Part two was written on December 31st 2015, and part one came around a year before that, on December 30th of 2014. In the more recent one I said I didn’t want to wait another full year for an update on this, so there it goes.

As I wrote in ‘The State of the Internet, sort of‘ I’ve been taking bottles to ‘family events’ left and right. Weekends with friends, holidays and such things are perfect opportunities to drink some awesome and luxurious whiskies and not give a damn about properly tasting them and reviewing them.

Because of that I don’t have that many reviews lined up, and some of the reviews I’ve done over the last couple of weeks will never see publication since I can’t for the life of me make it into an interesting post.

As said in December 2015 I want to get my open bottle count down to 35 by the end of the year. If my count on WhiskyBase is correct, and I add the one or two bottles that aren’t on there, I am at 43 right now. That’s 11 down from the beginning of the year, including all bottle shares (there were quite a few) and still 8 more to go.

The eight bottles I want to finish are going to be a few more instead, since I plan to open some for my Blog Birthday Bash on August 6th and for my birthday. Still, I am trying to limit/pace myself in that regard, so I can actually get around to finally trying and reviewing some of my bottle-share bottles that have been sitting around for ages now.

So, in that regard things are going well. Unfortunately, there’s also the sample aspect of the equation. I want to finish a lot of samples as well. And while I drank quite a few over the last seven months, I also bought quite a few more. Not as many as previous years, but still quite a few (too many).

There’s still more than two shelves dedicated to samples as there were in the beginning of the year so that’s not going anywhere, as it seems. Not only for monetary reasons and the matter of wanting to downsize the space required to store everything, I also find that because of the vast amount of samples, it’s also lost some of its grandeur. I mean that while there are some really, really awesome whiskies in there I can’t see the forest for the trees.

I know there’s a lot of Springbank Open Day, Feis Ile and other awesome samples waiting for me, but my desire to actually get around to them just sinks when I see the hundred or so tiny bottles lined up. This is partly because there’s so many, but also because I want to give the rares, more expensive bottles the time and attention they deserve. This is a rarity in a life with two little kids and a rather busy social life. That, however, is another issue entirely.

So the plans for the coming weeks and months is to make another kill shelf (it’s been emptied twice over already) and also focus on the samples. Make a few line-ups on a Friday night and get randomness out of the way.

If I count things in the image from December, there are 4.5 (the small one count as halves) shelves of non-wine booze. Currently that’s down to 4. I want to get that to 2.5 by the end of the year as well. That means one less shelf of samples, and one less shelf of full bottles. It also means a lot more cramming…

Summarizing:

• I started at 54 bottles open, I’m now at 43, I want to get to 35.
• The amount of samples seems stagnant.

The nice thing about a kill shelf is that you’re having a lot of great evenings with mates, believe you me!