The natural response to having less free time is to try and jam more into it, right? At the very same time that I was asking Ethan to cover for me after the birth of daughter of mine I was also planning ways to add more content to the site. Thirsty Thursday has been going since CBW was a group of guys in a basement: no beer, no location, not even a logo. When one is tasked with writing a blog post for a brewery that does not produce beer and won’t for over a year, well, sometimes one has to wax rhapsodic.

We have a logo now! Look: here it is. Maybe you’ve seen it places.

After the brewery opened there was so much actual news that the more introspective, actual-bloggy type posts fell to the wayside. I could talk about the philosophy behind choosing low alcohol beers, or I could tell you about the beer we were coming out with, the tasting we were having and the new merch that just came in. With one post a week the blog became just the facts, ma’am.

This was all well and good: it’s great we’re so busy! But, as you may have noticed, I love the sound of my own voice. Ethan tells me it’s a selling point of the site! That’s good, because I’m a self indulgent bastard so it’s not like I was going to stop my irrelevant tangents. But a side effect of dry reporting is dry language, and people had noticed I wasn’t quite as… entertaining, I suppose, as I had been.

After I wrote The Long Overdue Kickstarter Post, Part One I realized how much I had missed writing as opposed to the relating of news. I wanted to get back to that, but there’s a fundamental problem: I got my start in the writing-about-beer world with Ethan on the now defunct Beer-O-Vision, and now that we’re an actual commercial brewery it feels wrong if not decidedly underhanded to be speaking critically about other breweries. On the one hand I’m a person with opinions and tastes, but if I say “I think beer X sucks” then I’m trashing a competitor in an official capacity, which isn’t an okay thing to do.

I’m Dan Conley, and I’m drinking Frank. (While washing kegs. I don’t usually wear blue rubber gloves and safety glasses. Well, sometimes.)

I haven’t quite settled on the proper middle ground, but I think it’s going to be something like this: I’m going to drink beer that we didn’t make, and I’m going to talk about it, at least in broad strokes. I’m not going to “review” it (which is good, since I was never good at that anyway), but we are not the only brewery in the world and to pretend that we are is downright silly. As I said, I’m a person, and I do occasionally drink beer that’s not from CBW (although until recently not as often as I should have: more on that in a few weeks).

So here we are. A second post every week, this one not about CBW directly but more about beer in general and its place in my day to day life. It’s going to be more personal, and yes even more self indulgent (if such a thing is possible). There will be talk of board games. There will be talk of things you probably don’t care about. There might even be talk of things you do care about.

I’ll be honest: I’m a little worried that I’m going to run out of subjects to write about. That’s just self-doubt, though, because I don’t ever stop living, and I drink beer regularly, and if this forces me to experience things and not fall into the rut of work, kids, tv, sleep that seems so easy (ah, blog-as-therapy) then all the better.

Next week: the paradox of owning a brewery reducing the amount of beer you drink.