He kept popping up on my FYP page on TikTok and my “suggested for you” on Instagram. A thin, middle-aged man with rectangular glasses, often wearing a Penn State hat over his shaggy hair. In a warm but excited voice, he would introduce every one of his reels the same way: “I’m Alan and I’ve had over 2,900 different beers.”
As craft beer began to boom in the aughts and 2010s, so emerged the ticker. A person — most often a man — obsessed with trying (or “ticking”) as many different beers as humanly possible.
It didn’t even have to be a full pint, can, or bottle. Blasting through a flight of tiny sample pours to garner four or five unique ticks was perfectly acceptable. Forty or 50 different one-ounce ticks at a beer festival was legit. As was trying a mere sip or two of some extremely rare and expensive stout or lambic split among a large group of fellow tickers.
It was, admittedly, a fairly dorky, laughable practice, and I would have told you that it had all but ended as craft beer entered its post-pandemic dark days. But then, here was Alan with an astonishing 260,000 followers on Instagram, another 60,000 on TikTok, still meticulously rating each and every beer on Untappd, the beer logging app it seemed everyone had quit using years ago.
So was Alan alone, or has ticking made a quiet comeback in the year 2025?
A Past Tick
I used to be a beer ticker myself. So did a lot of people. And why wouldn’t we have been? Between 2000 (when I turned 21) and 2020, nearly 9,000 new breweries opened in America. Thus, with thousands of new breweries out there producing tens of thousands of new beers every year, there was plenty of great stuff to try. Why would any enthusiast want to stick to the same old, same old?
Untappd launched in late 2010 and I registered for it almost immediately. The first beer I ever logged came a couple weeks later: Concentrated Evil, a Belgian strong dark ale from FiftyFifty Brewing Co. in Truckee, Calif. I scored it a middling 3.5 out of 5 stars, and I don’t remember this beer at all.
For the rest of the decade, I would log several hundred new beers per year, pretty much everything I tried. And then, I simply quit doing it. Pulling up my Untappd account for the first time in years, I see my last-ever login came on June 16, 2019.
I still remember that Sunday afternoon. It was Father’s Day. I had a 3-year-old and another on the way. And, as a little gift, my pregnant wife let me escape the family for a few hours to go drinking with my buddy David Covucci.
We hit up Threes Brewery, which was hosting a Can Jam event, selling interesting, canned beers from across the country. David and I were most blown away by one from Nashville: Pharmacy Pils, made by a brewery called Bearded Iris. I was impressed enough to give it 4.5 stars.
“When other people are drinking and chatting at a bar or wherever, they have beers lined up with their laptops out. Each taking notes and passing the beer onto the next rater.”
At 40 years old, I was about to be a dad of two, a pandemic was a few months away, and, little did we know, the craft beer renaissance was seemingly in its final glory days. I never logged another beer after that Pharmacy Pils. Meaning, I currently sit at 2,983 — a few more than Alan.
But, the thing is, Alan and others have continued to seek out new beers, continue to get their ticks in, and continue to log into Untappd. So I decided to find out why.
Trainspotting
“I always liked beer,” says Alan Spoll. Now 56, and living in the Philadelphia suburbs, he started drinking it while attending Penn State in the mid-1980s. “And what I quickly discovered was that I liked beer, but I didn’t like most of the beer that my friends and I could get easily.”
Back then, that mainly meant Busch, Anheuser-Busch’s notoriously bad economy beer. So Spoll began to sample stuff that was a little different. At first, that meant things like Molson or Moosehead, but as the craft beer revolution hit Pennsylvania, he began to sample things like Anchor Steam and Yuengling. He recalls Rogue’s Morimoto Hazelnut Signature Ale — made in collaboration with the famed Iron Chef — being a particular revelation early on.
“I was just constantly on the search for something new and interesting, but I never counted anything back then,” Spoll says.
Like me, that would all change when Untappd launched. Spoll began using the app around 2014, not as a social connector, nor as a ticker’s log, but simply as a reference he could return to and see what he thought of previous beers he had drunk.
Whether intentionally or not, counting beers would change for a lot of people thanks to Untappd, as well as Beer Advocate, RateBeer, and other sites.
