Live Beer Blogging was the second most highly-rated event at the recent Beer Bloggers Conference. (Note: If you attended the conference and haven’t filled out your survey please do so. I’ll provide more feedback on all the results soon.)
Live Beer Blogging is a sort of round-robin, speed-dating event in which 12 breweries poured for 12 tables of bloggers. Each brewery started at a different table and had five minutes to pour, explain, and answer questions about their beer while the bloggers tasted, evaluated, and Tweeted or blogged about their opinions.
I’ll quote Billy from Billy Brew, who gave a good summary of the event. “This event on Saturday is the most fun I’ve ever had reviewing beer. Think of speed dating with beer. You should have witnessed this scene. The room in an uproar, brewery people red in the face from yelling, bloggers throwing back beer after beer as they type furiously, and the whole time I’m thinking, “Ok Billy, DO NOT spill beer on your new MacBook.”
For an amazing recap of the 12 beers by a blogger who not only knows his stuff but is clearly competent at the blogging side of Live Beer Blogging (which isn’t easy to do), check out Angelo’s writeup on Brewpublic. Some people chose to Tweet instead: here is a recap of Ronnie’s Tweets on the Houston Chronicle blog.
I heard almost entirely great reviews from both brewers and reviewers. In fact, the only thing I heard that was negative – and that multiple times – was that it was too fast and we should increase the time to seven minutes per round. Is that likely to happen? No! The great thing about Live Beer Blogging is the energy, the requirement for focus and precision, and the fun that is created because of the fast format.
We’ll do this next year for sure, in both Portland and London!
@Allan & @Ericmsteen I totally agree. 5 minutes was just perfect. Unless the crowd doubles in size next year (let’s hope so) I would leave it at 5 min.
Also, Billy put it perfectly! I’ve never really enjoyed “reviewing” beer on my blog for example, and still don’t…BUT this event was the most fun I’ve ever had reviewing any type of beer in any type of way. In fact, since I run my own beer meet up groups around the state, I’m going to try to get some breweries together and do something like this. Great idea on this one guys! 🙂
Ilya
Agreed, do not change the time from 5 to 7 minutes. It provided a nice challenge and made it a blast.