Number 800

I apologize to my faithful imaginary readers for I have recently been forsaking you. I have been posting pictures of beer on my Facebook page instead of posting those photos here. I hope this peace offering will help rectify the situation.This photo is a bottle of Thirsty Dog Brewing Company's
Siberian Night Aged in Bourbon Barrels. Thirsty Dog is located in the world-famous vacation locale known as Akron, Ohio. I was going to go with "tropical paradise" in reference to Akron, but I used that in a previous post where I won a bottle of Thirsty Dog's Bourbon Barrel-Aged Wee Heavy.

I am almost finally caught up on updating my Beer List which now stands at 801 entries. Assuming I can ever figure out which version of Left Hand Brewing's Fade to Black that I had the other day in order to be able to add it to the list, Siberian Night Bourbon Barrel Aged should be number 803.

Working backwards, the 802nd entry on the list will be a draft of Hop On Top from the Lynnwood Brewing. Besides being a stupid name, the Lynnwood Brewing Concern is the relatively new brewery associated with Lynnwood Grill which is a bar in my neck of the woods. I previously mentioned Lynnwood in a very odd post comparing love and bars.

The 801st entry will be a draft of Polished Pilsner from another new local brewery. Bombshell Beer Company is located in Holly Springs. The Raleigh suburb of Holly Springs is also home to Carolina Brewing Company (not to be confused with Carolina Brewery in Chapel Hill but I have covered that particular topic before).

Moving on to a nice round number, Jurata Baltic Porter would be the 800th addition chronologically to the beer list. Jurata is a cross-continental collaboration between Coronado Brewing Company located in Coronado, California and Cigar City Brewing located in Tampa, Florida. (Tampa is nicknamed the "Cigar City.") These types of brewery collaborations continue to increase in popularity. The first collaboration brew that I had was Hopfen-Weisse which was originally a collaboration between Germany's Bräuhaus G. Schneider & Sohn and New York's The Brooklyn Brewery. Reunion Ale, a collaboration between New York's Shmaltz Brewing Company and Georgia's Terrapin Beer Company, is now on its third annual release.

As I stated above, these numbers all depend on getting the bottle of Fade to Black that I consumed added to the list. That beer would be entry number 799.

Beer List 2013

As I continue to catch up on my backlog of entries to my Beer List, I have finally made it to the end of 2013. Obviously, the calendar year ends on New Year's Eve, and I was at a New Year's Eve party on December 31, 2013. An interesting thing about using Twitter to track the beers that I consume is that I know exactly which beer was my last for 2013 and which was first for 2014. My last beer of 2013 was a bottle of Old Engine Oil which is a porter from Harviestoun Brewery located in Alva, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, United Kingdom. The first of 2014 was a bottle of Newcastle Cabbie which is a limited-edition black ale (as opposed to their famous brown ale).

Returning to the Beer List, I drank 148 different beers in 2010. I found a missing beer in my Twitter feed from 2011, so the number of different beers for 2011 has risen from 150 to 151. In my post on the Beer List for 2012, I figured that I had consumed 150 different brews which would bring the total to 449 after correcting for the missing beer in 2011. I have gone back through the beer list and added dates where I could (which is how I found the missing beer from 2011). Unfortunately, I do not have a standalone list for 2012 and not everything had a post on Twitter, so I know there are several entries from 2012 that are now mislabeled as 2013. Up to the end of 2013, the Beer List stands at 756 entries which means I drank 307 different brews in 2013. That probably helps account for all those extra pounds I have accumulated.

Son of the Palmetto State

It has been almost four months since I last published a post. I am also months behind on updating my Beer List. I recently started working to add all the backlogged brews to the list. The list is currently up to 725 entries, and I have worked my way up to November 14. On that Thursday, I attended a college football game. My sister April was in town. We grew up in South Carolina, and April went to college at Clemson University. The Clemson Tigers had been recovering nicely from a disappointing blowout loss three weeks earlier to rival and eventual national champion Florida State. April and I drove down to Clemson to watch the Tigers continue that recovery with a blowout win over Georgia Tech. The game was broadcast nationally on ESPN. Clemson would go on to finish their 2013 season with a 11-2 record, ending the regular season with loss to their intrastate rivalry game with the South Carolina Gamecocks, and then a win in the Orange Bowl against Big Ten powerhouse Ohio State.

However, this post is about cleaning up the backlog of Beer List additions. The 726th entry will be a draft of Son Of A Peach from RJ Rockers Brewing Company located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. While Georgia is the Peach State, South Carolina is actually second in the United States for peach production, ranked behind California and ahead of Georgia. Therefore, it is not too surprising that a South Carolina brewery has a peach-flavored brew. The interesting thing about this beer is that it will be the first from a South Carolina-based brewery to be included to my list. I currently live in North Carolina, and as a point of comparison between the two states, of the 725 brews currently on the list, 145 are from the northern neighbor. Represented on the list are 26 separate breweries located in North Carolina: Aviator, Beer Army, Big Boss, Boone (aka Blowing Rock), Carolina Ale House, Carolina Brewery, Carolina Brewing, Deep River, Duck-Rabbit, Foothills (including brews from the former Carolina Beer), French Broad, Front Street, Fullsteam, Gizmo (previously Roth), Green Man, Highland, Lonerider, Mash House, Mother Earth, Natty Greene's, Olde Hickory, Railhouse, Raleigh, Red Oak, Triangle, and White Street (whew!).

Interestingly enough, Son of a Peach is not actually the first beer on the list to originate from the state of South Carolina. As I mentioned in a previous post, Evil Twin Brewing is located in Denmark and/or Brooklyn, New York. However, their beers are brewed by Westbrook Brewing Company which is located in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. The gypsy nature of Evil Twin is addressed in an article from USA Today.