Today marks our one year anniversary of the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog! We started just shy of Valentines day, 2008 (Happy Valentines Day!) to deliver a solid article about homebrewing each week.

I’ve really been surprised by the response to the blog.  In the first year, we’ve published 60 brewing articles, over 50,000 words and went from zero to a bit over 900 subscribers (the feedburner stats vary a bit from day to day).  Incredibly, the blog and its articles have been viewed by over 185,000 unique visitors more than 260,000 times.  Many articles are now on the first page of google and a few even occupy the first place for selected terms.  In fact I had to switch to a semi-dedicated server last Spring to handle the additional traffic generated by BeerSmith, the BrewPoll news site,  our forum, this blog and BrewWiki.

I have to say that when I started this journey a year ago, I was not quite sure where I was headed.  I wanted a way to give something back to the brewing community, to say thanks for helping to make our BeerSmith software a success.  But could I write an article every week?  Would I run out of things to say?  Would anyone care to read it?  Would I have time for both BeerSmith and the blog?

It turned out to be a pleasure rather than a chore.  Having brewed beer for so many years, there was much to write about, and once I got going I could complete an article in little more than an hour.  I still have a long list of articles I want to write.  It helped when I stopped trying to do the news and focused in on my favorite topic: brewing.

I thought I would share as list of some of my favorite articles of the past year, for those of you  who may not have been with us from the start:

• Ten Top Tips for Home Brewing Beer – Still the most visited page of all time
• Brewing and Irish Stout Beer Recipe – One of my favorite beer styles
• Soft Pretzels: A Recipe for Bavarian Pretzels – They’re not beer, but they go well with beer
• Best Hop Techniques for Homebrewing – A hop technique roundup
• Converting All Grain Recipes to Malt Extract – Step by step process for extract brewers
• How to Batch Sparge: Batch Sparging and No Sparge – Batch sparging for all grain brewers
• Mash pH – Water Treatment for Brewing – All you need to know about adjusting the pH of your mash
• Brewing Hops: 10 Tips for Surviving the Hops Crisis – One of a series of 5 articles I did on the hops crisis last Spring
• Brewing to Lose: 10 Tips for Making Beer – My weak attempt at adding some humor
• The First Wort Hop – Beer Brewing Techniques – One of my favorite hop techniques
• Belgian Wit Recipes – White Beer Styles – Includes my personal recipe for Wit

If you want to see all of the articles published to date – they are listed here.

There’s plenty more to come.  I have a dozen finished articles in the queue waiting to be published, and a long list of articles I’m planning to write.  I’ve also been in touch with several guest authors (and welcome more) who will join us in the coming year.  In the meantime, I have more articles on brewing techniques, beer styles, reviews, interviews and brewing fun to come.

Thanks again for your continued support of the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog.  If you have not already done so, I suggest subscribing.  We offer a simple email subscription that delivers a new brewing article to your inbox once a week as well as RSS subscriptions if you use a news reader.

• BeerSmith Blog Second Anniversary
• An Interview with Brewing Author John Palmer
• Homebrew Crisis: Where Have All The Brewing Hops Gone?
• New BrewPoll Home Brewing and Craft Beer News Site
• Welcome to the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog