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Blogging and writing

The Best of B&B in 2015

These end-of-year round-up posts are a combination of therapy, house-keeping and ‘ICYMI’ trumpet blowing.

ICYMI, as you probably know, stands for ‘in case you missed it’ and we’ve previously suggested is synonymous with BIDGEAFT — Because It Didn’t Get Enough Attention First Time.

Trumpet instructions.

The Best, Sez Us…

These are the posts from 2015 of which we’re proudest, whether anyone read them or not.

→ Proper Job IPA: Cornwall via Oregon — How St Austell’s Roger Ryman was inspired by an American beer to brew one of the UK’s earliest strong, citrusy IPAs. (15 January.)

→ Williams Bros: Craft Before It Was a Thing — A story omitted from Brew Britannia given the standalone treatment for a round of #BeeryLongreads. (28 February.)

→ Bona Fide Travellers: Fibbing for a Pint — A look at an oddity of licensing law which saw determined drinkers wandering the country to earn the right to drink outside licensed hours. (24 March)

→ Types of UK Brewery — One of our occasional attempts to categorise, this time with a big chart. (24 April.)

Chart of UK brewery types.

→ When the Sober Are Strange — Reflections on merry social drunkenness at Padstow’s May Day celebrations: ‘For summer is acome unto day…’ (7 May.)

→ The Good, The Bad & The Murky — The big one — 12,000 words picking up where Brew Britannia left off, covering the rise of canned craft beer, the Bermondsey Beer Mile and other such developments. (2 July.)

→ In REGION You Must Try BEER — What, if any, are the regional beer specialities of the UK? Mild in the Midlands, porter in London and Very Pale Ale in Manchester, perhaps? (26 August.)

→ The Quiet One — Just out, a profile of Peter Elvin, a brewer who is decidedly not a rock star.

A brain.
SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons (edited).

…and Sez You

These are, according to Google Analytics, our most-read posts published in the last year. You will note that BrewDog, CAMRA and writing about blogging continue to generate considerably more interest than most of the stuff in our (ahem…) curated list above.

  1. The Good, The Bad & The Murky
  2. How to Beer Blog 
  3. Beer Writing Clichés — Call for Submissions
  4. So Who Are the Usual Suspects?
  5. A Disruptive Influence
  6. Williams Bros: Craft Before it Was a Thing
  7. CAMRA and Lager: Euro-Fizz or Pure Beer?
  8. Choosing a Lager in the UK
  9. The Great Craft Beer Swindle
  10. Back of a Beer Mat — Free e-book!
  11. Proporval
  12. The Story Behind That Photograph
  13. What If… BrewDog & Greene King?
  14. What’s the History of Bar Snacks?
  15. It’s Meant to be Like That: 2015 Edition

All in all, 2015 was pretty productive — about 250 ‘proper’ posts amounting to something like 150,000 words — and generally good fun, too. Here’s hoping 2016, with a few tweaks and a bit of spring cleaning on our part, offers more of the same.