musing

With apologies to Samuel Beckett . . .

The current, but perhaps not ongoing, demise of really simple BEER syndication has been noted in comments here and in a devoted post by Alan McLeod. For those of you don’t know, it is a site that aggregates the latest rss feeds from hundreds of beer blogs.

Jonathan Surratt invented both RSBS and The Beer Mapping Project, another free web utility that has improved the quality of our beer drinking lives. He wrote in an email that Twitter now works for him much as RSBS did before, but he’s not ready to let it pass. He’s got a lot going on — he’s the web director for Draft Magazine and devotes (gives away) time to various other projects — so cut him some slack.

When I started this blog I did a lot more pointing to “good reads,” but between RSBS and bloggers discovering how to use Twitter and Facebook to promote their posts that seemed redundant. I figured, probably incorrectly but I’ve learned to live with such ignorance, that if I was seeing three to five notifications every time a new beer post went up that you were seeing at least one.

I wouldn’t begin to attempt to replicate the service RSBS provides, with sometimes more than 100 posts a day, but here are a half dozen recent posts you might have missed and should read while waiting for RSBS.

Requests like this seem to arrive in cycles and unfortunately we’re in an up cycle.

So I thought I’d pass one of them along, in this case with the name and contact information removed. The subject line is “My Home Museum Beer.” I’m not trying to be anti-social but the PS tickled me (I don’t usually read that far).

Hello.
My name is [removed]. I the citizen of the Ukraine. I the big admirer and the collector of Beer and beermats. I have my own family collection.
In addition to beer and beermats I collect any information concerning alcoholic production and alcoholic manufacture.
Now I work as that that I collect the catalogue of brands various alcoholic drinks from all world.
I plan to write the book – the catalogue about the description of drinks, the companies, and features of cocktails. I hope for the big circulation and popularity of this book.
If it probably I like to ask from you the information on your company and about beer made by your company.
From myself personally I would like to ask and to you would be grateful for what or a souvenir with a logo of your brewery in my collection.
I hope I have not taken away from you a lot of time the request.
Yours faithfully [name removed].

My adress:
[details removed]
Makeevka
86154
UKRAINE
P.S.: Perhaps you have received many requests for souvenirs from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and probably faced with such people as lovers freebies. I am very ashamed of these people. Please do not ignore my message.

See, I didn’t.

Southern Star Brewing in Texas basically doubled production from 2008 to 2009 and expects to do the same again this year, according to a story last week in the Houston Chronicle.

Curiously, a the manager at a Houston bar says the founders are smart to grow the brewery “at a slow, deliberate pace.” One hundred percent hardly sounds slow, but obviously he remembers that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Because of a story (for print) I just finished I happen to have an example at my fingertips.

From 1991 through 1997 the number of brewpubs in the United States increased from 155 to 845 (growing about 5.5 fold). Those pubs brewed 112,154 barrels of beer in 1991 and 691,879 in 1997 (increasing 6.2 times over).

What would have happened had they done the same during the next six years (until 2003) and then again for the next six?

Goodness. There would have been more than 25,000 brewpubs in the country in 2009 brewing 26.5 million barrels. And that was just brewpubs, which produced 12.5 percent of craft beer in 1997 and make a little less than 8 percent today.

We knew that wasn’t going to happen. In fact brewpub production turned flat in 1998 and has remained pretty much the same since. Craft beer sales kept climbing, reaching 9.1 million barrels . . . but who knows when they will hit 26 million?

Tom Johnson makes a flat-out statement in the Palate Press: Nobody reads wine blogs.

A year ago I was an unsuccessful political blogger, entertaining myself and almost no one else. Now, I’m a wine blogger doing largely the same thing, except that no one calls me a Nazi in comments anymore. Though my wine blog’s audience is only a tenth the size of my failed political blog’s audience, I’m informed by people-who-know that I am on the cusp of great success.

There’s no way to sugar coat this: wine blogging is failing its readers.

The evidence for that failure: with very few exceptions, wine blogs don’t even have readers.

The baseline numbers are appalling. Using traffic data aggregated by Cellarer and traffic rankings provided by Truth Laid Bear, the top 100 wine blogs combined would be the 280th most popular blog in the country.

Even looking at wine blogging as a niche product, we’re a disaster.

He explains why, so amble on over Palate Press and read the whole thing, then continue to Steve Heimhoff’s blog, where he asks if wine blogs are an endangered species.

I haven’t seen similar metrics for beer sites (although Martyn Cornell did something along those lines last month, limiting it to UK blogs, and 47 comments followed). Based upon sparse numbers I have seen the best read wine blogs draw more traffic than the best read beer blogs.

Does that mean beer blogs are particularly influential? Not compared to Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, I’d say.

Blogging about blogging seems way too much like navel-gazing — and certainly limits the potential audience &#151 but what I’m really interested in is the future of a) journalism and b) beer journalism. That raises a couple more questions I’m not going to try to answer now, because then we’d be into serious navel-gazing. What is beer journalism (or is there even such a thing)? And what is beer news?

Will it happen in the form of blogs or some other way online? Make no mistake. The stories you repeat to friends over a pint will be reported first online. Will they arrive 140 characters at a time? Will you read them primarily on your phone? Will there be a tasting app on your iPad? Some of these questions are related to how and some to what.

I don’t think there are answers to either yet.