I have qualms referring to 2015 as one of my favorite years. I had a great year personally and professionally highlighted by the birth of my son in May. Unfortunately that means I lost my editor to momma-duty, so I apologize for the inevitable increase in typos and drop in writing quality. It was also a great year for Hoppy Boston, thank you all for your continued support of the blog. Overall I had nearly twice as many page views in 2015 over 2014 (the blogs first full year), and I am close to 1500 followers between Twitter (@HoppyBoston), Facebook and WordPress. The main reason I started this blog was to have an excuse to try a ton of different beers and visit local breweries, and to give my readers suggestions of local beers they should seek out. I am sticking to that goal, but I feel like it is important to reassess and make tweaks periodically. While I have never been one for New Years resolutions (isn’t it arbitrary to wait until New Years if there is a life change you want to make now?), but it is a good time to look over what works and what doesn’t and potentially make some changes.
Last year at this time I introduced two new column types, brewery overviews and head-to-head beer reviews, and then I did a piss-poor job with consistently writing either. I am probably going to shelve the hear-to-head reviews, I might revisit it at some point but I prefer talking about a specific beer instead of the compare/contrast. I am still going to work on the brewery overview articles, they are a lot more work and take some planning, but I will be happy if I can get 5-6 additional overviews written this year. I’ll also plan on starting a new page to index them. I’d be happy to hear any feedback/suggestions on the overviews, please pass it along here or on social media. I am also going to try and mix in a few more opinion pieces that cover big news in the beer world, those articles tend to come about based on events that strike a chord with me, so we’ll see how things shake out in 2016.
I am also planning on adding one new feature to the blog this year, a beer style of the month. I want to focus each month on a particular style, review some beers of that style and at the end of the month identify my favorite beers. The plan is to focus on some less-sought after beer styles (ie, not IPAs), and help identify some delicious beers that are not necessarily hop-bombs. I will focus on local examples as much as possible, but also touch on some of the best national versions as long as they are distributed in Massachusetts. I will be happy to get some assistance/recommendations, I’ll try to tweet the style before I head to the bottle shop and take suggestions. I am planning on starting in February (need to wrap up some things in January). Feel free to share ideas for potential beer styles and beers as the idea develops. Happy New Year and thank you for reading!
Hoppy Boston 
