So who are the big beery twitterers?

Jamie Oliver, the thick-tongued TV chef and hugely successful restaurant entrepreneur (and son of an Essex pub landlord), has 3.3 million followers on Twitter. Which is, you’ll not be shocked to hear, about 2,600 times more Twitter followers than I have. Indeed, it’s quite possibly more followers, my very rough survey suggests, than all the tweeters about beer in the world, (including brewers, bloggers, beer writers, pubs and bars and ordinary drinkers who tweet occasionally about the drink), have  together, in one big overlapping and multiple-counted pile.

But how many “regular” beer tweeters are there? And how many followers do the most popular ones have? Here’s my entirely unscientific and probably unreliable take on the beery tweeting scene.

In addition, there’s a poll for you to fill in, just to try to get an idea of the overlap between people who read beer blogs (or at least, people who read this beer blog) and people who follow tweets about beer on Twitter.

One of the great things about Twitter is that by using lists, you can set up and manage your own Twitter communities: I have 15 or 16 different lists, covering my personal interest groups, such as tweeters from and about the West London suburb where I live, tweeters about language and science and history, friends on Twitter, tweeters about the media and journalism, tweeters about politics, and so on, which makes keeping up with what is going on in those “virtual villages” much easier.

My personal Twitter list of “beery people”, which doesn’t include brewers, has 45 names in it, mostly from the UK, though perhaps six or seven of those are pubs I like to keep up with. I think I follow most of the regular British beery tweeters, but let’s say I’ve only managed to capture half of them: that would suggest some 70 regular UK tweeters about beer. That would certainly fit with the estimated number of regular UK beer bloggers.

I don’t particularly follow brewers on Twitter, but a quick survey suggests more than 80 per cent of London’s 40-plus brewers tweet, which, if repeated across the country, means some 800 “brewery tweeters”. Instinctively I feel that can’t be true, simply because of the small number of brewers’ tweets I see retweeted on my timeline, but if anyone has any proper figures, I’d be interested to see them. I’d also love to know how many pubs run regularly-used Twitter accounts: judging by the few pubs I know who are tweeting around where I live, I’d guess fewer than one in ten, but that would still mean several thousand tweeting pubs. Again, I’d love to see a proper survey.

However, a quick scrabble in the Twitter undergrowth suggests that most of those pubs have only a few hundred followers each, max, well short of even the average number of followers of UK beer tweeters (of all sorts) that I track, which comes in at almost exactly 6,000.

I cannot stress enough that the tables which follow are very probably pretty worthless, because I surveyed fewer than 150 Twitter accounts to formulate them, accounts culled from my own lists and those of about four or five other compilers, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that I have missed out people and organisations who ought to be represented here. That’s why the tables are headed “Ten top tweeters” and not “Top ten tweeters”.

That said, and errors and omissions excepted, who’s the top UK beer tweeter, according to Zythophile Polling, your wet digit in the Twitter wind? No huge surprise: it appears to be the official Camra account, with just over 26,000 followers (meaning just over one in six Camra members follow the organisation’s Twitter feed: draw what conclusions you like from that.) Most of these tables, interestingly, you’ll note, demonstrate a monopoly/duopoly distribution, with one or two names a long way out in front of the rest. The next name in the UK top beer tweeter list, and the top UK beer writer/blogger tweeter in terms of Twitter followers, has fewer than half the followers that Camra does. However, I’m personally not surprised to discover it’s Melissa Cole, who is Ms Connected in the world of British beer: if you’re on LinkedIn and you have a connection in any way with the UK beer scene, I’ll almost guarantee Melissa is the person who shares most contacts with you. She is more than 15 hundred followers ahead of the man in second place, Pete Brown, four thousand followers ahead of the third-placed UK beer writer/twitterer, Marverine Cole, alias Beer Beauty, and has twice as many Twitter followers as the people in fourth to seventh place.

The UK brewers table I’m definitely cautious about, because I’m sure I’m missing some important names, but again the number one – Adnams – is well ahead of the field. But you’ll have spotted that only four of my top ten are “old-established” brewers, that numbers two to six are all relatively new start-ups (even Meantime is only 13 years old), that the king of publicity, James Watt of BrewDog, is number two, and that Kernel, the highly regarded railway arch enterprise that only began in 2009, is number five.

