Session #62: what drives beer bloggers?

To round out a week (or is it a month?) of navel gazing, here’s our contribution to this month’s Session, hosted by Brewpublic.

We can’t say for sure what drives others, but we know what drives us, and it’s not the same thing as when we started back in 2007.

Then, it was a desire to give structure to a developing interest in beer. Other ways to achieve the same end would have been becoming active in CAMRA, scooping, rating or beer label collecting. None of those appealed. We also wanted to test ourselves: could we understand blogging, its rules and conventions, and do it well?

It gave us much needed extra stimulus, prodding the little grey cells into action when they were exhausted from the office; it sent us to places we wouldn’t otherwise have gone; and it led to fun nights in the pub with Argentine, American, Irish, Norwegian, expat Scottish and expat English beer geeks we wouldn’t have met if we didn’t blog.

Now, though, it’s a habit, and if we stopped blogging, we’d feel like quitters. We nearly wrapped up last year as our jobs reached peaks of stressfulness before the move to Cornwall. Instead, we took a break, and, after a little while, found things we wanted to say piling up in text files and notebooks.

So, in conclusion, what drives bloggers? Perhaps, in the most general sense, it’s wanting to have a say, rather than simply observing from the back of the hall.

If you’re ever thought about starting a beer blog, don’t hesitate, do it. Take time to look at how other blogs you like go about it; be sociable — join the conversation with comments, links and posts in response to other bloggers; and try to stick at it for at least a year, posting more than once a week.