I wasn’t around on the forums this time last year so haven’t got a public record or any of my 2017 beer goals, but I did achieve a couple of little ones. Much smaller than most of you guys’ goals but they were realistic for me. I didn’t particularly care much for any of them though and aside from the first goal I didn’t put any special effort in for any of the others.
- Get into any top 50 stat - Finally broke into top 50 number of beers rated from my home county of Gloucestershire (in doing this I also reached over 100 rates for Gloucestershire beers which was another goal)
- Reach 100 Scottish rates - Ok ok 50% of them are BrewDog but I got more from Fierce, Fallen, and Tempest this year
- Reach 100 American rates - Other than obvious classic perennial exports like Sierra Nevada for example I found a much better range of US beers making their way to the UK in 2017 so this was way easier than I expected without travelling. I didn’t even seek much out specifically.
- Meet a RBeerian - Fin (and Loz) made their way to my area of the country a couple of weeks ago so it was a perfect opportunity to meet for a few beers. 2 ½ years on the site it took for me to finally meet one of you. And, I didn’t even get murdered or anything. So this bodes well for meeting more strangers off the Internet!
Goals I missed:
- Reach 100 Belgian rates - Currently on 89 but have a total of 24 Belgian beers sitting in a cupboard, some being aged, some I simply haven’t got round to. So I could have easily got this but have been too preoccupied with drinking fresh new beers.
- 1000 ratings in 1 year - So Ratebeer will say I achieved this but in reality I didn’t. Back in June/July I added all my cider ratings to the site, 60+ of them, however about 50 of them were from 2015/16 or before… not counting these puts me below 1000.
2018 Goals
Again none of these are serious, just what I think I have a chance of achieving.
- 1000 ratings in one year, for real this time - should be doable, averaging 3 beers a day will clear this easily however I kind of wanted to slow down a bit for health reasons. This isn’t a goal I will put special effort into because of that. Attending festivals will be a better option for amassing more rates.
- Rate every English county - Currently missing 7, however I think about 4 of them I can quite easily source bottles online. Rutland, Surrey and Leicestershire will be harder but certainly not prohibitively difficult.
- Get a Scandinavian country to 100 rates - already in possession of lots of bottles of Scandi beers so I have a head start on this one. In fact maybe I could get two countries there, or even 3. Currently Denmark 55, Norway 39, Sweden 36.
- Rate all styles of beer - I still miss a Scottish Ale, Sahti, Malt Liquor and an Unblended Lambic.
- More countries - currently on 68 so I’m at that point where it’s much more difficult sourcing stuff. I don’t intend to travel much so hopefully doing some trades will help with this.
I could probably set myself some style related goals as well but I’ll come back to this another time I think.
