PINtPOINT Blog

A beer publication from the people who built the app. Guides, love letters, essays and notes — nothing sponsored, nothing astroturfed, no SEO farm slop. Written because the pint deserves the thought.

• 20 April 2026 · Love letter
  A Love Letter to London: The City That Taught the World to Brew, Then Started Again
  The third in the trilogy. London is one of the oldest beer cities in the world, but the version you can drink now is barely fifteen years old — a comeback layered over an inheritance. Porter, IPA, Ind Coope and Charrington, then the long gap, then The Kernel in a Bermondsey arch and a new scene built on top of the ruins.
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• 19 April 2026 · Note
  Richmond, London — 15 Venues Now Live on PINtPOINT
  From zero to fifteen in one batch. A short coverage note on Richmond-upon-Thames going live — Tap Tavern, Richmond Vault, Brewstation, The Roebuck, and eleven more now tracked with tap lists where available.
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• 16 April 2026 · Love letter
  A Love Letter to Melbourne: The City That Built a Craft-Beer Scene on Bars, Not Breweries
  Companion to the San Diego piece — the structural opposite. San Diego built a craft-beer capital brewery-first; Melbourne did it bar-first. Catfish, Local Taphouse, Cookie, Hippo, Boilermaker — a scene that turned curation into a category of its own.
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• 12 April 2026 · Essay · Reference
  The Drinker's Guide to Hops: What Each Variety Actually Tastes Like
  A drinker-first reference to the 30-odd hops you're most likely to meet on a UK or European bar — Cascade, Citra, Mosaic, EKG, Saaz and the rest, organised by a six-category flavour framework that collapses Drexler's unwieldy 107 descriptors into something you can actually hold in your head.
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• 9 April 2026 · Love letter
  A Love Letter to San Diego: How a Navy Town Became the IPA Capital of the World
  Karl Strauss in 1989. Stone and Ballast Point in 1996. A hop arms race through the 2000s that perfected the West Coast IPA. A tour of how San Diego quietly became the most important craft-beer city in the world — and where in North Park, Miramar, and La Jolla to drink its legacy today.
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• 5 April 2026 · Guide
  The Chelmsford Beer Mile: A Live Guide to Essex's Best Craft-Beer Crawl
  Eight specialist venues in a mile — bottle shops, a brewpub, railway arch taprooms — walked in the right order. With live tap lists for every stop, plus a footnote on Baddow Brewery (1798–1927) and how Chelmsford Brew Co broke the century-long local-brewing quiet.
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• 29 March 2026 · Essay
  What's Wrong With Beer Recommendation Systems (And What PINtPOINT Does Differently)
  A response to Ethan Haley's Untappd-as-a-recommender analysis and NYC Data Science's Ninkasi project. Three walls rating-based recommenders hit — cold start, popularity bias, geography-blindness — and how PINtDEXTER layers Sip-or-Skip, Head-to-Head and venue-aware scoring to answer the different question a drinker is actually asking.
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Coming next

• In the pipeline

  The London Beer Map: 10 Neighbourhoods That Shouldn't Be Skipped

  Beyond Bermondsey and Hackney Wick — why Walthamstow, Tottenham, Peckham and a handful of lesser-known corners are quietly the most interesting beer geography in the UK.
• In the pipeline

  The Ghost Pubs of Essex: What We Lose When a Pub Closes

  Following the thread from Baddow Brewery's 1927 closure to the present-day FPI (Financial Pressure Index) we track for at-risk pubs, and why the PINtPOINT Ghost Hunter feature exists.
• In the pipeline

  Under the Hood: How PINtDEXTER Picks Your Pint

  A technical follow-up to the beer-recommender essay — the four layers of Sip-or-Skip, Head-to-Head, preferred-styles inference, and venue-aware scoring, with the actual decision trees. For the data-science curious.
• In the pipeline

  The Cambridge Beer Trail: A Walking Guide

  After the Chelmsford Beer Mile response, the obvious next UK trail. Cambridge's compact centre + college-town beer culture makes for a particularly good weekend crawl, with specialist pubs clustered in walkable reach of the station.

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