beer

2024, quantified

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I did this last year, and found it interesting to look back at the various statistics of things that I have done over the year. So, here it is again for 2024. It helps that loads of web sites now offer their own version of Spotify Wrapped.

Countries and counties visited

In 2024, I didn’t visit any countries besides England where I live.

Over the course of the year, I have spent at least some time in the following English counties:

  • West Yorkshire
  • North Yorkshire
  • South Yorkshire
  • Lincolnshire
  • Greater Manchester
  • Lancashire
  • Cheshire
  • Norfolk
  • Northumberland
  • County Durham
  • Merseyside
  • Greater London
  • West Midlands

This doesn’t include any counties that I have passed through without stopping. Compared to last year, I didn’t go to Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey or Hampshire, but I did go to Northumberland, County Durham, Merseyside, Greater London and the West Midlands which were all counties that I didn’t go to in 2023.

Most distant points

The furthest compass points I have been to are:

For context, I went as far east as 2023, but further north and (slightly) further west. However, as we didn’t go to France this year, I went significantly less far south.

Methods of transport used

Because we didn’t take our car to France, I didn’t drive as much this year – about 8000 miles, or 20% less than last year.

However, I have done more train travel. As well as my commute to work, we took the train to London in March. I have driven once in London and vowed never again; not least because our car is a diesel and therefore subject to additional charges inside the ULEZ. I also took our nine-year-old to Leeds last week on the train.

We’ve also been on trams a couple of times in Manchester – we tend to drive to Hollinwood tram stop and use Metrolink as a park and ride service. And whilst we didn’t cross the channel by ferry this year, we did cross the Mersey by ferry instead. Once again, no aeroplane flights in 2024.

My top 5 songs from Spotify Wrapped, which are 'React' by Switch Disco, 'Since U Been Gone' by Kelly Clarkson, 'Melodies of Hope' by Patty Gurdy, 'On The Floor' by Jennifer Lopez and 'What The Hell' by Avril Lavigne

Music listened to

Over the year, I scrobbled 12,671 tracks on last.fm, so slightly down on the 13,194 from 2023 (and 13,447 from 2022). That’s almost 35 songs per day, again down by about one a day from 2023. Assuming an average song is around three minutes, I listen to almost two hours of music every day on average. Spotify reckons that I listened to 436 minutes, or just over 7 hours of music on the 25 October.

Whilst I don’t exclusively listen to music on Spotify, on there, pop was my top genre, following by trance, rock, pop dance and Europop this year, according to my Spotify Wrapped. My most-listened to song was ‘React’ by Switch Disco featuring Ella Henderson and Robert Miles, which I listened to 14 times. Which is unsurprising as it’s one of our nine-year-old’s favourite songs, and samples Robert Miles’ ‘Children’.

My top artist was Armin van Buuren, which surprised me but there’s almost always one of his songs in my weekly Release Radar playlist. The rest of my top five were Patty Gurdy (blog post), Madam Misfit (blog post), David Guetta and Dua Lipa. I listened to 4,235 different bands and artists over the course of the year.

Books read and listened to

According to My Goodreads Year in Books for 2024, I read 77 books this year – 16 fewer than 2023. This amounts to 17,845 pages (although many of these were listened to as audiobooks).

The shortest book I read, at 32 pages long, was ‘The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me’ by Roald Dahl (sponsored link) – clearly, one of the books that I read to our nine-year-old this year. Meanwhile, I listened to 15 and a half hours of Nicola Coughlan reading ‘The Shadow Cabinet’ by Juno Dawson (sponsored link), which translates to 528 pages and the longest book. That’s longer in terms of pages than my longest book last year (‘What Just Happened?!’ by Marina Hyde (sponsored link) – 472 pages) but shorter in terms of listening time (17 hours).

Overall, the average length of book that I read was 231 pages, which is 11 more than 2023. Matt Haig’s ‘The Midnight Library’ (sponsored link) was the most popular book that I read last year.

A downloaded image from my Untappd Year in Beer, showing my average rating, checkins, and top rated beers.

