Special Features

Bottle # 4,000 and 25th Anniversary
Well, after 25 years of bottle collecting, I finally reached bottle #4,000 this weekend. I celebrated with some friends with a 6L big boy of St. Bernardus 12 in the final moments of August 2019 which marked the month 25 years earlier I started the whole crazy thing with a return business trip to Antwerp, Belgium. Turns out it took exactly 5 years to the month since #3,000. Thanks to La Jolla Public House for hosting and allow us to bring the bottle!

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.