I stuck in five beer retailers just for comparison: I fear the fact that four are London-based outlets is an artefact of my own bias as a person living in the capital, so don’t read a lot into it, but it’s interesting that the Real Ale shop in Twickenham is doing really pretty well, that three of the others are leaders of the “new wave London cask-and-craft-keg pub” revolution, and that Wetherspoon’s only manages an average of 16 Twitter followers per pub, which is pretty bloody poor.

There are also some more comparison tables: a list of what I believe to be the UK’s top (amateur) food twitterers, which shows that the country’s beer twitterers are all some way behind: a list of top wine twitterers, which shows that Janice Robinson hammers everybody, even Oz Clarke, but all top wine twitterers do better than beer ones; and a couple of lists from the United States, which once again undoubtedly miss out loads of people who should be in them.

The US has five times more people living in it that the UK, so of course its figures are going to be bigger than the UK’s, but New Belgium Brewing’s Twitter following is still impressive: three times as many as Brooklyn Brewery. In case you wonder where Samuel Adams is, it only has 24,000 followers: not much more than Adnams … It’s also interesting that Beer Advocate is so massively bigger than anybody else: scale its number of Twitter followers down to a UK-sized population and it would still have more than 76,000 followers. I’m not sure why it does so very much better than Ratebeer: personally, if I’m ever after information, I find Ratebeer, considerably more useful than Beer Advocado. I’m also puzzled why US beer bloggers/beer writers apparently  do so poorly when it comes to getting Twitter followers: Melissa Cole and Pete Brown have more Twitter followers than Garrett Oliver? Apparently so.

There we are, anyway: please fill in the survey on your personal beery Twitter use, put all the errors and omissions you can find in the comments, and if you want to try to lift my abysmal Twitter following up from its current pathetic 1,250, my Twitter handle is  @zythophiliac – many thanks!

Ten top UK beery tweeters
Name	Twitter handle	No of followers
Camra	@CAMRA_Official	26,112
Melissa Cole	@MelissaCole	11,297
Pete Brown	@PeteBrownBeer	9,796
Real Ale Reviews	@realalereviews	9,267
Marverine Cole	@BeerBeauty	7,152
Aletalk	@aletalk	6,693
Jeff Evans	@insidebeer	5,473
Mark Dredge	@markdredge	5,425
Roger Protz	@RogerProtzBeer	5,328
Fancyapint?	@iFancyaPint	5,207

Ten top UK (& Ireland) beer writer/tweeters
Name	Twitter handle	No of followers
Melissa Cole	@MelissaCole	11,297
Pete Brown	@PeteBrownBeer	9,796
Marverine Cole	@BeerBeauty	7,152
Jeff Evans	@insidebeer	5,473
Mark Dredge	@markdredge	5,425
Roger Protz	@RogerProtzBeer	5,328
Zak Avery	@ZakAvery	5,079
The Beer Nut	@thebeernut	4,238
Andy Mogg	@BeerReviewsAndy	4,114
The Gunmakers	@thegunmakers	3,580

Ten top UK brewer/tweeters
Name	Twitter handle	No of followers
Adnams	@adnams	20,536
James Watt	@BrewDogJames	16,108
Dark Star Brewery	@Darkstarbrewco	13,546
Thornbridge Brewery	@thornbridge	11,279
Kernel Brewery	@kernelbrewery	10,023
Meantime Brewing	@MeantimeBrewing	9,972
St Austell Brewery	@tribute_ale	9,699
Wells Bombardier	@Bombardier_beer	9,569
Camden Town Brewery	@CamdenBrewery	9,186
Brains	@brainsbrewery	8,502
Bristol Beer Factory	@BrisBeerFactory	7,730

Top UK food twitterers
Name	Twitter handle	No of followers
Niamh Shields	@eatlikeagirl	25,719
Kerstin Rodgers	@MsMarmitelover	14,739
Helen Graves	@FoodStories	15,352
Chris Pople	@chrispople	14,111
Signe Johansen	@scandilicious	13,131

Top wine twitterers
Name	Twitter handle	No of followers
Jancis Robinson	@jancisrobinson	183,695
Robert M Parker	@robertmparker jr	45,104
Eric Asimov (NYT)	@EricAsimov	44,278
Oz Clarke	@ozclarke	27,364
Tim Atkin	@timatkin	22,267
James Suckling	@JamesSuckling	19,920
Fiona Beckett	@winematcher	18,109