Beers and ciders consumed

I log the beers and ciders that I drink using Untappd, and these stats are from my year in beer. However, I only logged 11 such drinks this year (compared to 58 in 2022). I just haven’t been particularly interested in drinking beer and cider this year, and it’s notable that my favourite style was ‘non-alcoholic’.

Steps taken

My total steps taken was very similar to 2023. Overall I took 3,526,369 steps, which is 5% less than 2023 and means that, on average, I walked just under 10,000 steps per day. Overall that’s almost 2,600 kilometres (again down by around 100 compared to 2023). These are all tracked using my Fitbit Versa 3.

A screenshot from my Duolingo Year in Review which states that I am a top 1% French learner

Time spent learning French

I started Duolingo’s French course on the 1st January 2022 (so I have a three year streak now), and in 2024, I spent 4,228 minutes learning – that’s 70 hours or an average of 12 minutes per day. Again, slightly down on 2023, but then we didn’t go to France this year. I also managed to remain in the Diamond League for the entire year, and successfully completed every friends quest and monthly challenge.

My Duolingo Score for French is 100, which means that I’m in the low B2 level (‘vantage’) of the CEFR for French. Currently Duolingo’s maximum score for French is 130, which is high B2 level and should be sufficient to study a university course taught in French. I’m hoping to achieve that by the end of 2025, although there’s a possibility of us going on holiday somewhere else which may see me switch languages for a bit.

A shareable image from Overcast showing my top 6 podcasts this year

Podcasts listened to

I listen to the majority of my podcasts through Overcast (with the remainder in BBC Sounds). My most listened to podcast was RHLSTP (RHLSTP!) with 78 hours over the year. The Guilty Feminist, The Comedian’s Comedian, The Bugle and The Infinite Monkey Cage make up the rest of my top 5. ‘Reasons Revisited’ is the now defunct podcast which was hosted by Ed Milliband and Geoff Lloyd; now that Ed is a government minister again, there are no more new episodes.

Tracking my podcast listening is a relatively new feature in Overcast and so this is a new statistic that I didn’t track in 2023.

Photos taken

Another new statistic that I didn’t track in 2023 was number of photos taken. It’s an estimate – basically it’s the total number of images backed up from my phone to Dropbox over the year. That could also include screenshots, memes and a few videos. Overall, it was 1,813 in 2024, compared to 1,417 in 2023. So whilst I may have been less active, listened to less music and not been abroad, I did take around 28% more photos in 2024.

So, that’s 2024 quantified, and a useful summary of the statistics from various web services that seem to spend their December telling me data they hold about me but in a nice way. I suppose I need to get a bit active in 2025 then.

Brewing my own beer with Brew Barrel

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The Brew Barrel kit - a barrel and a box with ingredients

The folks at Brew Barrel approached me to review their eponymous home brewing kit. For £25, you can get everything you need to make 8 pints of beer, with a choice of different hops and flavouring to make different styles. It’s made by a German company, which, considering that Germany is famed for its beers, means it should be good.

The Brew Barrel kit includes a five litre barrel, and the ingredients – hops, yeast, flavourings and rather a lot of malt syrup. To make the beer, you combine all of these in the barrel, along with lots of water. Instructions are, of course, provided. It takes around 10 to 15 minutes of preparation initially, but after that it doesn’t require much attention – you have to turn the barrel after 24 hours, and then refrigerate it after five days. Two days later (so a total of seven days since starting), your beer is ready to serve from a small tap at the bottom of the barrel.

A photo of the Brew Barrel ingredients

I decided to brew an IPA, which is one of my favourite beer styles. Putting it together was quite easy – all the components are numbered so that you can be sure of the required order. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the barrel in the fridge – our fridge is rather small, and full. As you have to keep the barrel upright, I would have needed to extensively re-arrange the fridge and get rid of the contents, which I doubt my wife would be best pleased about. Especially as she doesn’t like beer.

So when it came to trying the beer, it probably wasn’t at its best. Despite this, I liked it – it was rather sweet and very, very foamy, but drinkable and certainly nicer than some other homebrews that I have tried in the past. Once opened, the beer in the Brew Barrel should keep for around two weeks, if kept refrigerated.

