Birraire - Beer Blog

The Session , a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. (more on Brookston Beer Bulletin). "I believe the importance of books for the beer culture makes them worthy of another Session"

 Back to The Session . This time the host is Jay Brooks, from this Brookston Beer Bulletin , who reaches his "mostest favorite" time of the year for seasonal beers and hence proposes to write about "Holiday Beers". So here we go. Christmas holidays, that time of year when for some strange reason all local hopheads rush to buy and drink, for a few days, malty, alcoholic beer, with ginger, and even star anise. Yes my friends, star anise. The great power of marketing . But today's post is not intended to be another protest . Otherwise, my intention is to take a brief look at the short, young, and yet so distant history of our local Christmas beers . "Until 2011, just four different Christmas beers were produced by local microbrewers"  

José Benedicto , a fellow beer blogger from Spain and prolific rater at Ratebeer, summons the digital beer enthusiasts once again to celebrate the International Stout Day  and share our impressions of Stouts drunk in the context of this event, both through blogs and social networks. Last year I commented that I couldn't see the motivation behind this event, but in this year's official website  the organisers added a short description of what is sought, supposedly being the mere fact of celebrating a popular beer style like Stout. So on November 5th I joined the party.

After two sessions without making my contribution, I come back from other beer duties to write about the present topic for the Beer Blogging Friday of May: Localising Mild. This time is Alistair Reece (from Fuggled) that suggests fellow sessioners to ponder on the features of Mild Ales across the globe. To write this post I thought I'd check my beer database to make sure I didn't forget to mention any locally brewed Mild Ale, but it would have been hard to miss any of them: only four beers labelled as Mild have been brewed at this part of the world, all of them by Catalan brewers.

It is high time the RoundUp was posted. I was asked for a little additional time, but I think 2 weeks is more than enough, so here we go with the brief summary of each of the contributions posted by beer bloggers from all around the globe. Before that, I just wanted to express my gratitude to every article published. It has given me a fantastic view on how Beer Festivals are lived by beer enthusiasts in many different countries. So the main prospect why I wanted to host the 96th Session has been satisfied. A priori one could have easily predicted that drinkers from countries with a time-honoured brewing tradition would be less excited than the ones living in places that until recently had almost no beer offer at all. But borrowing Stan's words " context always matters ", and it has been a great occasion to learn about different cultures and individual thoughts.

Today's  Beer Blogging Friday , so it's time to post my contribution for The Session, an initiative by Stan Hieronymus from Appellation Beer . The current one is the 96th edition, the third one in which I take part. You can check out my past sessions here . This time is a bit more special for me, as I am the one hosting the current call. I had attended two different Welsh beer festivals during the summer, and after my vacation I was pondering about the role that these events play on different beer scenes. It was quite clear that it was not the same in Swansea than in Barcelona, but then again even the two festivals I attended while in the UK had a completely different approach. So I decided to write an email to Jay and Stan to suggest a topic for The Session of February 2015: " Festivals: Geek Gathering or Beer Dissemination? ".

The Session , a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday , is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. (more on Brookston Beer Bulletin ). So, here we are. It was 4 months ago that I wrote Jay and Stan suggesting a topic for a future call. I was reflecting on the role played by Beer Festivals (or "Beer Fairs", as we locally call the ones with the brewers serving their own beer) here in Barcelona and thought it would be interesting to know other people's point of view on the matter. Time's flown since then, and now I find myself happily hosting my first Session. But let's get to it.

Being the first Friday of December, today I had a writing date with other beer bloggers from around the globe at The Session, an initiative by Stan Hieronymus from  Appellation Beer . The current one is the 94th edition, the second one in which I take part after my first contribution just one month ago. This time the session is on Ding, an English beer blogger who currently lives at the southern part of the US. He recently had an exchange of thoughts on Twitter, after which he pondered and came out with an interesting topic . It has proven to be a good chance for me to do a retrospective exercise and analyse my past and current role in the beer scene during all these years.

With this post I join my first Session (or Beer Blogging Friday), an initiative born in March 2007 on Appellation Beer's blog, by Stan Hieronymus. As you all may know, it all consists on a beer blogger hosting an event in which all the others are called to post about some specific topic, the first friday of each month. The current call is kindly hosted by Brian and Maria, from The Roaming Pint , and  invites us to talk about Beer Travel. Before giving an answer to the various questions laid out by the organisers, I'd like to make a terminological specification. Unfortunately, the availability of cash and time prevents me from travelling as much as I'd like to. Moreover, I'm a happily married man, and Mrs. Birraire is a lovely lady who just tolerates and seems to have a certain degree of liking for beer (i.e. she's far from being a beer geek... thankfully). Accordingly, I haven't had neither the opportunity nor the guts to plan a Beer Trip stricto sensu . S...