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Blogging and writing Generalisations about beer culture

That’s Not A Story Pt 2: Doom vs. Triumph

Stories about beer, especially in the mainstream press, often seem to follow one of two templates: collapse and defeat, or resurgence and triumph. But the truth is often somewhere in between.

We were going to say ‘Boringly, the truth is often somewhere in between’ but then we thought, hold on — it’s not as boring as the default positions of Oh Woe! or Yay, Awesome! trotted out time after time, seemingly on auto-pilot.

In the article we’ve just written about mild for All About Beer we touch upon this tendency because mild has been the subject of many overly-optimistic MILD IS BACK! articles over the years. They’re expressions of wishful thinking, or propaganda, or a bit of both. Our argument is essentially that mild is in the process of becoming, like Gose or Berliner Weisse, a local curiosity — not extinct, just rare, a base for experimentation, and of more interest to we nerds than to drinkers in the real world.

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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.)

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Blogging and writing

How to Beer Blog

We’ve been blogging since 2007 and this post summarises what we’ve learned in that time.

We got the nerve to write it after asking subscribers to our email newsletter if they thought it was a good idea, and after our online communication award from the British Guild of Beer Writers in 2014.

If you’re thinking of starting a beer blog, reviving an old one, or are struggling to keep one going, we hope you’ll find it useful.

Leaving the Shire.

Starting Out

This is how we’d go about starting a beer blog from scratch today.

  1. Lay solid foundations. Write 5-10 good posts on a range of subjects in your area of interest of 200-800 words each, posting at least once a week. Hardly anyone will be reading them but it doesn’t matter – you’ll be finding a voice, getting into the groove, learning your blogging software, and preparing for the next stage. (And if you can’t manage five posts, then maybe blogging isn’t for you.) Don’t make your first post ‘So, I’ve decided to start a blog! Let’s hope this goes well!’ Just plunge in with proper content.
  2. Get a Twitter account and/or Facebook page. Include the term ‘beer blogger’ and a link to your blog (lots of people, oddly, don’t do this) in your bio. Then follow/like other beer bloggers. Hopefully, they’ll do what we do and check out your link, where they’ll find a month or two’s worth of decent content which suggests you’re worth keeping an eye on. By all means follow the big ones like Pete Brown – he’s always interesting – but you might get a more immediate response from others who are at a similar stage in the process to you. Don’t mither people: ‘I’ve just started a blog – please take a look and Retweet!’
Categories
Blogging and writing opinion

Blogging About Blogging: Speak Your Brains!

Pipe, hat and pint.

Bad news: this is a blog post about blog posting. There’ll be a post that’s actually about beer later today. If you choose to read on, don’t say we didn’t warn you!

We’ve been reflecting lately on our tendency to self-censor. We used to shelve posts quite frequently, finished and illustrated, because, at the last minute, we found ourselves anticipating a bad-tempered response and couldn’t be bothered to face it.

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Blogging and writing

News, Nuggets & Longreads 14/06/2014

Welcome to the Inn, 1952.

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.