We are very pleased to announce the dates and locations of our two 2011 Beer Bloggers Conferences:

May 20-22: London, UK
August 19-21: Portland, Oregon

We hope to build on the success of our 2010 conference, which had 108 attendees this past November in Boulder, Colorado. While the London conference is designed to appeal to European beer bloggers and writers, we also hope it will attract bloggers from other geographies, including some intrepid traveling bloggers from North America.

Neither the Portland nor London conferences could exist without the support of our initial sponsors: Molson Coors (UK), Wells and Youngs, and Fuller’s in the UK and the Oregon Brewers Guild and BridgePort Brewing in Portland. These organizations make it possible to bring the Beer Bloggers Conference to you at extremely reasonable prices.

Registration is now open and space is limited due to our conference locations and the ability of our dinner hosts to accommodate large groups.

We will be in communication with beer bloggers across the world soon to gather input for the conference agenda, speakers, and other ideas.

Eric Steen, blogger at Beer and Sci Fi, was the very last individual to sign up for the 2010 Beer Bloggers Conference. We actually received his registration at 5:22 PM on Thursday, November 4th – the night before the conference start – but since we had promised him a spot earlier in the week, we made room and let him in as the final attendee.

Luckily for Eric, he currently lives in Colorado Springs and so waiting until the last minute to decide was possible. And luckily for all of us, Eric has already used his acquired conference knowledge to start a brand new blog, Focus on the Beer. We caught up with Eric to ask him a few questions about his new blog.

Focus on the Beer

I really like the new angle on local beer at Focus on the Beer and am curious – did this come out of an idea from the conference?

In a way it did come out of the conference. I’ve been struggling for about a year now with my older blog beerandscifi, trying to rethink my goals with it. When I moved to Colorado 3 months ago I could see that the area needed something that was a little more like Brewpublic. I’m friends with Angelo but after spending 3 days with him I was inspired, and then after being at the conference I was also really inspired. I’ve made 6 blog posts in one week on both blogs, I finally got the energy and “balls” to just start the thing, and I have ideas streaming into my head every day. The conference was a huge inspiration for me.

What are your plans in your effort to “focus” on the local beer scene?

As of right now I’m contacting all the local breweries, beer stores, and eventually even pubs that serve craft beer. I want to get their updates and press releases in advance so that I don’t have to check their websites, twitter, and facebook pages all the time. I’m hoping to be able to congregate all the local beer news into one place and really build an interest in the beer scene in this region. I also plan to do interviews, review the seasonal and special beers at the breweries, and even feature some local beer drinkers, both in interviews and as guest writers.

What do you do for a living and why are you currently in Colorado Springs?

I moved to Colorado Springs for a teaching job at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. I’m teaching entry level art classes, as well as a few other classes like “Art and Social Practice” where I concentrate on how contemporary artists think about community and engage the public, or how artists use food and drink as their artwork. I’m also a professional artist and as I alluded to, my work looks at how beer is a type of social lubricant and social glue. I did a project recently in Portland where I had brewers from three local breweries receive tours of the art museum, they each selected an artwork, I provided them with a bunch of research on the piece they chose, and they each brewed new beers inspired by the artwork they chose. That beer was served for free to museum guests. Also recently I did a project in Glasgow, Scotland where I worked with 15 homebrewers to create an event series called Pub School and I built a temporary pub that served 27 homebrewed beers to the public for free.

Are you planning to move back to Portland and what happens to the Focus blog when you do?

I’m giving Colorado Springs a few years at least. I absolutely love Portland, but I’ll likely be able to travel back there 3-4 times a year for family and various projects that I work on, so it satisfies my cravings a little. I always bring an extra bag so I can load up as much beer as possible. But for the Focus on the Beer blog I haven’t thought that far in advance yet; it would certainly be nice if someone took over, or if there are more blogs that pop up in the area, it may no longer be needed. We’ll see.

We conducted an online survey of participants after the recent Beer Bloggers Conference and, as part of our effort to be open about the conference, I’d like to share some of these results.

Before I do, it is important to understand the five-point scale we use on the survey. In this scale, 1=needs improvement, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, and 5=outstanding. Note we purposefully slant this scale to be difficult, so that the midpoint (three) is “good” and not “fair”.

Overall, thankfully, no one rated the conference a 1 or a 2. Three people rated the conference Good, nine rated it Outstanding, and the bulk of respondents rated it Very Good. The overall score of 4.13 was essentially tied with our 2010 Wine Bloggers Conference, which scored a 4.12. So, great results but room to improve.

The top vote getters among all the different events at the conference were, not surprisingly, those involving beer. The Night of Many Bottles was the top vote getting with an average score of 4.50 while Live Beer Blogging was second with 4.30. The dinners at Oskar Blues and Boulder Beer were close behind.

