My website doesn’t like the #### character!

Yah so I found out that any bar or brewery that has the # character in the address makes the entire page crap because somewhere between Google Maps and our website the website says I don’t know what to do!  I got my developer on it.  In fact I think he just fixed it.  What a rockstar.

 

Had a great meeeting today with my marketing advisor who works over at a little company company called Coca-Cola.  He has been super helpful and is making me realize that I need to start putting more love and emotion into the website.  He is going out next week to shoot a NCAA commercial with college mascots including Buzz of Georgia Tech!

I am still trying to contact all the brewers I can to get the suggestion engine working.  Let me know if you know any brewers or distributors that woudl be willing to jump on the website and iPhone app.

 

Drink some beers tonight!

Met with Sales Rep of Thomas Creek Brewery at Octane + Hop City

For those of you in the Atlanta area, if you haven’t taken advantage of Hop City’s and Octane’s free beer tasting from Wednesday usually around 5:30-7:30 you need to get in on that!  Go get yourself on the Hop City mailing list and make that happen!  Octane coffee is conveniently located between 19 Starbucks in the greater metro area.  (I love that marketing line!  Brilliant.. Seth Godin would agree!)

 

This week I was able to meet Katie the Sales & Marketing Director of Thomas Creek out of Greenville, SC.   I gave her a few distributor flyers and told her all about adding her data to my website which she said she will look at when she gets a free moment!  Her Atlanta distributor is already listed on Brewpot.com so you can check it out.  I am hoping she will want to get her other distributors on board and I will keep everyone posted to the progress of that.

 

Tonight, Chris, Bruce and I are goign to discuss the immediate future steps of the company as well.  Keep drinking good beer!

Brewpot – Beer rating website – kept in the dark too long!

Hey guys,

I’m going to make more of an effort to say what I have been up to and keep you guys more informed of what is happening.

I am going to start by listing all of the people on this effort.

myself (Jay) promoting to breweries and distributors.

Bruce Redd, one of the lead developers, works on pretty much everything and compiles.  Most recently he has been working on the WCF webservice which will give XML data to the iPhone app.

Chris Beatty, another lead developer, has been focusing on the distributor mapping aspect of the project and created the functionality to allow data to be mapped on the google maps seen on the website.

Jessica Robinson, our front end designer, has been hard at work mocking up the new website set to launch in a couple of weeks.

Chase Bradley, one of our coders, is hard at work developing a picture and video manager for brewers to add their images and videos and associate them to their brewery or even a specific beer!

Justin Michela, is working on a US map where brewers can list what states their beer is available and will allow us users and the breweries to pester the distributors to get their data available to you!

Noah Witherspoon is hard at work on our iPhone app from which I hear is 35% complete!

 

Right now users can profile beers and in the future those ratings will help determine suggestions for you.  You can also find a wide selection of beer available in and around the Atlanta area.  Brewers can manage their flavors and ingredients of their beers with the ability to upload pictures and videos hopefully within a week.  Distributors can give us location data which we can input into the system immediately.

 

How you can help:

If you know any brewers: tell them to create an account and email me jay (at) brewpot  (dot) com their username and i will associate them with that brewery.

If you know any distributors: have them call me or email me and we can discuss adding their data to the system!

Rate as many beers as you can and check back often!

Thanks so much for all your patience and support!

 

Interview with Greg Koch CEO of Stone

Video of Brian “Spike” Buckowski of Terrapin Beer Company

NEW CODE PUSH!!!

later this week! Exciting new features to be added!

Brewpot.com long awaited updates

Hey everyone,

It has felt like years.  Ok well it has almost been a year I think.  I try not to write blogs these days unless I have very important news.  The website now has a starter amount of beers listed at the establishments in the database.  One issue is taht sometimes the name in the database is not the same as the one given to me by the distributor.  Unfortunately, I have to go through and hand point each mismatch the the appropriate place, which I plan on doing next week.  You can still see where you can find a lot of beers in the city of Atlanta.  So far only one distributor’s data is uploaded and a lot of his data needs to be pointed to the right spot.  We are working on that.  We are also working on being able to search for a bar/restaurant directly and also removing the full page load when you select beer/brewery or establishment from the drop down menu.  I would say within the next few weeks, the location data will start becoming much more useful and usable so be patient and I will make a wonderful website for you all!  If you want to play with the site, searching for “Allagash White” seems to bring back nice results.

Also, I just got back from the Craft Brewer’s Conference and have fun interviews to share with you all as soon as they are edited.  My beer expert Matt Simpson interviewed Jim Koch of Sam Adams, Greg Koch of Stone, as well as brewers from Terrapin, Duck-Rabit, Nogne-O, Deschutes, Pete from Pete’s Wicked, Flosmore, Flander’s and many more!

In the meantime, follow me on twitter @Brewpot.

Thanks everyone,

Jay

Brewpot.com

Brewpot is up!! But we need your help!

Hey everyone, thanks so much for checking this all out.  http://www.brewpot.com is up but I need your help in the beer rating.  Please go out this weekend and rate a beer and add it to the website.  Once we all do this for a couple of weeks, we will have generated enough data that we will be able to give you suggestions of other beers to try!

Also keep updated with the facebook page: http://snipr.com/bucet

Thanks everyone in advance!

Cheers,

Jay

How to make your very own Brewpot.com Jack’o'lantern!

Hey Folks, even at a friendly pumpkin carving there was shameless advertising and marketing by me.  I spent a very long time making the perfect brewpot.com pumpkin and it came out AMAZING!  I was in the zone, and sat and the corner carving away while everyone else made a nice simple pumpkin design!  Check out the steps of my very first pumpkin carving ever.  I think it came out great though!

Brewpot is feverishly working on large site update

It has been a few months folks and I know you have all been patiently waiting.  Some site updates are coming in the next few weeks including an entire redo of the rating system.   The last system was cumbersome, confusing and not very useful.  This one is going to be very extensive, easy to use and more more useful for information.  This is partly due to Matt Simpson my beer expert who helped make it.  I am also working with more than one developer to get things rolling even faster.   I know it has taken longer than anyone would have ever imagined but the end is near.  In the meantime, I am going to start helping you guys out by getting products for you to enjoy.  I have been reading a lot of beer books lately, and I feel it’s time for me to share my favorites for you to enjoy.   I will list them and you can tell me what you think, and as always feel free to comment!!  There is also a rumor somewhere that I will be selling the perfect beer glassware, but that might just be a rumor!

Talk to you all very soon!