another round.

I try to avoid crossing the work and personal streams here, but this one is too good to not mention.

A few years ago, I had a regular place for beer writing — besides here, I mean — in the monthly entertainment tab my paper produced. It was a great gig, and it gave me the chance to get to know some of the folks who drive the beer scene here in town.

I did that for a couple of years, until the paper pulled the plug on most of the side projects we were involved in. I still wrote an occasional column, and I’ve continued to cover beer-related news stuff, but those opportunities come around only occasionally, and I’ve really missed having a regular space to write about beer.

A couple months ago, our political writer was griping about having to send his Twitter followers to someplace other than our site when he posted an interesting link. He griped about it to me, and the light bulb went off — if we had blogs, we could both accomplish what we wanted to while still ensuring the traffic is coming to the paper’s site.

We got approvals from editors. We got our web folks on board. We jumped through a bunch of hoops and now, finally, my beer blog is ready to go.

So. Meet Half Full.

My model for this is Lew Bryson’s excellent beer blog, Seen Through a Glass, which does a great job of covering the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and beyond. My focus will be more regional, at least initially, sticking with brewers, bars and events in western Pennsylvania and perhaps northern West Virginia, eastern Ohio and western New York.

My goal, pretty much, is this — to make Half Full the place to go for beer news in our area. Piece of cake, right?

Y’all can help with this, too. Let me know if there’s something you want to see, if there’s something I’m not doing but I should or if there’s something that’s bugging you about the site. Any suggestions you have will help make it better, and I want to make it very, very good.