Observant readers will have noticed a tile ad that appeared in the left sidebar of this site a couple of weeks ago for something called Beer & Butter Tarts. This is a new project being spearheaded by my wife, Sheryl Kirby – with a bit of help from me – and our aim is to build a blog aggregator that gathers together posts from as many food and drink blogs from all across Canada as possible.

Canadian Beer News is one of many sources that are currently feeding posts to the site, and we’re looking for more blogs to join the fray.

If you’re based in Canada and have a blog that covers any aspect of food and/or drink, please consider submitting it to the pool. Beer & Butter Tarts only publishes excerpts from posts that are fed to it, with a link back to the original, so the end result will be more traffic to your blog.

Canadian Beer News has been migrated off wordpress.com to a self-hosted website.

While all requests to canadianbeernews.wordpress.com will redirect to the applicable page at www.canadianbeernews.com, this may not be the case indefinitely, so please update your bookmarks to point to the new location.

Also, please excuse any glitches as we finish work on the new site.

As I promised in the comments on my previous Movember post, here’s a photo of me in my full mustachioed glory.

As you can see, the ‘stache does a good job catching beer foam. For that and many other reasons, I’m going to be glad to shave it off in just a couple of days.

In the meantime, it’s not to late to show your support for me and my Movember team in our efforts to raise awareness and money for the battle against prostate cancer. If you’re able to give anything, even just a few bucks, please click here and pitch in whatever you can. Thanks!

Since Canadian Beer News is intended to be a news blog first and foremost, I generally take a fairly impersonal approach to the posts here, and save my personal opinions and thoughts for my other blog, Beer Beats & Bites. In this case, however, I think the importance of the topic justifies getting rid of my editorial anonymity for just a moment to make a personal plea.

This month, I’m participating in Movember, a campaign to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer, a disease that affects millions of men worldwide. Along with my many “Mo Bros”, I’m growing a moustache on my usually clean-shaven face, and trying to drum up donations for the cause.

This issue is especially important to me as my full-time job is in the data warehouse department at a cancer agency, where I deal with a frightening volume of cancer data and statistics on a daily basis. It’s estimated that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, and while a straight-up cure may not be within reach yet, there’s a lot we can do to help us get there, and to assist those men who are diagnosed in the meantime.

Wanna help? Click here to donate. At the very least, you’ll make me feel a little better about this ridiculous thing I have growing on my face.

A quick note for those who are on Twitter: Canadian Beer News now has a Twitter account at @cdnbeernews, so please follow if you’re so inclined.

The RSS feed of CBN posts was previously being fed to my other account, @beerbeatsbites, but they’ll now be going to @cdnbeernews exclusively.

I just wanted to give a quick mention to three other websites that I’m involved in publishing, and which may be of interest to readers of Canadian Beer News:

• Taste T.O. is a website that my wife, Sheryl Kirby, and I have been running since early 2007. Its fairly self-explanatory tagline is “Food & Drink in Toronto”, and it features restaurant reviews, local food news, shop profiles and lots more. Along with various event and news round-up posts that I compile for the site, I also have a regular Tuesday slot that focuses on beer, alternating between beer reviews and pub profiles, with an occasional event recap as well.
• Beer & Butter Tarts is a new site launched by Sheryl and I just this past week, where we’ll be expanding beyond Toronto to look at food and drink all across Canada. I’ll be posting beer reviews there on a semi-regular basis under the column title “Stubbies & Longnecks”, as well as weekly headline round-ups of the posts here on CBN.
• Beer Beats & Bites is my personal blog that I don’t post to as often as I’d like. But when I do, it mainly features stuff about beer (reviews, etc.), and occasionally bits about other drinks, food and (very rarely) music.

Since launching Canadian Beer News late last year, I’ve been doing my best to keep on top of the beer scene all across Canada, but it’s often hard from my location in Toronto to know what’s happening in other provinces. So I’ve decided that I’d like to take on a few “correspondents” from across the country who can represent their region and keep me up-to-date on the latest news.

If you think you might be interested in taking on this role for your area, here are some things you should know:

• You won’t need to post the actual articles, just email me the news and I’ll take care of posting it.
• There will be no pay, as the site makes no money. But anyone who commits to being a regular contributor will be listed on the “About” page as an official correspondent, and will be credited in any posts that they contribute to.
• Even if you don’t want to be a regular contributor, news is always welcome, so feel free to drop me a line if you find out something that the readers should know about.

If you’d like to join the CBN team, please email me at greg@canadianbeernews.com.