Spankify Wrapped 2024: Spotify
You're Lucky I Don't Charge: Pick Of The Year 2024

Spankify Wrapped 2024: Untappd

My manager always said to me, there are no such things as problems, only opportunities. So at worst, I've got a drinking opportunity. (Gag stolen from Ed Morrrish on Bluesky.)My name is Spank The Monkey, and I'm not an alcoholic.

So now we've established that, let's talk about the 501 beers I've drunk this year. And why that number is actually an underestimate.

It all started in October 2021, when – after a delay of almost two years, because of that pesky pandemic – I finally got to use my Christmas 2019 present from The BBG: a voucher for a day of brewing at London Beer Lab. I wrote about it at the time, but didn’t mention the punchline: the beer we made (a black IPA called Serious Black) went on general sale at LBL the following January, and the only way we could try some for ourselves was to go to the bar and buy it with our own money. What’s the worst paid job you’ve ever had?

Anyway, we were told at the time that the best way to find out when our beer was on sale would be to follow LBL on the beer tracking app Untappd. It’s primarily a place where drinkers can keep track of all the beers they’ve consumed and rate them, but it’s also where bars can announce what’s currently available. Once we saw the beer they’d chosen to call Serious Black was out, we went there and got ourselves a pint each to drink on site and a few more to take away. I gave Serious Black an obvious five star rating, and then stopped interacting with Untappd after that, apart from occasionally using it to look up the current tap list of bars.

Cut to late December back in ’23, and Untappd send me an end of year summary mail along the lines of Spotify Wrapped, scraping the data they’ve gathered from me and concluding that I’ve drunk zero beers in 2023. This is obviously wrong. And it made me wonder: what would that mail look like if I logged every beer I’d drunk in a single calendar year?

It’s now late December back in ’24, and I’ve been using Untappd to keep a record of every beer I’ve had since January 1st. And at first glance, the results are bloody horrifying.

You’ve seen the summary screen at the top there, so I need to throw in some immediate caveats about that figure of 501 check-ins in 2024. (As a commenter on Mastadon pointed out to me, the danger of Untappd is that it means a large portion of any drinking session is taken up with admin.) The main thing to stress is: that doesn’t mean 501 pints. The BBG and I tend where possible to order different beers in a round, and then swap halfway through to maximise the number of different types we’ve tried. So generally, each check-in is generally for a maximum of half a pint, with each round we have usually resulting in two check-ins. And you should also take into account that in some cases we’re splitting schooners between us, or halves, or even thirds of a pint when we’re in extreme tasting mode. Also, some of those check-ins were for alcohol-free beer.

It’s still quite a lot, sure, but it’s not quite as horrifying as it first looks. And there are some interesting trends noted in their video summary (see below). For a start, that map of Everywhere I’ve Been Drinking This Year is delightful, because it’s really Everywhere I’ve Been This Year. Because I didn’t log anything on the app during 2023, the comparison stats are a hoot – “You checked into 191 venues this year. That’s 191 more than last year.” And then there are the meaningless badges that Untappd keeps awarding you, generally for trying a particular style or doing a particular thing in a multiple of five times. So, in case you were wondering, Photogenic Brew Level 100 celebrates that I’ve uploaded five hundred pictures of the beers I’ve been drinking. (My camera roll is an absolute mess right now.)

Like I said: it’s a lot of admin. And as well as uploading a photo of every beer, I’ve given it a rating out of five. It’s a fairly coarse rating system, only working in increments of a quarter (unless you pay for the next tier of membership to increase that to increments of 0.1, and I can’t be bothered with that). Everything I’ve rated has been somewhere between three and five on the scale, so their choice of Siren's Death by CCC as my favourite beer is a somewhat random selection out of all of my five-point ratings (though I can’t really argue with it). It’s also worth noting that despite the heavy focus on BrewDog in these pages over the years, it’s breweries like Siren and Signature Brew who are racking up the big numbers with me, which tracks against the ongoing feeling that BrewDog took their eye off the ball some time ago.

If you’re on Untappd and fancy looking over the full horror of my profile, it’s here: otherwise, you’ll have to make do with the summary. (No sound, I’m afraid. Maybe try playing this song in the background.)

Overall, it’s been a fun experiment, but I wouldn’t want to show the results to my doctor, and I’ll be keeping away from the app again once 2024 is over. Although, theoretically, I should be stopping now – the Year In Beer stats stop dead after the first week of December, but I’m still recording beers on Untappd. Put it this way: at the time of writing I’ve reached 511 check-ins, and we haven’t even got to Christmas yet...

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