It still looks a little bit hectic around here (especially behind the scenes) and cosmetically we need a few new paints and plug-ins and other dealies to really get the new site jumping. But, we are officially moved over. And this also marks the first *NEW* post of 2021. We have several posts that will publish and be back-dated since they were written and started back in December and early January while we were capped on our bandwidth, I will make sure they are visible and easy to find. But this marks the first new post for 2021 and the first new post for the new site.

So be sure to update all of your bookmarks and everything, we are no longer at thebeerthrillers.home.blog but are now instead at: https://thebeerthrillers.com/

The move now means we have our own full domain hosting, our own full site, and no longer operating on just the old little WordPress blogging that we started with. I started the blog in May 2019, and we hit our bandwidth cap just shy of the end of December 2020. Over those two years, we had nearly 300 blog posts (due to editing and changes and back-dating, it will appear as over 300; and its been more than 300 written, but things get changed, moved, edited, and the process sometimes makes things get moved around). Our first year (2019) (May – December) we hit 27K views. In 2020 (January – December) we hit 58K (nearly 59K). Already in just January 2021, before the full migration – the old site (without posting to it or editing the blog) has already gotten near to 400 posts. We have worked our way up on FeedSpot’s Top 100 Beer Blogs to #9, and Pennsylvania’s Top 40 Blogs at #11.

This move will allow a lot more visitors to have access to the site, it will improve our search engine results with Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, etc. It will also give us a lot more features to play around with. We can do polls, quizzes, surveys, and a whole host of other things. And we will likely take full advantage of a lot of these features going forward. I know I’d love to set up a March Madness type bracket thing come March this year, and see how that goes.

Like I said above, we have quite a few articles to move over yet from the drafting phase that will get published and backlogged, as well as many new articles freshly written to be posting in the near future. With the move, you can expect to see a lot more articles coming from us.

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has visited, followed, liked, and subscribed, I would also like to say I am eagerly awaiting to getting to play around with the new site. And I know Josh is also eager to get to try it out and post some new articles. So you can expect to see a lot more from us here at The Beer Thrillers; thats for sure. You’ll see plenty more from myself (B. Kline), as well as Josh (J. Doncevic) and its looking like AJ Brechbiel (Default Brewing / Rough Edges Brewing), Andy Parys (A.Parys, The Sugar Foot), and hopefully Karl Larsen (ihackbeers) will be joining us as well for more articles from all of them. Also, the extended Beer Thrillers family – Knights of Nostalgia (Drew – along with his crew of streamers; myself, Rome, Kelsey, Rory, and the several others he’s had on his stream) and So a Mexican and a Scot Walk Into a Bar… (the podcast ran by Esteban and Drew, that features myself, Dan, and several others from time to time) are all looking forward to providing more content in the future. So please be sure to check out the site here, as well as their sites, and be sure to also check out our friends from the south (Georgia area) – Let Us Drink Beer blog, as we are looking forward to working with Dave (blog runner for Let Us Drink Beer) and sharing articles back and forth. (Let Us Drink Beer Blog, has written a few articles for us, and we have written a few for them, in an effort to reach a wider audience and collaborate together. You can find some of my articles on their site as The Beer Thrillers or B. Kline, and you can find some of their articles here on our site under Let Us Drink Beer).

As always, we provide a wide range of topics and discussions here on The Beer Thrillers blog. We have beer reviews, brewery reviews, travelogues, beer education, home brewing articles, book reviews, beer and brewery events, brewery and craft beer news, as well as articles on growing hops, lantern flies, and other topics related to the beer industry, and much much more. You can also always contact us by using our CONTACT PAGE – THE BEER THRILLERS.

Thank you everyone for visiting, following, reading, sharing, and liking us, and staying with us through this move. It is so greatly appreciated. All of you readers out there are why we write and maintain this site. Thank you so much!

Happy New Years everyone, and welcome back to indoor dining in Pennsylvania. So be sure to go out and support your local breweries, they certainly need all the help they can get right now! (If you still feel unsafe dining indoors, you can always do to-go and take out and order beer to-go, most breweries are offering some form of to-go, either growler or crowler fills or four or six packs to go.)

