Liz Crowe | Time to get TAPPED

You can craft a novel about a second chance at love, a young/first love, a
May-December love, an older man meets young virgin love, surprise/chance meeting
love, and set that anywhere.

Outer space…a Texas ranch…the fire or police department… a movie set…a giant
corporation…backstage at a rock concert…in the thick of a motorcycle gang…in the
future…or well back in the past…as long as the love story is front and center,
most readers are not that particular about where it’s happening.

However, as authors, we are always encouraged to make our worlds believable. And
when we say “world” we mean that “setting,” be it a humble small Southern town,
or in the emergency room of a bustling metropolitan hospital. I’m sure you’ve
read a book or three where the setting seemed off somehow, as if the author
really didn’t know enough about that world to set the story there but hopes that
no one will notice. I’m one of those who notices, and tries to turn those
mistakes into learning opportunities for my own books.

TAPPED (book one of the Brewing Passion Series from Totally Bound Publishing) is set in a world that I am intimately familiar with—but one that some readers go “uh, no thanks. I could care less about beer, sheesh, Liz give me a faceless, nameless New York corporation instead!”

If you would allow me a few moments worth of words to convince you otherwise,
I’d say that the craft beer business—by all measures both booming and incredibly
hip right now—is one of the coolest, most interesting, dare I say, sexy places
around. It’s made up of many layers—starting with the actual beer brewing which
can be on a small, 100-gallon or so scale, all the way up to 50,000 “barrels”
which translates roughly to 1.2 million gallons of the precious liquid or in the
case of a brewery like Sam Adams, more like six million barrels (multiply that
times 31 to get the number of gallons. It’s a big number!) Some breweries even
have bars attached, which as we all know are some of the best places to both
people-watch and character-formulate.

In TAPPED, a young man born into wealth and a generations-deep food supply business in Grand Rapids, Michigan has a love for craft beer that won’t be denied. Against his domineering parents’ wishes, he enrolls in one of the few certified brewing institutes in Munich, Germany. While in this three-year program (fun fact: one of the only places where your degree earns you the right to be called a “brew master”) he meets a man who becomes his partner in female seduction for a while and who evolves into his life-long friend. He returns home to start his own brewery and his German friend (a better “artist” style of brewer) decides between multiple job offers from already successful, U.S. based craft breweries.

Thanks to his trust fund, and the fact that he has jumped into the business in
its nascent days and not today when the market is grossly overcrowded, his
brewery (Fitzgerald Brewing) becomes a huge success.

The other aspect of this business is the sale of beer to the consumer. There is
a somewhat silly and entirely boring rule which states that all beer (and wine
and liquor) sold in the United States has to flow from the source (the
brewery/winery/distillery) to the final end user (you, the drinker) via a middle
man, or wholesale distributor. There were a lot of at-the-time good reasons for
this post-prohibition, but they’ve fallen by the wayside, even as distribution
companies get bigger, richer, and more entrenched in the craft beer world.

Our brewery-owner hero finds the love of his life in the form of a sassy,
successful, trying-hard-to-prove-something saleswomen at one of his
distributors. Once they hit it off, then hit a snag thanks to my plot, our
intrepid brewery owner introduces his oldest friend from Germany into the
relationship and VIOLA! A super-sexy, craft-beer based ménage novel is born!

I’ve set a lot of my past books in this world and have always been told that the balance between the background and the story is near perfect. I worked hard with my editor to ensure that holds true for TAPPED, this first of at least three novels in this series. For TAPPED (which is, by the way, of the “enemies to lovers” trope) I took my own experience as the founder/owner and sales and marketing director of a successful craft brewery and teased out the parts that make the story more compelling, and a little different from the usual. But I promise to bring a legit veracity to all aspects of this world so it should never feel “off” to you—if it does, be sure and let me know because I like to learn!

So, my challenge to you, future reader and Liz fan—let go of your preconceived
notions about where romance “usually” occurs and dive headlong into this world
with me. Meet Austin Fitzgerald (brewery owner hero), Evelyn Benedict (sassy
saleswoman heroine), and Ross Hoffman (German brewer and secondary hero)—whether
you love a great double IPA or a chocolate, oatmeal stout for your poison or are
more of the herbal tea and lemon water type, you will not be able to stop
reading this compelling, sexy story of love, love lost, and love regained.