I have added a new page called Event Calender that shows an embedded version of my google beer calender.

This calender will show:

• Brewing Dates
• Interesting AHA beer events (i.e. GABF, Savor, National Homebrew Day, etc...)
• Local beer events (DC Hombrew club meetings, Fest dates)
• Anything else beer related that is worth keeping track of

To start off the new decade I would like to make a few resolutions:

1. Post More: I posted 38 times in 2009 which is entirely too little. There is a lot I’m not blogging about, not sure why (usual excuses apply I guess). My goal for the year is at least 100 posts.
2. Add more resources for brewers: When I first started the blog I had envisioned many great tools that I wanted to add to help out brewers, myself included. So far that really has only been the BJCP style listings and maybe the commercial releases page (which is not up to date). Have no fear though, more to come.
3. Spruce it up: the blog theme is somewhat bland. Its functional and works for me, but I really need to get more color into this thing and maybe think about a new name that draws more attention.
4. Add readers and Contributors: I’m eager to get more people involved in the blog. I only know of a few people who consistently subscribe to my noise and I have only had 1 contributing post. More interesting posts and resources should attract more visitors. That along with more contributors will certainly get me more involved.
5. Drink more beer: instead of collect it. For some reason I began hording different beers. Some for good reason others for not. I need to clean out my stores of stuff that shouldn’t be in storage and only keep the quality beer that should be aged.

The last one really isn’t for the blog, but it will help grow my appetite for anything beer.

So my first question is: Who wants to contribute?

I have been getting a LOT of comment spam lately and it is becomming a problem manually removing them all the time. So I have decided to turn on comment moderation. This way I will have to approve all comments and can filter out the crap!

When you enter a comment it will tell you that it needs to be approved, so don't be surprised if you refersh and its not there anymore.

I have been noticing over time a large influx of new beer releases. Many sound very good and are things I want to try when the come out. I have been having a hard time keeping track of all of them so I decided to create page dedicated to new beer release info. I will also sprinkle in release information for beers that I like or plan to get more of. Enjoy!

Commerical Release Page

I finally have the database hooked up to the blog and published a generic but primitive gridview control that can display data from it. The control is currently setup to page with 20 record pages and sort on each column in either direction. At some point in the future I would like to add some more sorting, grouping, and filtering capability, but for now the control does the job. The control will cache itself for each different view, sort, page combination, so output should be fast. At some point I will probably use AJAX instead of full post backs to save even more, but that’s for later.

The following pages have been added:

• Inventory: shows my current commercial bottled beer inventory. The link is located in the pages widget on the right.
• Homebrew Inventory: shows my current homebrew bottled beer inventory. The link is accessible from the homebrew history page.
• Purchase Prices: shows vendor and cost information for beer that has been purchased. This is meant to help others find decent pricing for available beer. The link is located in the pages widget on the right.

Please let me know if you notice any anomalies. I have added some special JavaScript to handle the post back caching and not sure if it’s completely cross browser compliant. For instance if you click a link on the grid and the content doesn't change, it may be a JavaScript bug. The only caveat to the previous sentence is that if you click the sort on the left most column, it will reload the same page once to fill the cache state. Then after that it will flip to descending. All other grid links should cause the intended change.
I would appreciate any feedback.

 

I have just added a new BJCP Style Guide page which provides a breakdown of all of the BJCP styles. The information is parsed from the XML provided by BJCP by my beerblog site, formatted, and cached for fast viewing. The main page presents an overview of the styles categories and styles with links to the individual styles. Select one of the styles to get the full BJCP description.

I hope to add some more filtering and display capabilities later, but for now this is pretty good.

If you want more info on BJCP and their style guidelines, go here.

Enjoy!

I currently have the Beer Blog site running an early release of the new 1.4.5 version. The change was made over the weekend.

Yesterday I noticed an issue with the RSS feed. Not sure if its the new version or my content, but the rss generator is creating no-compliant rss. I will be looking at this in the next day or two and will hopefully have a resolution soon.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I am moving my homebrew history to the blog. So far I have moved everything but the:

• Brew links, and
  
• System construction (which will probbaly have its own page).

You can find the page from the "Page List" widgit on the right of the blog or from this link

This is the inaugural post of the Beer Blog. A blog devoted to my experience in and around beer. Hopefully I can get a few others to post as well.

Why Blog:

The reason is simple, I do a lot related to beer and I often find that I wanted a structured way to save all of my thoughts and experiences. I love to share my experiences with friends and a blog is a good way to make sure the information is saved for those who are geographically displaced. Plus, I tend to forgot much of the details of things that happen and having a permanent anywhere accessible record is perfect for solving that problem.

What Experiences: 

Plain and simple anything related to beer and beer making. For example, I'm currently planning the following category of posts:

• Description of newly tasted beers
• Visits to Breweries or Brewpubs
• Homebrewing
  • Date announcements
  • Recipes for my brews
  • Trials and tribulations related to
  • System construction
    
• Book and magazine reviews
• Kegging and Kegerator
• Purchases
• ... etc ...
  

In addition I hope to use this site to bring together many resources and of my projects that related to beer:

• Brewing History: history of my brews
• Beer Club: record of drinks. Used to ensure unique beer consumption and to rate those beers
  
• Kegbot: provides keg status and automated record of pours through the kegerator
• Cellar: record of what's in the cellar
• Links to helpful online resources
• Online home brewing tools

Lastly, it is my goal to have friends post to share in some of their experiences too. Depending on how that goes maybe we can extend the site to support multiple blogs.

ENJOY!

Oh, BTW, you may have noticed that this post is dated at the start of the [W:Unix_time:epoch]. I did this so it will show up as the first post because I plan to back date some posts.