Should you buy one? If you want to brew your own beer, but are completely new to it, then yes – the Brew Barrel keeps it simple for you and doesn’t require too much effort. Those with existing home brew experience may find it useful to have all of the necessary materials in one package, but could feel limited as it’s aimed more at novices. Financially it’s probably more expensive than just buying eight pints of beer to consume at home, but where’s the fun in that?

The Old Brewery, Greenwich

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Lunch at the old brewery

This is the second in a series of posts about what we did on our recent trip to London.

After visiting the Cutty Sark, we took the short walk to The Old Brewery. Originally, this was the brewery of the Old Royal Naval College, opened in 1836 in Greenwich. In 2010, the Meantime Brewing Company moved in; at first, this was their main brewery but nowadays most of their beers are brewed elsewhere. Some brewing equipment remains, but the rest of the brewery is now a bar and café, owned by Meantime.

Meantime is one of my favourite brewers, and I’ve sampled most of their range of beers before. So I was pleased to have the opportunity to visit, even if it was just to have lunch in the café. As you’d expect, the full range of Meantime’s beers are available, either on tap or in bottles, and we had a happy couple of hours getting merry on good beer.

A northerner like me would find the food and drink a little pricey, but then it is in London, and slap bang in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage Site to boot. Meantime’s beers are on the expensive end of the spectrum anyway.

The Meantime Brewing Company had humble beginnings, back in 2005, and was one of the first ‘craft beer’ breweries in the UK. However, this year it was taken over by SABMiller, the world’s second largest brewing conglomerate. This has seen some of its production moved to the Netherlands, where its beers are produced alongside Grolsch. SABMiller is itself in the process of being acquired by its largest rival, Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Whilst Meantime may no longer have its hipster credentials, they still produce good beer, and The Old Brewery is worth popping in to if you’re in Greenwich. You may struggle to get a seat at lunchtime, although there is plenty of outdoor seating if it’s a nice day.

Tapped Leeds

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Tasting trays

On Saturday I visited the latest addition to Leeds’ craft beer scene – Tapped Leeds. It’s an American-style brew pub, where some of its beers are brewed on the premise. As you go in, there’s a huge bar on your left, and a microbrewery on the right wall.

Tapped Leeds is on Boar Lane, and located under the eastern wing of the Trinity Leeds shopping centre, next door to BHS. Go back a few years and Boar Lane wasn’t somewhere that you would spend much time, but the opening of Trinity Leeds has seen the area turned around and now all bar one shop unit is occupied. Together with Friends of Ham and the Leeds Brewery Tap (where the above photo was taken), there are now three good craft beer pubs within drunken staggering distance of each other, and two of them brew some of their beer on site. Brewdog Leeds is only a short walk away too.

Tapped Leeds is certainly the biggest of the three, and has the largest beer selection. Typically, there will be 13 cask ales (delivered by gravity feed rather than pump), and 14 keg beers. And then over 100 beers in bottles and cans in the fridges. This isn’t the sort of place where you go to drink the same thing every time.

It’s owned by Pivovar, and is their first Leeds bar. They started off with Pivni in York, as one of the first British bars to sell Bernard beer from the Czech Republic, and have since opened bars in renovated buildings at York, Sheffield, Harrogate and London Euston stations.The York Tap is one of my favourite York bars, which is saying something as York isn’t exactly short of pubs (the legend states there are 365 but in reality it’s closer to half that).

Compared with their other properties, Tapped Leeds is rather different as it’s not in an old renovated building – it’s in the ground floor of a shopping centre. Consequently, the interior is very different as it doesn’t have to show any original features. In some ways it’s lacking character, and indeed the bar is very plain – all of the beer pumps are on the back wall. Some of the beers can be on the pricey side, with my pint of Damson Porter from the Ashover Brewery costing £3.80 (expensive by Yorkshire standards).

Beer drinkers who like variety will find a lot to like at Tapped Leeds. It’s not somewhere that you would go for a quiet drink, and I personally prefer Friends of Ham. But it’s good to have the choice and it shows that the craft beer scene is in good health.

