Beer List 2012

This post is ostensibly a summary of my consumption of new beers in 20012, but it is basically an excuse to show some leftover photos of beer bottles that I took during this past year. In 2010, I tried 148 beers. The next year, I added 150 different brews to my beer list. As I mentioned at the beginning of 2012, instead of having a separate list of beers for 2012, I created a new page that combined the lists from 2010 and 2011. Then I started adding new beers to the combined list. At the end of 2012, Jim's Beer List had grown to a total of 448. Subtracting the 148 from 2010 and 150 from 2011 results in another 150 new brews that I consumed in 2012.

The 448th beer is the top photo on the right. The bottle shown is Mokah which is from Southern Tier Brewing Company. Southern Tier was founded in Lakewood, New York. I did not find an explanation on their webpage as to where the name Southern Tier originated, but I did noticed on Wikipedia that the Village of Lakewood is located in the southwestern corner of the State of New York. The company's webpage for Mokah explains that it is from their Blackwater Series of imperial stouts and is actually a combination of their Jahva and Choklat brews. Since I really enjoyed this smooth and flavorful beer, I think I should add its two component beers to my currently non-existent "Beers To Drink" list.

To digress for a bit, one problem with my beer list that I originally decided to organize the list alphabetically by the name of the brewery. With many breweries combining (for the largest examples, see Anheuser-Busch InBev, SABMiller, and Molson Coors), the brewery included on the list can seem a bit arbitrary. When I first created the 2010 list, I wanted to have a sortable table. Those are familiar to people who frequent wiki-based websites such as Wikipedia. Needless to say, I never figured out how to do that with Blogger.

Another problem that I have discovered with the beer list is that I have neglected to include when I first drank each of the beers. I do not think this is a major oversight, but in hindsight, it would be nice information to know. In some cases where I took photos with my cellphone, the date can be found from the file properties of the photos. For instance, I can tell that I took the middle photo on November 9, 2012. I took the photo of this bottle of Singha Beer while I was having lunch with my manager and some coworkers at a Thai restaurant near our office. Singha is brewed by Boon Rawd Brewery which is headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand. I guess that made it appropriate for our Thai lunch.

Unfortunately, that solution does not work when I did not take a picture of the beer or when I take a picute of a bottle of beer but do not drink it until later. That gets us back to Southern Tier. I took the picture of the Mokah bottle on December 20, but I did not drink it until New Year's Eve. An even more dramatic example is their Crème Brûlée Stout. I took the bottom photo on August 19, but I did not get around to drinking the bottle until much later. I do not remember exactly when, but I know it was before I bought and took the photo of the Mokah. By the way, I actually liked the Crème Brûlée better than the Mokah.

Of course, another solution to the date problem would be to check my Twitter page for when I posted about the beer. Unfortunately, I never posted when I actually drank the bottle of Crème Brûlée. Oh well.