Introduction

This blog has been created as a companion to my website the beer engine. I've been working on this insane project for about 5 years now and truly wish I'd never started it. Unfortunately I still think the idea is a good one and the website has the potential to be the most useful web destination for anyone interested in finding the best beers the world has to offer.

The inspiration was an American website called PubCrawler. I made a number of trips to the US west coast in the 1980s & 90s when the craft brewing scene was expanding like mad. Being a beer lover I was always keen to find out what was new every time I emerged from San Francisco or Sacramento airport. PubCrawler was a very early example of a website built around user contributions. Anyone could add a new bar, brewpub or brewery or add a review to existing entries. It was (and still is) organised by state and city, an arrangement well suited to the USA. In 1996 my wife and I drove an old muscle car coast to coast and the folder full of PubCrawler printouts proved invaluable.

A few years later, having learned many of the skills required, I decided to have a go at doing the same thing for Europe. I also decided to take things much farther as I figured a large database of beers, brewers, beershops and bars could be used in many different ways. In addition I'm a great believer in making things as easy and intuitive as possible. I find sites like RateBeer and BeerAdvocate a bit, well, geeky. They also tend to have a very American viewpoint. Nothing wrong with that if you're American but there's a whole continent here awash with wonderful beer where the culture and traditions are manifold and often ancient.

So, one day I fired up my PC, created a new database and started experimenting. The second version was a complete rewrite based on what I learned and was published for a while back around 2003. Of course it was full of bugs and problems. The next rewrite is what you can see now. It was always my intention to get maps integrated into the site but for a while it just looked like too much work and expense. A conversation (over a beer) with my brother persuaded me to check out the then new Google Maps. The last work I did on this version was to integrate the maps.

I think I've now made all the big mistakes and learned from them so, once again, I'm rewriting the entire site. Just to keep me awake I'm also moving from ASP to PHP.

The new site is starting to take shape at http://phptest.beerengine.com/ and anyone is welcome to have a look round. It's a mess and will remain so for the next few months but all sorts of previously unseen goodies should start appearing soon.