The Golden Pints Beer Awards 2010

The 2009 Golden Pint Awards were a success so we have decided we'd have some fun with them again this year. It couldn't be simpler, just fill in your answers to the categories below. You can do this in the comments on someone’s blog post, write them in your own blog or email them to Andy or me and we’ll post them for you. Do it any time between now and New Year's Eve.

Feel free to do a runner-up and a winner for each category (or some honourable mentions) and link to blog posts if you’ve written about winners before. For the open category you can choose whatever you want: it could be bargain of the year, night out of the year, barman of the year, cooking lager of the year, best beer photo, worst beer, anything you want. If there are any categories that you don’t want to give a winner for then just skip it.

It’s a bit of fun to see out the end of 2010 with a few nominations of what’s been the best of beer from the previous year.

Best UK Draught Beer

Best UK Bottled Beer

Best Overseas Draught Beer

Best Overseas Bottled Beer

Best Overall Beer

Best Pumpclip or Label

Best UK Brewery

Best Overseas Brewery

Pub/Bar of the Year

Beer Festival of the Year

Supermarket of the Year

Independent Retailer of the Year

Online Retailer of the Year

Best Beer Book or Magazine

Best Beer Blog or Website

Best Beer Twitterer

Best Brewery Online

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year

In 2011 I’d Most Like To…

Open Category: You Choose

And thanks again to Rob from I Might Have a Glass of Beer for the logo.

Beer Blogger Awards 2009: My Winners

Personally, I’ve had a good 2009. I graduated from a Masters degree, I started a career, I moved in with my girlfriend, I wrote the first draft of a novel (and another 35,000 words of a second), I became an uncle and the BGBW award topped it all off. Beer-wise it's been a great year too. Lots of new beers tasted, new favourites found, new friends to drink them with and lots of great memories. But... it's time to announce my winners for 2009. It’s been really hard to select most of these, hence why I’ve gone for some honourable mention choices too. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while then most of the winners will be familiar names – I like to talk about the beers I enjoy the most. I did a semi-similar thing last year and my choices are quite different and I’m sure that this time next year they will be very different again.

Feel free to take these categories and the logo (designed, like Beer Swap, by Robsterowski from I Might Have a Glass of Beer – cheers!!) and paste them into your own blog, alternatively you can email me your winners and I’ll post them on here or you can comment yours below.

Here are my winners for 2009:

Best UK Draught Beer: Marble Pint (Thornbridge Jaipur is a very close second)

Best UK Bottled Beer: BrewDog Tokyo* (Thornbridge Bracia and Zephyr are close behind)

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Too many choices... Stone Imperial Russian Stout, Captain Lawrence Reserve, Bear Republic’s Racer 5, De Molen Amarillo... Ultimately, Racer 5 reminds me of a good couple of days in London and I won’t forget it in a hurry

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: Pliny the Elder (a few Mikkellers are up there)

Best Overall Beer: Marble Pint

Best UK Brewery: BrewDog for being constantly interesting, pushing and progressing British beer and making people talk about beer (Thornbridge, Marble and Gadds need mentioning and with all moving to bigger breweries it’ll be interesting to see how 2010 fares for them)

Best Overseas Brewery: Mikkeller

Best Bottle Label/Pump Clip: BrewDog’s Atlantic IPA (shame the beer isn’t as nice as the label!)

Pub/Bar of the Year: The Bull, Horton Kirby (The Rake is runner-up)

Beer Festival of the Year: GBBF (Planet Thanet is second – love that festival)

Supermarket of the Year: Sainsburys (Tesco almost got it for introducing Gonzo Imperial Porter, 77 and zeitgeist but they took away Orval in the process...)

Independent Retailer of the Year: Utobeer

Online Retailer of the Year: Beermerchants

Best Beer Book: Pete Brown’s Hops & Glory

Best Beer Blog: Reluctant Scooper

Best Beer Twitterer: @reluctantscoop

Best Online Interactive Brewery: BrewDog (for their ability to go viral – no one else in UK brewing has that power)

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year: Anything with the pork scratching at GBBF!

Open Category: Best Beer-Related Thing about 2009 is...: All the new friends I’ve made and all the great new people I’ve met through beer (The Best Non-Beer-Related Thing...: Becoming an Uncle!)

Next Year I’d Most Like To... : Drink in the US and make some beer-money from writing...

Dubbel, Rabidbarfly and John Clarke have commented their winners here. Chunk, Knut and Andy have blogged theirs. And I think Kelly from Thornbridge needs a special mention for putting the year of blogging into a poem!

2009 has been a good year... Here’s hoping 2010 is even better!

The Beer Blogger Awards 2009!

The year is almost over and there becomes an inevitable point (for me, anyway) in which we take a look over our shoulders and evaluate how the past 12 months have been, before looking forward to the next. As Beer Swap rolls on (there’s no hurry, just drink and be happy), Andy (from Beer Reviews), Mark (Real Ale Reviews) and me thought we’d announce another joint project: The Beer Blogger Awards 2009.

We’ve come up with 20 categories to try and find the best of the best from 2009. All you need to do is copy the categories and give your answers in your own blog post. For anyone who doesn’t blog, then feel free to email your answers to Andy, Mark or me and we will post them for you on our blogs.

It’s just a bit of fun, celebrating all the good beer that we’ve had and where we’ve had it plus it’ll be interesting to see how everyone’s drinking year has been. If you aren’t based in the UK then wherever it says ‘UK’ replace it with your country. Here’s the categories:

Best UK Draught Beer

Best UK Bottled Beer

Best Overseas Draught Beer

Best Overseas Bottled Beer

Best Overall Beer

Best Bottle Label or Pump Clip

Best UK Brewery

Best Overseas Brewery

Pub/Bar of the Year

Beer Festival of the Year

Supermarket of the Year

Independent Retailer of the Year

Online Retailer of the Year

Best Beer Book

Best Beer Blog

Best Beer Twitterer

Best Online Interactive Brewery

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year

Open Category: You Choose

Next Year I’d Most Like To...

For the Best Beer choices you can give an honourable mention to any runners-up, if you wish. The food and beer ‘pairing’ of the year could be a slap up dinner or it could be a bag of peanuts, whatever you thought was the best. The Online Interactive Brewery should be the brewery who you think embraces social media in the best way (we’re an online community so let’s champion the best of the rest of the online beer community). The Open Category allows you to write your own category and answer (Bargain of the Year, Beer Drinker of the Year, Beer Moment of the Year, etc, anything you like). Next Year I’d Most Like To... is another open category, maybe you want to go to GBBF or GABF or Belgium, maybe you want to start homebrewing, maybe it’s just drink more great beer, whatever you hope 2010 has in store. And use links too, so if you’ve written about a beer which you think is the Best UK Bottle then stick a link to your blog on it.

Let’s get them all published by the end of 2009 so we can start a fresh on the 1st January and look forward to the beer delights that 2010 has to offer.

Here’s to 2009!

The image is from here where you can buy the glass (which holds 3-4 pints!). We are (hopefully) in the process of designing a logo for the awards so that it can be used any time we wish to award something to someone.