The Beer Blogger Awards 2009!

The year is almost over and there becomes an inevitable point (for me, anyway) in which we take a look over our shoulders and evaluate how the past 12 months have been, before looking forward to the next. As Beer Swap rolls on (there’s no hurry, just drink and be happy), Andy (from Beer Reviews), Mark (Real Ale Reviews) and me thought we’d announce another joint project: The Beer Blogger Awards 2009.

We’ve come up with 20 categories to try and find the best of the best from 2009. All you need to do is copy the categories and give your answers in your own blog post. For anyone who doesn’t blog, then feel free to email your answers to Andy, Mark or me and we will post them for you on our blogs.

It’s just a bit of fun, celebrating all the good beer that we’ve had and where we’ve had it plus it’ll be interesting to see how everyone’s drinking year has been. If you aren’t based in the UK then wherever it says ‘UK’ replace it with your country. Here’s the categories:

Best UK Draught Beer

Best UK Bottled Beer

Best Overseas Draught Beer

Best Overseas Bottled Beer

Best Overall Beer

Best Bottle Label or Pump Clip

Best UK Brewery

Best Overseas Brewery

Pub/Bar of the Year

Beer Festival of the Year

Supermarket of the Year

Independent Retailer of the Year

Online Retailer of the Year

Best Beer Book

Best Beer Blog

Best Beer Twitterer

Best Online Interactive Brewery

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year

Open Category: You Choose

Next Year I’d Most Like To...

For the Best Beer choices you can give an honourable mention to any runners-up, if you wish. The food and beer ‘pairing’ of the year could be a slap up dinner or it could be a bag of peanuts, whatever you thought was the best. The Online Interactive Brewery should be the brewery who you think embraces social media in the best way (we’re an online community so let’s champion the best of the rest of the online beer community). The Open Category allows you to write your own category and answer (Bargain of the Year, Beer Drinker of the Year, Beer Moment of the Year, etc, anything you like). Next Year I’d Most Like To... is another open category, maybe you want to go to GBBF or GABF or Belgium, maybe you want to start homebrewing, maybe it’s just drink more great beer, whatever you hope 2010 has in store. And use links too, so if you’ve written about a beer which you think is the Best UK Bottle then stick a link to your blog on it.

Let’s get them all published by the end of 2009 so we can start a fresh on the 1st January and look forward to the beer delights that 2010 has to offer.

Here’s to 2009!

The image is from here where you can buy the glass (which holds 3-4 pints!). We are (hopefully) in the process of designing a logo for the awards so that it can be used any time we wish to award something to someone.