Ten top US brewer/tweeters
Name	Twitter handle	No of followers
New Belgium Brewing	@newbelgium	161,103
Dogfish Head Brewery	@dogfish beer	125,780
Stone Brewing	@StoneBrewingCo	84,544
Sierra Nevada Beer	@sierranevada	61,557
Brooklyn Brewery	@brooklynbrewery	55,791
Flying Dog Brewery	@flyingdog	50,118
Deschutes Brewery	@deschutesbeer	45,278
Rogue Ales	@rogueales	42,137
Harpoon Brewery	@harpoon_brewery	36,321
Oskar Blues Brewery	@oskarblues	33,096

Ten top US beery tweeters
Name	Twitter handle	No of followers
Beer Advocate	@beeradvocate	382,947
All About Beer magazine	@allaboutbeer	37,740
Beer Connoisseur magazine	@BeerConnoisseur	31,792
Charlie Papazian	@CharliePapazian	22,126
Ratebeer	@ratebeer	22,102
Beer Magazine	@BeerMagazine	17,667
Beer Mapping Project	@beermapping	13,037
Garrett Oliver	@garrettoliver	8,958
Peter Kennedy	@simplybeer	7,837
Jay Brooks	@Brookston	6,088

In defence of old men with beards

It happened, I’m guessing, about the time that the first wave of Camra members were hitting their late 50s and early 60s, that is, at the beginning of this century. If “real ale” had been pejorated almost from the beginning as the drink of men with beards, generally accompanied by sandals, soon after the millennium the cliché became old men with beards, sitting in a corner of the pub clutching a half-filled glass of something tepid, lifeless and tan-coloured in their wrinkled, liver-spotted hands.

Rooney Anand, viridian monarch at Greene King, seems to have been one of the first to favour the expression, complaining in 2002: “It’s time to explode the myth that real ale is for old men with beards. It’s not, it’s for everyone.”

Since then, the meme has trundled on, gathering speed: “Cockermouth brewer Jennings hopes to use Cask Beer Week to shatter the stereotype that bearded old men are the only ones who drink real ale” (Times and Star, Cumbria, September 2004); “real ale … seen as only for old men with beards and beer bellies” (BBC website, December 2005); “pubs full of old men with beards who drink real ale” (Farmers’ Weekly, April 2008); ” real ale drinkers … smelly old men with beards” (Metro, October 2008); “Normally when people think real ale, they picture old men with far too much facial hair, reeking of pipe smoke” (Metro again, August 2011); “real ale drinkers … crusty old men with beards” Hull Daily Mail, October 2011; “Real ale … for old men with beards and woolly jumpers” (Scotland on Sunday, October 2011); “real ale … a flat, warm brown liquid that old men with beards drink” (Bristol Evening Post, April 2012); you’re getting the idea.

Real Camra versus the revisionals

Is this newspaper report about ructions on Tyneside the start of civil war in the Campaign for Real Ale between “Real Camra”, those who hold to the original verities, that all keg beer is bad, and “Revisional Camra”, a younger set who argue that the campaign needs to accept “craft” keg?

I very sincerely hope not: Britain needs a “beer drinkers’ union”, and whatever criticisms anyone might have, Camra is and is likely to remain the best organisation to represent the concerned beer consumer that we have.

But the division in the Tyneside and Northumberland Camra branch reported on by the local Sunday Sun newspaper under the headline “Beer war erupts” does seem to have taken place along a faultline that I predicted 18 months ago, when I suggested that if Camra did not take care

it is going to become increasingly irrelevant to the real concerns and desires of keen younger drinkers unfettered by a too-rigid application of the tenets of the Founding Fathers. Instead it will become a beery equivalent of the Royal British Legion, the only active members those at or approaching bus pass age.

The problem is that any Camra member younger than 40 wasn’t born when the Campaign began, cannot remember what all those beers that so revolted the Founding Fathers, such as Whitbread Trophy and Courage Tavern, were like (and they were, truly, very poor indeed), and they simply will not accept the mantra “all keg is bad” if it clashes with their own current experiences.

