Holy Thursday: Chock-Full of Beer Reviews

"Stop your doings, they cried. Please take mercy on us!"

Last week's Session post hosted by Oliver from Literature and Libation challenged us all to review a beer without actually reviewing it. After I had finished my individual post, I did a little pondering on the state of beer reviews in the blogging world. I settled on the idea that beer reviews are pretty basic. My beer reviews included. That's pretty much the gist of it.

I get the feeling that a decent portion of the online beer community doesn't put much merit into them anyways. After all, we are only going to decide based upon our own tastes. Beer reviews can only go so far. I mean, how long until some of them begin to sound redundant. I've followed the same procedure for at least 85 percent of this blog's existence. I've got to the point of using a thesaurus to incorporate different words to describe aspects of the beers I'm writing about.

Generations of Books

Man, I remember when I first settled on the perfect photo backdrop for my beer reviews. I put each beer on the end table just offset from one of the three bookcases here that are chock-full of history books. Books my grandfather owned. There's an orange book by Harry Pfanz entitled Gettysburg: The Second Day. If you've peered close enough in some of my review pictures you can sometimes spot "Gettysburg" in white lettering on a bright orange book spine. That's the one. I've always loved having that small Easter egg in the background as a token of my obsession with the three most important days in the small Pennsylvania town's history.

If there's one thing that I don't cringe at anymore when I write my beer reviews it's the fact that I prominently stick that bookcase in there. It signifies a lot. If I end up changing the format of how I present my thoughts on certain brews on this blog, I somehow want to keep that bookcase incorporated.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road?

So, the question is where do we go from here? At least, where do I go on this blog? I don't want to completely stop doing them in any fashion. Beer is a beautiful thing. Lovely colors and fluffy foam. Bubbles. The list goes on and on.

I'm planning on continuing with the same old boring format for a least the next few weeks. I already have photos taken and notes recorded stained with beer on certain pages. I can't let that work go to waste. Thus, those beers deserve to be reviewed. At some point I'll change it up. Maybe a creative angle for the photograph with a few funny quips? Not totally sure yet. Maybe "shut down and retool!?"

Where Have the Images Gone?

So, you've cruised on over to the web version of Twitter and looked quickly at your Twitter profile. More than likely (if you're an Instagram user) you've noticed the absence of many of your photographs that were kept under the "Recent Images" section of your profile. That would be due to Instagram pulling all of its images from Twitter posted there by users. Your photographs are now kaput now kaput.

If anything, the beer community benefited by the amazing filters Instagram employed. How many mouth-watering pictures did you post or come across over the past two years? That's right a ton.

From my (possibly former) Instagram account.

Now, Twitter has developed a new photography interface for both its iPhone and Android apps that enables you to add some filters to your pictures. Sadly, it leaves most of us in the online beer community with a dilemma.

If we continue to post photographs through Instagram, it means that less of our followers will be seeing what gets posted to our Twitter feeds. You might think those of us that say this are being picky, but people are less likely to see what you post when they have to make that second click on a tweet. If not, we can either post our pictures solely to our Twitter feeds with its new interface, or forgo posting them to Twitter altogether. To be honest, I find the collection of previous photographs on Twitter profiles valuable. I'll most likely be making the switch from Instagram to Twitter's new interface.

I'm interested to see how this goes. Will Twitter's new photo filters be anything like that of Instagram? I say it most likely will. All you're doing is putting a filter on a picture. Not that stunning when you really think about it.