Online Communities

Browsing a bit online,  I found several groups dedicated to homebrewing and celebrating good beer. 

If you’ve got questions about brewing only the internets could solve, try looking to Realbeer.com. This site contains lots of helpful people looking to ask and answer questions about the process. 

Google and Yahoo each have some brewing groups. These seem to serve the same function as the Realbeer.com group, but with the familiarity of Yahoo and Google to stand behind.  There’s a yahoo one for homebrewers, which claims to be the largest on the site, and one for people in need of brewing equipement only. The Google groups are each about home brewing.

And on the social network side of things, there’s is a Facebook group with over 2,000 members dedicated to brewing and drinking the good stuff.

It seems like the majority of the discussion is on technical issues and beer trends/flavors. The identity of a “Chicago” beer doesn’t seem to matter as much as a “quality” beer. The people know what they like, and drink it.

But Chicago does have a few smaller groups more interested in the local scene. ChicagoHash.com, for example, is a meeting of a group of “beer drinkers with a running problem.”

I’ll drink to that.