​ Did you know there’s a North American Guild of Beer Writers? We didn’t either until last year when we saw the announcement of their 2014 National Awards presented at the Great American Beer Festival. The Guild is made up of people who blog, vlog, write, podcast and otherwise promulgate the good word of beer and brewing. If you read through the membership roll, you’ll see a number of names that you recognize including the co-chairs Don “Joe Sixpack” Russell and Jay Brooks. Lucy Saunders is the director of the org and then my BeerAdvocate editor, Ben Keene runs the online social stuff, amongst many others you know love and have read. Since we published Experimental Homebrewing – Mad Science in the Pursuit of Great Beer during this year’s award window, we decided, “what the heck?” Our what the heckedness was rewarded when on GABF Saturday we were awarded Second Place in the “BEST HISTORY/ TECHNICAL WRITING” category of the competition – one of 27 awards that day. Haven’t read it yet? *sigh* – Well, go over to Amazon and get a copy! (If you have read it and haven’t dropped a review – please take a moment – the reviews help!) At the same award ceremony, I also got another award for BEST SHORT FORM WRITING, (600 words or fewer) for one of my BeerAdvocate BYOB Columns called “The Belgian Highlands”. Normally, I don’t have access to the final proofed copies of my BYOB articles, but Ben decided to share out copies of both my article and Aleszu Bajak’s winning article “Unlocking the Secrets of Smell”. If you want to read those articles – Ben’s uploaded them to Google Drive – The Belgian Highlands and Unlocking the Secrets of Smell. If you want to read my column every month (along with an embarassing amount of really great content) – subscribe to BeerAdvocate the Magazine. It’s been going strong since 2006 and I promise, I’ve only repeated myself a few dozen times! (I would also be remiss to not recognize the contribution to the column of Ellen T Crenshaw, who’s been illustrating the column since 2010. Her artwork kicks ass and usually tosses another layer of silliness on top of my text – Check out her website and her Tumblr to catch her illustrations.)