Howdy Reader!

This is a post to let you know that for the first time since I started writing Beer & Nosh two years ago, we’ll be taking a little break. While I’m gone I’ll be getting married to beautiful girl and amazing girl, doing a little honeymoon travel across Europe to celebrate, and taking a much needed vacation.  That said, I’ll be traveling camera in hand, so you can expect lots of content when I get back.  Maybe even some photo essays while I’m abroad – we’ll see.  In the meantime, I’ll still be posting to Twitter so you can follow my exploits there.

This break seems like a good time to take stock as well.  I’ve been posting to Beer & Nosh for almost exactly two years.  Two Hundred and Fifty-Eight posts later, what started as a small project that only my Dad read (Hi Dad!) has grown into something much, much bigger. It’s helped me refine my culinary and brewing point of view, understand what makes for great food and beer, both in the kitchen and on the restaurant floor.  It’s opened up phenomenal friendships and professional relationships with local chefs, butchers, brewers, sommeliers, cicerones, restauranteurs, farmers, food bloggers and lovers of great food of all stripes.

One of the most rewarding parts of this blog has been the opportunity to plan beer dinners. It’s easy to play blogger/critic and say how things should have been done (Note: I’m plenty guilty of that too) but it’s much harder, and much more rewarding to go out and build something new.  My dinners at Scalas Bistro – both the first beer dinner I ever put together, and last year’s epic Mostly Barrel Aged Dinner successfully combined classic San Francisco Cal/Italian food with great local beers.  Then there was Notoberfest – an indulgent free for all of Ryan Farr’s never-ending parade of pork, Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream and Steve Altamari’s beer. Everyone keeps asking when there will be another one.  It isn’t planned or scheduled yet, but yes, there will be another Notoberfest.   How could there not be?   Thanks to everyone who has attended these events, and I only hope you’ve had as much fun at them as I have.

Creating these dinners, getting to collaborate hands on with local talent, and present in person to a welcoming San Francisco crowd has been an extraordinary experience.  The reaction to both my work on this blog, and these events has proven over and over again that there is a market in San Francisco for great beer and food, and the constant string of announcements of new beer-related openings hammer the point home.

So, with all of this in mind, I’m very excited that when Beer & Nosh comes back in late August, I’ll have some announcements to make for a new project – one that brings much of what I’ve learned here to bear, and will bring local beer and local food together in a whole new way.  We’re creating something just for San Francisco, designed with the local beer and food lover in mind.  It’s one of those “You got peanut butter in my chocolate!” kind of moments.  It’s gonna be…

See you in August.

- Jesse

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 11:11 am and is filed under etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.