Cheers!

-B. Kline

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Seriously. F*CK 2020. I don’t think I’ll hear too many disagreements with this statement. F*CK it. 2020 has been everything everyone keeps saying it is: a train wreck, a dumpster fire, a dumpster fire full of dog excrement traveling on a train headed right for a train carrying a dumpster fire of ostrich excrement, it sucked, it blew, etc, etc, etc…..

This has been a crazy time for all of us. Terms like “unprecedented times” became the norm for news stations, hundreds of thousands of people dying to a pandemic level virus, ….a pandemic level virus!…., shut downs and lock downs and quarantines, civil unrest, altered sports leagues, massive economic changes, unemployment and furloughs from the shut downs and just loss of jobs due to the pandemic, all in all,…. yea…. F*CK 2020 and F*CK COVID-19.

This has been a hard time here for me, and for The Beer Thrillers in general as well, as I’m sure its been for a lot of you. Dealt with two lock down / shut downs by the government that closed my work and forced me into unemployment twice. (The latest of which, due to how horrible our unemployment system, I still haven’t received a penny for the three weeks I was unemployed – thankfully I’m back to work now.) A divorce amidst the pandemic and quarantine and lockdown.

But, it hasn’t been all bad (no year is all bad); I did get to do a lot more hiking. I did get to do a little bit more traveling due to now being single and having a lot more extra time, I got to hike lots of new places that I never did before, got to visit 57 (new to me) new breweries. And I got to do a lot more work on the blog and site here. Which has been a great bit of fun. My friend started his streaming and got do do that a lot with him, and we got to do some more podcasts with his podcast group.

(I will have a whole “End of 2020” and recap of the year, as well as a “Looking Forward to 2021” post coming soon, the site migration and things have kind of made things wonky with getting it all moved over and posts published up, due to us hitting our bandwidth wall on the old site and having to migrate, so some things got all garbled up.)

I went to Breski’s Beverage and had to pick up a four pack of this – and knew – I needed to make it the last beer of 2020 and the first beer of 2021. Thankfully it’s a fantastic beer and its not just a “cool name / bad beer” like some of the other cool name, cool can art, cool pop culture reference beers, I’ve had in the past. I also picked up the RBG beer as well as Breski’s.

So my 31st was pretty simple; being by myself, with no places open, and my first New Years Eve / New Years Day off in quite a while – due to the shut down of Pennsylvania. Early in the day I went to Breski’s and picked up the four packs. Despite the rain, I took my dog (Leela) to the Greenbelt walk off of Derry Street, stopped at Boneshire Brew Works for my last pint of 2020 at their location, and then stopped at Rubber Soul Brewery for take-out (pierogies…. *drools like Homer at thought of food*….) and then pretty much just went home, read, wrote, and stayed in my bed. My friend did an overnight stream on his site – Knights of Nostalgia – and I had that up on one screen and tuned in just for the last 2 minutes to a ball dropping ceremony on another screen. All in all – a lame New Years Eve. Which about sums up how 2020 was.

So I also started this post and beer review on December 31st, but with the bandwidth limits, and the problems of the migration, I didn’t get to finish it until January 1st. So this is a “two year project”. Hahahahaha…. oh I crack myself up. It was written and finished on January 1st, but with the bandwidth and everything, and having to re-upload media, I’m not sure when it’ll finally get published, hopefully soon into the new year.

I’m not too great and technically savvy, so this move of nearly 300 blog posts, and several pages, as well as a homepage, users, links, followers, and everything else, was a lot harder than I imagined it would be. I started everything on December 31st, and wanted it all set to go on January 1st, but noooooope….. that didn’t happen. Was really hoping everything would go smoothly into 2021…. but 2020…. said NOPE to that, and I’m thinking 2021 might have a rockier start than we all wanted it to have.

But anyway…. we have beer!

So let’s do it and drink!

