On Sunday I made my 500th unique check-in on Untappd, which earned me the “Legendary” badge. As a grown man I shouldn’t be excited about imaginary badges but I am – just a little bit. In hitting the 500 mark I learned three things.

1) Everyone thinks too much about the beer: Seems any time someone is approaching the 500, 1000 or greater milestone, they tweet about which beer they should drink. Some want it to be a really special drink while others go for a dose of Gen X irony and try to pick the worst beer possible for that unique check-in.

Me, I wasn’t going to think about it too much. I wasn’t going to focus on how many beers I had to go so that whatever beer I ended up drinking for my 500th was randomly chosen (of course, that sounds like a lot of thought for someone who wasn’t going to think about it too much). But the countdown was too hard to avoid – by Sunday I knew I had two beers to go. And I had put a nice beer in the fridge a few days earlier, so I was obviously going for the good beer like most other people.

2) Pay attention to the alcohol: My beer was a farmhouse style – 3 Monts (so named for three mountains in the area of France where it’s brewed; though visitors say “3 Hills” would be a better description”). I bought in January at Bowral while on a weekend away for my birthday – picked it up at an otherwise ordinary Liquorland of all places.

On Sunday night, I’d already had three beers by the time the 500th came around and so I opened up this 750ml bottle with the weird cork closure – took me a while to figure it out. It was then that I realised it was an 8.5 per cent beer and that I was going to have to drink all 750ml of it. Don’t get me wrong, it was a pleasant beer but, man, I was feeling the effects of it by the time that bottle was dry.

3) I have to be careful who I tell about the 500 check-in: My 500th came just a week after my first anniversary of joining Untappd. So, in a year and change I drank 500 different beers. To people reading this blog and those in the beer community, that’s fine. We all understand that 500 different beers doesn’t represent the efforts of a lush but of a beer lover keen to try different things.

But to the general public, 500 different beers looks like the work of someone with an alcohol problem. This is despite the fact that many people would easily drink that many beers in the course of a year. Drink three or four beers each day of the weekend for a year and you’re there. It’s just that, instead of drinking the same beers 500 times, I drank 500 different ones. And, of course, kept track of them through a website so I knew how many I drank in the last year and a bit.