A plea for help and a little history.
We've been doing this beer blog thing for awhile now, but there's always ways to evolve and change how we can recognize our local breweries. We need your help identifying the best spots of 2023.
A measure of gratitude
This newsletter won’t be super beer-heavy, just so you’re forewarned. I’d first like to start with a thank you to all of the readers and subscribers. Without your readership, this newsletter wouldn’t be as fulfilling to create.
I’d also like to extend a huge thanks to Matthew Schniper of Side Dish with Schniper (go subscribe!), who helped get me back into writing this newsletter. I helped create his Side Dish brand, and after playing around with the Substack platform, I realized it was far superior to the automated (and impersonal) MailChimp newsletters we were sending out. Matt’s influence and passion for journalism has helped me become a better writer, has reignited my passion for beer writing, and has revitalized Focus on the Beer through the Focal Pint newsletter. So strap in, the next year has a lot of fun newsletter-related things coming down the pipe.
The Focus on the Beer website will continue to exist, but won’t be updated as often as this newsletter(tell your friends). So, in a way, Focal Pint is an evolution of Focus on the Beer—a shiny new vehicle helping us continue to build relationships and cultivate conversation around craft beer in Colorado Springs.
A trip down memory lane
As many of you may know, Focus on the Beer was created by a group of beer drinking buddies—Eric Steen, Isaac Grindeland, and Daniel Flanders—in 2010 as a way to help bolster our local community and share the incredible stories from those breweries.
That crew put in a ton of work in the blog’s early years, and really set the stage for where we’ve gone since. From Meet the Brewer events at Front Range BBQ (and Another Pint) to Anniversary parties at Trinity to the founding of Beers Made by Walking, those early days for FOTB provided ample opportunity for local craft beer lovers to congregate and share amazing beer.
I joined the team in 2012 writing a few articles here and there about random topics, freshly back in town after a decade in Durango. In 2013, the original crew all found themselves moving away from the Pikes Peak region, so a rag tag team of Josh Howard, Aly Hartwig and myself took the reins with Eric managing from afar. The three of us ran the blog with Eric’s guidance until I bought the brand in late 2013. Special thanks to all of our part-time or one-time contributors like Chris Myers, Dane Skousen, Katie Black, Emily O’Keefe, Darcie Hannigan, David Wright and others I am probably forgetting.
While the faces have changed a few times along the way, it’s been quite a ride. Our scene has come quite a long way since those days, so thanks for allowing me to keep doing what I love.
Want to see our town’s brewery history? Check out our map of all the places that have come and gone.
Prime Picks, what the heck is that?
For those of you who followed Focus on the Beer in the before-times, every December I put out a voting contest to help recognize breweries and beers from around town. This recognition program was problematic at its core, as I picked the categories, and always prickled some feathers depending on who won or felt like they weren’t represented.
Throughout the years, our awards elicited every emotion from “lolz” to “Awesome,” but in the end, it always felt like some piece was missing.
So, with my rekindled Focus on Colorado Springs beer through this newsletter, and in an effort to keep with the photography puns and attempt to reinvent the wheel (nothing is new, right?), I’m relaunching the annual awards, retitled as the Focal Pint Prime Picks.
Ok, new name, but what’s different?
First off, there’s no popularity vote this year, so a brewery with a huge following can’t stuff the ballot box. Second, I’m making the total number of awards extremely limited, to only highlight my top 5 picks for 2023. Depending on availability, I may work with a committee to narrow down the Picks, but I may not.
Contrary to past years, the awards won’t just be a line on a screen, and I’ll be hand-creating some fancy awards (gotta use that Fine Art degree somehow) and presenting those to the winners. I’m still nailing down those designs and processes, but look for updates in early December.
Here’s where you come in
Since I can’t be everywhere at once, I’m obviously going to miss something cool that’s happening in the craft beer scene somewhere around town. So, in an effort to not miss out on something cool that happened, or a brewery who is pushing the boundaries for our small community, I need your help filling in those blanks.
For these awards, there are no categories other than “notable beer person/place/event/occurrence in Colorado Springs”—the door’s wide open for you to share a place or person or event that really made 2023 special for you beer-wise.
When you’re submitting a nomination, please make sure to give as much information as possible about who you’re nominating…there are no wrong answers!
Thanks again for all of your support.
Here’s to the next decade.
Ryan
Upcoming Anniversaries:
October 13: Wackadoo Brewing 1st Anniversary
October 21: Fossil Craft Beer 9th Anniversary