Border country

And so James at the Beer Cellar bar in Exeter asked me this yesterday

And then I replied

border country

— Adrian Tierney-Jones (@ATJbeer) May 17, 2018

 

I wasn’t entirely serious, I was looking around the room, which has books piled up everywhere and hunting for a title that would be both esoteric and perhaps make some sense. And there was a Batsford book called Welsh Border Country. Obviously I dropped the Welsh, which would make even less sense. This morning, I thought about it a bit more especially after reading Boak & Bailey’s monthly newsletter, which featured their commentary in the aftermath of a social media scuffle following their blog post on the possibility of Beavertown being made ready for sale at some stage. 

Border country? I like border areas, where two lands shuffle up against each other and you get the best of both. I would never return to live in Wales, but the borders would have its attractions. With beer writing, it feels as if on one hand there is the old traditional campaigning side of beer writing on one side of the border, nurtured in the once scared halls of CAMRA and now mutated to writing about diversity, brewery sellouts, why this beer festival is a game changer etc; on the other side of the border there’s the fanciful notions of beer, the poetic side of things, the sensory writing, the people watching, the personal experiences within the context of beer. Both have their validity and maybe someone somewhere will inevitably argue that beer writing is more of a federal state with a variety of identities. That might be true but for the moment my thoughts are in the borders.