Piss and Vinegar on the New School

I'm excited to report that I will be contributing a monthly column to my friend Ezra's blog/online magazine The New School.  The column, called Piss and Vinegar, will be a monthly rant about some beer subject or another.  The first installment is called Beer Confusion, where I give a few anecdotes of a beer geek's worst nightmare -- when the bartender or server at a multi-tap beer bar doesn't know the important details of the beer being served.  Beer Confusion went up yesterday on The New School; go check it out and share your own anecdotes about clueless service in the comments.

Once a month blogging is the kind of project I can get behind.  For the first four years of It's Pub Night, I enforced a quota on myself of about two posts a week (95 a year or so).  That worked well, but it was becoming less fun for me as time went on.  In order to still enjoy blogging, I dropped the schedule, and now only blog when I feel like it.  I missed a couple of months entirely in 2012, and it felt great.

The New School is a natural fit for me.  Ezra has become a great friend over the years, and we originally met because he was an early reader of It's Pub Night.  Early on I told him that he was the one who should be blogging, since he gets out a lot more than I do and has many more industry connections.  He said other people had told him the same thing.  Eventually he did start The New School, and it has become a much bigger deal than I imagined.  Not that I didn't have high hopes for it -- here's how I introduced it in a post here almost exactly three years ago:

Ezra is so plugged in to the Portland beer scene, that the New School is going to be a must-read blog for getting the latest information.

I'm feeling pretty good about that quote, especially when you consider that of the four new beer blogs mentioned in that post, The New School is the only one that is still being updated regularly.  It didn't just survive, it is expanding.

Oh yeah, the new column.  Anyway, I chose the name Piss and Vinegar to encourage the idea that I'll be writing ranty, bitter pieces.  You can kind of think of piss as a backhanded pet name for beer, and I also like to think of myself in the role of "piss-taker" -- someone sarcastically mocking his subject, but all in fun.  Go check it out as I become the oldest pupil in The New School.