Tag: solipsism

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OK, I am one to blow my own trumpet

People who say, “I’m not one to blow my own trumpet” always follow it with – well – blowing their own trumpet. So I’m not going to try to pretend.

The nice people at Wikio have been in touch again. A few months ago they gave me the exclusive preview of their gastronomy blog rankings, which rank UK blogs using a logarithm that works out how referenced they are – not just hits, but links to, etc.
Shortly after that they split off wine and beer blogs into a separate ranking. The new chart is published this week… and I’m number one! First time I’ve ever scaled such dizzy heights. I’m sure it can’t last, especially after my recent radio silence. Anyway, thanks so much to everyone who reads me and links to me. It’s made such a huge difference to my books sales as well as my ego so it really has had a tangible effect.

1 Pete brown’s blog (+3)
2 Pencil & spoon (+3)
3 Spittoon (-2)
4 Stonch’s beer blog (-1)
5 Brew wales (-3)
6 Tandleman’s beer blog (=)
7 The beer nut (+6)
8 Bibendum wine (+7)
9 Jamie goode’s wine blog (-2)
10 The wine conversation (-2)
11 Impy malting (+15)
12 Pubology (+43)
13 Called to the bar (+6)
14 Woolpack dave’s beer and stuff blog (+3)
15 `it’s just the beer talking` ? jeff pickthall’s blog (+6)
16 The southport drinker (-6)
17 Bubble brothers (-8)
18 Boak and bailey’s beer blog (+14)
19 Tyson’s beer blog (+1)
20 Bordoverview blog (+2)

Ranking by Wikio

And congratulations to Mark Dredge at Pencil and Spoon for soaring up the charts. Relatively new to beer blogging, Mark posts consistently and thoughtfully and does far more than just tasting notes. And he’s been nice about my books too.

I haven’t come across Pubology before but just had a peek and it looks really interesting – all about history and culture. Other bloggers and friends – Jeff Pickthall, Impy Malting and Boak and Bailey – are also showing strongly.
And I don’t normally go in for ‘beer is better than wine’ mudslinging, but beer definitely seems to be up in Blogworld at the expense of wine. Keep it up!

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Me being interviewed!

Yesterday’s Scotsman newspaper carried an interview with me which I gave when I was in Edinburgh launching Hops and Glory a few weeks ago.

The journalist has done a wonderful job, making me sound far more knowledgeable, cool and interesting than I’m sure I was at the time. Thanks Claire.
You can read it here.

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Normal service about to be resumed.

