searching the corners of the beer world for things nobody else in the UK was bringing back. That turned into years on the roads of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia, trips to California and half a dozen other American states, sitting with brewers I had enormous respect for, drinking more beer than I care to account for, and, the part that mattered most, meeting the actual influencers rather than the people with the biggest follower counts.

I don’t have a degree in brewing. My honest observation of formal education is that the useful part happens afterwards, when you spend years unlearning what you were taught and working things out for yourself. If you want a curriculum, here is mine: learn to cook. Learn to eat. Eat food that takes you somewhere else in the world. oh, and the difference between sterile and hygienic. Then get out and go there.

Here is my uncomfortable view of the phrase. “Beer innovation,” as it is generally used in industry, is a marketing term for taking the language and the effort of smaller, faster-moving brewers and finding a way to sell it more cheaply. There are only so many angles to exploit before the big fish copy you. The options facing a small brewer are therefore narrow and unromantic: innovate continuously to stay ahead, sell out, or get copied to death.

One thing that would genuinely help in the UK is a proper competition. Not one organised around dispense, cask against keg, as though that were the interesting question, but open to any brewer who wants to enter, with real breadth across style and presentation. If judging it properly takes three days, it takes three days. Make the prize worth having and you will get real innovation, because you will have created a target worth aiming at.

And if all that sounds like too much effort, there is a much cheaper option that almost nobody takes seriously. Go and meet the people who drink your beer, in your own town, and listen to them. Not the ones who heap on fake praise online. The ones who hand you money across a bar. They are what makes you a business.

Just be aware of the limits of that exercise. Ask them what they want and they will ask you for a faster horse.

(edit, written against a backdrop of a lot of social media selling a conference)