{"id":17521,"date":"2015-09-28T04:40:43","date_gmt":"2015-09-27T15:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/?p=17521"},"modified":"2015-09-28T13:04:28","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T00:04:28","slug":"anniversary-accidental-cellar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2015\/09\/28\/anniversary-accidental-cellar\/","title":{"rendered":"An anniversary \u2014 and an accidental cellar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Accidental<\/a>
Notes from a cupboard census<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The weekend was the fifth anniversary of, well,\u00a0this thing<\/em>. It was Sunday<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0the 26th of September, 2010, when I first hit the ‘Publish’ button on anything here<\/a>. I’ve since done so three hundred and forty times,<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> for\u00a0an overall rate of one post every five or six days \u2014 which just shows you the nonsense you can bury under an average. In truth, my activity here has fluctuated wildly,\u00a0as has what you might call the mandate or mission. The initial\u00a0intent was for\u00a0this<\/em> to be simply a backed-up and searchable version of the original, which itself was born about five years earlier when I scribbled the first-ever entry<\/a> and transmogrified a\u00a0blank notebook into a\u00a0Beer Diary<\/em>.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0On finally filling those pages and starting in on my second volume, five years and twenty-three days ago<\/a>, I wanted to scan and upload its predecessor for safekeeping \u2014 and on account of the fact that you can’t grep dead trees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What started as ‘Afterthoughts’ to that project quickly took over<\/a>,<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> though the Diaries still exist, gathering notes and bearing witness to my primary impressions of a beer or festival or whatnot. The revised and broadened nature of, well,\u00a0this thing<\/em>\u00a0slowly found an audience and even picked up an award<\/a>. But with a shift in my “day job” (to an\u00a0actual<\/em> day job), productivity here waned;\u00a0the switch in what energy was used up during the day and what was left to burn off saw my swimming and gardening increase and writing time decline.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> I’m still attempting to rebalance all that again, with mixed success.<\/p>\n

But anyway, I was put in mind of all of this \u2014 i.e.<\/em>, these five years and the utterly marvellous and\/or baffling beers and occurrences and best-of-all\u00a0people<\/em> that have been bound up therein \u2014 by (of all things) a spot of spring cleaning a few days ago. In the kitchen cupboards at home\u00a0was an unexpected trove of bottles that spanned such a swathe of time that I idly wondered if\u00a0it covered the entirety of this thing’s existence and so had to look up the dates. And lo, here we are. And yes, they do. The Beer Diary<\/em> started its life<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> as a memory aid. Fitting, then, that a steady accumulation of forgotten things would furnish an excuse to think back, try to remember how\u00a0these nearly-three-dozen bottles came to comprise my stash \u2014 and ponder what to do with them.\u00a0Because some beers really do age spectacularly gracefully and can sublimely cap off an occasion<\/a>. Others, of course, do not. Time, then, for a census of my accidental cellar, to see what it says about the last few years.<\/p>\n

\"Unintentional<\/a>
Accidentals, assemble!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Evidence that I am an absent-minded fool:<\/h3>\n