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!