Hello. We’ve decided to wind up this newsletter which we started (we think) back in 2015, on TinyLetter (RIP). We’re going to use this last edition to:
highlight some other ways to keep updated
advocate for cutting loose from big platforms owned by tech billionaires
We’ve enjoyed writing this every month. It seemed to prompt us to write different things, in different ways.
At first, because we knew it was going to people who liked us enough to subscribe, or were at least interested enough in what we had to say. So, in a funny way, we felt more relaxed, and spent less time pre-empting drive-by snarky comments.
Then, later, after it migrated to Substack, the appeal was people might read it even if they didn’t know us or our blog.
That’s why Substack has been successful as a platform, and why people are reluctant to leave it, despite its downsides – because it promises opportunities to get your writing seen through powerful discovery tools and recommendations.
In the past year or so, though, we’ve been pondering where to move our newsletter, and found ourselves mired in indecision.
At various points, though, we’ve also wondered why we give ourselves this extra job to do every month, with a vague deadline that sometimes stresses us out. When we had new books to promote, it made sense, but we’ve stepped back from that. We’re not even that bothered these days whether anyone reads the blog, as long as a few people do.
It also started to feel weird to be writing here, on the blog, and on Patreon. If you’re one of the kind people who pledged to pay if we ever started charging on Substack – thank you! Do consider signing up to support us via Patreon instead.
For now, we’re going to leave old newsletters up here as an archive, but we might start transferring them to the blog proper at some point.
The prompt for that might be when we find ourselves wanting to link to one of them, which we often do. Some of them are pretty good!
The only social media platform we use very actively is BlueSky. If you’re a member, you can follow us there for links to our latest blog posts and general updates on our pub-going and beer-drinking adventures.
We’re also on Mastodon – less active, but definitely present. Again, we post links to all our blog posts there, plus occasional other bits and pieces. If you @ us with a question or to bring something to our attention one of us (probably Jess) will pick it up.
As mentioned above, there’s also Patreon. We’re not very serious about making money from it but we do really appreciate the encouragement represented by people paying a couple of quid a month, and we provide a regular flow of bonus stuff.
What we’d really like is for people to set up their own RSS feed reader to follow the blogs and websites they’re most interested in keeping up with.
You know how everyone says they just want to see the stuff they’ve chosen to follow, in chronological order? Feed readers give you that. They’re the antidote to doomscrolling.
When you’ve got a reader set up, you fire it up on your phone, tablet or computer and see a list of new posts from all the blogs, websites and newsletters that you’ve chosen to follow.
You can organise them into categories or folders (beer, for example) and choose what to read when.
There are quite a few services that let you do this for free and it’s a great way to unshackle yourself from social media platforms that can (as we have learned) very quickly turn septic, change in shocking ways, start charging overnight, or disappear.
We still use Feedly, although we’re thinking about changing. Others have recommended Inoreader and, for iOS, NetNewsWire.
Setting one up is a tiny little but fiddly – but really not very much. Here’s a good guide on how to get a feed reader up and running, along with some more reasons why you should give it a go.
We were sorry to hear that veteran beer writer Des de Moor has died. We met him a few times over the years, including once for a proper session in a Bristol pub, and thought he was a lovely bloke. His website is a treasure trove of information about brewing in London and especially those difficult, barren years in the nineties and noughties. Let’s hope it’s preserved somehow.
We used to do this monthly on the blog. We’ll probably go back to doing it on the blog in a monthly post that’s a bit like a newsletter. But, now, for the last time…
Our last newsletter was a bit late, and this one is a bit early, so there’s not too much to list here. We did try to articulate our feelings about The Kernel, a brewery we think is fine, but apparently feel less enthusiastic about than other people do. On Patreon, we wrote a little chaser to this explaining how every time we write a post where we offer an honest critical opinion we put on our tin helmets and, sure enough, this post did prompt some grumbles because it was too positive, and too negative, and disrespectful to homebrewers (not the main point of the post), and misunderstood session beer (again, not the point). We genuinely loved how some people took it as a prompt to explain, very politely, why we’re wrong, and why they love The Kernel so much. That’s what it should be about.
We also wrote about how we accidentally gave ourselves a project in January: to avoid drinking in the same pub, bar or taproom twice. It was good fun and led us to check out some places we’d not been to for a while. Or for, you know, more than five years. There’s a follow up post due shortly on how January seems to have been unexpectedly busy; Patreon people got to see that early.
We’ve also kept up our usual schedule of weekly round-ups with lots of interesting stuff emerging off the back of last month’s newsletter when we urged everyone to get writing.
That’s it, that’s your lot.
No, seriously, that’s your lot.
See you elsewhere, we hope.
Cheers,
Jess & Ray
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