Manchester Beer Festival 2014

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Manchester Velodrome Panorama

On Saturday we went to the Manchester Beer & Cider Festival, one of the largest beer festivals in the UK. It took place at the Manchester Velodrome, which is part of the National Cycling Centre and was a major venue for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

The beer festival was the largest I’ve been to. Admittedly I haven’t been to many beer festivals, but with 300 beers and 75 ciders and perries (pear ciders), this was an order of magnitude bigger than anything I’d seen before.

Except, we went on Saturday, which was the last day – the festival ran over four days. The previous three days had been ‘unexpectedly popular’ and so by the time we arrived, around three quarters of the beers had been drunk and were sold out. Still, with 70-odd beers to try, there was still much to drink. At least until 3:30pm, by which point all of the beer had been consumed, leaving just a handful of ciders and perries to try in the half hour before time was called at 4pm – three hours earlier than planned.

Still, it was a really good day out, and it was good to visit the Velodrome, which will be 20 years old this year. Admittedly it wasn’t the best venue for a beer festival – the main festival floor with the bars was in the centre of the track, and most of the seating was around the edges of the track. To get between the two, you were required to descend three flights of stairs, pass through a subway and then ascend another flight of stairs. But it offered some great panoramic photo opportunities, as shown above.

I think it will be a while before I visit such a big beer festival again. The ‘big daddy’ of beer festivals is The Great British Beer Festival at Olympia in London, which usually coincides with a very busy period at work, although it’s earlier this year so perhaps not.

We also popped in to The Moon Under Water pub in Manchester, a Wetherspoons pub which holds the Guinness World Record for being Britain’s’ biggest pub (and rumoured to be the biggest in Europe). It can hold 1700 people and is even important enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which explains the origin of its name.

The Transpennine Real Ale Trail

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Huddersfield Station

On Saturday myself and a group of friends went to do the Transpennine Real Ale Trail. Many of the stations on the railway line between Leeds and Manchester via Huddersfield have pubs serving real ale either on the station or nearby, and eight of these form part of an official trail.

Though it’s been done for years, the trail grew in popularity following the broadcast of Oz and James Drink to Britain, a BBC TV show with Oz Clarke and Top Gear’s James May which was broadcast in 2009. The number of people attempting the real ale trail increased significantly, although sadly many weren’t in it for the real ale. Go back a to any Saturday afternoon earlier this year and you would expect to see large groups of people – mostly men – frequently in fancy dress, drinking lager and engaging in anti-social behaviour.

A particular problem point was the small and usually quiet village of Marsden. Though Marsden has a pub right by the railway station, conveniently called The Railway, many prefer to go into the village to the Riverhead Brewery Tap and others. This BBC News video gives you an idea of how bad it was last year.

Since then, many of the pubs on the route have stopped serving lager and spirits on Saturdays, and will refuse service to those in fancy dress. In other words, patrons have to drink real ale or soft drinks. And, based on our experiences, it seems to be working – whilst a Saturday in late October is bound to be less busy than in mid-summer, the route was much quieter and the people there were better behaved. At Slaithwaite (pronounced ‘slowwwit’) station, Northern Rail had provided a couple of marshals to manage the numbers of people on the small platforms. And at Huddersfield there were a number of British Transport Police officers around, but that may be more to do with the local football team playing local rivals Leeds United at home that day.

On our visit, we went to six of the eight ‘main’ pubs on the trail. Starting at Stalybridge, we then called at Greenfield, Marsden and Slaithwaite, before then skipping straight to Dewsbury and then back to Mirfield. By this point it was getting late, so we didn’t go to Huddersfield or Batley this time around.

I’ve done Huddersfield many times before though, and the station actually plays host to two pubs. They’re both on platform 1 – The Kings Head and The Head of Steam – although the introduction of ticket barriers means that you need to exist the station to access them now. The Head of Steam is my favourite and has the largest overall drinks selection (including a good cider menu) but real ale drinkers tend to prefer The Kings Head as its ale selection is stronger.

It’s a good way to spend an afternoon with friends and I’m pleased that the solution to the problems with rowdy drinkers seems to have worked. Other ale trails are available around the country and this month’s CAMRA magazine has a special feature on pubs at stations, which seem to be enjoying something of a renaissance of late. CAMRA also published a book last year; it’s out of stock on Amazon unfortunately but is available in CAMRA’s own shop, and members get £2 off.