500 Beers in 9 months

For about the last 9months, Ive been using an online/mobile application called Untappd to record or check-in nearly every beer or cider Ive drunk in that time, and recently just passed the 500th unique type of beer/cider check-in.

If you think 500 sounds alot, CAMRA currently estimate there are over 5,500 different real ales currently on the market, so plenty more left to try.

Anyway curious as to what the accumulated data from my total of 918 check-ins so far that made up 500 unique types of beer/cider looked like, to see if I could learn anything about drinking habits from it, I thought Id analyse the data.

Before we get to that part need to clarify a couple of points

• a half-pint was the minimum amount required for a valid check-in, so no thirds, free tasters or sips have been counted
• check-ins could not be retrospective or saved up to be added at a later point if Ive lost mobile signal, except when "abroad".

that last point is more important than it might at first appear because the app needs a working online connection to check-in with, so no connection, no check-in and more than a few check-ins were lost either due to a lack of signal, or simply the battery on my phone ran out.

Unique types of beer checked-in per brewery

So the first chart shows the number of different beers tried per brewery, essentially a measure of how much of the breweries range Ive tried. No real surprise that more than half of the breweries are based in East Anglia, given these are the beers I have most access to. What is surprising given they dont really have a cask presence locally unlike say another non-local brewer like Dark Star Brewing Co, is that the Bristol Beer Factory tops out at the top of the leaderboard on 21, which even if I excluded their 12 Stouts of Christmas that I had over Christmas, would still leave them on an equal 4th place footing. The other thing to perhaps mention is Adnams in 2nd place with 17 different beers, which kind of puts to bed the notion some cask ale breweries only do a few types of brown beer.

Total Beer check-ins

Next up is the number of check-ins per beer, essentially which of the 500 beers is the most checked in, which is probably a good time to highlight some of the data not shown in the charts. Like for example 386 of the 500 beers have only 1 checkin, definately the effect of beer festivals there, and just less than 70 or more beers have 3 or more check-ins. So this top 21 list is quite an exclusive bunch. What surprised me most as I thought I only drunk it regularly in one location, was the difference between the most checked in beer, Brewers Gold at 63, compared to all the rest. Its not just slightly the most checked in, it totally trumps everything in the list and curious stat I actually account for nearly half of all the checkins to Brewers Gold that are recorded on Untappd. Worth pointing out also that Great Eastern was a Woodfordes homebrew kit, now discontinued, so likely to fall down the list in the future.

Total Brewery check-ins

Final set of data, at least for the moment, is the number of total check-ins expressed in brewery terms, so kind of an almagamation of the previous two sets of data. And Adnams clearly on top almost hitting 100 check-ins, obviously helped by their 17 types of beer and Southwold Bitter sitting 3rd in the all time Beer check-in list. Crouch Vale take second with the bulk provide by Brewers Gold checkins, followed by Woodfordes, again helped by a substantial number of checkins for Wherry and their albeit fewer number of unique beers, still provide volume.

The next 500...

When I started Untapping beers, I think I thought Id probably only hit 500 beers maybe after a couple of years of trying if I was lucky, as I didnt think there were simply that many different beers on sale, or that I tried that many different styles, and although I havent gone out of my way to try all these different beers, clearly as 7% of my total checkins come from one beer, in many ways i feel Ive hardly scratched the surface. There are so many beers from parts of the UK I havent yet tried yet and heard about how good they were, and plenty more that I havent, before I even think about the number made in America or beyond. But if I keep up the current rate, maybe sometime in February next year, Ill be reviewing the 1000th beer.