Hail the Ale! Beer Blog

2005 was the first year for Hail the Ale! so I wanted to give a recap on some of the topics we covered, what we learned, and where we are going. I'll try not to make this too boring.

The Beginning

We launched this beer blog on 1/14/2005 with an interview with Michael and I. Our goals were to provide all beer-related news that we thought was interesting or funny and also do beer reviews for the non-technical beer drinker. We have been good at the former and not so hot on the latter.

Some Stats

We have posted 315 articles which generated 42 comments and 43 trackbacks. Thank you to those who commented (except the comment spammers). Our fellow beer bloggers have linked to some of our posts and helped to increase our readership so we'd like to hoist a virtual beer to them.

We are currently averaging about 10K unique visitors per month. Roughly 2/3 of these visits are to the HTML site and 1/3 via RSS. According to FeedBurner we have 27 aggregators subscribed to our feed. It is hard to equate that to actual people since some of the subscriptions are for services like Google where they don't report the number of subscribers.

The most popular articles this year were:

• Flash Game: Make Pilsner Urquell Girls Strip for You
• Flash Game: Miller Beer Run
• Softcore  Beer Irish Cream Porn

It seems everyone likes beer, games and nudity. Mix them and you have a winner.

The Future

In 2006, we'll continue posting all the beer news fit to consume. Michael tells me he'll be blogging more (and now that I've called him on it, hopefully he will) and hopefully he can work on posting more beer reviews.

What do you want to see from us? More beer, games and nudity? Less? More technical beer info? More layperson's info? More nudity? Let us know in the comments.

You can now find Hail the Ale in the Food and Drink Blogs category at blogsearchengine.com. So, if you subscribe to their RSS feed, you'll now see posts from Hail the Ale also. Damn, technology is cool

Have one on us:

No, this isn't the subject of a spam email. It is a product claim for the Octopus Tap. Similar to the Uber Tap, the Octopus Tap has three lines for your beer drinking pleasure. I love the testimonial:

“I just got this tap and tried it out for my friend's b-day. No one had to wait for beer and as long as she remembered to ice the keg there was no foam either! Also I thought it would need to be pumped a lot, but it didn't need it. Definitely the most unique and cool tap out on the market. A necessity for someone who gets a lot of kegs.”

Link via: Gizmodo

I wouldn't say it is a good ad, but it does feature beer and Jessica Alba.