I finally got around to moving my ever growing beer bottle collection out of my room to make way for the also consistently expanding collection of textbooks. For the most part my work with those beer bottles is done, while with my textbooks it seems like an impossibly long time until they can be shoved off to the side somewhere.
The bottles aren't lined up around the top of the wall yet like I want. Nor do they set the mood around a small basement bar with a permanent keg fridge and tap like I also want. But the best things in life aren't free, so such grand schemes will have to wait. For now they'll have to stay crammed together with other beers of the same national origin, begging me to add new friends to their group.
The society thus far are strongly Belgian, with large minorities of Germans and Poles peacefully coexisting. That's not to say that some of them haven't combined to create their own little Auschwitz's in my stomach before. I need to add to the Dutch and Czech minorities, with some attention to the dry Asians out East. The problem is that the turnover on new selection at the liquor stores in town is less than spectacular, even when visiting multiple stores.
The easy, and infact ideal solution would seem to be to travel the world and get some of these things straight from the tap, but I don't see a windfall of money blowing in from the horizon. If it wasn't all regulated by the provincial government, it might be easy to go to a private liquor store with a request. Hell, if alcohol sales were privatized here, I'd consider opening my own store for import beers. The grocery stores are allowed to sell wine in their booths after the checkouts, why the hell shouldn't I be able to sell good beers?
In the mean time I'll have to sit down relax and wait on some new stock. Until then I'll take one down and pass it around...to myself...98 bottles of beer on the wall.