11 December 2009 (Friday) - Beer... At Any Time

Being on a late start today I had some time, and so finally got round to phoning Shepherd Neame to ask about this year’s porter. Disaster!! – they have decided to do the Xmas Ale instead of the porter. Xmas ale is OK, but you can’t beat the black stuff.

(For ten points can any of my loyal readers tell me in which pub the above photo of the Shepherd Neame pump clips was taken)

Talking of beer, whilst I had a few minutes, I had a look at the “Beer in the Evening” website. It’s always been one of my favourite places on the Internet. You can review pubs and see what other people think of pubs you might want to visit. Once upon a time you could even suggest pubs to them and they would add them, but the current management of the site has chosen not to bother with that any more. I suppose it’s got such a major database of pubs already that it attracts sufficient revenue from the advertising. And so they don’t need to bother adding more pubs. Which is a shame. To the first time visitor, it’s quite an impressive website, but once you’ve been there a few times you see that the people who own the site are actually quite cheeky.

They rely on unpaid volunteers (i.e. me) to provide the reviews which make their website worth bothering with. In the last month over three thousand reviews of pubs have been put up by roving reporters like “Yours Truly”, but the site management have only added two new pubs. I suggested one in July (White Horse Bilsington), and it’s still not been added.

If you have a look on their website’s forum you can see the list of pubs waiting to be added. There are suggestions from two years ago that still haven’t been actioned. Plenty of people (including myself) have volunteered to help clear the backlog of pubs to be added, but for some reason the chap who owns the site has (very rudely) turned down all offers of help. Oh well, if pubs continue to close at the current rate, sooner or later he’ll have to start adding more pubs to the website.

And so back to work. Perhaps I should have taken another day off sick, but it’s the Xmas party tonight and I’d agreed to work the late shift since on one else wanted to. Bearing in mind my recent run-ins with management perhaps I shouldn’t be so helpful, but then, that’s the kind of guy I am.

Meanwhile “weirdie beardie” has got into his car and left “Gervais” in the lurch. “Gervais” doesn’t seem to care – he still has “Ginge” and “Old Bill” on the scene, and seems very content to be pushing the button.