My audience at the Borders Book Festival was marginally bigger than that shown here.
It’s been a crazy, fantastic few weeks around the book launch.  As you can tell by my lack of posting, my feet have hardly touched the ground.  There are so many stories I wanted to share, but I’ve forgotten most of them.
Billy and Declan proved to sceptical Three Sheets readers that they are indeed real, and that I did not exaggerate them in any way.  The Animal Lover With No Arms now looks at them suspiciously when they run into him in Galway, so we think they’ve been rumbled.  At first they thought they might get away with it because no-one in his family can read, but word has got out.  And Declan informed us that he has been diagnosed with scurvy.  When the doctor asked him when he had last eaten fruit, he replied, “Ah, that would be the early 1980s.”
The following week, the drunkenness moved to Burton on Trent.  I was invited to lunch at the Burton Club – an institution I didn’t even know existed when I wrote Hops & Glory, but which was founded by the men I’ve spent two years researching.  On to the Coopers Tavern for the Burton book launch.  A more intimate and less glamorous affair than Brew Wharf, but with attendees from White Shield, Thornbridge, Acorn, Burton Bridge and the Crown Brewery at Sheffield’s Hillsbrough Hotel, it was great to get a gaggle of brewers around to taste the last remaining cask of Calcutta IPA.  At nearly two years old, it was starting to resemble the beer I opened in India after the journey.  A wonderful experience… until someone knocked the cask and it fell to the floor, churned up, but still about half full.  Ah well.  Was invited to brew IPAs by both Acorn and Crown, and will be doing so in July, around the Derby Beer Festival and my reading at the Devonshire Cat on the 9th.  Me and Mrs Pete Brown’s Beer Blog will also be brewing again at Thornbridge that week.  I really am spoilt.  And getting Mrs PBBB to clean out the copper should be the spectator event of the year.
The following weekend saw me rubbing shoulders with Richard Stilgoe and John McCarthy on Excess Baggage on Radio 4, which seems to have gone down really well, and I got my sailing piece in the Guardian (before you follow this link – I’m sorry about the headline.  This was a sub-editor who simply didn’t know any better.  I would never knowingly try to appropriate the title they gave me).  Sales went berserk as a result – Amazon ran out and everything, so I was well pleased.  Spent the day at the Beers of the World Live/BBC Good Food Show on the Worthington White Shield stand, and the response was fantastic – hopefully a lot of fathers were pleased last Sunday, because I signed an awful lot of books to people who felt they’d found the perfect gift.  
White Shield are sponsoring my reading tour and couldn’t be more helpful.  If you live around the Midlands look out for Hops and Glory Ale, a special cask version of White Shield with the book cover design on the pump clip.  And soon, White Shield in Sainsburys will carry a neck collar offering a great deal on the book.  This legendary beer isn’t that easy to get hold of, but it’s having a huge renaissance and the ancient, creaking former museum brewery can’t brew enough beer to meet demand.  It’s a fantastic experience to take it round and introduce it to people who have never tasted it before – a true taste of a traditional English IPA.
And then it was off to Scotland.  Attendance at my Scottish launch event was disappointing because we’d moved the date from Thurs to Weds, only to find we’d moved it into a direct clash with an Oasis gig and, just a hundred yards away, the launch of the Edinburgh Film Festival.  But it was great to have the Caledonian Brewery to ourselves.  I had a fascinating chat with a woman from The Scotsman, and met a journalist whose girlfriend is a direct descendant of Samuel Allsopp!  I spent so long trying to find info on him, and here at the launch I was hearing that there are lots of family stories about him, few of which are complimentary.
And on Saturday, down to the tiny town of Melrose for the Borders Book Festival, which has nothing to do with the chain, but is organised by a bunch of wildly enthusiastic and kind people who live there.  It takes place in a few marquees in the grounds of a beautiful big old house.  And after I got over the shock and nervousness and feeling of being inadequate and a fraud to be in the same room and on the same bill as Ian Rankin, Vince Cable, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Jim Naughtie and David Aaronovich, I had a fantastic time.  My reading was well-attended, and the complimentary Deuchars IPA was swiftly despatched.  If you love books, do yourself a favour and go to this festival next year.  I certainly will be, even if it is as a paying punter rather than a performer.
My tour continues throughout the summer.  Please do come along if I’m near you.  There’ll be free beer and everything.
Hopefully now though, I can get back to talking about beer and pubs and the wonderful and frustrating industry I find myself stuck in. 

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Busy Weekend

Forgive the completely self-promotional nature of this post.  However: 

  • Tomorrow (Saturday 13th June) at 10am I’m the lead item on Excess Baggage on Radio 4.  If you’re not sitting by a radio in the UK at 10am GMT you can probably listen to it here after transmission.
  • Tomorrow’s Guardian also carries a long piece by me about life on Europa, the fantastic tall ship I took as part of my voyage to India.  Not only that, but the guide to summer pubs, free in tomorrow’s paper, also features (hopefully) several of my reviews of my favourite pubs.
  • And if you’re around the Midlands, come to the BBC Good Food Show.  Beers of the World Live is part of it.  The Worthington White Shield stand is part of that.  And I’m part of that – signing books.
Yes, it’s the first ever Pete Brown media over-exposure day.  Get everyone you know to buy my book, and I promise I’ll get out of your face.
ttfn

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Wicked Wikio!

Every month, Wikio compile rankings of UK blogs by subject, one of which is Gastronomy. Wikio explain that the position of a blog in the rankings is determined by the number and weight of incoming links from other blogs.  Then there’s some stuff about RSS feeds and algorithms which many of you probably understand but which to me is just a noise.  But the result is what they can authoritatively describe as the ‘most referenced’ blogs in a particular subject area.

