West Berkshire CAMRA Good Beer Guide 2011 - We need your help!

Good Beer Guide selection is always going to leave some disappointed.

Leaving aside the specifics of the case of The Rising Sun, the point that the article does highlight is the extremely difficult decision we face every year trying to whittle down our selection for the next Good Beer Guide.

We're a small branch and the number of "active" members we have is even smaller and the task that faces these half dozen or so stalwarts of trying to get around all of the pubs located in the West Berkshire area is challenging to say the least. Even once that's done, the work doesn't end there as we then have to make the tough decisions as to which of the several really good pubs we have in the area are going to take the 10 or 11 all important places in the guide.

We do as good a job as any fair minded person could expect but we recognise there are always going to be hard working landlords and landladies and, probably most importantly, locals and drinkers who are disappointed to see that their favourite watering hole has been left out.

 So how can you help out? Well there are two main methods:

Firstly the National Beer Scoring system is a really inventive way that the local branch can be aware of pubs that are consistently serving excellent ale. The system is easy to use and full details and the electronic form to send scores to our branch can be found on the survey form here. If you don't have regular access to the internet we're more than happy to receive scores on scraps of paper, back of cigarette packets and supermarket receipts! Just send them to the secretary's address found on our committee page.

The second method is to help us out with the tens and tens of forays we make to actually check the pubs out. Selection for the 2011 guide starts now (oh yes, it's this far ahead we have to work!!!) and this will be a hot topic during every branch meeting for now on. New faces are always made more than welcome at any of our meetings and of course the branch's schedule can be found on the diary page.