Co-incidence? Just a fluke that the same holiday weekend sees Jeff close down Stonch's beer blog and the tenth Doctor making his exit? I was going to photoshop a Dalek in replacing the keg above but that would be a little too much effort on my part.

Jeff, first as "Stonch" and then as himself, was a big part of 2007's British beer blogging explosion and the one who did not at that time have a foot in the trade one way or another. For a long time, before he got into the pub trade and my house filled with more kiddies, we were sending chat messages about beer blogging back and forth every other day. I looked back to see of there was a particular back and forth worth summarizing what that was about and came up with this:

Stonch's: ... i might go and meet some folks at the pub now actualy
me: I hide from everyone...

The rest of the conversations are largely idle bitching sessions and working out strategies for maximization of ad revenue. Let the masters students figure that one out when they write their term papers on the early days of beer blogging. Jeff stuck his oar in with a heft in his early days but also rightly found the navel gazing boring. And, lest it be lost to mankind, in addition to taking a cask of homebrew on a train we all have to remember that Jeff was the one who gave us a time lapse movie of primary fermentation set to the music of Dolly Parton:

I haven't met Jeff yet and may never get across the Atlantic to visit his pub but I've liked following his life and writing so much I did a screen save of his last post for posterity. Hopefully someone has archived the rest.