The next eleven posts will all be from my three week trip to Sweden and Finland (and a day-trip to Estonia) in August 2015. It was a relaxing but interesting vacation, and that was what I needed at the time. In addition to all the usual sightseeing, I found some cool bars and breweries, and after visiting the Omnipollo bar and pizzeria, I finally came up with a blog rule for gypsy brewers. If they have a flagship (or original) bar that serves a bunch of their beer, then visiting it will be sufficient for a blog post. (I put in the flagship/original requirement because Mikkeller has a bunch of bars around the world, but then they announced they’d be taking over the old AleSmith brewing equipment and space, and so soon they will have an actual brewery to visit. But I’ll keep that wording anyway. Why not.)

So yeah, posts on four breweries in Sweden, six in Finland, and one in Estonia coming up. I’m still debating whether or not to do a compendium post on beers I tried from breweries I didn’t visit, but I probably won’t. No need to create more work for myself. Aside from doing more travel and visiting more breweries, that is.

Well, 2014 has drawn to a close, and I just barely managed to write up all the new breweries I visited way back in 2013. I can rattle off plenty of excuses for my meager blog output, but they all add up to Procrastination. My 2015 resolution will be to post at a steadier pace, regardless of whether people read it or not. The eventual goal is to get caught up on my backlog, which at this point is 13 breweries and one cidery, as well as a bazillion beers to add to old posts. Now that the 2013 entries are done, though, I feel like I can start working on those updates without falling too far behind on new posts. Heck, I’ve got all year to get those new posts done!

There are, however, at least a dozen new breweries in the Puget Sound area I want to visit, and a trip to the Bay Area coming up where I’ll hit a few more, and suddenly 2015 sounds like it’ll be pretty busy. I may need to dial down the beer intake for a bit in order to get caught up. Funny how that works.

Anyway, the new posts to look forward to include three new places in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood, three on the eastside, two in Bellingham, and three in Corvallis. Yeah, I didn’t do a whole lot of travel last year. That’s another resolution for 2015, travel more.

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.

Welcome to the new home for my brewery blog!  It was originally hosted on a friend’s server, but I thought it was time to give it its own space.  I started it, as you can see, in November 2008, about a month after a road trip to Oregon during which I visited seven breweries.  The first several posts are fairly minimal because I didn’t know I was going to start beer blogging, but they do get more detailed eventually.

I don’t have any formal rules about what qualifies as an “official” brewery visit, but in general I like to set foot in the main production brewery or its associated taproom.  I don’t need to do a tour.  Taster/sampler trays are preferred, but not required.  I don’t blog about macrobreweries or the larger chain brewpubs, but I’m sure there will be exceptions.  There are always exceptions.  Once I’ve published a post, it goes into maintenance mode, and I update it with any new beers from that brewery I try, whether it’s from a re-visit or from somewhere else.  I’m not sure yet how I’ll handle breweries that don’t have any sort of visiting hours, other than not writing about them, but I’ll think of something.

That’s pretty much all you need to know.  Thanks for making the trek to my little corner of the web!  Cheers!