Michael Jackson, beer and whisky writer, died on August 30th 2007, in his 65th year.

Here are some of the things I liked about him, and some of the reasons why I will miss him.

I liked his soft-spokenness. I knew he lectured a lot in America, to vast and enthusiastic audiences, and this gentle, hesitant, almost mumbling quality therefore came as a surprise to me. Yet when he began speaking, he had a way of expressing himself which commanded your attention. You soon forgot the lack of volume; indeed, maybe the lack of volume made you listen all the more intently. I particularly envied his huge repertoire of anecdote, often gently amusing yet always germane, with which he seasoned the points he was making.

I liked his physical appearance, which slowly transformed from ‘70s groovy to wildly professorial in his last years. He had very large, watery eyes which seemed to have a life of their own, oscillating gently and almost independently of one another. He wore glasses, yet would usually be looking up at you over the top of them in a gently schoolmasterly way, as if he was challenging you to remember exactly what he was saying. The hair and beard grew ever more unruly with the passing of the years. Professor … or rabbi? Either way, the repository of great scholarship, albeit in a secular, non-academic field. I love the fact that a Yorkshire Jew (ok, his mother was a gentile but that’s just a technicality) became the Pope of Whisky and the Archbishop of English Ale.

Michael, famously, lived to work. I remember staying at the Port Charlotte Hotel with him during the Islay whisky festival of 2002, and watching the chaos of multi-tasking to which he was habitually prone: camera crews, newspaper deadlines, interviews, phone conversations, appointments ... As I’d head gratefully for bed, Michael always seemed to be heading back to his room to write a piece whose deadline had expired a week earlier. I knew I couldn’t live like that. Yet I never saw him exasperated or evidently stressed; he always seemed calm and unruffled. I never saw his sense of humour fail, either.

The beer and whisky worlds are dominated (unlike the wine world) by large corporate interests, and there would have been many opportunities for Michael to sell out to those, with endorsements or compromised editorial coverage. He never did that. I could find nothing sleazy about him at all; indeed there was a sort of charming innocence about his pursuit of knowledge and his championing of the excellent which was both endearing and admirable.

He wasn’t vain. He didn’t constantly underline his own brilliance or laud his own achievements in the way that lesser, more insecure journalists are prone to. He travelled, discovered, described.

Beer and whisky are both industries in a way that wine isn’t: they produce consistent products whose very aim is to be the same from year to year, from one bottle to another. They are both dominated by large producers and large brands. This makes them more difficult to write about than wine, since there isn’t the same ready fund of stories to draw on. Michael’s years on the road were admirable compensation for that: his writing was never repetitive or dreary.

The last time I saw him was when I interviewed him for a BBC Food Programme feature shortly before Christmas 2006. We were at The White Horse in Parson’s Green, tasting the C19 Bass beers unearthed last year in Burton-upon-Trent. Michael wasn’t well, and I remember thinking as I recorded the interview that he rambled so far and wide that the recording might be unusable. When we came to edit it, though, we found as usual that he had made some telling points, and that gentle, witty, slightly laconic voice made it into the programme, reminding listeners that he was still learning about and still marvelling at the beauty of the human creation to which he had given his life. We carried on talking until almost everyone else had left. I remember the darkness of that London night, and taking a last look at the slightly stooping, slightly lost figure in the now-empty upstairs room above the pub bar, and hoping very strongly that all would be well with him.

I never travelled with him professionally on long journeys, and geographically we never lived near each other, so I never spent time with him socially. I would have liked that, though – I’m sure the stories would have been endless, rich and humane, and I would have learned even more from him than I already have.