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19-07-2017, 09:19
Visit the Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog site (http://boakandbailey.com/2017/07/quick-one-overlooked/)

Here’s an interesting question, in the form of a Twitter poll, from @ThaBeardedOne who works at Twisted Barrel, a brewery in Coventry:
Do you think the beer scene in the West Midlands is overlooked? If so what could be done to improve it? Comment below..https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f447.pnghttps://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f447.png
— The Bearded One https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f587.png (@ThaBearded1) July 18, 2017 (https://twitter.com/ThaBearded1/status/887239393643286528)

He is no doubt going to write or do something interesting himself based on the responses so we won’t get too involved in the specifics of this particular case but what he’s expressing does seem to be a common anxiety: that the next city over, or London specifically, is getting more than its share of attention in the national press or on prominent beer blogs.
We’ve written pieces relating to this on a few occasions, most notably here (http://boakandbailey.com/2015/02/londoncentricity-blogs-around-britain/) where we said…

…if writing about beer is London-centric, and it might be a bit, it’s partly because London is bothering to write about beer.
More recently we suggested that in 2017 what people mean specifically when they make this kind of point is,*‘Wah! Why hasn’t Matt Curtis written about it/us/here!? (http://boakandbailey.com/2017/06/quick-one-hypedignored/)’
We say, once again, that if you think your region is overlooked, you should make the case. Write a blog post or ebook, or put together a Google Map, showing where a visitor to your region can find local beer, the beer-geekiest bars and pubs, and give some suggestions for how they can get from one to another. Your target audience here is people on weekend breaks — why should they visit your city rather than, say, Sheffield, or Manchester, where there is so much interesting beer that it’s hard to know where to start? But also, by extension, bloggers and journos looking for advice on where to start.
‘But we’re not like those obnoxious Londoners/Mancunians/Leodensians — we don’t like to shout about ourselves because we’re so humble and unassuming,’ feels like a response we’ve heard several times in this kind of conversation, and that’s a bit… pathetic. It’s probably better to boast than to grumble, and wait for someone else to do the shouting for you.
And, of course, writing critically is good too — it’s a sign of maturity in a scene and can add credibility to your guidance. If a visitor follows your advice and ends up in pubs that are merely*‘meh’, drinking bad beer, they’ll think less of your scene overall.
We used to have a page here collecting links to town, city and region guides and pub crawls written by beer bloggers, but had to scrap it because they weren’t being kept up to date and too few new ones were appearing. It would be nice to revive that, or at least to know that there’s a guide out there to Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, or wherever, that we can point people to when they ask us, which they do from time to time.
Note: if you’re interested here’s what we wrote about Birmingham (http://boakandbailey.com/2016/06/impressions-birmingham-pubs/) and the Black Country (http://boakandbailey.com/2016/06/swans-bulls-dipping-black-country/) last summer.
QUICK ONE: Overlooked (http://boakandbailey.com/2017/07/quick-one-overlooked/) originally posted at Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog (http://boakandbailey.com)


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