If you've spent any time with me, you've heard my lecture along the lines of "Well you know, for us cask ale is an especially good kind of craft beer, but in England the cask ale lovers hate 'craft beer'".  It's true.  The CAMRA crowd consider craft beer to be too expensive, too strong, too gassy, and too pretentious.  When I'm travelling there, I fall in with the real ale crowd and spend almost all of my time in real ale pubs.  That's my own pretentiousness showing, though I sincerely love the pub atmosphere and the lower-alcohol beer.  And I appreciate a bargain ..read more

The previous three posts have all my Twitter activity from 2008-9, 2010, and 2011.  Not all of the tweets have to do with It's Pub Night or with beer, but the Twitter account is mostly an extension of the blog.  It's not a place where I interact with family or work colleagues, and not very seriously with the few friends who are connected on Twitter. This post has links to what I tweeted and analyzes when, who, where, and how I tweeted.  The only unanswered question is WHY? When I was actively blogging, I got very annoyed by blogs that were more about blogging than about their su ..read more

To celebrate 15 years of It's Pub Night, I've been posting all my tweets from the early days, in forwards order.  Below you will find all the tweets of 2011.  Again, I hope they are not offensive in 2022.  In case you missed them, these are links for the tweets from 2008-9 and 2010. I wouldn't have guessed it at the time, but 2011 was the last real year of It's Pub Night, at least so far.  I kept up a pace of 8 posts per month for the four years 2008-2011, which was probably the minimum to keep some kind of readership and search engine presence (there may be a dif ..read more

In observance of 15 years of It's Pub Night, and 16 years of Twitter, and the possible implosion of the latter, I downloaded all my micro-narcissism (HT @kscaldef) from that benighted cesspool.  In a fit of nano-narcissism, I decided to post all of my early tweets here in the correct chronological order, instead of in the counter-clock order of the weird shave whiskers onto your face Philip K. Dick metaverse we live in now. This post consists of the tweets from 2010.  Hopefully none of them are too offensive; it was a different era. 2010 is squarely in the golden age of t ..read more

It's Pub Night has now been around for 15 years, since December of 2007. Blogging was eventually eclipsed by social media, but in those early days there was a more symbiotic relationship between blogs and the nascent social media universe.  The four big years of It's Pub Night, 2008-2011, coincided with the rise of Twitter and Facebook.  Since Twitter looks like it might be tottering on the brink right now, I downloaded my personal data from there, and I'd like to share some of those early tweets with you as a way to celebrate 15 years of beer obsession. Background Twitter (founded ..read more

Every year for the last 10 or so, Carla and I would say "Let's go to New York City this year".  Somehow we never did, until recent events taught us that you shouldn't keep putting these things off.  So we spent about 9 days in Brooklyn in October.  It was only my second visit to New York, and the first was only for 36 hours in Manhattan about 30 years ago, so this was long overdue.   We had a great time.  The vacation was not primarily a beer mission:  we skipped many of the important Brooklyn beer stops; we only found a couple of worthwhile beer options in Manh ..read more

I've spent a lot of time over the years obsessing about fresh hop beers, in fact fresh hops are the subject of the first post on the blog.  So I was not going to miss this year's "Fresh Hop Seminar & Tasting" held at Zoiglhaus this past Saturday as part of this year's Portland Beer Week. Participants listened to tales of fresh-hop glory and misadventures told by Zoiglhaus's Alan Taylor, Von Ebert's Sam Pecoraro, and Ex Novo's Ryan Buxton.  We got tastes of a Tettnanger-hopped kölsch and an oktoberfest from Zoiglhaus, a Sterling-hopped pilsner from Von Ebert, and a Simcoe-hopped ..read more