Category: Beer writing

A marvellous and stirring long-lost Scots ode to ale from the 18th century

Beer poetry is pretty much always rubbish. Books-full of fine prose have been written about beer, and a fair few excellent aley folk-songs still survive, but plain versifiers seem only to produce dull, plodding rhyming tedium on the subject of malt and hops. I was delighted, then, to stumble serendipitously (I was looking for examples… Read More A marvellous and stirring long-lost Scots ode to ale from the 18th century

Martyn Cornell2 Comments

Strange Tales of Ale – ideal summer reading for the beach-bound beer fan

Of all the different styles of books about beer, the old-fashioned anecdotal ramble, as exemplified by John Bickerdyke’s classic Curiosities of Ale and Beer from 1889, or Richard Boston’s Beer and Skittles from the 1970s, seems to be the rarest. I’m delighted, therefore, to be able to add to the genre with Strange Tales of… Read More Strange Tales of Ale – ideal summer reading for the beach-bound beer fan

Martyn Cornell15 Comments

So who are the big beery twitterers?

Jamie Oliver, the thick-tongued TV chef and hugely successful restaurant entrepreneur (and son of an Essex pub landlord), has 3.3 million followers on Twitter. Which is, you’ll not be shocked to hear, about 2,600 times more Twitter followers than I have. Indeed, it’s quite possibly more followers, my very rough survey suggests, than all the… Read More So who are the big beery twitterers?

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The Oxford Companion to Beer: how the temperature became raised

I was going to blog about the London Brewers Alliance beer festival at Vinopolis last Saturday (great event, let’s see more like it), but since my comments on the Oxford Companion to Beer have driven Garrett Oliver into apoplectic rage, infuriated Pete Brown, and apparently sent waves crashing around the beery blogosphere, I thought it… Read More The Oxford Companion to Beer: how the temperature became raised

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All your beer blogging updates in one place

If anybody has been missing Really Simple Beer Syndication, the American “beer blog aggregator”, since it went down apparently never to rise again a couple of months ago, a very nice chap called Pelle Stridh has put together a site called All About Beer which aggregates the feeds of all your favourite beer bloggers from… Read More All your beer blogging updates in one place

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Michael Hardman MBE – Mighty Beer Enthusiast

Congratulations to Michael Hardman, one of the four founding members of Camra, appointed an MBE (that’s Member of the Order of the British Empire for my overseas readers) in the New Year’s Honours List “for services to the Campaign for Real Ale and the brewing industry”. Since Michael has probably done more, in his way,… Read More Michael Hardman MBE – Mighty Beer Enthusiast

Martyn Cornell6 Comments