The beer blog is dead. Long live the beer blog.

Earlier this month, within one day of each other:

• Jay Brooks announced the impending demise, after 11 years, of the monthly communal beer bloggers' jam session, "The Session: Beer Blogging Friday."
  
  
• Jonathan Surratt announced the creation of ReadBeer, an aggregator of beer blogs (in non-jargon parlance: a list that updates the latest posts of beer blogs).

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Jay Brooks is a beer author and the amazingly prolific publisher of the beer blog, the Brookston Beer Bulletin. He posts daily about beer birthdays (historical and current), historic beer ads, beer art, and current beer-related topics. And, of course, he co-founded "The Session" (with fellow beer writer, Stan Hieronymous).

The penultimate Session, the 141st overall, he titled: "Second-To-Last Session: The Future Of Beer Blogging" and wrote:

Fast forward a decade and there are many more ways that people interact online, and blogs, I think, lost their vaunted place in the discussion. Now there’s also Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and countless other ways to communicate online. This has meant blogging, I believe, has lost its place at the top, or in the middle, or wherever it was. That’s how it feels to me, at least. I think one incident that confirmed this for me is that recently the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference changed its name to the "Beer Now Conference," a seeming acknowledgment that the landscape has changed.

Jonathan Surratt, among several beery things, is the web guru for the Cicerone Certification Program. Way back in 2005, he launched the (still viable) crowd-sourced brewery/beer store locator, the Beer Mapping Project.

A few days after ReadBeer went live, Suratt tweeted:

We just hit 988 posts in less than a week. That's from 63 different beer news/blog sources. Since we launched (last Friday), we've sent more than 4,500 clicks outgoing to these sources.

The beer blog is dead. Long live the beer blog. Or, at least, long live the beer journal, public or private, online or pen-and-paper.

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• This post originally appeared on YFGF's Facebook page.


• The Session:Beer Blogging Friday
  • "Second-To-Last Session: The Future Of Beer Blogging."
  • All 141 episodes from the 11 years of The Session.
• ReadBeer
  • Web: readbeer.com.
  • Twitter: @read_beer
  • Add (or remove) your feed.
• Beer Mapping Project: beermapping.com/.


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