Web-beer 2.0, and food videos

My Web 2.0 skills are as deficient — if not more so — as those of many other Baby Boomers. Heck, I think Thelonius Monk the distillate of cool.

But that being said, I do have a FaceBook page (currently devoid of much content), a LinkedIn profile, a Last.fm music page (better), and a Flickr page (better yet).

I recently joined Democracy's Drink, a newly minted social network "devoted to beer and the people who enjoy it". You can be a pioneer here; there are currently 184 members. (The badge below will show the updated figure.) The home page, however, has that spurious quote from Benjamin Franklin about God and beer. We'll have to get author/historian Bob Skilnik on board to debunk that.

Visit Democracy's Drink


And speaking of Mr. Skilnik, I've just finished reading an autographed copy of his Beer and Food: An American History. I'll post a review soon. Hint: good.

Bob also sent this request, and I'm passing it along here.

I’m slowly but surely working on a media-rich website/blog that will be a one-stop and entertaining site of video food recipes makingdeals.gifusing beer, wine and spirits. It will be short on my opinions and beer industry news (like http://www.beerinfood.wordpress.com/) and long on taped recipes of me trying my hand at whipping up “spirited” foods. More importantly, I’m hoping to find brewers, pub owners, distillers, vintners, importers, distributors, blog owners and book authors who are willing to contribute short recipe videos using their products. There’s no fee, no sales pitch…nothing required except the submission of a filmed recipe contribution along with the recipe itself that I can post to my soon-to-be-unveiled site.

In other words, Drinkz-N-Eatz-TV will be a very interactive and media-rich way of entertaining and informing anybody at home who wants to cook along and add some “zip” to any food recipe. I’ll also be working on audio podcasts of interviews with business types as listed above.

My video skills aren't even hand-held-shaky good. But Bob's project is eminently viable. More on Drinkz-N-Eatz-TV.

I am also a member of the two big sites for reviewing beer — RateBeer and BeerAdvocate — both of which have aspects of Web 2.0.

I don't contribute much to those two because of a conflict of interest: I work for a brewery now and in the past I worked for a beer wholesaler.

But the greater reason I don't rate beers is because the very act of reducing a beer to a number demeans that beer.