Website Recommendations

Here are a few websites that I've been geeking out on recently, and that I think you should check out:

• White Beer Travels
• Silly Wine Tasting Notes Generator
• A pint for Dionysus

Let me explain:

White Beer Travels: We are hoping to take a family vacation to Europe this summer, and as I googled around for information on the Cantillon tour in Brussels, I landed upon the charmingly 90s-flavored webpage of White's Beer Travels.  The content hasn't been updated since Mr. White's unfortunate demise in 2007, but there is a ton of good beer information there, mostly focused on Europe.  There is absolutely no rational organization to the website, and the narratives and photo credits are innocently homespun in the manner of George Herter's cookbooks, or your oldest male relative's holiday videotapes.  If you must have some structure to your web activities, start on the beer hunts page, or the "pub of the month" entries for Bamberg, Bruges, Uerige, or Denver.

Silly Tasting Notes Generator: I'm very proud of my Beer Review Generator, and every now and then someone StumbleUpon's or Reddit's it, bringing an extra thousand visitors to the blog for a brief time.  Along the lines of the BRG, but for wine, is Greg's Silly Tasting Notes Generator.  It recently caught New York Times critic Eric Asimov's attention, who tweeted it to the rest of us.  Good stuff.  Try it out on your wine friends.  And don't forget the BRG when you need a silly beer review.

A pint for Dionysus: There are many excellent beer blogs in Portland. Man, that's a weird thing to say -- why would any town need more than a couple of good beer blogs?  There's only a certain amount of gossip and current events to report upon.  It's true, and yet the varying interests of the different bloggers still makes for a pretty interesting ecosystem.  Then there is A pint for Dionysus.  I don't want to ghettoize Dan by putting his blog outside that ecosystem, but there is something so refreshingly different about his writing style that it sits outside the mundane concerns of the rest of us.  Or -- I'm confused -- are Dan's concerns so timelessly mundane that they make good reading whether they're about beer or not?  You'll have to decide for yourself, but if you're not already following Portland's Studs Terkel of beer, I recommend you start with some of his bar reviews:  The Agenda, The Nest, Angelo's; or peruse his year-long project of checking out The Local.