For most of January so far I have been sick and while recovering, my palette has been in terrible shape, I haven’t been able to taste much but that is behind me and I am ready to continue my year of beer.  Tomorrow I am planning on brewing my 3rd batch of beer.  It’s going to be either another Irish Stout or a Scotch Ale.

I need to update my goals as I have made some pretty impressive progress so far.  I have visited more than 10 breweries, toured all that offered a tour, tried a ton of different beers and have learned a lot.  I have a lot more to learn but am pretty happy with how far I have come since my birthday an am excited to be back to blogging on a regular basis.

I may not have been blogging but I was still pretty involved in my pursuit to learn as much about beer as I can this year.  I tried a lot of different beers in December and need to update my Goals page to reflect all of them.  I brewed and bottled a batch of ESB that I am pretty happy with but ran into some cleanliness issues with my bottles.  I need to figure out a better way to clean, sanitize and store my home brew bottles so it was a good learning experience and most of the bottles of beer seem to be okay.  As I recently posted, I got a lot of great beer stuff for Christmas and have been looking at taking the plunge into all grain brewing.   In short, despite not having the time to blog about it, December was still a pretty great beer month for me.

I also had a lot of time to think about my pursuit and this web site.  I think I am trying to be too many things with this blog.  There is nothing wrong with blogging about as many things as I can but I need to get re-focus my efforts into my original ideas for this web site.  One of the things you are going to see a lot less of are beer reviews.  One of my goals was to review 100 beers this year.  The thought behind it was it would force me to learn how to review beer, how to taste beer and how to analyze and write about beer.  However, I  think I have been focusing on that goal too much and I need to focus on writing about all of the things I am learning about instead.  You will still see an occasional review from me and as I refine my palette you may see reviews increase again but for now, expect to see them less often.

As always, if you have anything you would like me to write about, please feel free to send me an email or post a comment.

Anyway, just wanted to remind everyone that I am still here and still involved in this awesome craft beer community.  Just going to be posting a little less frequently this month.