I wasn’t going to do the Golden Posts. I don’t think I read a wide enough range of blogs to do it justice, and then I looked again at the categories and thought, why not. It at least gives me an excuse to talk about what I’ve enjoyed this year and to make a resolution to read more blogs next year. I also thought it might be a good opportunity to see how far I could stretch the word ‘blog’ before it breaks. So here goes, and be warned for those of you who have read my Golden Pints, there’s a fair bit of doubling up here…

Best Impassioned Rant

I called it when I first read it back in April but Richard Taylor’s post entitled ‘Brewmeister – the shame of British brewing’ was more than an impassioned rant and rather a fantastic piece of investigative journalism.

Best Pub Post

Bit of a stretch here as not a single post, but more a ‘series’ of them featured on a website. Beer East Anglia is a great resource for anyone visiting the area and features short posts on what to expect from the pubs listed, like this one about my Golden Pints pub of the year The Swan in Stratford-St-Mary.

Best Palate Post

You could pretty much choose any of Justin Mason’s posts on Get Beer Drink Beer for this category, but the one that took it for me was this post on the launch of Beavertown’s Ger’omino. A fantastic description of the evening, food and beer and well worthy of a place in these awards.

Best Beer Travel Post

Another series of posts takes this – Chris Hall’s ‘Four Nations of Beer’ posts were an excellent look into the current state of beer in the home nations. Check out the epilogue here (with links to the original four posts).

Funniest Post

Doubling up after winning in my Golden Pints, it absolutely has to be the #VineDiaries by Matt Curtis.

Open Category

As predominantly a podcaster, I’ve been ribbing Chris Hall since he announced the Golden Posts about how there should have been a category for podcasts – the Golden Pod if you will. I sometimes feel that we sit in the nether between the blog and the vlog, a blogging void where we generally tend to get forgotten about. We’re not ‘recognised’ for our writing or ‘popular’ for our videos, we just provide a ‘different’ medium. So I’m standing up for the podcasters here and as I can’t give this award to our show I’m giving this one to fellow podcaster Ian Bergin for the 11pm Somewhere podcast. Each week Ian talks with passion about the craft beer scene in Ireland and has also started discussing wider topics such as what the impending Wetherspoons invasion means for Ireland, tax breaks for brewers and what beer can do to your health. A worthy winner in my opinion.

So there you have it – hopefully next year I’ll have a wider range of blogs to choose from. If you enjoyed this, make sure to also check out my Golden Pints for 2014.