Steve Koenemann

Reflections on 1,000 Beers

I recently reached one of those “important” milestones with my Ratebeer beer collection… my 1,000^th beer rating. While I am sure that there are some Ratebeerians that would laugh at such a paltry number of ratings (the “top dog”, rating-wise, on Ratebeer is rapidly approaching 17,000 ratings!), for me the actual process of collecting these ratings is much more important than the number of ratings. Am I thrilled that I attained this milestone… absolutely, but the story and the experience of collecting that rating will always mean much more to me than the fact that it was my 1,000^th. I have written before about how serious I am about collecting “experiences” along the way, rather than just simply beers.

For my 1,000^th rating I ended up selecting Russian River’s Pliny the Elder. Not only is this beer listed as #19 on the Ratebeer Top 50 beer list, but it is a Double/Imperial IPA… my favorite style of beer. You probably would not believe what I went through to actually select this particular beer for the event… I had lots of help and the selection process was an “experience” all its own.

A few months ago I put out an e-mail to a long list of people… friends, Ratebeerians and fellow HopPress writers… requesting their assistance in finding a beer suitable for my approaching 1,000^th rating. The response that I got back from these people was almost overwhelming. I had, literally, dozens of offers from people to help me locate a particular beer that they felt was suitable or ideas of other people that could be contacted to line something up. To be honest, I did not follow up on all of these as it would have taken a lot of time to do that. I did pursue a dozen (or so) leads that seemed to be the most promising. Unfortunately each and every one of these lead to a dead end.

Like many beer collectors, I have become reliant on my travel to other places and on people that do not live locally to help me locate beers that I have not tried yet. The relatively meager selection of beers available in Vermont would not allow me to continue to add to my collection without access to beers outside of New England. My wife and I over the years have many times been the benefactor (and victim) of “fate” and, as it turns out, “fate” appears to have played a part in providing me with the beer for my 1,000^th rating.

Over the course of the last half year I have started to “trade” beers with people in other parts of the country. I recently received a “shipment” of beer from a close friend, David Weinstein, who lives in California. David and I became friends as a result of the tragic death of a shared acquaintance and later learned that not only did we share a love of beer, hoppy beers were our particular favorite. The box of beer I received from him a couple of months ago contained a bottle of Pliny the Elder. I also had the opportunity to trade beers with Mario Rubio, who also lives in California. Mario is a HopPress writer and also bears the awesome responsibility of being the managing editor for it’s merry band of writers (“The HopPress Gang”).  A recent box of beer that I received from him also contained a bottle of Pliny the Elder.

Now that the beer had (finally) been selected, the rest of this story turned out to be the easy part… sharing this excellent beer with friends and collecting another experience in the process. There were lots of people vying to be a part of this “event”, but I decided that the people that I would share this beer experience with would be some of my closest friends and family. I chose to share this beer and the experience with my son (Jamie), who is a strong supporter of my beer writing efforts as well as a beer lover, and a good friend (Mike Bard), a fellow beer lover, outdoorsman and someone that I have gotten into plenty of “trouble” with over the years.

The actual tasting occurred at my house on a sunny Vermont afternoon and was nicely complimented by some snacks thoughtfully chosen by my wife to pair with the beer to be sampled. As expected the beer was awesome. You can read my rating on-line on Ratebeer. Like all good beer stories, this one had a very happy ending. After the tasting we all (including Mike’s wife Debbie) headed out for a good old fashioned pub crawl; visiting quite a few Central Vermont restaurants, bars, taprooms and brewpubs sampling (many) more good beers and great food along the way.

It is much too early for me to be thinking about the next major beer collecting milestone (my 2,000^th rating), though I am already well on my way toward that goal. I definitely don’t plan to change the way that I collect these ratings in the future. My focus on building this Ratebeer collection has always been dual purposed; I really like sampling all of these beers (good and bad) and it is important to me to treat each beer as its own event. Some of these tasting events are, naturally, done “solo”, but many of these tastings are shared. Regardless of how long it takes to reach the next milestone, I can assure you that I will collect an experience for each beer along the way and savor each and every one of them.

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