The monthly update blog post we're doing instead of a newsletter is up/out, including news of a special edition of the session in collaboration with @agoodbeerblog.bsky.social and inspired by @beervana.bsky.social. 🍻🍺
boakandbailey.com/2026/04/apri...
Counterpoint: I use em dashes with abandon and will not let "AI" steal them from me. I was overusing them first and will continue to do so long after "AI" is a crater in our financial system, or our merciless overlords, or both
Humanity: still worth saving.
Deadloch season 2 was great again - truly Australia's answer to The Thick Of It in the swearing Olympics.
As before, the mystery is juicier and better told than you expect from a comedy. And it has a knack for making fun of eccentricities without feeling unkind.
As a bartender I approve this message. This whole thing was dumb Nevada vote-buying and it stinks. Why should I get a tax break while the dishwasher doesn't, to say nothing of teachers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers etc etc
It's been wild to see the Australian beer industry co-opt this observation as if it was primarily a call to lower beer excise.
Equally maddening to see people salivate over a windfall from higher taxes on gas exports. Leave it in the ground. Burning it for royalties is a false economy.
Interesting! We had ALE three days in a row, last year: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of the first week in December.
(And it was back-to-back ALE or ALES four other times in 2025, I think.)
i put together a bunch of the photos of dive bar bathrooms i’ve taken over the years and compiled them into a FREE digital zine. check it out if you are a little freak like me who loves grimy spaces marked by the passage of countless human dramas merrittk.itch.io/dive-bar-bat...
Every year, we get One Perfect day around peak bloom. See pictures from this year's this Photo Friday:
Social media post showing a bottle of fictional Boo Hoo non-alcoholic beer by Yee Haw brewing. Bottle of beer is resting on a table, with an open laptop computer in the background. Text reads "Introducing our first non-alcoholic beer -- For those long nights trolling the internet -- available April 1"
Here's some past April Fools posts. Fewer breweries are making April Fools posts nowadays. Can't imagine why.
The very thought of a brewery making NA beer is absurd!
(Yee Haw Brewing, Greenville, SC, circa 2017)
New archives added to archiveofarchives.com
Czech record sleeves
National Park brochures
Chinese cigarette packaging
Floppy disks
Record label logos
Alternative press newspapers
Dad hats
The singular "they" has been around longer than English has had codified grammar, so really, anyone who fumes about it can go fuck themself
www.oed.com/discover/a-b...
Screenshot of Untappd's 2024 April Fools "joke" as posted on Facebook. It announces the launch of "Tappd" an app like Untappd, but for water.
Screenshot from the current version of Untappd which now (in addition to beer, cider and mead) includes "waters" — as well as "sodas, juices..., mocktails, premixed canned or bottled beverages..., distilled beverages, cannabis-infused drinks..., still, sparkling, and fortified wines..."
Also — if you need a nice illustration of the near-impossibility of satire, here — 2024's "joke" from Untappd (featured in the above post) has since become a part of their increasingly bloated and ad-stuffed product.
Annual reminder for everyone — but especially the brewing industry: if you have access to the right social media accounts, there's still time to quietly delete (or at least unschedule) whatever nonsense your company has contrived for April Fools.
That was exactly my own reaction. Glad I could pass it along. Enjoy!
And there's always @tyburr.bsky.social's six-and-a-half-hour supercut '50 Ways of Hearing a Tom Verlaine Solo' if you feel like hearing a few decades with the push of a button.
idk who needs to hear this but you can just put Television’s MARQUEE MOON on repeat and let it ride all day give it a shot i promise it’ll help
Still no sign of the once-ubiquitous "IPA" in the main crossword this year, but it did appear in today's two-minute Midi puzzle. I'm not sure whether that counts as a sign of life or of relegation to the second tier, in Zeitgeist-monitoring terms.
Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay
I always come back to "It's Toasted" — "we've got six identical companies making six identical products; we can say anything we want." Pick something, anything, and say it like it's a good thing. Let people assume that you mean it, and that it means something. (This is diagnosis, not endorsement.)
Elliott saying: Bartender! Fetch me your finest ale. And bring some wine for the lady!
This is why i will forever hate Elliott
* "Bartender"? You see that man every goddamn day. His name is Gus. We love Gus.
* If you're ordering his finest ale, it's definitely one that i brewed. I made the wine, too, but "some wine for the lady" is 🙄🙄🤮
I love that James Watt feels badly enough about Tilray wiping out the Equity for Punks program to go the Guardian and complain about it, but not quite badly enough to reach into his own pocket and give any of their money back.
The man in full, really.
Brewdog's new owners are ensuring continuity of the brand in one sense: earning negative headlines for shitty behaviour.
GOOD MORNING! Here's the latest round-up of news, nuggets and longreads, with a vague them of nostalgia for 2016 which (we've checked the maths) is apparently a decade ago. 🍻🍺
boakandbailey.com/2026/03/news...
The news of an NA beer play by Clooney made me viscerally angry and Dave does a really good job hitting every element of why here.
Spring! Did I mention it’s spring tomorrow? Spring!!! Sure, it’s still snowing outside today and, sure, the yard is a mess from the hard weather and, sure, there’s weeks to go until the plants move outside… but spring! Here’s the beer news…
Happy to report that Evin from The Kernel has confirmed that his interview, at least, did actually happen. But after the weird and winding path the original article took me on, I don't blame myself for wondering.
New post up on Beer Diary, with weirdly appropriate timing for Saint Patrick's Day — scratching under the surface of a seemingly-innocuous article about the apparent popularity of Guinness took some unexpected turns and got a little weird, turning into a cautionary tale about an older kind of slop.
Yeah, sockpuppeting two random people, one or both without their consent, really put it over the line for me. You can't 'debunk' every random bit of puffery — time and sanity are both finite — but that felt like it was worth pointing out.
For the record, BLUESKY — referencing this very thing you're reading now — officially graduated to NYTXW Endorsed Status over the weekend. I do mostly watch the beer stuff, but I can't help notice other things too.