We’ve Gone International! (AKA, A big thank you to my viewers)
I don’t often look at my blog stats. I should, they tell an interesting story. Turns out I have quite the international audience. Today having an international audience is not a big deal – the web makes these sorts of communications incredibly easy. But if 5 years ago you’d have told me that I would have a blog with over 25,000 visitors a year, from all corners of the globe, I’d have thought you crazy. Via this medium I’ve managed to reach readers from 37 different countries, scattered across every continent but Antarctica. Even one lonely soul from Greenland has wandered by here a few times…
…Much to my surprise, non-English speaking countries dominate my top ten – Germany, China, Russia, France, Switzerland, Brazil & the Netherlands account for almost half my traffic. I hope my consistently bad grammar doesn’t impede their enjoyment of this blog.
But more impressive, to me, is how this blog has allowed me to reach out and share yeasts with brewers around the world (see map below). To-date I’ve managed successful exchanges with over a dozen people from six countries (counting my home nation of Canada), on four different continents. Much to my delight, my mailer system has worked without fail with brewers as far away as Australia and South Africa (and using regular letter mail to boot)!
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| Map of my yeast exchanges, click for full-size |
So to my local, national, continental and inter-continental viewers, let me say thank you for your traffic, comments, video views and emails. I hope this network continues to grow, and that yeast farmers from around the world continue to exchange and share their yeasts with me.
Shawn,, send me an email as described in the "Yeast Bank" page (link on the top-bar of my blog) and we can talk about an exchange.
Bryan
Bryan, I too would be interested in exchanging. I just read up on your process for mailing and am quite confident I can follow the process. You have a few strains I want but not sure what I could offer you. I have the regular White Labs yeast and a few from BKYeast but I think your list has all that. Would you be interested in "Conan" yeast? This is cultured from Alchemist Brewing's Heady Topper. Very great attenuating strain that has some distinct characteristics.
Hey Sam,
My blog has been mentioned on German, Dutch and Russian home brewing forums, which is where most of that traffic seems to originate. The others – China for example, seem to come in from google mostly.
My Swiss connection is an old co-worker of mine who moved to to Switzerland for a job with Roche.
I'd be more than happy to do an exchange – I'll fire you an email.
Bryan
Very interesting. I know that your blog got mentioned in a homebrewing forum in Germany and may explain the hits from Germany/Switzerland/Austria. I noticed there is a yeast trade connection to Switzerland of yours. And since its not me, I am wondering who gets yeasts from you?
I would be up for a yeast trade. Let me know if you are interested. Keep up the good work.
Cheers, Sam
The yeast exchange has opened up a lot of unique opportunities; in terms of unqiue brewing opportunities, there have been several. Especially with the bretts that other bloggers have isolated. These don't seem to spread very far, especially outside of the US, so I'm not sure I'd have them otherwise.
I'm hoping one day I'll get some truly bizarre yeasts. I've always wanted some African millet-beer yeast (AKA "schitzo yeast", aka Schizosaccharomyces pombe) would be super-cool to have/brew with…
I too am shocked with how wide an audience I have reached, with currently 31% of my traffic coming from outside of my home country of the US. I don't have as large of a readership yet, but 65 countries are represented on my stats page (which I admittedly look at far too often); I'm excited to see where I will be in six months when I hit a full year. The yeast exchange feature is particularly cool though- that must open up brewing opportunities which would otherwise be completely unavailable. Have you gotten anything exotic you wouldn't have been able to get otherwise yet?
– Dennis, Life Fermented Blog