The Beer List

On the right side of my page, I have a gadget from the website Goodreads that shows books I've recently read. While I think Goodreads aims to be more of a social networking site, sort of a Facebook for intellectual people (i.e. people who think in more than 140 characters), I just like the site for tracking books that I've read, books that I'm currently reading, and ones that I plan to read. If you visit my Goodreads profile, you will see that I am currently reading a book entitled Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel. Galileo's Daughter is about the famous scientist Galileo Galilei and his daughter who was a Catholic nun. It uses letters that his daughter wrote to him, but unfortunately, his replies have been lost to history. I have previously read another of Sobel's books, Longitude, which told the story of John Harrison. Harrison developed highly precise timepieces which could be used by navigators on ship to calculate their longitude. Thus Harrison won a coveted Longitude prize from the British government.

I like having the Goodreads gadget on my site, and I would really like a similar gadget for tracking various beers that I've tried. Instead, I have made do by using Blogger's Link List gadget, although I'm also considering just using a regular post that I continually update. Anyway, at the very bottom of my main page I now have the Beer List. It is ordered alphabetically by the name of the brewery. Next is the location of the brewery in parentheses, either the country or U.S. state, and then the particular brew and whether I had it on draft or in the bottle in parentheses. While my aim is to track interesting micorbrews and imports, I have also included more generally available beers such as Yuengling, Dos Equis, and even Miller Lite, which I tend to drink at my biweekly male-bonding sessions. However, I have so far decided not to include the Mr. Beer home brews.