We All Love Beer And We All Love Beer

This is going to be a great year for beer in Leeds. As Sweary Matt points out on his blog, it's North Bar's 15th birthday this year (it's nearly old enough to drink!), the Leeds beer scene is going from strength to strength, and we're hosting the European Beer Bloggers Conference. If you live in Leeds, it would be really easy to look forward to a great year of beer, to put your feet up at home with selection of fine beers purchased from a local independent retailer, or prop up the bar of one of Leeds' fine drinking establishments, and just congratulate yourself. But you know what, let's not do that just yet.

We're beer bloggers, and we blog about beer because we love it in all its myriad glory. We have our own ranking system run by Wikio/ebuzzing, we're a happy community of like-minded souls, and we're a splendid group of people. But something that's been levelled at the beer blogging community is that it's a bit insular - it talks to the converted rather than recruiting new drinkers to the cause. So given that the conference in May is going to be great - we'll take that as read - why don't we try and broaden the scope of the attendee list a bit?

I've been chatting to Leigh at The Good Stuff, and over the next few months, Leigh has agreed to host/organise/curate a series of beer and food tastings at Beer-Ritz in Headingley, Leeds (disclosure - that's my business). The idea behind this is specifically to try and recruit some of the excellent West Yorkshire foodie bloggers to the conference, and also generally to promote beer and/or beer and food together. Leigh is kicking off on Monday 6th February with an evening of baking and beer. I'm sure that Leigh will follow up at some point with more detail, but the poster (designed and executed by Ghost Drinker) tells you all you need to know - come along between 6 and 9pm, and have some baked sweet treats and a mouthful of beer to wash them down. Please do come along, and if you can bring one of our foodie blogging brethren or sistren, so much the better.