New updated locator page!

The Locator page has been updated and now includes more information in the popover, better search results and most importantly you can know how fresh the results are!  SWEET!

CRAFT BREWERS CONFERENCE 2010

Brewpot.com attended the 2010 Craft Brewers Conference that took place in Chicago, IL. We had the opportunity to show in detail the functionality and unique features of the website to brew masters, distributors and brewpubs across the nation. The impact was tremendous and the result was a total success. Many breweries saw the value of the site and jumped on board right there! We expect to see many more breweries and distributors signing up and listing all their beer information in the near future.  

Brewpot was designed to simplify the beer world, making it fun and easy for any user to locate, profile and get personalized suggestions of other beers to try. It helps brewers and distributors to reach out to many potential customers,  make their  information more available and educate consumers about the different characteristics and flavors of their beers. In other words, Brewpot is out there to help the beer community in any and every way possible and the Craft Brewers Conference was a great way to get the word out and start building strong relationships with key people in the industry. For those of you who don’t know, the guys that make the beers are incredibly amazing individuals, full of charm, spirit, good energy and, above of all, explosive creativity and passion for making every drop of the beers you drink. Below are some of the pictures of those guys taken by the Brewpot members that attended the 2010 Craft Brewers Conference.

Michael Bell - Founders Brewery

Lakefront Brewery Inc

Steve Indrehus - Tommyknocker Brewery

Peter Bouckaert - New Belgium Brewmaster (He is actually from Belgium!)

Mitch Steele - Stone Brewing Co

Jon Moldenhauer - Avery Brewing Company

John Swanson - Fort Collins Brewery

Explaining the Brewery Admin Page to Dan Del Grande

Dan del Grande - Bison Brewery

Charlie Papazian

Tom Korder - Goose Island Brewery Manager - Will Turner, Goose Island Senior Brewer

Jim Koch

Brian Buckowski - Terrapin Brewing Company

Peter Caddoo - NOLA Brewing Co.

Keith Millers - Matt Brewing Co

Explaining the Beer Rating Feature

Brewpot Members

Brewpot.com is rapidly growing and new updates and features are added to the website every day.  Our main staff, which consists of 7 developers, a designer, a salesman and a PR associate is more than committed to make Brewpot the most innovative, complete and powerful beer website available in the marketplace. We are not just making a website or mobile applications, we are true beer enthusiasts making a living out of our biggest passion.

We truly feel  this is the beginning of what will become the largest and most comprehensive beer website in America… So if you haven’t yet, go to brewpot.com or download our iphone app and create your account today!!!

iPhone app submitted to apple for approval

Submitted the iPhone app for approval.  Hopefully that won’t take forever!  You can see us demo it at the Craft Brewers Conference 2010 in Chicago next week.

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=365793387&mt=8

Brewpot LLC deal with ABInbev and MillerCoors goes through

The deal finally finished this morning.  I wanted to keep it a secret until i knew it went through.  For a while now ABInbev and MillerCoors have been wanting to buy Brewpot LLC to push the suggestion engine and locator service and the deal finally went through today for a large undisclosed sum of money.  Part of the deal is that Brewpot gets a large sum of money and in return the suggestion engines will only return only Bud Light Golden Wheat or Miller Lite.  All other brands have been removed as part of the deal.  While I do feel that we sacrificed a bit of the integrity of the suggestion engine, getting a large sum of money was well worth it.  You can still find all your favorite places to buy Bud Light Golden Wheat and MGD 64 but unfortunately a lot of the Russian imperial stouts and Double IPAs had to be removed from the locator as part of the deal.  Again, it was totally worth it, because I got a large sum of money and all I have to do is drink coors light and bud light select 55 for the rest of my life as part of the deal.   I will have full details in the following days about the change in the website.

Check out the new changes to the website.

Cheers,

Jay

NOTE: This blog post was written on April 1st 2010, so it’s probably completely made up! Happy April Fools Day (edit: 4/2/10)

New changes!

Suggestion Engine:

The suggestion engine is finally working!  You can get suggestions of beer based on a different beer, or the engine can suggest you beers based on ones you have already rated or favorited!  Very exciting!

My account:

The long awaited my accont feature is now working!  You can change your picture, change your basic information.  The ability to view beers you have rated and favorited will be available shortly!

(btw you may have noticed that I used a nice dark wood template.  Well WordPress wants to charge me for any custom css added.. yah because i want to links and titles to be aqua and fuchsia!  ..oh well)

First Time here:

Updated first time here page!  (by this afternoon)

Is there a perfect beer? Why is there 40 kinds of mustard and only one type of Ketchup?

