2009 Year in Review and Plans for 2010

I wrote last year about the importance of setting some goals to keep improving as a brewer.  Since it’s the time of year for this kind of thing – I thought it might be a good idea to recap what went down in the last 12 months and setup some new things to strive for in twenty-ten.

• Mission Impossible from 2009 was to win a medal at the National Homebrewers Competition.  Mission Accomplished.
• That lead to a bunch of other cool opportunities including the trip of a lifetime to Sierra Nevada Beer Camp.
• I managed to eke out a modest 30 batches from the garage brewery in 2009.  Just over one every 2 weeks – not half bad.
• I published 77 posts to this blog – hopefully you found at least 1 or 2 of them helpful!
• I started a Twitter account – which you can follow along here – and finished the year at ~480 followers.
• My picture appeared in Zymurgy twice (Sept/Oct 2009, Jan/Feb 2010) and on the new AHA website (awesome!).
• Gained an immeasurable number of new friends.

All in all not bad, but I think I can do better.  While all very cool – some of the things that happened were a bit of a fluke.

For the new year, I want to focus on things I can actually do – and maybe the rest will work itself out.  With that in mind here’s what I’d like to accomplish this year.

• Publish an article in BYO or Zymurgy.
• Publish at least 50 articles (and coming soon videos!) on this blog.
• Put on some unique beer events to raise money for local charities.  There can’t be enough of this.
• Get to at least Certified rank in the BJCP.
• Send 50 beers to the National Competition.  There’s very little control over the outcome, but I can improve the odds by entering lots of high quality brew.
• Brew 50 batches of beer.  That’s nearly once  a week – and I’m fermentation-space-challenged but practice makes perfect.

What about you?  Do you have any brewing or beer related endeavors you’d like to undertake this year?  Share them with us in the comments.  And if you’d like I’ll check in with you throughout the year to see how it’s going.

Tagged as: goals, homebrewing, improvements