In terms of “academic” sessions, Erik Boles’ presentation on how to make money from your blog, which was really more about how to build your own brand, and has been affectionately dubbed (by me) “Work Your Face Off”, was the top vote getter with a score of 4.19. Julia Herz from the Brewers Association, who opened the conference by talking about the state of the craft beer industry and how bloggers fit in, was also highly rated at 4.15. Most of the presentations followed with scores in the upper 3s, with our three other keynote speakers (Jay Brooks, Jessica Daynor, and Greg Koch) leading the charge.

The only event of the entire conference that was not well rated was the Women and Craft Beer panel. Many of you pointed out the panel needed a moderator. I’ll take responsibility for that, since I asked Julia to both be on the panel and to moderate it. That didn’t work well. Having said that, the topic itself clearly drew out lots of passion and I would propose we repeat the topic again in 2011, even if we change the format. Let me know what you think.

One interesting aspect of the survey results was 68% of respondents said the mix of educational, beer tasting, and fun activities was a good balance while another 26% said you could use more educational activities. I found this interesting in that the lower-rated activities of the weekend were the more technical educational talks.

Sean from Beer Search Party wrote an interesting post about this, explaining he really wasn’t that into the technical aspects of SEO, monetization, or even how to write to match your readers’ interests. Instead, Sean explained he is into sharing the reality of good beer wth his readers. I think this was true for many of the attendees, a good portion of whom either were not interested in or not ready for some of the technical talks. I have a few thoughts about this:

First, we will continue to involve you in our conference, will go thoroughly through the many suggestions you made in your surveys, and will again ask you what topics you wish to see in 2011. Second, we’ll try to keep the educational balance of the conference but try to have more inspiring speakers (like Erik) who are discussing beer and blogging in a non-technical way. Third, my suggestion is we continue to have some technical presentations. Although many of you might not be ready for SEO, adding a search box to your blog, or trying to monetize, my guess from our other blogger conferences is that you will be. We want to stay ahead of the curve.

Finally, 70% of you said you were very interested to attend the conference in 2011 and 28% of you are somewhat interested, mostly because you want to attend but need to deal with timing and cost issues. Heck, three quarters of you also expressed interest in attending the European Beer Bloggers Conference in London. I hope you can jump over those hurdles so we see most of you next year. Dates to be announced soon.

Please comment if you have any thoughts on this process or post.

For Immediate Release

Contact: Allan Wright
info@BeerBloggersConference.org
303-842-0474

World’s First Beer Bloggers Conference Wraps Up in Colorado
108 Online Beer Writers Discussed State of Beer Blogging

November 9, 2010

Boulder, Colorado – 108 beer bloggers from around the United States wrapped up the first-ever Beer Bloggers Conference on Sunday in Boulder, Colorado. Attendees enthusiastically claimed success and started looking forward to 2011.

“It was a great mix of sessions, events, and time to network”, explained Carla Companion, author of The Beer Babe. “I would certainly attend again, and the people invited were credible, quality bloggers who are examples of why we’re all so passionate about we do.”

Beer bloggers are considered the “new media” when it comes to the art of critiquing beer and have a role in educating consumers about the beers they drink. According to conference organizers, there are almost 600 citizen beer bloggers in North America alone.

The event also attracted industry representatives, including speakers Greg Stone from Stone Brewing, Julia Herz from the Brewers Association, and Jessica Daynor from Draft Magazine. In addition to talks and presentations, there were many beer-oriented events including dinners at Boulder Beer Company and Oskar Blues.

One of the featured events at the conference was Live Beer Blogging, a round-robin, speed-dating style of beer tasting in which 12 breweries each poured beers in five minute segments for 12 tables of bloggers, who tasted and reviewed the beer live. “I had a great time doing the live blogging”, offerd Justin Patti from New Belgium Brewery. “I didn’t know quite what to expect, but ended up having so much fun. Everyone was excited and really into sampling the beer and writing about it.”

Conference organizer Zephyr Adventures announced there will be two Beer Blogger Conferences in 2011, one in Portland, Oregon and one in London, England, with dates to be announced soon.

Complete information about the conference can be found at www.BeerBloggersConference.org. Zephyr also organizes the Wine Bloggers Conference and the Fitness & Health Bloggers Conference and co-organizes the International Food Bloggers Conference.

Attendees, feel free to post your photos on this Flickr account (thanks to David Jensen from Beer 47 for helping us moderate this):

http://www.flickr.com/groups/bbc10

If you have videos you would like to upload to the YouTube BBC channel, you can do so here:

http://www.youtube.com/beerbloggers

Finally, if you have a great review post or other information about the conference, please leave a comment on this post so others can find you. I’ll start by just linking to this photo gallery of Boulder Beer Crawl participants:

http://www.westword.com/slideshow/drinking-with-beer-bloggers-31784192/