Those experiences, I suggest, are that some modern “craft” keg can be very good indeed, and certainly much better than badly kept cask. And if you try to tell them that it’s irrelevant whether or not they enjoy a particular beer, if it’s not served from an unpressurised cask it must automatically be cast into the outer darkness, they will regard you as an unreconstructed old beardy who is stuck back in the days when “internet” is where you tried to put a football.

I’m not in any place to pass judgment on the argument between the Tyneside and Northumberland Camra old guard and the youth squad, since I know only what little I have been able to gather from the Sunday Sun article, a comment piece from the local Journal newspaper’s website and from links provided by Tandleman on his blog. The battle seems to encompass a number of different issues, including proposals for a new website, and the choice of beers and ciders at the branch beer festival, as well as “craft” keg, and it has ended up with two different websites running under the “Canny Bevvy” label used for the branch’s newsletter, one (the “official” site) dot-co-uk and the other (the “revisional” site) dot-com.

But I suspect the statement on the website run by the “revisional” wing of the branch sums up what a lot of Camra members under 35 feel:

Beer and cider should be most of all about having fun, experiencing new things and if you can, supporting local producers and pubs. We don’t mind if a landlord wants to use more modern technology to keep their beer in tip top shape, or if there’s another fruit flavour in our cider. We don’t even mind if a brewery wants to have their beers served from a keg. After all, surely it should be up to the person who creates something how they think it’s best to drink it, and for pub-goers to decide if they like it?

You can argue all night about whether that’s the best position to take in modern Britain to safeguard great beer. All I will say is that it’s an argument Camra is going to be increasingly hearing from its younger members, who have tasted and liked craft keg beers. What happened in Tyneside and Northumberland branch when the “revisional” wing put forward that argument, according to the “revisional” website, is that

the “beards” started shouting things about “mutiny” and “bringing the campaign into disrepute” and a great deal about why they didn’t want to change.

which might, some may suggest, be the surest way to drive away the new young enthusiasts Camra needs to keep it going as the Founding Fathers pass through their sixties and head towards their seventies.

Beer bloggers want you to drink keg, says Camra chairman

Excuse my intemperate language, but I’ve just been reading some total lying crap by the chairman of the Campaign for Real Ale about beer bloggers. Apparently we’re the “bloggerati” (eh?), and we’re “only interested in new things”, and for beer bloggers, Camra’s “40 years of achievement means nothing, as the best beer they have ever had is the next.”

Unfunny Valentine

What utter bilge. Colin Valentine’s presumably not a stupid person, but he’s evidently never heard of the Straw Man fallacy– or maybe he has, but he thinks his audience is too stupid to spot it. The Straw Man fallacy involves setting up a totally distorted and easily demolished version of your opponent’s proposition, demolishing the distorted version without tackling any of the points in the real proposition, and finishing with a smug grin and – if your audience has failed to see the deceit – a standing ovation.

What has rattled Colin’s cage so badly that he felt the need at the Camra AGM to attack with lies and distortions a group of people that includes not a few Camra members who have given, over decades, a great deal to the campaign and to the promotion of proper, tasty beer? Apparently it’s because some members of the “bloggerati” (a name chosen, presumably, to make us sound like a shadowy secret organisation up to some Dan Brown-ish plottery) have been “making calls for Camra to embrace craft beer”.

Maybe they should have kept to ‘revitalisation’. And dropped the ‘ale’

The biggest mistake that Camra made, I fear, was to change its name in 1973 from the original “Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale” to “Campaign for Real Ale”. The second-biggest mistake was to have ever used the word “ale”, rather than “beer”, in its title.

Am I serious? Surely coining the phrase “real ale” was a superb marketing tactic, enabling the campaign to put across its message simply and effectively: that it supported traditionally brewed and served British beer against the tide of over-carbonated keg ales and lagers that threatened to destroy this country’s drinking heritage. Would an organisation with similar aims, to stop cask beer disappearing, but called, I dunno, “Anti-Big Brewers Alliance” or “Confederation Of British Beer Lovers and Experts” have risen to become what the National Consumer Council declared as early as 1976 to be “the most successful consumer organisation in Europe”?

Maybe. But as the campaign approaches its 40th anniversary next year, I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that its name, and the mind-set that name creates, makes Camra today part of the problems facing beer in Britain, as much as it may still be part of the solution.