52 Week Drink Along - Summer Schedule

Here's the Drink Along schedule for the summer 52 Weeks beer case. If you're wondering what the hell a Drink Along is, check this out.

Friday 08th July - Bitterend Brewery Lakeland IPA
Friday 15th July - Meantime Brewery Wheat
Friday 22nd July - Lymestone Brewery Foundation Stone
Friday 29th July - Darkstar Brewery Sunburst

Friday 05th August - Hawkshead Brewery Red
Friday 12th August - Hewitt's Brewery Unhung Hero
Friday 19th August - Ossett Brewery Yorkshire Blonde
Friday 26th August - Ilkley Brewery Mary Jane

Friday 02nd September - Williams Brothers Seven Giraffes
Friday 09th September - Moorhouse's Brewery Blond Witch
Friday 16th September - Oakham Ales Inferno
Friday 23rd September - Cotleigh Brewery Barn Owl
Friday 30th September - York Brewery York Minster Ale

52 Week Drink Along

I love to share good beer with other people. Cracking open that beer you’ve been saving is one thing if you’re drinking it alone, but if you’re sharing it around with two or three other people, it’s always more fun. Share it around and pull it apart. What can you taste in the glass, what can the person next to you taste? What food would you drink it with? What would they drink it with? It’s a great way to take the drinking experience beyond the actual drinking, and it’s a great way to expand your vocabulary for taste. They’ll be times when a flavour is on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t put your finger on what it is, then suddenly your mate says “coffee grounds” and all you can do is face-palm with how obvious it is! Every time you then taste that flavour, you’ll instantly be able to describe it.

If you’re a member of the MyBreweryTap 52 Week Beer Club, then I’m willing to bet that you’re a lover of good beer. And, as a lover of good beer, I’m also willing to bet that you’re interested in expanding your appreciation for beer, for learning more about it and for becoming better at appraising beer flavour. At the heart of all that is a simple question: “do I like it or not?”, but beyond that is an appreciation for brewing technique, for beer style and history, for a whole new vocabulary of flavour descriptors and for beer ingredients and the roles they play in what you taste in your glass.

Many of us find it hard to regularly get together with friends and drink beer; geography gets in the way, work and family commitments have to take priority or maybe you’re just someone whose friends are all content with drinking cans of any-old-lager. Well, the 52 Weeks Beer Club gives us a chance to avoid all those problems. How about a drink along where each week we take one of those 52 beers and we all drink it at the same time? We then use the MyBreweryTapBlog as a place to discuss the beer, what we taste in it, what we like and dislike about it, what food we’d like to eat with it and so on. It’s your chance to share a beer with a houseful of like-minded people, without ever having to open your front door! Sound cool?

Let’s start with the summer case. If you’re already part of the club then you’ll be receiving yours through the post very soon - hold on to those bottles (or at least make some notes so you can join in when we get to those that you can’t help but drink)! If you haven’t signed up but would like to, don’t worry it’s not too late, have a look here. The summer case runs from July through to the end of September, so I’ll post a running list of bottles by week at the end of June and then the first bottle post will happen in the first week of July. My post will have some thoughts and opinions on the chosen bottle, and then it’s over to you guys to tell me how wrong you all think I am in the blog comments section.

If you’ve got any ideas or comments in the meantime, post them below or drop me an email at beerbirrabier at gmail dot com.

Cheers,
Mark

Allow Me To Introduce ... Me!

Starting up a brewery takes time and dedication you know. Time enough that you aren’t really left with a chance to write blog posts anymore. And so, with a face-full of malt dust and hands covered in hop resin, @magicRockRich hangs up his keyboard and his mouse and draws a line under his blogging days. Well, for the time being at least …

Which I guess means I should introduce myself. Most likely you don’t know me at all, but if you do, it’s probably through such blog posts as “Beer Festival. This Time It’s Personal”, “Colin Valentine on Beer Bloggers” or “Dry Hopping Bottled Macro Lager”. My name is Mark and I often go by the alias beerbirrabier; I write a blog at beerbirrabier.com and I tweet about stuff here. With Rich dedicated to making great beer at Magic Rock, I’ve been given the opportunity to write content for the MyBreweryTap blog - and it all starts with this post here.

My aim is to carry on the great job that Rich was doing, and I’ve got some cool ideas for posts over the next few months. We’ll start with a “Drink Along” idea that I’ve got for members of the 52 Week Beer Club (more details on that in the next entry) and we’ll build on things from there. There’s no reason why we can’t build a real community of MyBreweryTap customers, of beer lovers, taking your interaction with MyBreweryTap beyond the checkout, all the way up to the beer in your glass.

By way of a disclaimer, I’d like to say from the outset that I’m writing blog content here for free. I’m doing it because I think it’ll be fun, I think it’ll improve and further my appreciation for beer and because I genuinely am a fan of MyBreweryTap. Lack of payment also means that I have no ulterior motives or any obligation to say that I think something’s great if I actually think it’s a bit crap. What you’ll read on this blog is my honest opinion and the opinion of me alone; but that being said, I think this should be a blog for anyone that buys good beer from MyBreweryTap, so please get in touch with me (beerbirrabier at gmail dot com) with any comments, ideas or views.

So let’s do this then! Let’s talk beer.

Mark.