How does this all work, then?
Some end-of-year reflections on how we do what we do, based on questions asked throughout the year.
People ask us all sorts of questions throughout the year.
Sometimes, they’re the same questions, or questions we’ve been asked many times before.
Other times, they’re unique and surprising.
With our last reserves of energy, before we slump in front of The Good Life Christmas special on repeat for a week, here’s our attempt to answer some of them.
How does your business work?
Well, it’s not really a business. We make about £150 a month from Patreon, plus another, say, £150 a year from selling copies of our books.
We don't write articles for pay any more. That's partly because we have day jobs that leave us too little time to pitch, write, and chase payment. And partly that we wanted to get out of the way of people trying to make a living at this.
That we've gone back to basically being amateurs is a bit confusing, apparently.
People keep inviting us to events, which we don't attend, and sometimes stamping their feet at us because we won’t cover the story they want in the way they expect as “journalists”.
We're really grateful to people who do support us on Patreon.
That money covers the costs of hosting and research expenses.
It also, frankly, makes us feel less daft when we spend one of our precious days off back at our desks working on a ‘proper’ article like this about drinking in the inner suburbs of Cologne.
Do you work in the brewing industry?
No, not at all. Jess has been in and around the charity sector for years and Ray is currently working in design.
A few years ago, Jess was tangentially involved in the running of a hotel-pub-restaurant in Cornwall, in a finance role in the company that owned it.
We never reviewed it on the blog as we considered that a conflict of interest, even though we did like eating and drinking there quite a bit.
Of course we thought about opening a brewery and/or a pub in about 2012, like everyone else. Which brings us to…
Have you ever thought about opening a pub?
We have some elaborate daydreams about the pubs we would open, or would have opened over the years.
For a while, we thought a properly convincing Belgian café might be a goer, because it’s the one thing we really crave in Bristol.
We also had a thought about a 1930s theme pub with 10-sided pint glasses, dark mild, and a vintage gramophone soundtrack.
Fun as these would have been to design and set up, it’s hard to imagine them (a) surviving contact with reality or (b) making any money.
So bullets dodged, really.
How do two people write a blog post?
We've been doing this so long it doesn't seem remarkable to us but people seem to find it puzzling.
It tends to start with a conversation, often in the pub. After we’ve yammered at each other for 30 minutes, we've generally got the bones of a post worked out.
Then one or the other of us will write a first draft, for the other to complete, edit, or polish. That helps us get a more-or-less consistent tone of voice, we think.
Are you going to write another book?
Probably not. Again, day jobs get in the way… and pay better.
The last time we got offered the chance to write a book, we quoted a fee that would make it worthwhile for one of us to take three months off to handle research. The publisher said, oof, too expensive! So we passed.
We’re very proud of Brew Britannia and 20th Century Pub but certainly didn’t make much money off either. We wrote them because we had an urge to find out and then write about something we didn't know.
Gambrinus Waltz, our little monograph about lager in Victorian and Edwardian London, is a hint of where we might have gone next. A full history of lager in Britain. But we pitched that around and nobody was interested.
If an irresistible idea occurs to us, maybe we'll change our minds, but in the meantime, we’re happy using the blog to express and explore our thoughts.
Why are you leaving Twitter?
Sometimes, you just have to stop dithering and make a change.
We got to dislike feeling tethered to a particular platform. Feeling as if we couldn’t leave irritated us.
It's also been unstable and chaotic for a year or more, with sudden changes in functionality and policy. That made us anxious.
It also turns out that starting from scratch on other platforms comes with benefits. We’ve got far fewer followers on Mastodon, BlueSky, and Instagram, but they seem more engaged.
Many of our 10,000 plus followers on Twitter either weren’t really there, or weren’t really interested. (Or were permanently annoyed by us…)
Smaller, quieter conversations, and being less present on social media, suits us.
If you want to chat, you can find us on:
Sherlock Holmes in the pub at Christmas
From ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, 1892
It was a bitter night, so we drew on our ulsters and wrapped cravats about our throats. Outside, the stars were shining coldly in a cloudless sky, and the breath of the passers-by blew out into smoke like so many pistol shots. Our footfalls rang out crisply and loudly as we swung through the doctors’ quarter, Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and so through Wigmore Street into Oxford Street. In a quarter of an hour we were in Bloomsbury at the Alpha Inn, which is a small public-house at the corner of one of the streets which runs down into Holborn. Holmes pushed open the door of the private bar and ordered two glasses of beer from the ruddy-faced, white-aproned landlord.
“Your beer should be excellent if it is as good as your geese,” said he.
“My geese!” The man seemed surprised.
“Yes. I was speaking only half an hour ago to Mr. Henry Baker, who was a member of your goose club.”
“Ah! yes, I see. But you see, sir, them’s not our geese.”
“Indeed! Whose, then?”
“Well, I got the two dozen from a salesman in Covent Garden.”
“Indeed? I know some of them. Which was it?”
“Breckinridge is his name.”
“Ah! I don’t know him. Well, here’s your good health landlord, and prosperity to your house. Good-night.”
A footnote: The Alpha Inn is reckoned by Sherlockian scholars to be a stand-in for The Museum Tavern which is still there, and still in business, opposite the British Museum.
On the blog
Since the last newsletter, we’ve written about…
A cider farm and restaurant on the Somerset Levels that reminded us of Bavaria.
The Alpine Gasthof in Rochdale (a substantial update to an old post).
Carol singing in Sheffield, again, because it’s becoming a habit.
Whether there’s a Wetherspoon effect that depresses nearby pubs.
There were also our regular round-ups of reading from other beer blogs and publications. We’re also planning to share our usual mega-round-up of the best writing of the year shortly.
And on Patreon we shared notes on The Royal Oak at Borough, closing in on 300 pubs in our ‘every pub in Bristol challenge’, and the best beers we drank each weekend.
And that’s it until 2024.
Have a good break, if you’re having one, and we’ll see you on the other side.
Jess & Ray
What would you call the pub? Why not B&B and revel in the confusion?