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... (That was written in 2021, by 2023 it was up to 4-5 thousand!)

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.

What Now? (where now is 2023/09/21)

Let's see how close I am to 14×14×14, ignoring the fact that I have >4500 in backlog:

$ ./brob.pl 51287
 1      30 Finland
 2      25 England
 3      20 Latvia
 4      20 Estonia
 5      16 Sweden
 6      16 United States
 7      16 Poland
 8      16 Belgium
 9      15 Lithuania
10      14 Denmark
11      13 Russia
12      13 Germany
13      13 Netherlands
14      11 Scotland
15      11 Italy
16      10 Czech Republic

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 (OK, in 2023 it's more like 29000 and 4500))) 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

Brobdingnag 12×12×12 Index as of 2023/12/15

$ ./brob.pl 136546 12
 1      44 Estonia
 2      33 Finland
 3      31 Latvia
 4      30 Poland
 5      30 England
 6      23 Belgium
 7      22 United States
 8      16 Sweden
 9      15 Russia
10      14 Germany
11      13 Lithuania
12      13 Netherlands
13      12 Denmark
14      10 Czech Republic
15       9 Italy
16       7 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 2023/12/15

$ ./brob.pl 136546 13
 1      40 Estonia
 2      29 Finland
 3      29 Poland
 4      28 Latvia
 5      28 England
 6      21 Belgium
 7      18 United States
 8      15 Sweden
 9      14 Russia
10      11 Lithuania
11      11 Germany
12      10 Netherlands

Brobdingnag Country Progress as of 2023/12/15

$ ./brob.pl 136546
 1      24 Estonia
 2      19 Latvia
 3      18 Finland
 4      18 Poland
 5      17 England
 6      16 Belgium
 7      14 United States
 8      14 Sweden
 9      13 Russia
10      12 Lithuania
11      12 Germany
12      12 Netherlands
13      12 Denmark
14      11 Czech Republic
15       9 Italy

Beers/Country h-index as of 2023/12/15

$ ./hbeer.pl 136546
 1   2845 Estonia
 2   1652 Latvia
 3   1559 Poland
 4   1428 England
 5   1193 Germany
 6   1171 Finland
 7   1147 United States
 8   1036 Belgium
 9   1021 Denmark
10    751 Sweden
11    736 Netherlands
12    715 Czech Republic
13    555 Russia
14    499 Italy
15    488 Lithuania
16    472 Scotland
17    468 Spain
18    355 France
19    294 Canada
20    283 Hungary
21    258 Austria
22    255 Norway
23    224 Ireland
24    190 Japan
25    172 Croatia
26    164 Portugal
27    112 Slovakia
28    108 Ukraine
29     88 Iceland
30     75 Greece
31     71 Belarus
32     69 Slovenia
33     49 Luxembourg
34     48 Switzerland
35     46 Wales
36     34 New Zealand
37     27 Australia
38     25 China

Breweries/Country h-index as of 2023/12/15

$ ./hbrew.pl 136546
 1    357 Germany
 2    326 England
 3    294 United States
 4    196 Czech Republic
 5    187 Poland
 6    156 Belgium
 7    151 Canada
 8    130 Estonia
 9    125 Finland
10    121 Netherlands
11    109 Italy
12    106 Latvia
13     91 Spain
14     87 Sweden
15     73 France
16     69 Russia
17     63 Austria
18     59 Ireland
19     58 Japan
20     57 Scotland
21     52 Portugal
22     51 Lithuania
23     49 Denmark
24     47 Hungary
25     40 Slovakia
26     38 Greece
27     36 Croatia
28     24 Norway
29     24 Slovenia
30     20 Switzerland

martjoobolut (retired)

$ ./brob.pl 286327 9
 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 (as of 2023/12/15)

$ ./brob.pl 10233 10
 1      98 Finland
 2      79 United States
 3      56 England
 4      54 Belgium
 5      48 Sweden
 6      39 Denmark
 7      32 Norway
 8      30 Germany
 9      26 Netherlands
10      22 Estonia
11       9 Poland
12       8 Spain
13       8 Scotland

Surprisingly (Tbone has more ratings than me, and way more than Marduk), only the 10×10×10 level has been reached so far. 11×11×11 still looks like it'll take some effort:

./brob.pl 10233 11
 1      94 Finland
 2      69 United States
 3      47 England
 4      47 Belgium
 5      44 Sweden
 6      36 Denmark
 7      29 Norway
 8      23 Netherlands
 9      22 Germany
10      22 Estonia
11       8 Scotland
12       7 Italy
13       6 Spain

Appendices

My Beers/Country H-Index (as of 2023/12/15)

./hbeer.pl 51287
 1   4636 England
 2   3045 Finland
 3   2253 Estonia
 4   1476 Latvia
 5   1379 Germany
 6   1361 Belgium
 7   1328 United States
 8   1245 Poland
 9   1136 Denmark
10    838 Lithuania
11    775 Netherlands
12    719 Sweden
13    599 Czech Republic
14    541 Scotland
15    488 Russia
16    437 Italy
17    322 Spain
18    321 France
19    300 Norway
20    283 Hungary
21    183 Wales
22    166 Japan
23    151 Croatia
24    141 Austria
25    117 Slovakia
26     93 Canada
27     91 Ireland
28     87 Belarus
29     73 Iceland
30     61 Ukraine
31     56 Slovenia
32     53 Switzerland
33     47 Australia
34     46 New Zealand
35     35 Greece
36     31 Portugal
37     27 South Korea
38     25 China

My Breweries/Country H-Index (as of 2023/12/15)

26, I can't quite sneak a 27th:

./hbrew.pl 51287
 1    909 England
 2    421 Germany
 3    329 United States
 4    223 Belgium
 5    177 Czech Republic
 6    163 Finland
 7    160 Poland
 8    113 Estonia
 9    113 Netherlands
10    107 Latvia
11     97 France
12     94 Italy
13     86 Spain
14     84 Denmark
15     83 Sweden
16     76 Lithuania
17     68 Russia
18     56 Scotland
19     53 Hungary
20     51 Wales
21     48 Japan
22     48 Slovakia
23     44 Austria
24     39 Croatia
25     30 Canada
26     27 Ireland
27     26 Norway
28     24 Switzerland
29     21 Slovenia

Helper command lines

./rbsum.pl -template='$brewer' country begins Czech < 51287.raw | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

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