One thing you notice when you don’t have an address you can have your magazine subscriptions sent to is which magazines, including those about beer, have the best presence on newsstands.
Beer Advocate, for instance, has none — by choice. Brew Your Own and Beer Magazine are particularly strong (with the latter appearing in gas stations across Canada). You can count on finding DRAFT and Imbibe at most Borders and Barnes & Noble, while All About Beer is a little more hit and miss. Which is why I still haven’t seen the AABM with Santa on the cover, but yesterday tracked down the January-February DRAFT.
So a bit of news. After putting a personality such as Leslie Nielsen or Jeremy Roenick on the cover for its first 14 issues DRAFT went with a big old glass of beer. Interesting given yesterday’s reports that brewing giants Anheuser-Busch and Heineken have hired new celebrity spokesmen for their beers.
Good to see beer as the star. The cover says “The Best of Beer” with 2009 in large numbers behind the glass. The words promote “25 Beers of the Year,” “200-plus Top Beer Bars” and “35 Ways Breweries are Going Green.”
I’ve already rambled on enough about the silliness of “best” lists, so do what you want with the link. Instead I’ll confess there is one end of the year best I look forward to. That’s Stephen Beaumont’s Taste of the Year. I don’t always agree but he seems to get it right two years out of three and this is one of them.
The beer? Go look yourself. You’ll see it’s from the same brewery as two other beers on the DRAFT list.