Nora McGunnigle

I guess giving up Gambit and Southern Brew News has given me a few extra minutes to post something here, which is good. Even though I don't get paid for updating my website, it's still all mine and an important part of communicating to the public.

Preparing for the speed drinking madness that awaited us The Beer Blogger's Conference, held this year in San Diego, is a heady, um, brew of beer geeks, beer geek enablers, free beer, lots of information, and then also some beer. While I will be providing a more complete overview, I wanted to start out with the most intense (and my favorite) event of the conference, Live Beer Blogging. I recapped last year's  here , and used a lot of tweets to capture it. And I'm doing it again!

I'm a little behind on updating since I've been on vacation without my laptop, but behold the following:

Putting the "blogger" in the educational content, the last day of the conference kicked off with 10 different blogger attendees sharing five-minute presentations on the work they do, be it with a specific audience, using a special tool, or working with public or private partner organizations. Louisiana's own Jay Ducote of Bite & Booze fame presented on his work with the state travel authority, LouisianaTravel.com, by providing the content for their LA Beer Trail page and filming a video of Louisiana's breweries. There were also presentations on generating revenue from blogging (hint: really not so much) and one I was super excited about, an introduction to a new beer app called Brewhorn . Brewhorn is an app that helps beer drinkers figure out what they would like to drink based on their preferences and location. I think it will really help people new to craft beer or curious in expanding their craft beer horizons in a way that is respectful to the consumer's...

Speed blogging is pretty much what it sounds like - think speed dating but between brewers and bloggers. And the brewers have beer. And the bloggers write about it. Quickly, though, 'cause you only have 5 minutes with each brewer/beer before the bell tolls and they move on, and a new one moves in. We arrive via bus at the warehouse run by Burke Distributing, a member of the MA Beverage Alliance  and sat at one of 14 tables, and waited for the process to begin. I think that the gist of the tasting is best provided via tweets, just to get a feel for it.

Saturday was the main educational component of the Beer Bloggers Conference. For the entire morning we had sessions like "The Current State of Beer Blogging Survey Results" and "Mechanics of Beer Pouring" while conversing on Twitter. I particularly enjoyed the panel of "industry" bloggers - bloggers and social media gurus working for breweries. It gave an intriguing view of the different paths this blogging thing could potentially lead to, if an independent blogger was interested in making that switch.

I'm experimenting with sexier blog post titles! My second day as a Beer Blogger Conference attendee started out with several dozen other sleepy conference attendees boarding a bus on a drizzly Portland morning. We were heading down to Portsmouth, NH to have lunch at the beloved Portsmouth Brewery (and brewpub).

One of Maine's many state slogans is "The Way Life Should Be," and my time in New England so far would bear this sentiment out. The reason I'm here is to attend the Beer Bloggers Conference, held in Boston but with a pre-event excursion in Portland ME and Portsmouth NH.

My piece on the beer "scene" at Tales of the Cocktail is out today.  I can't pretend it was a very prominent part of the experience, but there was a connection between beer and cocktails or brewing and distilling that could be felt, if not seen, most of the time.

Enjoying a pint at the Kent St. Ale House in Brooklyn Starting on week 2 of my new adventure of writing professionally about beer full time, I've realized that I need to keep sharing this stuff here. Sure, I've got the Brewsday Tuesday column in the Gambit, and the Southern Brew News column starting in August, and several other irons in the fire. But this blog is where I can express myself in a relatively uncensored fashion and write about anything and everything I want to.