Every few years we feel the need to deliver a pep talk and remind people that, actually, anyone can decide to write about beer and that it’s very much a case of ‘the more the merrier’.
Every Saturday morning we put together a round up of the best writing about beer and pubs we’ve seen in the preceding week. We don’t usually have any trouble finding six or seven standout pieces, and there are usually a few left over to go in as bonus links in the footnotes post that follows on Patreon.
Still, two prominent beer bloggers sadly died last year – Martyn Cornell and Peter ‘Pub Curmudgeon’ Edwardson – while others seem to have quietly left the writing game.
What keeps us engaged and enthused is the steady arrival of new voices. These days, they’re often here on Substack, or writing for outlets like Pellicle.
We still believe that posting on your own blog, that you own and manage, is the best approach – and very much an antidote to the problems of social media and platforms run by arseholes.
You don’t need to gather your friends and family and announce that you’re planning to start blogging. It’s not a big deal. You can just quietly start doing it. And if you write five blog posts and quit, that’s still worthwhile.
Until there’s a pub guide for every town, city or shire, there are still gaps in the market.
There are still around 1,600 breweries in the UK, many of which we’ve never heard of and know nothing about.
There are local drinking customs and cultures that probably seem unremarkable to people who know them but which would interest people like us. Flat Bristol Bass is one that fascinates us but there must be others all round the country, and certainly around the world.
Alex, our favourite beer blogger of 2025, goes to three pubs and writes about what he sees going on there. Adrian Tierney-Jones (a pro, not a blogger) takes a similar approach.
Now, you could write tasting notes of every beer you drink but, honestly, that’s probably the hardest thing to make interesting – unless you are a skilled, creative, and/or amusing writer like The Beer Nut. It can still work if your tasting notes find a theme or tell a story, though.
Kevin Kain at Casket Beer has found his niche writing about glassware and cask ale in strange places. Franz D. Hofer tramps around Bavaria reporting on village pubs and rustic beer, among other things. Chris Dyson goes to a town or city, has a wander round, and writes up his adventures. Lisa Grimm is chronicling Dublin’s pubs one at a time.
You’ll find your thing.
So write it again, but different.
Updates are always needed. The beer world has changed a lot since 2020, and a lot more since 2016, and more again since 2011… You get the idea. In beer history, new sources emerge all the time, from newspaper archives to archive film.
Remember, too, that your perspective and voice are different to anyone else’s. Your life experiences, where you live, your relationship to beer, and a thousand other variables, mean that your take will have its own value.
You could do worse than look at this list of topics that have been chosen for The Session over the years. This was (is?) a collective exercise in which beer bloggers took turns to choose a subject and then wrote posts in response. It now amounts to an excellent list of writing prompts.
So write short ones. Not everything has to be an epic Pellicle article, excellent as those are.
Alex, who we’ve already mentioned, writes three paragraphs per post. When we wrote our little columnette for The Guardian Guide a decade or so ago, we had 150 words to play with, and it improved our writing. We’ve even written 100 word blog posts, as a challenge to ourselves.
You might be thinking, oh, so I should just do a social media post or thread instead. Sure, why not, that’s legitimate, too. It’s just that blogs are (a touch) more stable and less at the mercy of algorithms and the whims of tech billionaires.
We also find that setting a time limit of, say 45 minutes, and aiming for a word count of about 600 words, can help us get to a first draft fast. A first draft doesn’t need to be perfect, it’s just something to come back to and tidy up a few days later. Or, in our case, to share with the other half of the partnership.
Writing beer history is more difficult than reviews or opinion pieces. You need to do research, find sources and get your facts straight. (Or, among other considerations, Ron Pattinson will be very, very disappointed in you.)
Local beer history is often inspiring, though, and you can do worse than visit your local museum, library or archives to see what they might have. Every time we do this we find some thread that’s worth pulling on.
We also subscribe to the excellent British Newspaper Archive which helps us follow up leads we find during those archive trips – or that we find while drinking in the pub. See our piece on Rustic Ale for evidence of that.
“It’s only a blog post” is something we say quite frequently, when we catch ourselves exhibiting perfectionist tendencies or getting frozen with anxiety about hitting publish.
It’s not an article or a book – even if the work you put into it might eventually lead that way.
Blog posts are supposed to be quick, easy, transitory and personal. If you get something wrong, you can correct it later, or even just delete the post. And once you’ve posted you’ll be moving onto the next piece anyway.
“It’s only a blog post” is also a reminder that hardly anyone will read what you write. We mean that to be encouraging rather than off-putting. Knowing that, at best, a few hundred people will read what we’ve written reduces the pressure. For a new blog it’s likely to be way less than that, which means you’re essentially getting to practice writing in a safe space.
It’s supposed to be fun, too. Remember that. Muck about. Try new things. Explore different techniques, formats and voices. It’s a playground and you’re just a big kid.
If you do have a go at writing something, let us know, if you like.
We’ve started 2026 with a new rule: we don’t post until we’ve got another post in draft, almost ready to go. This has helped us get into quite a nice rhythm with:
a new post on the blog on Sunday or Monday or whenever
Let’s see if we can keep that up as work and other pressures begin to bite.
At the very end of December we posted about a topic nobody wants to be reminded of in January: what Christmas beer drinking means to us now. It opens like this: “Christmas used to be when our worst instincts as beer geeks emerged. But these days, choosing fancy beers is down the list of priorities.”
Our first post of 2026 was about The Fargate, the fancy new Thornbridge (Thornbridge & Co) pub in central Sheffield, which quite impressed us. In that piece we suggested that we thought some of the artwork on display in the pub might be AI generated; James Buchanan, General Manager at Thornbridge, got in touch to tell us that we were wrong. He said “all of these, and all of our artwork, are done by our in-house designer” and that they’re “proud to employ a full time Creative Lead who manages our whole look and feel”. But when we pressed on whether some of the underlying images had been generated with AI the reply (“we do have a human doing all our work”) felt a bit hedged. Christine Taylor also had thoughts on The Fargate, transmitted via her husband’s blog, if you want a second opinion.
Staying in Sheffield, we went into more detail about exactly why we loved the Saint Mars of the Desert taproom so much: “[Every] surface and corner of SMOD tells you that it is run by human beings. Even the toilet is covered with yet more handwritten signs pleading with customers not to steal the decorative plaques, and arguing for a reduction in beer duty.”
We’ve also ended up thinking quite a bit about pub etiquette with posts on, first, the habit of using phones in speaker mode in the pub and, secondly, the question of whether it’s OK to share pub tables. That second post in particular prompted the sharing of some stories of horrific bad manners on BlueSky: “A small group asked to join our table – yes, no problem. One of the group said this table was called Sandy Bay… ‘this is Sandy and we always sit here’. Time went on, he took a shoe and sock off, put his foot on the table…”
Finally, we wrote up notes on a survey of the pubs of Stokes Croft, a Bristol neighbourhood with a reputation for crusty studenty funkiness.
And that’s it, that’s your lot until next month.
Cheers!
Jess & Ray
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