The Archives

We've been keeping a beer diary for 13 years.... almost exactly 13 years as the first entry was August 10, 1997. Some of the first entries are very rudimentary, and many of the places we've been to have since closed. But we wanted to document our diaries and see if anyone else was interested in reading our journey. These notes are being posted nearly verbatim (I've added a few words to make them more grammatically correct as often we write in a shorthand). These are merely our opinions at the time of tasting and are in no way any official review. Sometimes we've revisited a brewery or a particular beer and changed our minds entirely (and in both directions). I've posted dates of our visits so the reader will have an idea how current (or not) the visit was.

Most of our visits have been to brewpubs, but occasionally we have had a draft beer at a restaurant and reviewed it. We've also been to several beer festivals (not GABF - yet anyway!). Lately we've been hitting up more beer bars than brewpubs, mostly because there are many more of the former which we haven't yet visited. They'll all be posted here - eventually. There are at least dozens if not hundreds of pages to type up.

A note about, well, our notes. When we started our diary, we didn't have particularly educated palates. Not that we're qualified as beer judges or anything at this point, but we've tasted enough craft beers to know what we like and at least have an idea what a brewer is aiming for in several styles. Our initial tasting notes were bare minimum; now we can be quite verbose (probably annoyingly so). Our rankings started lower, and have crept higher. When we started, 7.5 was an average beer. Now, 8.0 is an average beer. We are pretty stingy with anything 9.0 or above.

We've had some extremely well-made beers. We've also had some that we wondered whether offering them for sale was the right choice. We've tried to keep our words on the less than wonderful beers humorous, and it's never been our intent to appear malicious towards the brewer. We appreciate the effort made into brewing craft beer and are very happy to have so many people willing to take the time to make it.

We WILL travel for beer!!