The Museum Turns 14 Years Old, Part 1: Site Summary and Statistics

STATE OF THE BLOG

For 14 years now I've been writing posts and profiles, telling the story of breweries and their taps. The big news for me personally is that due to my early retirement, I'm forced to make some changes. The main change that concerns this site is that I'm moving, and I have to downsize the collection. I'll be selling off a large amount of taps...well over 1,000. My goal for now is to downsize to 900 taps, possibly 800. That means I'm keeping most of my top taps like Reverend Mudbone's and Tilted Kilt.

It's a shame that I'm selling my property, which houses the Museum, just as I've finished my displays. To be more precise, I almost finished them. I had planned to upgrade or install lighting for the display cabinets, but that is on hold until I figure out what my new situation will be. I may not have room for cabinets in my new place and may have to go with shelving. While I had dreamed in the past of having a public museum, unfortunately my future didn't turn out the way I thought it would, so that is one dream I have to let go of.

The good thing about all of this - as far as my profile posts are concerned - is that although I've had several visitors to the physical Museum, it's primarily virtual, and exists mostly for brewery and tap historical purposes, not to document my physical collection. As a result, I can continue to make profile posts for taps that have departed the Museum.

One last thing to note is the appearance of my tap profile photos. My cameras that I've used over the years have changed and evolved. Early tap photos (with the white tissue background) were taken as stills using a Casio QV-4000 video camera. The first photos taken with my display stage were taken using a Canon VIXIA HF100. That changed to a Sony a6000, a mid-level digital SLR that for some reason could not capture color in the red/orange spectrum properly and required color manipulation and oversaturation to get the colors of the tap right. I'm not happy with the appearance of those images, and some of the worst offenders will be re-taken, but I'm unlikely to re-do most of the photos due to time constraints. Moving on, with the arrival of my Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra in 2020, I finally had a camera phone that was good enough to take over photography duties, and the Samsung did a much better job than the Sony at capturing colors accurately. However, starting with the recent Ellison tap profile, the Note 20 has been retired and replaced with a new Samsung S26 Ultra, so the photos are looking slightly different. I'm still learning my way around this new phone camera, and as a result, things like focus, color balance and exposure are still a work in progress. I also added some LED light bars to brighten up photos.

I'm going to be busy preparing to sell my property and make my move, but I should be able to squeeze in profiles here and there. So, look for more great posts of amazing tap handles throughout next year from breweries and pubs such as Middle Ages, Scarlett Lane, Mission, Pabst, Phuk, Rogue, Alaskan, Twin Peaks, Pizza Port, Wicked Weed, Original Joe's, and Lorelei on the horizon. Now, on to the site statistics...

TAP PROFILES

I was able to complete 30 tap profiles this past year, almost as many as last year. While there were actually only 25 new posts, I did 5 re-writes to previous profiles, which takes almost as much work as a new post, so I have counted those in the total, but they are separated into stacked columns on the chart.

NEW BREWERIES PROFILED PLUS RE-WRITES

The number of new breweries/brewpubs/restaurants profiled this past year was a bit less than last year, but with the 5 re-writes, it's actually more. New brewery/brewpub/restaurant profiles take considerably more time in research and writing than posts for taps from breweries/brewpubs/restaurants I have previously profiled. I have stacked the columns as I discussed on the previous chart.

NEW PURCHASES

With the decision to downsize the collection, you would expect this number to drop and it has. But there's always great new taps coming out, so what do I do about that? I decided to continue to add taps, but for each one I add, I have to sell an equal value of other taps in the collection. While this does result in a constant turnover, it also prevents me from growing the collection and keeping taps in boxes, which I don't want to do anymore. So this statistic moving forward will reflect new incoming purchases, but not taps going out the door in return. Another reason that this year's stat is lower (in addition to the decision to downsize) is due to having 4 taps on order, which would have raised the number to 44, but were not counted since I don't physically have them yet.

PAGE VIEWS

It took a little over 12 years to hit a million page views. Remarkably, in less than 2 years I'm already almost halfway again to that number, and I predict I'll easily exceed 1.5 million page views by mid-2026. That's incredible! It seems like 2 million page views is within reach. Thanks once again to everyone who comes to visit the Museum!

The next post will be a little different this year...I'll be posting photos of the Museum displays. That post will be up in the next 7-10 days, so check back to see some amazing tap handles!