The Museum Turns 5 Years Old, Part 1: "State of the Blog"

Instead of leading with a post about statistics this year, I'm going to talk about the state of the Museum and what happened over the past year, with a hazy look at future activity.

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The year started out great. After some fairly common taps profiled, some really rare ones hit the site like Caged Alpha Monkey, Octopabst, and Chameleon Ryediculous. I talked about my trip to Hopworks Urban Brewery and hosted my third tap giveaway contest. I made some great connections with Wooden Robot and Anthem, and completed work on my Scarcity Guide. In May I gave away Tap #4, and since then, tap giveaways have become a regular occurance (as I once hoped they would). I met more great people from Hellbender, Titletown, and Lost Coast. By August I was on pace to shatter the site statistics for the past 3 years of profiling.

And then it all fell apart.

As I've mentioned before, it's not my goal to share insight into my personal life here on the site. I enjoy telling the stories of breweries and their taps, and would rather talk about them than myself every day of the week. But I think I need to explain the perfect storm of events that robbed me of my time and caused my postings to fall off a cliff. Between August 18th and October 15th, a nearly 60 day span, I only profiled 10 taps, with 4 of the 10 requiring no brewery profile (meaning they should have been fast and easy). Time between postings went from 2-3 days to 5 days and then 7 days. Frankly it's been equal measures of exhaustion, pain, frustration, and chaos. Here is a list of events that explains how the wheels came off:

• I sold my house, which required some minor repair work, cleaning, moving appliances (by myself), and several meetings and time filling out paperwork to get the deal done.
• At "Museum Restoration Expert" Kelly's house, where I now rent a room, we started building "The Barcade", a large detached bar and gameroom, where the taps will eventually be displayed.
• I moved 4 pinball machines (about 250 pounds each) and over 60 boxes of taps into the Barcade.
• Kelly's dad, who also lives on the property and is 82, fell off of a ladder and broke 8 ribs. Daily hospital visits ensued.
• My workplace instituted new anti-virus software which has slowed my work PC's performance considerably. Unfortunately, that is where I upload most of the photos and do some of my editing.
• I was having bad nosebleeds, which required me to have surgery.
• A couple of my pets got sick, resulting in multiple trips to the vet.
• I spent time filling out a Q&A interview by Paste Magazine about tap handles and my Museum.
• One of my technicians at my regular place of work was diagnosed with cancer. Besides the emotional factor, I have been short-handed on personnel and have picked up some of his job responsibilities, which makes for long work days.

CURRENT & FUTURE STATUS

Things have settled down a bit, but the main factor, having one of my technicians out indefinitely, has not changed and is still putting a major dent in my free time. Even if I'm able to hire somone new, I will need to spend time to train them, which is even more demanding. So for now I'll keep plugging away the best that I can. One thing I have considered is having an "assistant" who can help me write profiles in exchange for free taps. It's something I'm mulling over, although I don't know if there'd be anyone interested in doing this, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

For the future, the monthly tap giveaways will certainly continue. And as far as acquisitions, as I approach 1,000 taps in the collection and start displaying them in the Barcade, I will have to make a decision as to whether the acquisitions will continue or not. On one hand, it doesn't make sense to keep acquiring taps if I can't display them all. On the other hand, if someday I had a real physical museum, it would make sense to not display them all, instead rotating taps to give people something different to see on each visit. Do I get rid of taps I can't display now, when in the future it might be better to rotate taps and keep things fresh? How many taps are enough? Is my money better spent on other things? If I limit my total number of taps, should I sell off less-favorite taps to make room for ones I like better?

These are all questions I'm struggling with right now, and there are no easy answers. Well, the easy answer is to keep buying taps. But is that the best answer? I don't know, but it's still fun to get them!

Thanks again for your patience, and I hope things are going better for you than they are for me!