Meet Maurice Daniel

Introducing Beats Brews & Life and its creator Maurice Daniel.

Maurice, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My personal passion for beat culture and beer runs very deep. I first discovered the world of craft beer around 2005, and hip-hop has been a constant for me from the very beginning since I was a kid. I’ve been experimenting and making music seriously for the last ten years and one of the key ingredients in my creativity is having an interesting beer close by. In my opinion, I think that good beer, good music, and good people just kind of flow together naturally. I’ve always felt that some of the greatest conversations and interactions between people happen over a good beer while listening to and talking about music. It just kind of goes hand-in-hand to me.

I had just started podcasting with my then-girlfriend, now wife, around 2018, and thought to myself, it would be cool to just hang out with producers and talk shop over good beer while playing some really good music. That’s where the idea was birthed. I brought my brother in beer Bernard in after we connected through our job. We hit it off naturally being two of the only black beer nerds in our circle, as well as the fact that we both have a mutual love for the Washing Football Team. It’s been on since then. Bernard is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to beer. I thought I knew a lot until I met him. I call him my beer sensei. Now we’re just trying to connect the worlds of beat culture and beer culture as well as introducing people of color to our favorite beverage.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s been far from a smooth road, lol. We started in my living room with some basic equipment that I had laying around. In those first episodes, the audio quality wasn’t so great. The room had a crazy echo, sometimes we couldn’t record live beats sets, files got lost. We did everything the hard way and learned from trial and error along the way. The equipment that we originally used required so much work in the editing process and took forever. Now we record in a professional podcasting studio with much better audio and even video. We’ve come a long way.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
As of now, we mostly interview music producers for our podcast. We nerd out with beatmakers and drink beer. We’re all about highlighting artisanship, whether in craft beer, music production, food, you name it. If it’s artistic and we can talk about it over a beer, then we’re all in. What we’re mostly trying to achieve is finding the intersections that make artists relate to other artists, highlighting the similarities that we all have as creatives. I think what we’re most proud of is our latest project and what we want to make happen for the future.

We’re currently getting ready to release the first episode of a new series for us called The Beats Brews & Life Bottle Share Project. It’s similar to the podcast with the best in Lo-Fi, Boom-Bap, and just beat culture as the background, but it takes a turn into interviewing a wider range of creatives. We sat down with a DJ, toured a brewery with a head brewmaster, and then had a round table with myself as a producer, my co-host Bernard who happens to be a chef, and a few different types of creatives. What we want to happen next is for this whole thing to become a travel series, doing this all over the world, meeting creatives of all kinds, and sampling beer and cuisine everywhere while making amazing music.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
My favorite memory from childhood was when my mother bought me my first walkman for my birthday. I remember going to the music store and loading up on a bunch of tapes and CDs. It was my first bit of independence and control when it came to what music I got to listen to and it definitely fueled my infatuation with music.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.beatsbrewsandlife.com
• Email: beatsbrewsandlife@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beatsbrewslifeshow/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beatsbrewsandlife
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/beatsbrewsandl1

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