The rate at which I’ve been writing and updating posts has been substantially lower than the rate at which I’ve been visiting new breweries and trying other offerings from ones I’ve already blogged. I suppose I could say that I’ve been too busy drinking beer to work on the blog, but that’s kind of a silly excuse – I just haven’t been sitting down in front of the computer and transcribing my little notes. So I need to re-focus because there are 16 breweries I have yet to write up and 30 or so to update. The next two in the pipeline, M.T. Head and Puyallup River, I visited on a long bike ride from over five months ago. There are also four exotic international breweries I visited during a Memorial Day weekend climbing trip to Skaha in British Columbia. Need to make a dent in this backlog before more breweries open, such as Bad Jimmy’s, Stoup and Helios (and those are just in Ballard).

The main hurdle is I usually scribble my tasting notes in one of those fancy Moleskines, which adds some visual legitimacy to my beer sampling, but slows down the process of getting what I write into the blog. I’ve been thinking of buying one of those tablet devices in order to type the notes directly into a blog post, but there are too many choices out there. The iPad Mini is nice but expensive. The new Nexus 7 looks good, but then it’s a question of wi-fi only or 4G. Might just have to flip a coin. Another advantage of the tablet is people will think I’m checking email or the web. You know, doing something important, rather than writing mysterious things in a notebook, which looks suspicious. Looking different is bad – everyone knows the outsider chimp gets beaten to death by the others. Well, okay, so I may be exaggerating a bit, but I need to somehow justify spending the money on a nifty new tablet.

And then recently, instead of finishing up a post, I looked through a couple shoeboxes of old pictures to see if there were any of breweries I visited pre-blog, thinking that I might start amassing tasting notes on their beers because I don’t know when or if I’ll get around to visiting them again. Places like Rogue, Deschutes, Pelican, Sierra Nevada, North Coast, Mad River, etc. I really like having a picture for each brewery for some reason. But nope. Bunch of photos of coastline and mountains, but no breweries. Probably for the best – I’m behind enough as it is.