Beer Review

Beer: F*CK 2020
Brewery: Abomination Brewing Company
Style: IPA – Imperial / Double New England
ABV: 9.1%
IBU: None
Untappd Description: “Fuck 2020” is a slightly amped up 9.1% version of our Fog series, double dry hopped with a blend of two of our most popular variants … Galaxy & Citra.

Abomination Brewing Company has had some amazing beers, and they have done a ton of collaborations with a lot of local Pennsylvania breweries. Rotunda Brewing Company, Tattered Flag, and stuff with multi-collaborations with Pilger Ruh Brewing, Snitz Creek Brewing, Wolf Brewing Co, etc. Untappd lists them as a micro brewery from North Haven, Connecticut. They have 159 unique beers on Untappd with a global average rating of 4.04 out of 140K+ ratings. Their Untappd description simply reads: “Crafting liquid chaos. #beermonster”

Starting off with appearance; this has a beautiful golden orange hue. A gorgeous looking New England IPA appearance, its got a nice dank hazy orange look, its not full of turbid and sediment, but its still dank and hazy looking, and its opaque and not see through. It had a thin white foamy head and great carbonation from the can.

Aroma is a lovely hoppy New England IPA nose. The nose comes through with the galaxy and citra very heavily, you get lots of tropical fruit, citrus, some peach, mango, and wee bits of passionfruit, guava, and grapefruit. It smells juicy, it smells delicious.

Whooo…. this is the way to go out of 2020! With a banger of a good beer and a way to say F*CK YOU 2020 with both middle fingers up like Stone Cold Steve Austin. This was just a delicious all around good beer. A perfect end note to 2020 and a wonderful start note to 2021 (drank one early in the day of 2020, had one right before midnight, and cracked open another one two minutes into the New Years). Galaxy and Citra hops are wonderful hops and work very well together. You get a very heavy dose of citrus, peach, mango, the tropical fruits, and there is so much more hidden and buried underneath that adds to those heavy hitter flavors – like the passionfruit, guava, and grapefruit. There’s a right balance to all of this. The mouth feel feels right on, not oily, slick, not watery or thin, no cloying; just a nice drinking NE IPA. This is is a consistent beer and reason for why the New England IPA style has caught on so much with craft beer drinkers. There’s a bit of hop bite, but its covered in all of the fruity wonderful flavors, there’s no bitter aftertaste, no bad off flavors, and its a really drinkable beer. Even the 9.1% ABV is hidden by how wonderful the flavors are. You don’t taste that ABV, and you don’t even notice it until you’re done. This isn’t a crushable beer where you could drink the whole four pack in one sitting, but you could have two, and be happy and content afterwards, especially with a really good meal to go along with it. This is a great ‘nap inducer’ as I like to call some of the mid-range double IPA area beers (8-9.5/10%), especially with a meal, it just fills the belly and makes you sleepy. This was the perfect way to end out 2020.

My Untappd Rating: ****.25
Global Average Untappd Rating: 4.34 (as of 1.1.21).

So this might be the first post of 2021, or it might not be; and it might be the first post on the new The Beer Thrillers page, or it might not be. Who knows with migration, work starting back up, moving domain hosts, moving links, uploading pictures (since the bandwidth put a halt to that), etc. There’s a lot of other posts that are in various states of being done, that also will be published soon too, once again, with the migration and start of the new year, who knows. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Been a little hectic here.

I hope everyone had a wonderful end to 2020. Hopefully despite everything, you still had a great 2020, and lets hope 2021 starts off so much better. Things are looking up. The vaccines are rolling out. Hopefully by the end of 2021 we are back to a level of normalcy. One can only hope. I want to get to some brewfests in 2021!

Cheers everyone!

-B. Kline

See some of our latest beer reviews here:

• Beer Review: Mutant Temple (Strange Roots Experimental Ales)
• Beer Review: B-52 Belgian Dubbel (Cox Brewing Company)
• Beer Review: The Soft Glow of Electric Sex (RAR Brewing)
• Beer Review: This is The Whey (Bolero Snort Brewery)
• Beer Review: Snow Tracks (New Trail Brewing Co.)

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