This April it’s two years since we started this blog and what a two years it’s been.

From a bored Tuesday night wondering what we could do that was better than sitting on our arses, to writing for thousands of visitors each month, we’re pretty proud of our little hobby and we spend most of the time thinking about how we can make it better (unfortunately the day job prevents that from actually happening!).

We've come along way baby...

...from the days of cocktails and Mythos!

We don’t always write posts as much as we’d like too and we don’t always write about things as quickly as we’d like to (nothing like a blog post once the ship has sailed eh?!). And despite the out of date ‘About’ page it’s all worth it when we get nice comments or bump into people at beer festivals who tell us how much they enjoy reading our musings.

So it’s great to be able to get involved with a project that aims to bring together the beer community and hopefully contribute something useful for other people who want to find out about beer or write about it.

In late May we’ll be attending the European Beer Bloggers Conference and little me will be sitting on a panel entitled “Do’s and Don’t of Beer Blogging”, designed to provide an answer to the questions about beer blogging that Google just can’t answer. Think of it like a beery search engine that’s drunk waaaay too many beers and might not provide coherent answers.

European Beer Bloggers Conference

I’ll be joining author Pete Brown and journalist Melissa Cole to give you the chance “to learn a few new tricks, discuss important issues, and ask a question you have never had answered”.

There’s currently plenty of spaces left for the conference which starts on 20th May (although expect some drinking in London from the night before!) and you can sign up here.There’s also the chance to win a free conference pass. Read the rest of this entry »

Wils Swan was £1.49 a pint whilst the footy was on - and I had one for each Leeds goal (plus our penalty save!)

There are arguably too many moments I cringe at to call myself a responsible drinker with any real level of conviction. The ones that came in the gap year before I university are mostly classified under the ‘regrets’ section of my brain. As year one of university unfolded the balance of ‘I never want to remember doing that’ versus ‘I’m pretty pleased with myself’ was evenly weighted and shifted towards to positive end of the spectrum as I matured, with a few ‘we’ll laugh at that in a few weeks’ moments thrown in for good measure.

But at 26 I thought I’d stopped doing things like singing Leeds songs in rowdy northern cities not called Leeds and waking people up in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately Saturday’s combination of Jermaine Beckford’s 95th and a half minute equaliser and Stone Ruination IPA being on draught (or draft should I say) at the last pub of our #twissup crawl, ensured the night was one that would bring back some of those youthful moments of folly.

Returning to the Hillsborough Hotel after a skinful of cask conditioned Wild Swan and a liquid supper of fancy beers from the newly opened Sheffield Tap, a bunch of bedraggled beer bloggers struggled to open the blue painted door at the front of the pub. Having no qualifications in door opening and a more general problem with late night coordination turned out not to be a career changing combination as the shiny Yale key duly snapped in the lock leaving the burning eyes of my beer chums planted firmly on my back. Read the rest of this entry »

When I went down to the British Guild of Beer Writers dinner a couple of weeks ago I had a fantastic night. But the day after topped it all off with a pub crawl around London starting with Mark Dredge, Tim Hampson and Zak Avery in the Market Porter, and continuing across London town with Knut Albert, Ally Shaw and John the Beer Nut (via The Rake, Greenwich Union, The Wenlock Arms, The Gunmakers Arms and beyond).

I knew I’d taken a group photo at some point, I clearly remembered balancing my camera on a precipitous ledge in the Wenlock Arms, but for the life of me couldn’t find the resulting image.

Until now! And it made me smile and remember how great it is to meet up with like minded beer folk and talk beer and drink beer.

Beer bloggers unite over a pint or three in the Wenlock Arms

To good times, sláinte!

From left to right: Ally Shaw (FeralStrumpet), The Beer Nut (John Duffy), Knut Albert, Mark Dredge and me, FletchtheMonkey (Mark Fletcher, Real Ale Reviews).