I remember months ago Stonch was contacted by them to give an exclusive preview of that month’s rankings, because his blog featured in the top ten.  Of course, I had to have a look to see if I was in… and I crept in at number 48.  I was quite chuffed at having the 48th most referenced food and drink blog in the UK because it allowed me to make self-deprecating comments about my ‘success’, which are the only kind Mrs Pete Brown’s Beer Blog will tolerate.
Well, I can’t make them any more.  This month Wikio asked me to unveil the new figures, which I was very surprised by… then I saw I was up to number 6!
I’ll admit that when I saw I was only number 48 it did spur me to write a bit more frequently, but I’m blown away by this.  Thank you so much to everyone who links to my blog, for both your frequency and… um… weight.  Here’s the top twenty, due to be published tomorrow:
It’s great, considering that this is all food and drink, and that the top one belongs to The Guardian, that beer blogs feature so prominently. It shows that despite a tendency to moan in this medium, blogging has been a revelation for the beer community, and has allowed enthusiasts to gain a genuine influence in the world of not just beer, but broader food and drink coverage. I’ve only just broached the top twenty, probably due to Hops and Glory buzz, but Stonch and Tandleman are there every single month, hovering around the top ten.  When mainstream media continue to meet pitches from beer journalists with “I’m sorry, we just don’t cover beer, we don’t have room,” blogging reveals that there are talented writers, issues to be discussed, and an audience that wants to read them in the beer world.
And fair play to Wikio UK for categorising this area as ‘gastronomy’ – the US site follows the annoying trend that bookshops do and refers to ‘food and wine’, which always makes beer feel like a guest invited at the last minute to make up the numbers.  By accident or design, no beer blogs feature in the top 100.

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I am une chienne Andalusian!

Going on holiday at dawn tomorrow, so I won’t be updating for two weeks.  

“How will that be any different from normal?” I hear you quip.
Well, I am (fingers crossed) hopefully making writing my full-time occupation this year rather than what I do at evenings and weekends while earning advertising’s dirty money to pay my mortgage, and I have been trying to blog more regularly, apart from when family circumstances in February prevented it.  So it feels a bit odd to be leaving off.
But it has been getting pretty down of late – many of my recent posts have been negative and critical, exceeded only in dourness by some of my commenters.  When I get back in May I’m going to try and lighten up a bit and look for more of the positives in the wonderful world of beer.  It’s going to be a long hot summer so I hope you feel like trying that too.  
By the time I’m back the launch of Hops & Glory will be only one month away, so expect lots of plugging,  more extracts that didn’t make the final cut, and details of promotional activity up and down the country.  If you like my writing, I’d love it if you could get involved.  I’m up for readings, talks, IPA tastings and book signings anywhere in the UK, and hope to avoid a repeat of the event at Borders in Bournemouth last year where I managed to coax one old lady to sit down and listen to me with a bottle of Schneider Weisse.
Y Viva Espana!

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Now I’m Britain’s second-best beer blogger!

Sorry to be an egotist for a minute but last night I attended the British Guild of Beer Writers (don’t laugh) annual awards ceremony.  This year saw the first award given for ‘Best use of new media’, and I picked up the silver for this blog, plus the website for the Intelligent Choice Report, which means this blog is now officially Britain’s second-best beer blog.

Older readers may remember that about 18 months ago I was runner-up in the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group’s Beer Drinker of the Year Award, which I took to mean I was Britain’s second-best beer drinker.  Some might say that on this performance, I’m carving out a niche for myself as the biggest Number Two on the British beer writing scene.
The judge’s comments were of course complimentary, but laced with a thread of chastisement.  Apparently I’m “improving” as a journalist, with the main improvement being that I’m “less laddish”.  I can only apologise to fans of my first book, Man Walks into a Pub, for this development, and promise to try to be more fatuous, rude and irreverent in future.  Let me start by urging you to go here and click on ‘drunk words’, for a reminder of the kind of writing that has apparently prevented me from winning much in the past.
When I won silver I simply assumed that I’d been beaten by Stonch – but it seems it wasn’t his year.  The gold award went to Zak Avery, who embraced the medium more fully than I by being more prolific and also posting a regular video diary.  Given that I have trouble pasting pictures on this blog, if you’re going to call your award ‘best use’ of new media he deserves it hands down.
Zak then went on to beat some very distinguished and talented writers to be named overall Beer Writer of the Year – a magnificent achievement for someone who is a relative newcomer to the scene.  Congratulations Zak.
The only problem I have with this result is that I just assumed Ben McFarland was going to win this year.  If you win one year you’re not allowed to enter the next, and Ben has won every year he’s been allowed to enter since he started writing.  Zak’s success means I now have to face competition from Ben in the awards next year when my new book comes out.  Looks like the best I can hope for will be number two again.