I think there are some nice parallels between between opening a brewery and developing an app. There are clearly large differences. Brewers have infrastructure costs in the $100,000 range and working in a coffee shop will get you arrested.
But this, from Andrew Nations, really caught my attention as a parallel between the two:
“Most breweries are struggling with staying relevant. A new brewery is opening every single day in America.
Who do you trust for recommendations about anything? Jeff and I talk about user ratings, recommendations and avoiding buyer’s remorse. We also shared a bunch of our favorite beer-related podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs.
We drank Mastermind by Fiddlehead Brewing and Dark Penance by Founders. It was a very good day.
This is what it’s like to be a nerd. As a computer-geek, my friends tend to think I have a lot of “answers” about computers. In reality, I spend more time making up problems than I do solving them.
For some unknown reason I decided I wanted to extract all of the beer style data from BreweryDB and create a nice portable concept map I could use in iThoughts. As this pointless project unfolded, so did the scope.
With TapCellar, we were really focused on making the data portable but private. We also didn’t just want the ability to backup and restore data. We wanted the backup to have its own value outside of the app. So, we backup everything in a single user accessible archive. The photos, label thumbnails and user data are all available to the customer.1 This makes for some interesting experiments and people do cool things when it’s easy to get at their information.
It’s a dumb trick but pretty handy. Here’s an Alfred custom search for Brewery DB. Note that spaces need to be encoded as “+”
:::text http://www.brewerydb.com/search?q={query} And here’s a query string for BeerAdvocate:
:::text http://www.beeradvocate.com/search/?q={query}&qt=beer Here’s the Untappd query string:
:::text https://untappd.com/search?q={query} RateBeer uses an ASP form so there’s no URL query possible.
Pretty straightforward use of the custom Alfred Web search function but put to a very good use.
Episode 8 of Nerds on Draft brings the story of a terrific hoppy saison and digital collaboration tools. Jeff and I discuss a bunch of the tools that we liked for remote collaboration on TapCellar. Slack, Asana and Sorachi Ace go great together.
If you follow me on Twitter or Pinboard you may know that I’m a pretty big craft beer nerd. I have a rather large cellar of rare and varied beer and I love checking out what’s evolving in the market. I found a kindred spirit in Jeff Hunsberger and we made an app for beer nerds and we’re calling it TapCellar.1
There were a few key principles behind the design of TapCellar and I think these are what set the app apart from most other beer apps I’ve used.
Related to the previous post, Joshua Bernstein writes about the increasingly crowded craft beer market:
I’m onboard with America abandoning middle-of-the-road beer and exploring flavorful new directions. The highway, however, is getting mighty crowded. Hundreds of different beers debut weekly, creating a scrum of session IPAs, spiced witbiers, and barrel-aged stouts scuffling for shelf space. For consumers, the situation is doubly confusing. How can you pick a pint on a 100-brew tap list?
From BeerGraphs:
You are well within both your rights as a consumer and the bounds of propriety in keeping that cellar, friend. There are legitimate reasons to save a beer: to age it in the hopes of developing more nuance over time; to save it for a special occasion or to share with someone in particular; to create a vertical series of several or more years' vintage for a diachronic tasting.
Beervana links to the latest GABF beer styles guide. The styles are only going to continue to get more complicated. I did find this bit interesting:
Each style description is purposefully written independently of any reference to another beer style. Furthermore, as much as it is possible, beer character is not described in terms of ingredients or process. These guidelines attempt to emphasize final evaluation of the product and try not to judge or regulate the formulation or manner in which it was brewed, except in special circumstances that clearly define a style.
