It has been a hell of a week. Last Wednesday, hours after posting about the launch of Ribstone Creek Brewing, onbeer.org was hacked. Some evil-doer broke into my server account and re-directed my site to some Spanish travel site. It has taken 10 days to fix the havoc the hacker created. But I am back!

So, first, allow me to apologize to all of you for this interruption. I know that in the world of the interweb, 10 days is like an eternity. I hope you all start popping by again as frequently as you were. I promise to get back into the flow of regular posting right away.

The reason it took so long is that basically we needed to rebuild the site from scratch, using backup data. Not everything has been returned to normal yet, such as the links menus, but I will get to that in the coming days. In a way this is onbeer.org Mach II – hopefully with stronger security settings.

I owe a big thank you to Greg Clow over at Canadian Beer News for letting people know what happened to me, and to those of you who emailed expressing concern. I also want to thank Jon H. for his early troubleshooting and Chris Crowley for doing the heavy IT lifting these last few days.

Much has happened in the beer world in my absence – many new beer released on the prairies and some new beer events announced. A few of my columns at Vue, CBC, Planet S and Sherbrooke have been published during this time as well. I will try to catch you all up in the coming days. So stay tuned.

But for the moment I plan on breathing for the first time in over a week, and continue with the few more hours of backstage repairs that still need to be completed.

I think I need a beer.