FatPhil's Brobdingnagian Challenge
What?
The plan was to reach 12 countries from which I've had 12 different beers from each of 12 different brewers.
Why?
Some people want to have at least one beer from every country in the world.
Others want to have all the beers from their country/state/region.
Those ticker/trainspotter targets didn't interest me so much.
Instead I wanted to take a more balanced approach - a large number of beers
from a large number of breweries from a wide range of countries.
I wanted to be able to say not just that I knew certain breweries well
(by having many beers from from them)
but also that I knew a country's beer scene very well
(by having a large number of breweries that I knew well).
I also wanted to extend this concept to the world -
I wanted to be able to say that I knew the beer scene in a lot of different countries.
Where Did The Idea Come From?
The "X countries with X breweries with X beers" idea is based on the "h index" in academia.
If you've written a hundred papers that have only been cited once each, you're not having much influence.
If you've written one paper that has been extremely widely cited, then you're not very productive.
The h-index balances these two extremes - what's the highest X such that you've published X papers that have been cited at least X times.
If you've written 10 papers that have been cited 10 times each, then you're reasonably productive, and reasonably influential, better than either of the extremes.
It's an easy calculation, list your pubs in citation count order, and then just count down the list, as soon as your list position exceeds the citation count, you've gone too far.
E.g., with 100 × 1 cite, you can only count to 1,
and with 1 × 100 cites, you're similarly limited.
With 10 × 10 cites, you can only count to 10.
So the h-indices are 1, 1, and 10.
My idea is just a 3-dimensional equivalent.
When Did I Come Up With This Idea?
Some time around 2015, I guess.
Some people on the RateBeer fora were comparing their beer-per-country h-index.
I think at the time, my h-index by this metric was 29.
At the time I achieved my 12×12×12 Brobdingnagian goal,
it's was 32, now 33,
and progress is slow.
It struck me that not all countries are equal. Some countries don't have much going on apart from a few brewers that just churn out a new beer every couple of days, all much of a muchness, and you can have had literally hundreds of beers from that country and still only have experienced a narrow range of beers.
Addressing this issue, someone, perhaps me, proposed the idea of counting not the number of beers from each country but the number of different breweries instead. I have no idea what my score was back then, but when I achieved my 12×12×12 Brobdingnagian goal, I had an h-index of 23, now 24.
This can be hacked by someone just trying one thing from each brewery,
which again doesn't imply any real knowledge of that brewery's oeuvre.
So it needed fixing. It had to be made 3-dimensional: Countries × Breweries × Beers.
I did a quick scan down my beer ratings, and noticed that I had already rated
11 beers from each of 11 different breweries in 11 different countries.
The next target was clear: 12 × 12 × 12!
Why The Name?
The concept's from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
The giants on Brobdingnag were twelve times larger in each dimension,
so 12×12×12=1728 times larger in total.
Why Did It Take So Long?
Because it's damn hard. You don't just need another new beer from another
new brewery from another country.
11×11×11 has a "volume" of 1331, so 1728 is ~30% more work.
Add to that the fact that just finding countries with lively beer scenes
gets harder and harder - even some of the most well-known beer countries,
such as Germany and Czechia, are full of breweries that only make 3-5
different beers - finding 12 beers from most of those is practically
impossible. So you can probably double that work factor.
I'd already been rating beers for well over 10 years, so it's not weird
that it would take another 5+ years. That, and in 2019 I stopped rating on
RateBeer, and started to build up a backlog on paper, and on my phone.
This meant that there might be stealth breweries that would contribute to
my total, but I didn't yet realise it. As the target got closer, I specifically
hunted out ratings in my backlog that were most likely to assist me in making
progress towards my goal. There are still 2-3 thousand in the backlog, who
knows what's within...
The nice thing is that I managed to hit this target before my 50th birthday.
3 days before it, to be precise.
I entered the final ratings on Wednesday 10th Feb 2021,
I grabbed a backup of my ratings on Thursday 11th, and ran my checker scripts then,
and finally I put this webpage together on Friday 12th.
And the cock's just crowed - just in time!
Prove You've Done It!
These are the numbers of breweries that I've had at least 12 beers from in each of my top countries - and all these are now entered on RateBeer:
$ ./brob.pl 51287 12
1 83 England
2 59 Finland
3 29 Estonia
4 28 Latvia
5 28 Belgium
6 26 United States
7 19 Denmark
8 19 Sweden
9 17 Lithuania
10 16 Netherlands
11 16 Poland
12 13 Germany
13 13 Russia
14 8 Italy
15 7 Scotland
16 7 Norway
So I've actually done 13 countries at 13 breweries with 12 beers.
But I did just do a specific push to get Polish, Russian, Dutch, and German beers from my backlog, so it's not surprising more went over the line together than strictly needed.
What's Next?
Obviously 13×13×13.
When I restrict the above search to breweries that I've had 13 beers from, rather than 12, the result is as follows:
$ ./brob.pl 51287 13
1 77 England
2 57 Finland
3 27 Estonia
4 27 Belgium
5 25 Latvia
6 23 United States
7 17 Denmark
8 17 Lithuania
9 17 Sweden
10 16 Poland
11 14 Netherlands
12 13 Russia
13 13 Germany
14 7 Italy
15 7 Norway
16 5 Scotland
So I have 13 countries at 13 breweries with 13 beers! A
baker's Brobdingnag! Thanks to Chris Pilkington for providing
the Schneider Weisse that pushed me over. Alas, the next
target down the line looks mindblowingly hard.
