I like beer. I like beer well enough to be a Supreme Court justice although my other qualifications are rather weak. I’ve had favorites from time to time. I was pretty much a Stroh’s guy in the 1960s and ’70s, then became a big fan of Christian Moerlein Select when Hudepohl introduced it in 1981. But I’ll confess to never being entirely faithful to a single brand. My roving tastebuds would sometimes be led into temptation by an exotic label or a shapely bottle. Today, encouraged and aided by the craft beer explosion, I’m downright promiscuous. Several years ago I began using Utappd, a phone app that allows me to track the various beers I’ve tried, and I’ve accumulated a decent score. I have, since January of 2014, consumed a measurable amount of 1202 different beers.

Yes, that’s decent, but it pales next to some others. Just within my small circle of Untappd cohorts, Brian is over 1600, Sara is pushing 1900 (and now only logs on special occasions), and Nick is well past 3000. I’ll never catch them, of course, and I’m OK with that. If nothing else, when someone accuses me of being too fickle in my drinking, I can point to Nick or Sara or Brian and say, “But not like them!”

Besides, as the title of this post indicates, I have other things to brag about. I enjoy logging different venues about as much as I like logging beers and that goes double for breweries. In the beginning, I didn’t watch closely. I was almost halfway to the current count before it registered with me that logging breweries was something I was doing more than most. I completely missed the 100 brewery milestone but did note number 115 with a weak joke about Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream. I’ve been much more attentive as I approached completion of the second hundred and my thoughts have been on Zappa rather than Dylan. It’s not only giving me an opportunity to brag but an opportunity to recount some of the breweries I’ve seen.

For starters, here are numbers 1 and 200. My first check-in of Lock 27 Brewing was on January 31, 2014. It was not, of course, the first brewery I ever visited. I have vague memories of being inside the recently departed Hudepohl brewery several decades ago and I toured the oldest brewery in the US, Yuengling, back in 2005. A blog post from just about a year before I joined Untappd (Something’s Brewing in Cincy) describes visits to five breweries and mentions a couple more. And there were others. Lock 27 was simply the first brewery I visited after joining Untappd. My 200th brewery was the part-circus part-brewery Bircus. It’s in a converted movie theater just across the river in Kentucky and is more upfront about their tumbling and juggling than most breweries.

Dayton, Ohio, where Lock 27 Brewing is located, is also home to some truly unique producers of beer. Carillon Brewing Company (#24 12/8/14) is part of Carillon Historical Park and brews beer the old fashioned way. I mean the 160-year-old fashioned way. With the exception of piped-in water, the operation duplicates a brewery of the 1850s. I did a full blog post, History by the Pint, on my first visit. Pinups & Pints (#– 4/8/15) is a tiny 15-gallon operation that offers one choice of beer at a time. Unfortunately, Untappd had not yet identified it as a brewery when I was there so it is not one of my 200 (It would have been #30). Even so, how could I not include “The World’s Only Strip Club – Brew Pub” in this post? And Untappd does now recognize it as a brewery. The third picture is of Ohio’s first and the nation’s second co-op brewpub shortly before it opened. Fifth Street Brewpub (#3 2/12/14) is the only brewery I currently “own” a tiny piece of (it’s a co-op!) and the one with the most Untappd check-ins. Here‘s a picture from the most recent of those check-ins.

I used the word ‘currently’ in the preceding paragraph because I once owned a few shares of the ahead-of-its-time Oldenberg Brewery in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. Somewhere I have a beautiful and totally worthless stock certificate for the brewery that closed in 2001.

Two other visited breweries deserve shout-outs because of their locations. Silver Gulch Brewing (#79 6/29/16) and Kona Brewing (#123 4/7/17) are, respectively, the USA’s northernmost and southernmost breweries. I claim a bonus point for reaching these outposts within a year of each other. I have yet to reach the westernmost (Kauai Island) or easternmost (Lubec) breweries in the US.

Maybe I’ll make it to three or four hundred or beyond. I’ve started the second 200 like I started the first, with Lock 27. In 2017, a second location, which Untappd counts as a separate brewery, was opened just outside the Dayton Dragons ball field. The Dragons are an affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds who are celebrating 150 years of professional baseball this year. A few months ago, Cincinnati.com published an article listing fifty-one breweries in the area including fifteen I’ve yet to visit. There is also an unvisited-by-me brewery in the ten listed by the Dayton CVB. The Ohio Craft Brewers Association reports that there are now more than 300 breweries operating in the state which means I could reach the next multiple of a hundred without crossing a state line — but I doubt I will.