We are a group of like-minded people in the Vancouver area who taste beer together, argue about it, and publish what we think, and a year of writing has shown us that the second part is harder than either of the others. We are not a foundation, a guild or an awards body, and we do not have a founding date worth celebrating or a membership count worth quoting. What we have is a weekly habit, a rating scale out of five that we do not change after the fact, and a large and growing pile of published pages that were written with more confidence than the evidence underneath them supported. This is an accounting of where we got that wrong, written by the people who wrote the pages.
First, What One Year Actually Means Here
The oldest surviving post on this site is our original introduction, from 2014, and it sets out the method: we exchange what we are drinking before a meeting so we do not duplicate each other, we give each beer at least an hour, we score it out of five, and we do not revisit a score afterwards. That method is still the reason to trust anything we publish, and it is also the reason our weak spots are predictable. We are volunteers tasting in a group, not analysts, and a group of four opinions added together is still four opinions. A number that looks like a measurement is really a summary of opinions, and we should have said so more often than we did.
So the year in this title is a year of editorial work, not the age of the project. We would rather say that plainly than let the phrasing imply a founding date we cannot document.
The Mistakes We Are Least Proud Of
The most serious fault is not stylistic. It is that we published sentences that read like findings when they were guesses, and in a few cases the guesses were about things that never existed. We have found brewery names in our own pages that appear nowhere on the web except on our pages. We have attributed statistics to sources that do not publish them, and in at least one case a number we repeated was traced to a different year and a different country from the one we implied. We have described festivals, awards schemes and media events that we could not confirm were running at all. None of that was an attempt to mislead anyone. It was the ordinary failure of language written faster than it was checked, and it is our fault for not checking.
The second fault is staleness. Our pages are full of addresses, opening hours, product lines and prices that were true when written and are not now, and a page about a brewery that has closed or moved reads as current to anyone who lands on it from a search. We carried 2014 tasting notes as though they were a present-tense view of the province, which they were not. This is a specific hazard for a site about a province where small breweries open and close faster than almost anywhere else in the country.
The third fault is the one we can least defend, which is borrowed authority. Our older posts are full of first-person voices we do not have, a historian, brewers, a judge, a traveller visiting other provinces, each of them writing with a career behind them that no one on this project has. There is no such person here. We are a tasting group, and when we wrote as somebody else we were padding a page with authority we had not earned.
What We Are Changing In How We Write
- Every unsourced number comes out. If we cannot name where a figure came from, it does not go in, and we do not replace it with a smaller guess, because a smaller guess is the same invention in a quieter voice.
- Every page is checked against what is actually true at the time of writing, and where a detail is likely to move, such as an address, an opening hour or a festival date, we either verify it fresh or we say plainly that it needs checking.
- We write in our own voice as a tasting group and we do not borrow a persona. When we describe a beer we say what we tasted, and when we do not know something we write that we do not know it.
- We separate what we think from what is established. Our opinion of a beer is the part we are paid in experience for. The history behind it, the law that governs it and the chemistry inside it are things we check against sources before we commit them to a page.
- We treat a correction as ordinary. Publishing something wrong and then quietly fixing it without saying so is how a site like this loses the only thing it has, which is the reason to believe it.
What We Are Watching This Year
The first thing we are watching is the packaging and format question, because the format a beer is sold in is changing faster than the beer. Cans, four-packs and single serves have pushed small breweries into distribution shapes that older taprooms do not need, and the consequences for what a brewery can afford to make are real even when the beer is identical. A shift in format is also a shift in who decides what a brewery is allowed to be, and we would rather write carefully about it than loudly.
The second thing is the return of older formats, and here we have to be careful with our own bias. There is real interest in British Columbia in traditional pub beer, in mild, in cask-conditioned ale, in lager that is meant to be an ordinary drink rather than a tasting item, and in beer that is sold near where it is made. We like all of it. We are also the kind of writers who get carried away, so we are watching the return of the neighbourhood pub with the same scepticism we are applying to our own pages, and we would rather ask what a pub needs in order to survive a decade than announce a revival on the strength of a good month.
The third thing is movement of beer across borders, old and new. Beer has always travelled further than the beer itself, in casks and barrels and now in tanks and shipping boxes, and the current interest in beers from other countries is partly a taste story and partly a supply chain story. We are writing about that trade carefully, because a history of shipped beer is easy to fill with romantic claims about centuries past that we cannot source, and we have done enough of that to recognize the temptation.
What Would Make Us Trust Us More
What would make us more trustworthy is not more posts but fewer claims, each one we can stand behind. We would rather publish one page a week that a reader can check than seven that they have to take on faith, and we would rather a brewer correct something on our page in public than find out we quietly removed a sentence. Our original commitment, that we would not be bought, bribed or blackmailed into skewing results toward one brewery, is the whole of our position, and it is worth very little if it sits above a page full of numbers we made up. Everything in the past year has been a lesson in that, and the honest summary is that we are better at tasting than at checking, and we are working on the second thing.
If you find a mistake on this site, we would rather hear about it than defend it. A tasting group that argues with its readers cannot keep the independence it claims, and independence is the only qualification any of us actually has.
