Make every journey a beerPilgrimage
When I first decided to build beerPilgrimage, it was a shoot-first-ask-questions-later sort of thing. While this is pretty common among developers, it doesn’t always make the best end product.
Fortunately, the site has collected feedback from lots of users, showcasing some pretty obvious areas for improvement. Today, I’m excited to launch beerPilgrimage 2.0!
Few things present the opportunity for a road trip like destination weddings. Two good friends of mine from my college days recently got married in Green Lake, Wisconsin at the Heidel House Resort & Spa. This gorgeous venue was a fair drive from my hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, but with a couple other wedding attendees to pick up and delicious beers to throw down along the way, it was a small ask to celebrate such a momentous occasion.
Continue reading “beerPilgrimage Log – Road Tripping from Des Moines, IA to Green Lake, WI”
After building out the functionality, I spent a lot of time perusing the brewers guilds in each state, grabbing information about breweries and dropping them into my database. It was time-consuming, but educational I suppose. Put some hair on my eyeballs.
But is that the best solution? No. beerPilgrimage is designed to get you to beer on your next road trip, not to serve as a database of breweries – a task that would ultimately only grow to accommodate phone numbers, taproom hours and myriad other information. It’s simply beyond the scope.
Enter BreweryDB, a service designed just for that. This open-source database provides a wealth of information via a fantastic REST API. I’m happy to say that rather than me maintaining a database of breweries, beerPilgrimage now runs a sync every time BreweryDB is updated to make sure that the breweries here reflect its information. This gives access to beers, hours and more. Without having to focus on maintaining information, I can dedicate my time to making sure that information is leveraged in the most effective way possible to get you to beer better, as well as build out new functionality.
The feedback page will soon reflect this, but if you see missing breweries, it’s not going to do you a lot of good to contact me anymore. Submit it to BreweryDB, where it should be promptly approved and make its way into beerPilgrimage.
Amazing what you can do with a day or two off of work!
Hey all!
I’ve been hard at work trying to get every state represented on here, and while you could say I’ve cheated a little, I’m happy to say that the site should now have a (nearly) comprehensive list of (almost) every brewery in the United States!
Hey all –
We’ve been live for over a week and the reception (mostly from various regional beer-related subreddits) has been excellent! Plenty of people managed to find missing breweries while I cross-referenced with several sidebars. This combined effort has resulted in more thorough results in states like Connecticut and Delaware.
Furthermore, I’m excited to announce that results have expanded to include Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin! That’s over half the United States with more to come.
Over the past…well over a year now…I’ve been working on a personal project regarding a certain love of mine: beer. I was going to wait until I got data entered for all 50 states, but since my sphere of influence isn’t quite that large (and after being poked by some friends) I’m very proud to present the soft launch of beerPilgrimage!