beer blogging and writing Archives - Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

A quill pen.

The other day in conversation on Twitter with Nathaniel Southwood (@NateDawg27) we were prompted to think about beer blogs and bloggers again.

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut following the same few people you’ve always engaged with since year dot and thus get the idea that Beer Blogging is Dead when some or all of them give up the game. Meanwhile, whole new waves of blogs have come, and maybe gone, and probably been replaced by yet more.

We share round-ups of interesting stuff every Saturday, trying to cast the net as far and wide as possible, which hopefully helps highlight interesting writers but we sometimes end up featuring the same names time and again for various reasons.

So, by way of a bit of extra sauce, what we’re going to do here is provide a list (if not’s rude to say so) of less well-known bloggers we’re following via RSS (we use Feedly) with brief notes on what they’re about.

You might not like the look of all of them, and inclusion doesn’t necessarily equate to endorsement, but hopefully you’ll find at least one or two new things to spice up your feeds.

Inside the mind of CAMRA

We hope CAMRA appreciates the brilliant if unsanctioned work of its activist bloggers. All the paid-for PR and press releases in the world can’t compete with the kind of insight we get daily from Maeib, Tandleman, Steve and others.

Recently, all three have come into their own, explaining the murky world of Good Beer Guide selection to outsiders in posts like those linked above. When we questioned why a particular pub wasn’t in the Good Beer Guide a few months back, Steve commented here, chased up with his contacts in the region in question, and then posted a detailed response here. Although Steve is careful to remind everyone that he isn’t speaking on behalf of CAMRA when he blogs, he certainly boosts its image by doing so.

We still don’t understand why, in some towns, the GBG lists so many indifferent Wetherspoons and Greene King pubs; and we’d rather be told, straight up, which are the most interesting pubs in town, rather than those with the most consistent beer quality (inconsistency is half the fun with real ale, right?); but at least we know now that the decisions aren’t made by robots or at random.