I can't believe that the #YearofCOVID is finally almost over, feeling like it was several years in one. Here's my favourite posts/reviews I did this year.
1. Cody's Visit to Vancouver - I didn't expect that my only vacation this year would be to Vancouver, a long weekend of visiting breweries, a beer festival and some awesome pub grub. In total, my buddy Chris and I visited around twenty breweries in such as short period of time. I'm not done writing about it just yet!
2. Nonsuch Brewing's Louis Rye Ale - Several years ago I came up with the name Louis Rye Ale for a beer and a brewery finally used it, the awesome Métis-owned Brasserie Nonsuch Brewery created this beer as a Strong Rye Ale. As a fan of Rye Ales and as a Franco-Manitobain, this made me giddy, though the name unfortunately is controversial. Riel himself did not drink and he didn't like how alcohol was hurting his community.
3. Brewery & beverage delivery in Manitoba - Due to COVID, many breweries had to close their doors to public access. To deal with such an issue, almost every brewery started to offer home delivery allowing beer geeks to still be able to enjoy the products with the safety of their home.
4. Crown Royal 10 Year Limited Edition Whisky - While I mostly focus on beer reviews, once in a while I want to write about something different. Crown Royal came out with a special limited edition Whisky aged for 10 years in honour of Manitoba's big 150th birthday. I'm excited for the day when there's many more Manitoban-made Whiskies by other distilleries... which will be happening within the next couple years.
5. Grolsch Non-Alcoholic Radler - This may not have been my most popular Non-Alcoholic review of 2020 (Bud Zero wins that), this was one of my favourite N.A. reviews of the year. I'm finding that I'm getting a good following writing about beer without alcohol or at most 0.5% ABV. This one was smooth, citrusy and very lemony. They brought more products to Manitoba in recent months so I'll probably have to try them out soon.
Now that the year is almost over, I've been thinking about what I'd like to see in 2021. I've been seriously contemplating quitting this blog completely, I just don't enjoy doing it as I did five years ago. To me, this is a job, my second job but I don't make money off it, nor do I want to move it to a platform where people have to pay or anything, I just want to keep my reviews open to the public as I feel like my reviews are pretty straight forward and decently well liked by some people. So here's my top five goals for 2021
1. Write less but focus more on beers that I want to try. I try to review whatever I get my hands on but it's not healthy. So I hope to cut down on consumption, which will mean less reviews, but if it means more reviews of beers I'm truly excited to review, so be it.. but if people want me to write about specific beers, I probably will still.
2. More Non-Alcoholic reviews. Frankly, in any given day when I check out BeerCrank.ca's analytics, 8/10 of the most popular posts are always my non-alcoholic reviews, so I'll try to review a lot more of that.
3. Micro-reviews. A lot of my friends who review beers have mostly focused on using Instagram for reviews with short blurbs rather than writing complete blog entries with in depth reviews. I'm not sure what to do yet but I might do a series of reviews exclusively on Instagram without posting on here, but I'm unsure so far.
4. Hopefully build my online presence. I started my Facebook and Twitter accounts a long time ago and the amount of followers or fans has either stagnated or gone down over time. I need to bring that up, or I should just not give a damn about those numbers.
5. Hopefully more beer travel columns. I don't think that will really happen but I'd love to visit breweries throughout Canada and give my personal experience with visiting the breweries, write about what makes them stand out.. like be a bit of a Guy Fieri visits breweries kind of thing, but in reality it'd be more like Zach Galifianakis Between Two Beers kind of series.
6. Stop stressing, go with the flow, be happier. I said five but mental illness impacts my life (including blogging) too much. I worry too much about what others may think of me, my blog, etc. I need to just focus on what makes me happy, if that means less writing, so be it. If that means travelling across the country for a beer event (if I have the money and assuming things get better), so be it as well. It's you, the reader that keeps me writing and the analytics don't lie - people are visiting this site more and more than any other year. In fact, the readership in December 2020 alone exceeds several years worth. Tell me what you want me to review, because I don't read these reviews once they're posted, but you do!
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