Despite craft beer's meteoric rise in recent years, its growing popularity and the people behind the product are rarely featured on national television programs.

Perhaps the audience isn't there yet: Low ratings prompted Discovery Channel to pull the plug on "Brew Masters," a short-lived 2010 series starring Dogfish Head Brewery's Sam Calagione.

But a Pennsylvania beer writer is hoping to change that by spotlighting suds and the people who make them in a new television project. 

The series will be called "American Beer Blogger" and will be hosted by Lew Bryson, author of the Seen Through a Glass blog and several books on beer and breweries. Bryson chatted with Hip Hops about the project, which he and Green Leaf Productions are currently trying to fund through Kickstarter.

• How did the idea for this come about? The idea wasn't mine. One of the cameramen at Green Leaf stopped for a drink at a bar in Easton (Pa.) and got to talking to the bar owner, Laz Melan. Laz had an idea about doing something with beer on TV, a kind of follow-up to Michael Jackson's "The Beer Hunter" show from the early '90s. Then I got an email from John Wright, Green Leaf's crative director, asking me if I was interested in being the 'American Beer Blogger.' Why me, I asked John, and he told me that when he looked at my blog, the first post he looked at 'made me laugh out loud twice...' We talked some more, I talked to Laz, and we went up to Stoudt's in May and did six hours of shooting, which went really well.

• Where do you hope to have the show land? The idea is to shoot six episodes, and then hit the channels to sell it. Ideally, we'd like to land on a channel like the Food Network or Discovery, but we're realistic enough to be looking at smaller independent channels as well. We'll be shooting these six episodes relatively close to our homes in eastern Pennsylvania to save costs -- luckily an area that's rich in excellent breweries big and small -- but once we make the sale, we'll have a travel budget, and then things get fun.

• Besides you and brewers, will anyone else be featured in 'American Beer Blogger'? There are lots more people in the segments, and they all have great stories and huge influence: hop growers, maltsters, yeast hunters, importers, brewpub owners and managers, beer bar folks, festival organizers, volunteers at festivals, beer judges, beer store owners and workers, brewery sales reps, and of course the drinkers and enthusiasts who make it all what it is. This is a story that goes on and on, and every part of it is chock full of interesting people.

• Your Kickstarter goal was to raise $60,000 by Saturday. You've still got about $54,000 to go. Are you optimistic that will happen, and what is your plan if it doesn't? Oh, I don't think we're going to make it! I want to push as hard as we can, and we've still got some events to hit. But if we don't make it, we have a Phase II/Plan B for raising the money. If that fails, we do have enough money to do one episode, a simple pilot, and take that on the selling circuit, but our chances are better with a six-episode set. We'll see what happens. But I'm in for the full play; this is too good a project to give up on.