'Britain's dullest man': Craft beer's ruined my 42-year obsession of can collecting
My name is Nick WI live in Langford, North Somerset and I’m a former beer can collector. I was 16 years old, I was just starting getting interested in beer. I was a bit of a collector so I thought I’ll combine the two. So I started out a small collection of beer cans. Obviously I was only 16 so I wasn’t old enough to buy them myself, so my parents used to buy me occasional ones as and when they remembered. We then moved house down to Somerset. I met my wife and she bought me a book about beer can collecting. And that really inspired me and and fired my enthusiasm and 42 years later I end up with 9300 cans. Basically I collected beer cans for 42 years. It was a a massive part of my life. I’d even had an extension built on one house to accommodate the cans and then made my poor wife move to a large five bedroom Victorian house just purely to accommodate the collection. And I was I was always doing something to do with the beer cans, either researching beer cans, working out displays or going around trying to find new cans. So as I say it feature. It was such a massive part of my life that when eventually I decided that enough was enough and it was time to stop, it was a really tricky decision to make. It was, it was a very hard decision to make and it’s taken me about 18 months to come to terms with that that decision. So when I when I decided there was three factors that made me realise that, you know, it was actually time to stop. One was I took early retirement from work and obviously my finances weren’t as as strong as they had been previously. The second thing was. My wife and I are going to move to another house and obviously if we moved with 9300 cans we’d probably need a five bedroom house. If I downsize the collection we could get away with buying a three bedroom house and the final thing that made me decide that it was time to stop was the massive explosion of craft bearing cans. For the 1st 40 odd years of collecting I was getting typically 100 and 52150 new cans a year, which was a reasonable amount. It was enough to keep you interested, but not too many to get you completely swamped. And then with the advent of craft beer in cans, that suddenly spiked up to 650 cans a year. So after a couple of years at 650 new cans a year, a A from A room point of view and B from the finance, because craft beer and Cairns are quite expensive, I just thought, well, this just cannot carry on. So those three factors together made me realize that it was time to stop.