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A brief introduction

My name is Harry Pinkster. I was born in 1960 in Drachten and have been living in the city of Groningen since 1966. I am now (pre-)retired, after having worked for the Municipality of Groningen in the Social Domain for 40 years.

My interest in beer did not begin until I was about 23 years old, when my father gave me some foreign beers. At the time, he was already collecting labels from the beers he had drunk. For me, this was the starting point to also keep all the labels from the beers I tasted. In 1988 I became a member of the Beer and Collectors Association BAV. Since 1990 I have regularly written an article for the BAV journal, featuring the latest news about breweries in Groningen.

As I tasted more and more beers, my interest in beer grew, which was one of the reasons why I became one of the founders of PINT Region North in 1999. For many years I maintained the website for PINT Region North. This was a logical step, as I had already been running my own website about the beers I had drunk since 1997.
In the early years there was no personal domain name yet, and the site could be found through WXS at http://home.wxs.nl/~pinkgron. The name pinkgron is a combination of my last name (Pinkster) and my hometown (Groningen). I had to choose this name because in 1997 a WXS subdomain could not be longer than eight characters, and unfortunately ~pinkster had already been taken. In 2005 I decided to apply for my own domain name, which naturally became www.pinkgron.nl.
Partly because of the creation of my website pinkgron.nl, my collection grew enormously and the website became the information source on breweries in the province of Groningen. Besides keeping track of the beers I had drunk, I began to immerse myself in the beer history of the province of Groningen. This interest was sparked when, around the end of the last century, I received a number of glasses from the former Barbarossa brewery in the city of Groningen. Today, my website also contains as much information as possible about Groningen's beer history.

In 2012, collaboration was sought, and found, with Jan Ausems, Fedor Vogel, and KBC (now Craft) to map the brewery landscape together. In the early years everyone still worked independently, but this cooperation eventually led to the establishment of the Stichting Erfgoed Nederlandse Biercultuur (Dutch Beer Culture Heritage Foundation) on Friday, 17 February 2017, of which I became the secretary at its inception.

Of course, beer is not my only interest. One of my other hobbies is photography, although I must admit that in recent years it has been on a very low burner. Perhaps the photos I have taken in and around the city of Groningen are interesting to see. Nowadays, most of them are taken with a mobile phone, as I bring my full photography equipment with me less and less often. The Groningen photo page can be opened here. New photos are added from time to time.