I love the last few days of a year. It’s the perfect time to reflect on what you’ve done over the past 12 months – the things you’ve achieved, the successes and failures you’ve had, the happy and sad times and of course the beery moments you remember and several you’d rather just forget.

It’s an opportunity to take stock of where you are and to look forward to where you want to be. There’s a genuine sense of optimism as the last few hours of the year ebb away, a feeling that the slate can been wiped clean and everything is possible once again.

Writing a New Year’s resolutions list is your best chance of the year to press life’s reset button. With a list you can tick off the goals you’ve achieved and update the ones you never quite got around too.

And even though you may never fulfil all the resolutions on your list it’s still a useful statement of intent. By writing it down it instantly become more serious and real. By publishing it on a blog (where people can remind you of your total lack of action months later) even more so.

So here it is, in no particular order, my New Year’s Resolutions list for 2010. And this time I mean it folks!

1)Drink 300 different beers over the next 12 months (likely) and rate them all (unlikely).

2)Develop BeerSweden into the most visited English-language blog about the Swedish beer scene in the history of the universe. (I’m aiming high here).

3)Start posting virtual beer tastings on BeerSweden.

4)Launch a ‘Top Secret’ ground-breaking new website that I’ve been working on for almost a year that will be the go-to resource of its kind on the web. (and yes, it does involve beer).

5)Visit at least five Swedish microbreweries and write feature articles on them.

6)Write a book about matching Swedish beers and food.

7)Develop a Beer ‘v’ Wine dinner concept with a leading Swedish sommelier for corporate clients and travel the country making conferences just that little bit more interesting.

8)Attend at least one (actually that would make it my first) Svenska Ölfrämjandet event.

9)Book a long weekend in Brussels and drink it.

10)As a reaction to all this beeriness take part in the Bob Graham Round and complete it in under 24 hours. There is about as much chance of achieving this as there is of BrewDog suddenly developing a sense of humility, but it’s my list so to hell with it (and I was actually part of a team that won this extreme event last year, so it’s not impossible…..)

11)Because of the above resolution I will run 30km a week and go to the gym at least twice a week. Some days I may even step inside it.

12)Take the F&B’s (Food and Beer Partnership) Beer Sommelier course, so that I can ‘authenticate’ everything I’ve been doing for the past 16 years, and get a nice certificate to hang on my wall that will finally make my mother proud of what I do.

13)Book flights to Chicago in April to attend the Craft Brewers Conference with my beery friend and US micro expert Jörgen from Oliver Twist. This requires a reshuffling of my personal finances of Enron proportions.

14)Continue my mission to convince as many people as possible that beer is the best drink in the world.

15)Watch England lift the football World Cup in triumph in South Africa (about as likely as point (10))

16)Start a microbrewery in Umeå and launch Sweden’s first birch beer using syrup made from the sap of birch trees (well you can dream can’t you?)

17Convince at least one leading restaurant in this country to have a beer list that’s at least as interesting as its wine list (and Mariestads doesn’t count OK!!).

18)Be a better person (that should have been point (1) I suppose).

That’s it for now, but as there’s still a couple of days left of this decade left I might add a few more resolutions to the list.

Hope you’re all having a ‘happy continuance’ (for you non-Swedish/Swinglish speakers I hope you’re enjoying the aftermath of Christmas. With a beer of course! (see point 14).