So I noticed in my email from the Brewers Association that they are shutting down forums.

Hey Forum Friends,

As I’m sure many of you have noted over the years, BA forum activity and participation has steadily declined (a phenomenon that is not unique to this specific forum).

In an effort to focus our efforts in areas that have most impact to BA members, we’ll be sunsetting the BA Forum as of March 1st.

For those of you who were getting key news and association updates from the forum posts and/or daily digest, I’d encourage you to utilize the BA Weekly Email (sent on Wednesdays) to that same end. Additionally, our new chat assistant, Barley, is now live and ready to help you track down resources and answer questions. Be sure to check it out and share your feedback!

Thanks for all of your participation and feedback over the years. It’s been a pleasure moderating these boards…

Most days I give the forums email a glance, but don’t use them actively. Many of the responses mention the jobs board or the equipment for sale how they will replace those resources. As long as the data from the forums is in their new chattbot’s dataset I don’t think it will be a loss of resources other than the equipment sales. For job posting between Probrewer, Brewbound, and even to an extent Indeed there are plenty of options to post jobs. The association did respond to the concerns about the forums but no clear path ahead yet.

But the larger question I started pondering is where are the discussions of beer happening online? The local homebrew club hasn’t closed their forums but largely are unused of late, when I asked a member they said the discussion had moved over to Discord. It seems Beer Advocate still has an active forum. X (or Twitter) hasn’t really been a place for conversation for a decade. There are local dedicated Facebook groups but I don’t see conversations. I noticed posting some long form pieces on Linkedin.

Bluesky, are people using it? I asked Stan and he said for UK based conversations it’s popular, but he hasn’t seen as much adoption for US folk. He mentioned Reddit is good for Atlanta scene so I am checking it out for Carolinas beer news.

So where do you find great online beer conversation these days?