That question has reared it’s head again: “Is beer blogging dead?” Here’s our response in the form of a special all Blogoshire version of our Saturday morning round-up.
→ Jeff at Beervana has been pondering (not for the first time) the meaning of ‘beer styles’: “I drank a bottle of Crux’s Better Off Red, a “barrel-aged Flanders-style red ale.” What exactly was Larry Sidor thinking when he used those terms? What should I be thinking when I read them?”
→ Adrian Tierney-Jones isn’t a blogger, but he does write a blog, and he’s been expansive and feisty of late. His piece on how fed up he is of ‘beervangelism’ and the ‘sacred duty’ of the beer writer is a great read.
→ Lars Marius Garshol has a profile of an accountant who became a brewer after a stroke left him out of work and depressed: “He travelled around the US for a while, fairly aimlessly by the sound of it, until he hit upon an abandoned brewery in Montana. This, he decided, was what he was going to do.”
→ It’s not something we’d be comfortable doing, but Tandleman recently took a thermometer to some London pubs and came up with numbers to support his feeling that cask ale in the capital is generally too warm: one pint came in at 17.2°c!
→ Connor Murphy’s survey of UK supermarket beer continued with a trip to ASDA, where he managed to find decent beers across a range of styles for a tenner.
→ Paul Bailey (no relation) has been posting a series of longish pieces on the family breweries of Britain, based largely on his personal experience as a drinker from the 1970s to the present. This one on Ruddles is a good place to start.
→ Beers Manchester has been undertaking a survey of the city’s historic pubs. Part one appeared some time ago, but parts two and three are new.
Some final thoughts: there are more blogs than ever and we think the standard of writing and research has improved across the board since we started in 2007.
As with breweries, though, the more there are, the harder it is to make an impression, and thus harder to get a conversation going.
Let’s put it bluntly: there is no demand for another blog reviewing readily available beers!
That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it if you enjoy it, but don’t expect anyone else to whoop with excitement.
If we were starting a new blog tomorrow, we would want to make sure it either (a) had a distinct and dazzling prose style or (b) covered something no-one was writing about. Preferably both.
7 replies on “News, Nuggets & Longreads 14/06/2014”
“It’s not something we’d be comfortable doing, but Tandleman recently took a thermometer to some London pubs ”
It’s not something Tandleman was comfortable doing either as you’ll see from my blog. But numbers speak louder than a general complaint of “it’s a touch warm.”
If I was starting a new blog tomorrow I’d want to write about what I felt like, when I felt like it, and contribute to the “conversation” mainly by leaving comments on other people’s blogs. If you’re not doing it for fun, why bother?
I am surprised by the suggestion there are more beer bloggers. Is it that they all look the same that caused me to miss this?
We haven’t counted, but it seems that way to us. Maybe we’re just more aware of them through Twitter and so on.
PS: what do you mean by ATJ is not a blogger? He blogs. It’s like being a poet and a playwright, isn’t it?
He might step in and correct me, but we had the impression that he doesn’t self-identify as a blogger and doesn’t quite like being described as such. Certainly heard other writers insist on the distinction.
Dear oh dear. Poor darlings. I shall stick to electronique essayistes for such gentle souls.