Introducing....

For the past couple years, I've blogged about beer as The Beer Retard. My output has been sporadic at best and it's been a constant struggle to find interesting things to write about. I love beer, but writing about it sometimes feels like work. I now realize that I'd much rather write about the experiences I have drinking at bars. I've never found a way to work this into beer writing, but what if I make it my goal to drink at every bar in Seattle?

This project has only one guideline. All the bars must be within the Seattle city limits and must be actual bars in their own right, not sectioned off areas in a restaurant. Other than that, any place is fair game.

To give credit where it's due, I wouldn't be doing this if a friend didn't introduce me to The San Francisco Bar Experiment. Heather may not be the first to run with the idea in her city--that honor goes to the two guys who run Every Bar in SF--but I like what she's doing with it. There's also a group doing Every Bar in DC and a couple friends have started up Sacramento Bar Snapshots.

I'm not even the first to attempt something similar in Seattle. In 2002, a couple guys started a site called 570 Bars after reading in the Stranger that the city had that number of places that served spirits. They visited all 570 spots in a year. Sadly, the site no longer exists. I'm thinking that, eight years later, the number's going to be a hell of a lot higher for me. Let's see how much damage my friends and I can do....