Six Beer Links to 14.10.11

In which I post another half-dozen links to items of interest I’ve spotted around the Beerblogosphere since my last Six Beer Links post.

1. Des de Moor reports on a visit to the Scottish Real Ale Shop in Callander, which sounds well worth making the journey up from Edinburgh for.

2. It’s good to see BrewDog getting back to what they should do best: brewing interesting, innovative beer. This time it’s Sunk Punk a beer matured at the bottom of the sea… lovely label artwork by BrewDog artist Johanna Basford as well; probably worth the tenner a bottle for the label alone.

3. Over at Hopzine.com, Rob has good things to say about Black Isle Brewery’s Hibernator Oatmeal Stout. Another definite for the wishlist.

4. Kate Fox’s article entitled Viewpoint: Is the alcohol message all wrong? on the BBC website surely needs no introduction if you’ve been anywhere near Twitter today. But just in case you missed it, my advice would be: go read it and then, as Simon ‘Reluctant Scooper’ Johnson exhorts, “…use that knowledge in the future. Rebut scuttlebut with it. Counter fallacious arguments across the interwebs. Use it as a line in the sand before neo-prohibitionists and say – thou shalt not cross.”

5. Happy Third Anniversary to Mark Dredge’s Pencil and Spoon blog. If there’re a more dedicated, a more energetic, a more enthusiastic or more affable beer blogger on the block then I’ve yet to find their site. Cheers, Mark!

6. And the same to Dave’s Beer Blog; originally Woolpack Dave’s tales of running a country pub up in the Lake District, later transmogrifying into Hardknott Dave’s saga of starting up one of the UK’s most highly-regarded small breweries. Always interesting, always intelligently written, always well worth a read. Cheers, Dave!

Dredge and Mogg‘s latest beer-related wheeze is Open It! – a weekend-long celebration of all those rare and interesting bottled beers that beer geeks like me have a bad habit of stashing away at the back of a cupboard for a ‘special occasion’.

Simple idea: pick out a choice bottle or three, Open It! and blog about it.

Here’s my Friday evening selection:

That’s a bottle each of:

• Harvey’s Elizabethan Ale
• Hardknott Infra Red 2009
• De Dolle Special Extra Export Stout

Maybe not the rarest beers you’ve ever seen, but I’ve been saving them all for a while and I’m looking forward to trying all three of them immensely.

Btw, does anyone else think “Dredge and Mogg” sounds like a firm of Dickensian solicitors..? :)

Time for another quick wander down the highways, byways, lanes and back-alleys of the beerier reaches of the blogosphere, the Big News of the Week of course being the results of the British Guild of Beer Writers Awards…

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I’ve been inspired by Mark Dredge’s post on Pencil & Spoon, Why I Write a Beer Blog, to do something I’ve been contemplating for a while and that I hope will become a regular occurrence (time allowing).

Mark pointed out that one of the main reasons he writes his beer blog (and it’s a bloody good beer blog, too, I highly recommend it) is: “Beer means a lot to me, sharing it with people means more; this blog is about sharing.” That really struck a chord. Sharing really is important. Sharing enthusiasim for beer, sharing tips on great beer, sharing good news about beer and brewing. Sharing the love!

Before I badgered Ed, Joe and, a bit later on, Tim into joining me on this beer blog venture, I spent years perusing the science fiction / fantasy / horror sector of the blogosphere (and indeed, I still do). There’s a venerable institution that almost everyone in sf/f/h blogging indulges in to some extent, but it’s one that I’ve not really noticed all that much in the beer blogs: the link round-up.

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