Tu be or not tu be?

I've been toying with the idea of starting a Youtube channel. Specficially one that documents me visiting pubs, drinking new cask ales and steadily adding to my tally of around 13,000 different pints over the past 30 years.

Maybe called BV ticks beers. Or something. You'd see me in a pub getting excited because they have a new Red IPA from Siren on. I sup the beer, tell you a bit about it, and give it my considered verdict. The number 13,326 flashes up on the screen, along with the beer name, the ABV and a rating of 7/9. Then I move on to another pub in search of the next tick. Probably swearing quite a lot if it's my tenth of the day, then cutting the video short because I need a piss.

Would there be any demand for content such as this?

(I'm not assuming the answer is 'Yes', by the way. I know it's a niche thing. But then a lot of Youtube is niche. And still more of it is about making niche feel normal.)

 

So many of my fellow British Guild of Beer Writers members are now effectively 'beer broadcasters', I feel a bit out of it being a mere 'beer wordsmith'. Or maybe a 'words beersmith'. Either way, it doesn't involve makeup, clapperboards or Adobe Premiere.

 

Has it already been done?

Weirdly, there doesn't actually seem to be a 'beer ticking' channel already, or at least, not one that is successful, popular or 'algorithimed' enough for me to be aware of it!

The platform offers quite a lot of great Craft Beer content and plenty of UK-based channels where the idea is visiting lots of pubs and chatting about them - for example The Great British Pub Crawl and Tweedy Pubs, both of which I enjoy immensely, but that's not really the same thing as what I have in mind. 

Learn to face the camera, Ben!

On a superficial level, the two interests (pub visits and beer ticking) would appear to have a lot of overlap, but the truth is that they don't really align especially well. And here's why:  

If you're a pub ticker, you'll get to visit pubs of all shapes, sizes and ages, but in most of them, the beer choice will be broadly similar: safe, mainstream, dominated by the products of the big National and International breweries. (Which I typically fucking hate!)

And if, like me, you're a beer ticker, your best bet for a constant flow of ale you've never supped before will be to largely stick to the small number of pubs that cater for enthusiasts like you. In many areas there's only a couple of pubs that would fit the bill, and if you 'waste time' or 'use up your drinking capacity' in the other pubs in town, you'll do worse than if you stuck to the places that you know will have a few winners. That's just the way things are.

Indeed, if you're an experienced ticker - a member of the 10,000 club, say - there will be entire towns and suburbs where you'll struggle to get a new beer. I watch these pub ticking channels and they might visit ten pubs in a row where is absolutely nothing that would be a beer tick for me.

This is what Dale from the Pub Crawl does - I enjoy watching his efforts, and having a drink in 20+ pubs in a single day is hugely impressive, but I wouldn't want to drink the stuff he has to drink to make the visit count, and I'd get bored very quickly! (Except of course, when he's in a pub with a great ale selection, but has to move on to the next one - I'd be wanting to stay there until I've had all the beers I need, obviously!)

Likewise, Tweedy can talk confidently and engagingly about architrave, balustrades and Neo-Georgian features, and the pub history lessons are genuinely informative, but his taste in beer is, I think, pretty limited, very different to my own (a monumental understatement), and what's great for him wouldn't suit me. After all, I wouldn't be me if I was content with drinking pint after pint of Harvey's Best!

 

Trade-offs and truth-bombs 

The bottom line, whether we like it or not, is that one has to really pick a side, and in doing so you might miss out on experimental cask sours or historic pub interiors. I picked mine many years ago, and what I'm really interested in when I visit a pub is seeing what beer they have on. An ornate snob-screen or Victorian bar counter might be a secondary interest to me, but it's not the reason I'm there.

The only pub ticking I really do is Wetherspoons (837 of them and counting), because they are 'doably finite' in quantity and the numbers can be racked up pretty quickly if there isn't anything on the beer front that interests me - though, crucially, about half the time there will be, especially in faraway parts of the country or during their beer festivals. 

One year at the GBBF I did film myself with every pint and did a cursory tasting, but I never did anything with the footage, figuring it would take a lot of editing and still might not be all that interesting to people!

So is the idea a goer? 

I find the content on YouTube generally to be increasingly bland, broad and generally unexciting. If it's not dubious 'AI slop', it's some gormless cunt holding a little tiny mic between their thumb and forefinger, as if they're pretending to be some sort of visiting giant. Look you fuckwits, if you want a small microphone, get a headset or pin it to your lapel, but don't attempt to use it like a proper full-size one. Otherwise get a proper broadcast mic, then you won't look completely stupid when talking into it, or, worse, when trying to interview someone! 

Pub ticking would appear to offer a bit more in the 'audio visual' department than a bloke trying a new beer for the first time. Maybe that's why it's never really been done, or it has been done, but it didn't take off so no fucker ever found out about it?

But I'm actively considering the idea. So be warned! 

If a middle-aged fat bloke appears on your YouTube feed, remarking that yet another Rugby-themed beer is a bit underwhelming with malt predominant, but at least it takes the tally of 4.2%ers up to 1200... well, it might just be me!

So, Like and Subscribe! (Did I get that right?)