The main thread on region splits got too hard to follow and I know Wales was mentioned in the Scotland thread but not sure we ever reached a conclusion? If we did then disregard this thread!
I originally proposed we split Scotland and Wales by their council areas, however Scotland got reduced to regions which in hindsight is probably a good thing given the lack of breweries in some.
With that in mind, I now think that a similar approach would work best for Wales too, as their 22 “principal areas” will simply be too much especially for non-UK raters.
If this is going to be done, it certainly isn’t going to be a priority. Far more pressing countries to do. Even choosing Scotland before, dunno, France, Spain etc. was questionable, though the prolific nature of certain brewers pushed it there.
Definitely agree I’d much rather see those bigger more prominent beer countries done before Wales.
Just thought it would be nice to have a solid proposal in place for if/when the time comes much later on after those.
I agree with Marko, but it is wise to get our house in order for when Wales is at the top of the list. I’m wondering whether splitting Glamorgan is wise, might make things quite tricky. All the others make sense but having Glamorgan as one area would be best imo.
Not in favour of this personally as it would bring Swansea & Cardiff under the same region - that seems like it’d just be too big a proportion of Welsh breweries/ beers in one place. Splitting into the 8 above seems about right.
Longing for the Welsh split (appreciate it may be a while) as it’s now by far my highest rated non-split country
This is also my concern with doing that. Looking at the list of Welsh breweries we have 97 active at the moment, 33 of these are in Glamorgan which is basically a third of Welsh breweries which does indeed seem like a bit too big of a share.
So…
is a good question. I think I’ll go through the list and try and come up with some rough numbers to see how it might look, I’ll include cideries too. Seeing the share of each county should make it easier to decide if a 6 county or 8 county split is better.
Right then, went through the active breweries, cideries and meaderies lists and did some spreadsheety wizardry - here are the totals.
County
Breweries
Cideries
Meaderies
TOTAL
Glamorgan
32
7
1
40 (28.0%)
Gwent
11
14
1
26 (18.2%)
Dyfed
15
7
3
25 (17.5%)
Clwyd
17
2
1
20 (14.0%)
Gwynedd
15
2
0
17 (11.9%)
Powys
7
8
0
15 (10.5%)
97
40
6
143
Glamorgan’s dominance is nowhere near as strong as I imagined. Will update with split soon…
UPDATE: Here’s the 8 county split with separate Glamorgans (which are surprisingly evenly represented). This is how the official Preserved Counties are.
County
Breweries
Cideries
Meaderies
TOTAL
Gwent
11
14
1
26 (18.2%)
Dyfed
15
7
3
25 (17.5%)
Clwyd
17
2
1
20 (14.0%)
Gwynedd
15
2
0
17 (11.9%)
Powys
7
8
0
15 (10.5%)
Mid Glamorgan
11
2
1
14 (9.8%)
West Glamorgan
12
2
0
14 (9.8%)
South Glamorgan
9
3
0
12 (8.4%)
97
40
6
143
Does this help people decide? Do you prefer the split to be 6 counties or 8?
Personally I’d still like all 8 for the sake of sticking to the defined counties, but I’m not against the 6 way split with a combined Glamorgan.
I’m not even an admin. Just trying to get group agreement on different countries together. Basically I’m trying to get shit as easily organized as possible for any given country so the admins split it. Or the admins admins I mean. As far as I’m concerned anything more is a win. Would have personally chose other places before Aus and Scotland but still happy we have those. We’re on a roll here now. So let’s just keep organizing and agreeing on best splits. Probably I’d say ireland is a better split before Wales but let’s get the regions agreed on for Wales so that when the powers that be are ready, they are ready.
We are not actually suggesting that Wales is a higher priority, just getting our house in order before we get the call.
If it were me I would go for Czech Republic next as it a very traditional Beer Producer then Netherlands, but I am not the driver in this.
Thanks @solidfunk for your efforts, & thanks @LazyPyro for the brewery count - very interesting.
I wonder if any other nation has such an even spread of breweries across its regions? Frankly Cardiff (South Glamorgan) needs to pull its finger out - I expect better of a capital city!
The way I see it is that services seems to be actively developing the site at the moment, and the region splits added so far have gone ahead relatively free of problems. It’ll be good to continue helping out to keep development moving forward.
Someone (or several people) be it an admin or normal user, needs to be proactive about getting the necessary discussions done for each country so that services will be adding the best/most logical splits when the time comes. So it doesn’t matter if you’re an admin or not, as long as we get these discussions completed so that services knows exactly what they need to add, all is good. Your efforts so far have helped a lot already hence why I tagged you in this one.
We all understand some countries are higher priority than others, be it their beer prominence, geographical size, or number of users, but it doesn’t change the fact that eventually us stat lovers would like as many countries split as possible. And it’s best to get these complicated/contentious ones like Wales done in advance.
But ya, definitely these days it seems more a question of which countries are ready and agreed upon get split first rather than which one necessarily deserves it based on some sort of beer merit. Anything more is a win at this point.
