Special Features

Big Year
2018 turned out to be one of my biggest years of the bottle collection, clocking in at 210 bottles. In January when I was putting up the beer shelves I got the bug to go big this year in an effort to get to 4,000 bottles in 2019, which would be the 25th anniversary of the collection. Should be in great shape to get there in the summer time for a big celebration.

Dogfish Head Master Collector
I wanted to make a post about a fellow collector, Victor from Delaware. To say he's a big Dogfish head fan is a bit of an understatement. He is a vertical collector, meaning he wants one of every bottle and product they make, including various years where they changed the label. His collection is 245 bottles strong, plus spirits and schwag.

Some pics of his collection:
• Beer Collection 1 Beer Collection 2
• Distillery Collection
• My Antonias #1 My Antonias #2

Vic only has two beer bottles (can be empty or just label) that he knows of left in the standard beer collection: the two Italian My Antonias pictured. Some non-distributed one-offs, like Intergalactic Bocce Tourney; Steampunk Porter; and Quartier Rouge are needed,too, but not counted! Distillery needs include: Tee-Keela; Fortress; DE Native Spirit; and Peche Brandy. Has some spectacular rarities, if have and want to trade, contact him here. Cheers!

1000th Brewery added!
After 24 years, I finally hit my 1,000th brewery! I was getting close to it last year, but after the audit I reshuffled several and had to delete a few.
The milestone brewery is Foothills, from Winsten-Salem NC. Bottle by my friend Jeff Becker.

March 7, 2018
Big updates for Brewpalace!

• Just recently put all of the bottles up on new shelving in the house.
• Retook all photos of every bottle (yes, 3,700+ pictures) and updated the website
• Along the way performed a full audit of bottles vs. website records. Ended up having to add a bunch of bottles that were missing, but for some bizarre reason I had to delete about 40 or so as the bottle was missing. For example, Carib from the Bahamas was completely missing, even there there are dozens of comments on the beer from years past. WTF
• Still having some technical issues on the photos - each browser handles rotation of pictures differently. If you have chrome you are seeing pics sideways. No clue how to normalize them across browsers.

I've been dreading this for about 14 years since I stopped taking pics after I moved to CA. With the new shelving (sliding shelves on tracks - sweet!), the pics, adding to the database, and performing an audit/inventory, all in it took me about 200 hours of effort to get things in perfect condition. Hopefully this will be the last time I have to do this ever.

To see the results, click on the 'See the Collection' menu item on the left.

January 2, 2017
2016 ended as another solid year for Brewpalace, totaling 130 bottles. A slow first half of the year had me worried there for a while, but in the end I was just able to meet the 120 yearly target just before Christmas. 2016 saw a few key trends, none of them any good:

• Fruit beer - everyone and there brother is ruining good beers by making fruit varieties of them. The Stone Brewing festival was almost 33% fruit beers. Hipsters, please stop this.
• Coffee beer - after decades of being a relatively unknown entity in beer, it is showing up in all sorts of bad places. Coffee fits ok with a stout or porter, but thats about it. Stay out of my IPAs please
• Sour beers - for some reason the Sour styles from Belgium are becoming popular. #NotAFan
• Big breweries buying craft brewers. This is disturbing, but ultimately inevitable. Just pray your favorite local brewery isn't bought by ABInBev, SABMillerCoors of Model. Here in San Diego, we lost two this year - Ballast Point and Saint Archer.

We have passed Peak Beer unfortunately.