By the late-aughts, so prevalent was ticking on the other side of the pond that a British documentary about the practice, “Beertickers: Beyond the Ale,” was released in 2009. “It’s a form of trainspotting,” explains one ticker in the film, making his hobby sound even dorkier.
“‘I don’t know that anybody cares how many beers I’ve had, but, at the beginning of this video I’ll say I’ve had almost 2,500 different beers.”
The ticker phenomenon was even more prevalent among the Danes. On longtime beer review website RateBeer, several Danish men began racking up an absolutely astounding number of ticks over the last two decades, capped off by one Jan Bolvig who had tried nearly 75,000 different beers. How could that be humanly possible, many had to wonder?
“They’re the guys at beer festivals with laptops just churning through samples on an assembly line and writing reviews that sound almost exactly the same,” posited one man on a Reddit thread from 2016. “They’re like an assembly line,” wrote another user. “When other people are drinking and chatting at a bar or wherever, they have beers lined up with their laptops out. Each taking notes and passing the beer onto the next rater.”
RateBeer shuttered on Feb. 1 of this year and you have to wonder where the tickers have moved, or whether they’ve folded up shop. Untappd checkins in the U.S. began to decline with the pandemic, from 89.1 million checkins in 2019 to just 67.4 million in 2020, according to a Good Beer Hunting report from 2021 entitled “Tyranny of the Tickers.” Surprisingly, however, there was a jump to 101 million checkins in 2024, though spread out over only 11.5 million users.
Is a new breed of ticker emerging?
TikTok Tickers
Around a year ago, Spoll’s 30-year-old daughter Jess urged him to start recording beer reviews for Instagram. She had found her own social media success via TikTok, where she has nearly 190,000 followers on a pop culture-related account, while Spoll’s son-in-law had found content success on YouTube.
“They tried for months, saying, ‘You should make videos, you should put videos out. People will watch them,’” says Spoll, who had a busy day job working for a software company. “Nobody’s gonna watch me talk about beer. But they worked on me enough that I eventually tried it and I just started doing it every day.”
Early on, nobody was watching. He tried different formats and different introductions to each video. One day, he looked at his Untappd and noticed he was at 2,375 beers. Being very data-focused from his software job, that intrigued him.
“And I was like, ‘I don’t know that anybody cares how many beers I’ve had, but, at the beginning of this video I’ll say I’ve had almost 2,500 different beers,” Spoll says.
Viewers quickly responded.
“I think Beer With Alan is having so much success because he’s framing his content in a way that’s understandable and approachable to tens of millions of people, which allows him to go viral,” says Doug Veliky, a partner at BrightBev and the creator of the Beer Crunchers Substack. “He’s speaking more broadly to everyone and being helpful, not a small echo chamber that was motivated by craft beer for different reasons than I believe Alan is.”
By February of last year, a video of Spoll drinking a boozy Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout at a Philadelphia’s airport bar shot to over 100,000 views. Then, in March, a video where he urged people to drink Firestone Walker’s 805 Cerveza instead of Corona reached a remarkable 16 million views. His follower count went from 75 to over 100,000 in a week or so.
Many younger Instagrammers and/or people not locked into the craft beer world were surely astounded that one person could have tried so many different beers — that there were even that many different beers out there to try! Looking at his analytics, Spoll notes that, indeed, most of his followers are young men in their 20s and early 30s; men surely too young to have been swept up by the craft beer revolution from a decade ago.
“I wouldn’t say that a ticker culture has reemerged among a younger crowd because I don’t think tickers are following Alan, aspiring to be one themselves, ” says Veliky. “Instead I think they’re just happy to get the educational nuggets that he’s passing along on his journey.”
But there were also naysayers, other tickers who troll his comments, telling him they’ve drunk many more beers than him. Spoll is well aware of that.
“I’ve got friends on Untapped who’ve had 10,000 different beers,” he says. “Like, I’m not bragging and I don’t think it makes me an expert. It’s just something to say at the start of my videos.”
Tick Tick Boom
If I once felt like a bit of a beer expert in my ticking days, I no longer do.
So I decided I should, again, become a ticker while writing this story; at least get to a cool 3,000 different beers.
