i got to thinking today... it would be interesting if there was a way that we could track the distribution and subsequent travels of a single release of HTF beer.... i'd love to see where these bottles travel all over the world via trading and how long they last before being opened. sort of like tagging whales. get it? i dunno. it would probably be really expensive and unlikely to happen... just rambling but thought it would be cool to see.
As a variation on this idea, a geocacheing tag that floated around as an extra (independent of a specific bottle) would be pretty cool to see as well. Just throw it in with your next trade, and so on.
So you mean for instance, a bottle of Rare that has exchanged hands many times since its release in 2010? Figure out a way to tell where it has been and how long? Maybe cellar conditions too (or lack thereof)?
exactly. cellar conditions would be tough... but it would be cool to see how many times a bottle may have changed hands, etc.
Couldn't it be as simple as putting a sticker on the neck of the bottle, or hanging a tag around the neck of the bottle? Granted, it would be up to each subsequent person to fill in their information (and accurately) and there could very well be holes in the information. EDIT: you'd literally be "tagging the walez". It would just depend on people following through by accurately recording their information.
So, as of right now, our tracking bugs will need to monitor temperature and other surrounding atmospheric factors to detect cellar conditions. If we find that bottles of, say, Rare are being improperly cellared, the chips self-destruct and create a small explosion. If you can't handle it, you don't deserve it .
Isn't there a website that does this very thing for dollar bills? Where's George or something to that effect? Each person could enter the serial number of a dollar bill into the site to see the history of others who have claimed it and checked into that site. Something similar could be done by a BA slapping a unique identifying number on a bottle so that subsequent BA's who receive the bottle can log when/where/how they got it as well in a database.
Totally agree and I think that makes sense. Personally though, I would never use something like that simply because there are so many other things I have to do once I unpack a trade box. Update my cellar spreadsheet, leave trade feedback, update my trading info on my profile, contact the sender to say thanks, etc. Your idea makes a lot of sense, but personally I just couldn't imagine keeping up with it. Let alone entering my existing 200 beers and trying to recall when I acquired them.
