Ticking is a peculiarly English beer-related hobby involving the tasting of as many different beers as possible—similar to bird watchers keeping list of birds species they have seen. It is also widely compared to trainspotting. Every new beer encountered by a ticking aficionado receives a “tick,” as in making a tick (check) mark on a list. Because of the sheer endless list of existing beers, augmented daily by experimental brewers all over the world, the lifetime list of a diligent ticker can be equally endless. Although beer ticking tends to strike many non-English people as oddly obsessive, the growth of social media such as Twitter seems destined to increase the ranks of the hobby.