I just love this question.  Why is there 40 kinds of mustard but only one dominant player in the Ketchup market?  Why is there 40 kinds of salsa and spaghetti sauce but only 1 kind of mayonnaise?  One of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell answers this in his new book “What the Dog Saw”  You might know Malcolm Gladwell from his award winning book’s Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers.  All of which are AMAZING books and I recommend you buy them right away, or if you live in Atlanta, I can let you borrow mine for a few days!

Anyways, In his new book, What the Dog Saw, he addresses that very issue.  Basically people used to think that there was a perfect food.  A perfect salsa, a perfect potato chip, but what Dr. Moskowitz, a pschophysicist, discovered that there was not a perfect food, but rather perfect foods.  The best example is spaghetti sauce.  The food industry in the 70s and earlier, thought that everyone wanted a thin spaghetti sauce, but actually 1/3 of the people wanted a chunky sauce, even though they would never say so in a food study panel.  People don’t know what they want, you have to tell them!  Here there was, an entire 1/3 of the population unhappy about their spaghetti sauce because of the assumption of perfect foods.

That’s why nowadays you have 40 types of chips, and 40 types of salsa and all this variety.. but why only 1 type of ketchup (Heinz)?  The reason is two fold; 1. Heinz ketchup hits all 5 of your tastes buds: salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami (a savoryness best tasted as the thickness in chicken soup) which very foods do, and you start using it as a toddler during those crucial years when everything you taste, usually you enjoy for the rest of your life.  As your parents give you a new food, you can create some certainty by adding ketchup to the flavor of it.  Also, the flavors are so well blended together in ketchup, that it is very hard to distinguish between the different flavors themselves.  Since you don’t taste any one flavor in ketchup, your palate never grows tired of it.  Here you can read the entire article written by Malcolm Gladwell.

Is there a perfect beer?

No.  For many reasons, which I’m sure most of your craft beer connoisseurs already knew, but here’s some science behind it, using Malcolm’s research.

1. You aren’t exposed to beer as a toddler (well you shouldn’t be at least!) so therefore you won’t develop that crucial life-long taste for it such as ketchup and other foods.  It is definitely an acquired taste.

2. Usually with most beers, you can pick out individual flavors so your palate will eventually tire of those flavors and you will want something else.  I love double IPA, hop bombs, but I can think of many situations where I want something a bit more sessionable.

There is no perfect beer only perfect beers, and perfect beers for certain people or situations.  Beer seems to be an interesting subject, because to me I really enjoy the variety of trying new beers all the time, but my favorite fruit and juice is hands down grapefruit.  Always has been always will be.  I very rarely drink OJ or pineapple juice if grapefruit juice is available.  The palate loves consistency but also craves variety at the same time.  The next time you see someone you know drinking the same beer they always drink, before you criticize them, think about that one food item you would want to eat or drink everyday and to your perfect food is their perfect beer.

What is that favorite food item?  Mine is a tie between grapefruit and tomatoes.

New Improvements to the Website

Fixed the mapping issues…  now you can see where a Brewery or an esablishment is located!

Fixed the backwards compatability issues..  now Brewpot displays properly for users using Internet Explorer 5-7.

Find Peak Organic in GA, MA, CT

We have been working with Rob Lucente of Peak Organic to list their location data and so far we have all of their beers for:

Georgia

Massachusetts

Connecticut.

http://www.brewpot.com/Peak

Find Founders in Georgia

Founders Brewing Company recently came to Georgia and we have all the locations for you right here at Brewpot.com!

Red Rye Pale Ale

Double Trouble

Dirty Bastard

Imperial Stout

Centennial IPA

Breakfast Stout

Backwoods Bastard

Porter

Pale Ale

Find Pliny the Elder in Seattle

Just added Click Distributing over in Seattle, WA.  You can now find good beers from these breweries in Seattle, WA:

Locations avaiable from these fine breweries:

Achouffe, Acme, Aecht Schlenk, Allagash, Anderson Valley, Avery, Barbar, BarbaRoja, Batemans, Bear Republic, Belhaven, Bitburger, Boulevard Brewing, Brasserie Dupont, Brigand, Cascade, Castelain, Coney Island/He’Brew, De , Dolle, De Proef, De Regenboog, Dogfish Head, Duvel, Ecaussinnes, Einbecker, Elysian, Foret, Gouden Carolus, Great Divide, Hair of the Dog, Hale’s, Hambleton, Harviestoun, Heather, Hitachino, Huygne, JW Lees, Kasteel, Kingfisher, Klein Duimpje, Kulmbacher, Lost Abbey/Port Brewing, Mahr’s, Maredsous, Midnight Sun, Mikkeller, New Belgium – Lips of Faith Series, Nogne-O, North Coast, Ommegang, Orkney, Pike, Ridgeway, Russian River, Samichlaus, Scaldis, Scuttlebutt, Stone Brewing Company, Struise, Taj Mahal, Terminal Gravity, The Bruery, Trade Route, Unibroue, Well’s, Witkap, Young’s