Should we expand the United States forums again?

This would be my suggestion as well.

 

I'll add my voice to @sulldaddy @Sheppard @ColdOne @guinness77 @jmdrpi. I was very much against the original merger because change is bad, but really enjoyed participating in the WNEBAYDN thread.

Some of us regular posters have semi regular meetups and I probably would have never interacted with @Kozaka MattOC and @alexsergio if it wasn't for that thread.

 

Agreed. When it first happened, I wasn't too happy, but overtime, I have appreciated connecting more with those from other states. Still, to be fair, that can occur with either format. I'm fortunate in that I get to travel a decent amount. So, for a Western forum, I would prefer to have Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. Thanks for asking for feedback!

 

Go back to the Original Forums.

CALIFORNIA on it's own (or with Hawaii).

California has enough beer and breweries to not be grouped with OR, WA, AZ, CO, ect...

I was pretty vocal at the time about the change. I think you probably have less engagement in the individual California Brewery threads when they got dumped in with several other states. Ones that used to be favorites, haven't even been started in 2023 or are pushed down to page 2 and hardly posted in. We lost solid posters who haven't been back. I know I post far less often. Obviously some of that is people getting off Old School Message Boards and moving to just Instagram, or other social media, ect...

The only draw back is I kind of like some of the PNW guys now...haha... But I can always just click into the PNW forum, problem solved.

 

I voted for the original 10, but have one insight. Move Idaho to the Northwest. The most populous part of Idaho is Boise, which is only 40 minutes away from the Oregon border. We tavel to and from Portland and Seattle more readily than to Montana or Wyoming (although, technically Salt Lake City is the next closest city at 4 hours away.) Montana and Wyoming are a good five hour drive just to get to the border. Our distribution reflects Oregon and Washngton breweries mostly. Only a handful of Wyoming or Montana breweries are available here.

Also for fun, Google "Greater Idaho" and see the recent proposal to carve off the eastern half of Oregon and add it to Idaho. Parts of No Cal too.(i.e adding all the red parts of those states to Idaho....)

 

Original 10 is better, IMO. The case for NE only is pretty strong, but I could be convinced NE+NY is the best combo. New England and PA in the same category seems like way too much of an over-reach, same as NJ, so I guess to me, the best placement is New England and NY, or NE only. Otherwise, its not a real region in any sense.

New England and Pennsylvania aren't the same region. At all.

 

I just skimmed the replies, but here’s my thoughts.
When Ohio got move from Great Lakes to Midwest, they pretty much got bumped off the front page. There’s a Columbus thread there now, but rarely is there an Ohio-specific thread on the first page. I understand that this is due to Ohio users posting less, but that may be because there’s not any Ohio threads on the first page. I’m sure there’s other issues at play, but the net result is that we see less Ohio posts.

 

As the BA pretty much propping up a Georgia tread by myself, I'd just love to see more participation from the state. Any way the regional format can help that I'm all for it.

 

New York absolutely does not belong in a forum with PA, DE, DC and Maryland. We get little to no distro overlap with those states, people here do not take beer day trips to them in the way they do Mass, VT, or Maine. That is a completely different beer ecosystem that is irrelevant to New Yorkers.

 

As a very casual lurker, I’d want the original back. I don’t really care what people are drinking right now, but I would like to be kept up to date on brewery updates or releases. So for me, the NE forum change made me much more apathetic to BA. I used to enjoy looking at brewery pages and finding new ones, even if they weren’t very active threads, such as River Roost or Tilted Barn or whatever.
Looking at it today, I don’t care about SE PA releases, Mid Atlantic Breweries, Pittsburgh breweries, etc. and rarely scroll past the first page, expecting the second to be just as irrelevant.

 

Per state, subscribe to what you want.

 

I'd be fine with going back to the original, but would prefer to break that down even further to say 15 or so forums. Huge states like NY, CA, TX, FL should probably get their own forum.

 

But isn't that just because you are in the Capitol region? I assume those in the Southern Tier would be more likely to check out a brewery in PA than Maine. Like I said in my earlier post, once you're in larger states it's all about where you are in that state. I live closer to NYC than you do. But Albany is also closer to me than Pittsburgh is.

As for your comment about distribution, I'm in upstate NY at least once a year and most the beers available in stores up there is actually pretty similar to what we get in the Philly area. We get a lot of the Hudson Valley and New England breweries that distribute.

 

I imagine you are correct about people in the Souther Tier and western NY being more likely to head across the border to PA as opposed to MA, VT etc. However, I also suspect the volume of people in NY that head northeast into MA, VT, CT vastly outnumber them.

Not saying that should be a determining factor. This is certainly not an easy decision to make because no matter what happens there will be people who don't agree/aren't happy.

 

Yes, there is always going to be a issue with people living on the borders of the overall Region no matter where you draw the line. Someone in Erie or Pittsburgh area would want Ohio grouped with PA instead of NJ.

 

This could easily be the result of population density. Also, southern boarder crossings are fairly scarce, compared with the Interstate crossings from the NY Metro area

Personally, this isn’t a factor worth consideration. For the reason noted below. And again, there is nothing forcing anyone to only participate in their regional forums. The regions really only make it easier to find threads catering to our interest of the moment.

 

Couldn't have said it better myself

 

Yes, go back.