Drink Talking Article in The Publican by Renata Pankova, Chairman, Budweiser Budvar UK

Jan 24, Drink Talking Article in The Publican by Renata Pankova, Chairman, Budweiser Budvar UK

  London is hosting the second world beer bloggers’ conference, May 20-22 (the first was held in November in Boulder, Colorado). I know that a lot of people, including the editor of the Publican, whose opinions I have the greatest respect for, have expressed their doubts about the value of some beer bloggers and their role so they will probably be less than enthusiastic about the conference.

There is a feeling that many bloggers are simply geeks in danger of getting carried away by their undisciplined enthusiasms. This can lead, among other deplorable things, to unwarranted exposure for weird beers that nobody but another geek would be interested in, thus undermining the revolution in beer appreciation that is going on in this country.

I would have a lot of sympathy with this point of view if I really believed the idea behind it; that every blogger is a journalist manqué.  Although a lot of our most consummate beer writers are bloggers, like Publican columnist Pete Brown, not all beer bloggers are journalists. Rather they are cerebral drinkers who for the first time in history have the tools to address a wider audience than just their mates round the pub table, without having to go through all the hoops that getting published in a conventional way requires..

The rise of the beer blogger also means that for the first time a consumer can actually stand out with a voice and a name rather than being a statistic collected on a clip board or imprisoned in a focus group. The more millennially inclined enthusiasts of beer bloggery have seen it as a way of challenging and perhaps overturning the present way the accepted beer writers and gurus along with the brewers’ comms people taste and review beer. Maybe they see the blog as a way of making beer appreciation accessible to more people but with only 80 bloggers expected at the world conference they are going to be a bit thin on the ground for firing up a revolution of this kind in the UK.

Personally I think we should regard beer bloggers as friends and allies in these post-global times where localism is celebrated and word of mouth (the beer blog being after all only a cyber version of this) is more important than ever before, indeed every pub should have one and I for one wish their event every success.

2010-12-28