When I went to a beer store or bar around a decade ago, I used to always look for something new, something interesting, something exotic. As I’ve aged, I’ve moved more toward the simple and well crafted. No more high-ABV adjunct stouts, very few double IPAs, only the occasional barleywine, and never sours. Today I’m happy with pilsners, helles lagers, and kölsch from breweries I know.
If anything, the pandemic made me more brand-loyal to those beers that always offer comfort, enjoyment, and drinkability above all else: Threes Vliet, Rothaus Pils, Live Oak Pilsner. If you’re rarely trying new beers, there’s no need to log ’em in.
But now I would move my mentality a little back in time and act like I used to. I’d seek out new breweries when I traveled, I’d grab new 4-packs when I went beer shopping. I’d be more like Alan, who, even in his mid-50s still favors big, bold beers over 10 percent ABV — Belgian quads, barleywines, and ingredient-packed barrel-aged stouts.
As for Alan, his following continues to grow every day, by now bigger than most of the breweries that send him free samples or hire him for sponsored content.
I resumed my ticker journey when I was in Vermont with a Hand Pulled Heady Topper, the best beer I’ve had in years — 5 stars. Back in Brooklyn, I tried a nitro English mild from Suarez Family Brewery. Delicious. On a trip out to Louisville, instead of searching for new bourbons like I typically might have, I sought out a great local brewery and found it at Atrium. I was able to check in a delicious Czech pils (on side-pour, natch) and a suped-up Italian pilsner.
Once again, I began to find enjoyment in ticking, a rediscovery of a youthful adventurousness I’d grumpily pushed to the side. Craft beer may be — statistically — on the decline, but there was still a lot of fun, delicious stuff to discover out there.
At my local movie theater, Nitehawk, instead of having the Three Floyds Zombie Dust Pale Ale I always have — at just about my max ABV cap of 6.5 percent these days — I had a double IPA; it sure helped get through the excruciating “Minecraft” movie with my kids.
The tickers’ mentality I once had returned — the desire to always find something new, something weird to try, something to flex with online. The latter arrived when I was lucky enough to attend the Masters.
The famed Augusta golf tournament has no branding on any concession products. The chips come in white bags and they offer plain or BBQ flavor. For beer, there is “Domestic Beer” (Bud Light maybe?) and “Import Beer” (Stella, surely). There is a third signature beer that does have a name: Crow’s Nest Wheat Ale.
OK, so it tasted like it was probably Blue Moon relabeled, but nevertheless, here was a tough tick, a beer that could literally only be ticked if one were able to get inside the notoriously tough-ticketed tournament.
Indeed, fewer than 1,000 people have ever checked in Crow’s Nest on Untappd, now including yours truly.
A Milestone
Eventually, I was at 2,999 check-ins. My sense of beer drinking competitiveness had fully returned and I was eager to cross a milestone.
As for Alan, his following continues to grow every day, by now bigger than most of the breweries that send him free samples or hire him for sponsored content. He even has a Cameo ($50), merch, and gets recognized in public — something he calls “very strange.”
As for his 3,000th beer, coming up any day now, he wants to make it count.
“It feels like I need to make it something different,” Spoll says. He’d done a $75 bottle of Anchorage Wendigo Double Oaked for his 2,500th, Sam Adams Utopias for his 2,800th, and a 15.5-percent-ABV Kuhnhenn Raspberry Eisbock for his 2900th. “It needs to be a big deal.”
I would make my milestone a big deal by saluting Alan, and having a beer more in his wheelhouse. I opted for a bottle of Side Project Beer: Barrel:Time (2023), a 15-percent-ABV blend of 22 different imperial stouts aged in Weller 12, Willett Family Estate Bourbon, and Blanton’s barrels. This was a beer that would have thrilled my ticker mind in 2014, but one I would hardly reach for these days.
With a flavor profile built purely from the malts and barrels, it offered decadent notes of chocolate, vanilla, and toasted coconut. It was way boozier than I drink these days, but in a small serving size it truly impressed. It made me recall what I used to like about these beers in the first place. I scored it 4.5 on Untappd.
Most importantly, I could now proudly say:
“I’m Aaron, and I’ve had 3,000 different beers.”
