The picture you see above is of our kitchen sink. And the white froth? Well that’s beer – I spend a couple of minutes pulling off some bottle caps or opening can and pouring it all down the sink.

Before you start hyperventilating, it wasn’t good beer. We’re talking a few cans of that awful Destroyer beer from Kiss as well as those Arvo beers that came out some time last year. I also poured out some review samples I’d received – you get sent a six-pack of ordinary beer, drink one for the review and put the rest away somewhere.

In short, they were all beers I was never going to drink. I’d kept them partially because they were beer and, for a while, chucking out beer seemed a cardinal sin. Even if it wasn’t very good beer. Then I decided I’d hang onto them for when people who don’t care about beer come to visit. if someone doesn’t care what they drink I didn’t see the point in giving them some beer I liked and would happily drink myself. No, I’d give them some rubbish – like Kiss Destroyer.

But then I started to get a bit of a homebrew backlog and figured I could serve such people a few glasses of homebrew. There was the bonus of serving them something I made, and the chance to bang on about how I made it too.

The big reason for the mass pour-out (I think it was 20 beers in all) is that I was running out of space in my beer-storing area. Those 20 bottles were taking up space that could have been used by something good. Also, I’d been buying too much beer lately and the overflow was starting to become obvious. So by taking the crap beer out of the storage fridge and replacing it with the good stuff it reduces the overflow. Which is great because it means my wife is less likely to notice the stacks and stacks of beer and start asking how much money I’ve been spending lately.

And that’s a conversation no beer geek wants to have with their better half.