Greetings, everyone. Been a minute, huh? After a nearly four-week hiatus, the Crew is getting back to work.

Well, I am getting back to work, the others are still swamped with jobs and/or personal responsibilities that take precedence over a not-for-profit craft beer website. Thank you to all who have checked in and encouraged us to start writing again. Your support was appreciated.

As one might have guessed, there will be some changes in how we operate. First up, we are no longer going to push the envelope and try to fill all five weekdays with content. Oftentimes, there is just not that much out there, and in a rush to get something up, I feel like at times we have not given stories enough depth or proper research to make them stand out. Our primary goal now is for one feature per week, of varying size and depth.

We will still churn out The Week Ahead in Beer every Wednesday, but the format of that will be changing as well (probably not this week, but I will start tinkering with it soon). It has gotten too long and cumbersome, both for me to write and for folks to read. The primary goals of that weekly roundup — announcing all new canned/bottled/draft beers, highlighting various notable brewery-hosted/involved events — will not change, but the brewery-by-brewery capsules below will look quite a bit different in the future.

As for breaking news, we will do our best to keep covering that, be it a new brewery opening, or a brewer changing roles, and so on and so forth. Sometimes that will replace the weekly feature, sometimes it will be in addition to the feature, so if a really busy week happens, maybe we will still do five stories in five days. We are just not going to push ourselves too hard, both for our sanity and for the quality of the stories.

Bigger events, like the upcoming IPA Challenge, will still get a breakout preview and not just run in Week Ahead. Again, those previews may be in lieu of a feature that week, or not.

Oh, and as for what we missed during our hiatus, the only big things we know of were the opening of Bosque Heights at Eubank and Spain, and the world’s-worst-kept-secret that Bosque will be taking over the Toltec space (when Erin’s far-outside-the-industry friends told us that they knew about it one afternoon, we knew that cat was out of the bag long before Bosque told the Journal). There is still some brewer movement afoot, so we plan to sit down with outgoing Sidetrack head brewer David Kimbell (and perhaps his successor), and we will be checking in with the recent posting of the head brewer job at Ponderosa to see if Antonio Fernandez is sticking around or if he took that other job he told us about.

Yeah, sorry about the tease there. I gotta get back to setting up interviews and the like, make sure the batteries are good in the old voice recorder, and stretch out the rusty writing muscles. Hopefully the others in the Crew will all eventually be able to get back to writing, too, and then we can all provide this craft beer community with the coverage it deserves, while still maintaining that work/life/side project balance that we need.

Until then, story ideas and Week Ahead reformatting suggestions are always welcome.

Cheers!

— Stoutmeiser