Are You The First?
Almost certainly not, I'm sure the really big raters (with 30, 40, 50+
thousand ratings, compared to my ~24000 (of which ~2500 in the backlog))
got there ages ago, and have done it to the 13th, 14th, perhaps even
15th level.
I have run the stats for a few friends, some of whom are still rating, while others aren't, and they are as follows:
Marduk (retiring)
Brobdingnag Index as of 2022/11/28
$ ./brob.pl 136546 12
1 40 Estonia
2 29 Finland
3 29 Latvia
4 27 England
5 22 Belgium
6 21 Poland
7 19 United States
8 15 Russia
9 14 Sweden
10 14 Germany
11 13 Lithuania
12 12 Netherlands
13 12 Denmark
14 10 Czech Republic
15 9 Italy
16 6 Spain
Congrats, Marduk, on achieving 12×12×12!
I'm happy to say that I was able to provide the final German beer,
a Schlenkerla, that finally pushed him over the threshold on
2022-02-05.
Brobdingnag 13×13×13 hunt as of 2022/11/28
$ ./brob.pl 136546 13
1 38 Estonia
2 27 Latvia
3 26 England
4 26 Finland
5 20 Belgium
6 18 Poland
7 16 United States
8 14 Sweden
9 14 Russia
10 11 Lithuania
11 11 Germany
12 10 Denmark
Beers/Country h-index as of 2022/11/28
$ ./hbeer.pl 136546
1 2604 Estonia
2 1508 Latvia
3 1333 England
4 1106 Poland
5 1096 Finland
6 1046 Germany
7 972 United States
8 967 Belgium
9 903 Denmark
10 673 Sweden
11 655 Netherlands
12 589 Czech Republic
13 550 Russia
14 471 Italy
15 464 Lithuania
16 447 Scotland
17 339 Spain
18 278 Canada
19 251 France
20 240 Norway
21 182 Japan
22 161 Austria
23 155 Portugal
24 146 Hungary
25 90 Ukraine
26 86 Ireland
27 83 Iceland
28 72 Greece
29 70 Belarus
30 60 Croatia
31 45 Switzerland
32 45 Luxembourg
33 43 Slovakia
34 43 Wales
35 32 New Zealand
36 26 Australia
37 25 Slovenia
Breweries/Country h-index as of 2022/11/28
$ ./hbrew.pl 136546
1 332 Germany
2 316 England
3 238 United States
4 168 Czech Republic
5 157 Poland
6 147 Belgium
7 144 Canada
8 127 Estonia
9 121 Finland
10 107 Netherlands
11 103 Latvia
12 103 Italy
13 79 Sweden
14 67 Russia
15 64 France
16 62 Spain
17 57 Scotland
18 54 Japan
19 51 Lithuania
20 50 Portugal
21 49 Denmark
22 46 Austria
23 38 Greece
24 25 Ireland
25 23 Norway
26 22 Slovakia
27 20 Switzerland
martjoobolut (retired)
$ ./brob.pl 286327
1 34 Estonia
2 32 Belgium
3 32 United States
4 22 England
5 14 Netherlands
6 12 Germany
7 11 Sweden
8 10 Poland
9 9 Italy
10 9 Russia
11 7 Japan
12 7 Latvia
13 6 Spain
So 9×9×9 already reached,
however, only 7 countries are at 10×10 level, so not that close.
Tbone
$ ./brob.pl 10233 10
1 90 Finland
2 74 United States
3 52 Belgium
4 51 England
5 46 Sweden
6 38 Denmark
7 28 Germany
8 28 Norway
9 26 Netherlands
10 19 Estonia
11 8 Italy
12 7 Scotland
13 5 Spain
Surprisingly (Tbone has more ratings than me, and way more than Marduk),
only the 10×10×10 level has been reached so far.
Appendices
./hbeer.pl 51287
1 4540 England
2 2850 Finland
3 1978 Estonia
4 1344 Latvia
5 1289 Belgium
6 1259 Germany
7 1233 United States
8 1077 Denmark
9 900 Poland
10 732 Lithuania
11 731 Netherlands
12 655 Sweden
13 526 Scotland
14 479 Russia
15 478 Czech Republic
16 408 Italy
17 286 Norway
18 272 France
19 270 Spain
20 182 Wales
21 159 Japan
22 119 Hungary
23 94 Austria
24 86 Belarus
25 77 Canada
26 68 Ireland
27 68 Iceland
28 63 Slovakia
29 50 Switzerland
30 47 Australia
31 46 New Zealand
32 41 Ukraine
33 38 Croatia
34 32 Greece
35 24 Portugal
36 24 South Korea
24, I can't quite sneak a 25th:
./hbrew.pl 51287
1 898 England
2 395 Germany
3 303 United States
4 214 Belgium
5 148 Finland
6 148 Czech Republic
7 132 Poland
8 108 Estonia
9 106 Netherlands
10 100 Latvia
11 88 France
12 88 Italy
13 81 Denmark
14 79 Spain
15 75 Lithuania
16 74 Sweden
17 66 Russia
18 56 Scotland
19 50 Wales
20 41 Japan
21 34 Austria
22 32 Slovakia
23 26 Norway
24 25 Hungary
25 23 Canada
26 21 Switzerland
27 20 Australia
Another hastily constructed page by Phil Carmody
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