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