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With various bits of travelling, October was a somewhat chaotic month on the blogging front, but we still turned out plenty of posts.

The month’s biggest hit, if the amount of discussion generated is taken as a reliable measure, was this account of a conversation between a British barman and an American visitor used to a rather wider choice of IPAs.
Here’s a complete list of everything else, in reverse order, with links out to follow-up comments and responses by others where we’ve spotted them.
→ The month began with a wish-list of beers we want to try in the last quarter of 2014. (Really a call for intelligence.)
→*“Yes, that must be it — that must be why we didn’t like your beer” was the conclusion to 100 words of grumpiness.
→ Our contribution to the beer blogging Session was a reflection on what we’ve learned from home brewing. (And here’s the final*round-up of all the Session #92 posts.)
→ Digging through old copies of the Whitbread in-house magazine, we came across the story of the English pub at the British exhibition in Copenhagen in 1955.
→ Wot we done on our holidays: an account of a night on the town in Brentford, West London*where we encountered Keg Chiswick Bitter.
→ We tasted a third batch of porters, from Guinness (Tandleman could not*believe that we didn’t hate them), a fourth batch from London*‘craft’ breweries, and a fifth from the US.
→ Is it always a good idea to rely on research and recommendations when seeking beer and bars in a strange town? (No.)
→ Our two penn’orth on the sexist CAMRA leaflet kerfuffle was really intended to point people to Rowan Molyneux’s post on the same subject.
→ Confessing to our ignorance about posh coffee, we had a moment of empathy with people who aren’t especially interested in beer.
→ We posted an updated beer lovers’ gift guide in time for the Christmas shopping season.
→ We were tickled by Chris Hall’s idea of the*‘juicy banger’ as a category of beer and considered if there might be other similarly vague, poetic groupings to be identified. (Tandleman thought this was all a bit silly.)
→ We summarised the talk on beer writing from 1960 to 2014 we wrote for the Brewery History Society and the British Guild of Beer Writers. (It prompted some further thoughts from Craig ‘Drink Drank’ Gravina, and there’s an account of how it fit into the wider narrative from It Comes in Pints?)
→ Ratebeer is either (a) an irrelevance or (b) a source of free feedback for brewers. Either way, they should stop getting so worked up about it.
→ Based on a brief conversation with a friend, we wrote 100 words on an unreconstructed boozer*supposedly run by gangsters.
→ We didn’t hate the relaunched Let There Be Beer campaign.
→ More empathy, and another 100-worder: when people are explaining to us why they don’t like beer, the most common reason is that it’s just too bitter.
→ We also provided our usual weekly round-ups of links around the beery blogoshire.
The Month That Was: October 2014


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