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Another month of all change - at least outside the top five. This table is virtually unrecognisable from what it was a few months ago!

1Pete Brown's Blog2Pencil & Spoon3Beer Reviews4Master Brewer at Adnams5Are You Tasting the Pith?6Bibendum Wine7Drinking Outside The Box8Travels With Beer9Zythophile10The Wine Conversation11The Good Stuff12Ghost Drinker13Raising the Bar14Spittoon15Called to the bar16Woolpack Dave's beer and stuff blog17HopZine.com18Tandleman's Beer Blog19Bordeaux-Undiscovered20The Pub CurmudgeonDrinking made by Wikio

My return to the top is due to a combination of Young Dredge being preoccupied with starting a new job, and me finishing a freelance adman contract that freed up some time to blog. I think it will be the last time I'm top of the pile for a while... as the readership of beer blogs grows, it gets more competitive, and I'm not going to be able to blog as much for the rest of this year thanks to getting quite a bit of new column and feature work, the upcoming Stokey LitFest, the next Cask Report, and what will hopefully be imminent good news on new books which will need to be turned around very quickly - I'll blog more fully about those when and if they are confirmed.

You can see the list for yourself. From now on when I preview these rankings (and if you want to preview them yourself, PLEASE drop me a line - it would be good to spread this around a bit more) I think I'll just pick on one blog that's showing some action and urge you to check it out if you haven't already done so.

This month I want to have a look at number eight, Travels with Beer, mainly because it is more focused on pub photography than writing, and we don't really think about about photography generally when we think about communicating beer. Good photographs of pubs are wonderfully evocative, and Robert Gale from South Wales is very good at taking them. I get a very sharp yearning to just be in most of the pubs depicted on the site.

Rob is one half of www.BeerLens.com, a transatlantic partnership of beer loving snappers with the delightful Kim Reid in Rochester, NY. Kim was one of the people who looked after me on a recent trip to the city, and is probably the only person living in America who wishes she lived in Newport, South Wales, instead. Most people who live in Newport don't want to, so it's an extraordinary enthusiasm to have.

Travels with Beer is also brilliantly laid out and put together, and makes me feel quite ashamed of my basic blogger template.

Generally it feels like beer blogging is starting to get a bit more serious, a bit more respected, a bit more polished. There will always be good and bad of course, but 'noisome bloggers' (copyright: Roger Protz) have in the space of a few years become a fundamental part of beer communication, and have made it much more diverse, richer and more influential.

Social media + world's most sociable drink - not hard to see why, is it?


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