Around the Beery Blogoshire (November 2013)

This post has been inspired by Pub Curmudgeon’s suggestion that beer blogging is a bit sluggish at the moment, its energy perhaps having been sapped by Twitter.

On the one hand, he’s right — some stalwarts have slowed down in recent months and certain topics seem to come up time and again, the same points being hammered home with nothing new being added. (Maybe we’ve been guilty of this ourselves.)

On the other, for each blog that peters out, a new one pops into existence, and we have certainly found plenty of interesting reading in the last few weeks.

• Curmudgeon’s piece on Pete Brown and Bill Bradshaw’s book about cider and Jeff ‘Beervana’ Alworth’s on the new Pocket Beer Guide, like all good reviews, are interesting in their own right.
• Facetious attempts to define craft beer from Ed and Rob gave us plenty of food for thought: amid the sarcasm are grains of truth about both what ‘craft beer’ means and the tensions it has revealed in the industry.
• Serial letter-writer Keith Flett also blogs about all sort of things including beer. We enjoyed this post about the arrival of Black IPA in that most British, middle-class, middle-of-the-road supermarkets, Marks & Spencer.

• The Beer Nut continues a run of particularly good form with posts which, while always beer reviews first and foremost, also weave insightful commentary in among the tasting notes. This, for example, has some excellent observations on big breweries and their attempts to ‘do craft’.
• Christopher at I Think About Beer tipped us off to His & Hers Beer Notes, a beer review blog with a difference: one half of the team writes prose, while the other gives her impressions of each beer in the form of a drawing.
• Though he doesn’t seem to have much time for us (*sniff*), we always keep an eye on what Red Nev is writing. Having been researching the origins and early history of the CAMRA beer festival for our book, we found this post about the politics of charging for entry fascinating.
• Ron Pattinson usually posts twenty-five or so times a day, but our favourites are currently the Let’s Brew historic home brew recipes he writes in collaboration with Kristen England. Even if you don’t brew, you’re bound to learn something.
• Wee Beefy continues his dispatches from the front line of dedicated boozing in Sheffield and surrounding areas in his own inimitable style. We like him because he tells us things we don’t already know and goes to places we haven’t been.
• Without Twitter, we’d have missed lots of interesting posts about beer from blogs which aren’t primarily about our favourite intoxicant, such as this interview with Mark Tranter, late of Dark Star, about his new venture, Burning Sky.
• Lars Marius Garshol on Norwegian farmhouse yeast — what’s not to like?
• Richard Taylor at the Beercast is developing a challenging, investigative approach which offers a real contrast to the cosy, pally, industry-dependent mode that dominates British beer writing. Let’s have more of this!
• Connor at Beer Battered tends to write longish, meaty posts about, e.g., craft beer in Japan (three parts). His interview with the brewer at Five Points is also worth a read.
• UPDATE: forgot to include Leigh’s post about the Old Peacock, a pub in Leeds targeting a very specific niche market.

This was just a quick round-up based on things we’ve bookmarked, shared and re-Tweeted. If you’ve spotted any other good reads (by other people, not yourself…) drop links below.