Scooping

[nonicman]

Scooping a beginner's guide

Not sure if the above site is the authority or not but Scooping appeals on many levels and in everyway.

Moved this from the Gbbf Top 10 thread.

Anyone engaged in this activity? In an informal way I'm sure many of us always head for the new beer.

 

[Doc]

Doh, just replied to it in the GBBF thread.

Doc

PS: I'm a closet scooper

 

[nonicman]

Sorry Doc, I got that "am I thread hijacking paranoia".

Edit: and Scooping is worth at least a thread :beer:

 

[Sean]

Scooping a beginner's guide

Not sure if the above site is the authority or not but Scooping appeals on many levels and in everyway.

Moved this from the Gbbf Top 10 thread.

Anyone engaged in this activity? In an informal way I'm sure many of us always head for the new beer.

[post="70251"][/post]​

Thanks for that - brings back same great memories.

Like the bloke at our 2nd Winter Ale Festival, who kept coming up to the bar for "a half of Exmoor Beast" literally every 5 mins for an hour. We were just beginning to wonder if we ought to start questioning his sobriety when we noticed he was secretly pouring them into bottles. He was our first "bottler", and had a big order from his mates who couldn't make it down to Exeter.

The there are the tickers who will drink half a pint of any new beer, no matter how foul, to get their tick. I have literally upended a cask of beer to pour half a pint of yeast sludge into someones glass so they could tick it. Sitting in a beer festival supping on wonderful beer while you watch you mates trying to drink half after half of crap beer from breweries that haven't learned to brew yet is great fun.

But the best has to be the couple of tickers who will swear blind they have ticked a beer called Avalon Morgana's Hat (or something like that). Since Avalon Brewery is me, and I've never brewed commercially, let alone supplied the particular pub in Wales they ticked it in ... The pump-clip was nocked up by a friend of mine to cover up the clip of the Boddingtons pump while they took a photo for their CAMRA newsletter. Apparently a couple of them managed to tick it before it was taken off again, and didn't get the idea that it wasn't Boddingtons all along. I wouldn't be at all surprised if one or two have "Avalon Questing Beast" in their book for similar reasons.

Of course a lot of the festival specials the real fanatics go after arn't special at all, the breweries have a standard concoction they supply with a different label.

 

[Malnourished]

Yeah tickers are a weird old bunch. I met a guy who had to give up trainspotting because it was taking over his life (he got a weird look in his eyes just talking about it) - he kept on ticking though.
Another guy "ticked" manhole covers - I've never looked at one the same since...
All that type of stuff seems to be a distinctly British peculiarity, though I suppose there are Aussies who memorise cricket statistics and the like.

 

[Sean]

Oh, I forgot to say: the guy I upended the cask for, after he had literally pleaded with me to do it, had the nerve to then say "you're not going to charge full price for that, are you?"

I'm afraid I snapped and very shirtly told him that I wasn't going to drop so low as to charge anything for unsaleable beer and walked off fuming.

 

[kook]

I know one or two tickers/scoopers, and technically most of us ratebeer.com would be classed as tickers by most people.

The difference is we actually take notes on the beer, and score it. Most tickers are literally just ticking a good beer guide from may years ago, or a festival programme.

FYI the close connections to trainspotting are correct, the ticker population at battersea was huge, purely due to it being next to clapham junction.

For anyone interested, theres a yahoo group called scoopgen. Great as a resource for finding rarer beers at festivals. But I'd be careful spending too much time on there. It's a dangerous place full of sandals, beards and bad smells.

 

[Sean]

There's nowt wrong with wanting to try new beers, but I think it's plain to everyone that when someone is reduced to drinking the sludge from the bottom of a cask, or finishing a whole half (or even pint) of an off beer, just so they can tick it, (not uncommon) they have completely lost the plot.

 

[Darren]

I would be a scooper except I know I would just lose the piece of paper I wrote it on