Counter: 3,201

For anyone on a data plan going into the Europe, Canada or US sections may not be good for you. Get on wifi or view it on a computer. You have been warned.

This collection began while I was in college. I can’t say what the first bottle was but if I had to guess it was either Yuengling Lager or Miller High Life. Don’t ask me why exactly I started it but by the time I left college it was over 200 bottles. A trip to Europe further supplemented it and it has been growing ever since. One advantage I have is that I can easily head to Baltimore and stock up. It is amazing how the selection can change just by crossing state lines.

I used to have this on display in my first house but when I got a cat I took it down. I needed the room for his litter box and eating area and well, I didn’t want to hear a loud crash at 3 AM and find little mister curious had brought an entire bookcase of beer bottles down. I kept the larger bottles on display so it was not all put away. That bookcase was sturdier and didn’t offer a way for the cat to get on it. When I got a bigger house it went back up in all of its glory thanks to some custom shelves built by my brother and this is a a virtual view divided by continent with separate sections for Canada and the United States. It’ll stay up until I need the room for a kid and so far neither cat has had any inclination to get up onto the bookcases.

Everyone needs a hobby after all! But there is also a selfish reason for this. If I can put up a photo of all of the bottles in the collection I can hopefully avoid duplicates in the future. There will be no more wondering if I have that bottle in the collection. I can simply pull this up and wonder no more.

As somewhat of a disclaimer I did not drink everyone of these beers but I have drank I would estimate 99% of them. My aunt brings back bottles when she travels abroad which is how most of the New Zealand, Australia and Caribbean bottles came into the collection. Most, but not all. Most of the foreign beers were purchased either while I was in Europe or at a liquor store in Towson, Maryland many years ago when I lived down there. They used to almost specialize in foreign beers then but now there is only a limited selection.

Many people ask me what my favorite beer is. That one is simple. Spotted Cow from New Glarus. The only problem with that beer is you can only get it in Wisconsin. The worst beer I ever had was a German beer, if you can call it that, Karlsberg Mixery which is a beer and soda mix. I picked it up when I was in Germany at a train station. It was a bottle to add, I didn’t care what was in it and didn’t look at the label (not that I could really read it since it was in German). That was one of two beers that I have ever just dumped down the drain. The other was an organic beer from England but I was expecting it to be bad since the above mentioned liquor store put it on sale for $1 rather than the normal $6. That I would guess was the second worst beer I ever had.

Over the years I have tied incorporating breweries into my traveling and the bottle collection took off as I hit untapped territory down in the Deep South and in the Midwest. I think it took less than 3 years to go from 2,000 to 3,000 bottles. I base that on the fact that I hit 2,000 right after I joined Facebook and I haven’t been on that platform all that long. I would doubt it will take that short a time to get to 4,000 but we’ll see. It seems that the trend now is to can the beer rather than bottle it so that is another potential impediment. I’ll get to 4,000 eventually.

I anticipate this will be updated about once a month going forward.

For the record I have grouped this by country and by brewery. I attempted to read the labels of the bottle to get this information and if I could not decipher it I either headed to Google or Untappd. There may be a few misplaced but I tried to be as accurate as possible. Some beers here may have gone out of production before Untappd came into existence and some may have changed their name since. When in doubt I deferred to the bottle itself but when that is not in English it was not always the easiest to determine the information.