It's a common question among friends of craft brewing: where can I find good beer when I travel to (fill in name of city). There's no shame in asking; even the American Homebrewers Association forum gets a question about brewpubs in Las Vegas once a month. But then you have to wait for answers. As a community service, I'd like to suggest bookmarking the following websites to help you zero in on the best place to enjoy one.
While most of these sites offer extra features for people who sign up for an account or pay for a membership, none of these sites required a login to access the place-finding features. Other factors considered in this article:
- Places tracked: Just brewpubs, or are well-stocked beer bars and liquor stores also counted?
- Mobile version: Does the site have a special cell-phone enabled site, or does it try to squeeze the front page into a tiny screen, forcing you to scroll down, down, down to a search box? I checked this feature on my Samsung flip-phone using the Opera Mini browser. No doubt a Blackberry or iPhone would have an easier experience.
- Interactive Map: Can you jump to a map of the whole city or other area, and scroll around to find a likely spot represented as a map pin? For all those sites that have maps, they use only Google Maps. I certainly prefer that over the mess MapQuest has become.
Each of these sites has different advantages and drawbacks. Additionally, you'll need to check two or three different sites to find a restaurant or "beer bar," since only known brewers are automatically added.
Be advised that most of these sites are run by a few people, mostly as a labor of love. New places and improved features are catch-as-catch-can, so don't be firing off angry e-mails to the admins if you can't find what you want.
And since I don't have an iPhone, I can't readily recommend any possible Apps for it. I do notice that just searching "Beer" in iTunes brings up a dozen beer pong games and very few databases. Some look promising, some just seem to be every bar and liquor store in an area linked to map pins.
Ratebeer.com
"Full Disclosure:" Yes, this is the beer rating site where I mostly hang out.
Places tracked:
Brewpubs, beer bars, restaurants and notable liquor retailers, as long as they've been entered and rated on the RateBeer database.
From the front page, click on the "Places" tab to get a list of U.S. states and foreign countries. Clicking on a state will give you a list of cities with rated places.
Mobile Version: None
Interactive Map: Yes.
On the "Places" page, at the bottom is a link for "View Geo Maps." This give you a Google Map with pins for major metropolitan areas. Some places won't show until you zoom in to a certain level. But one nice feature is that if you scroll away from the metro area, you'll still see the rural brewers and stores. The map correctly omits Goose Island's Fulton St. brewery, which has no public tasting room, but does show, for example, all the breweries for Anheuser-Busch, and August Schell of New Ulm, MN, since all offer tours with beer tastings at the end. Using that standard, though, A-B is listed as a "brewpub."
One nice feature is that if you go to the page for a specific place, the map diagram has a link labeled "View Proximity Map" that will give you a Google Map you can scroll around to find other places to your heart's content.
I had given up on this site after it started running constant pop-up nags to join or log in, even after I had already logged in. But they have recently partnered with Draft magazine, and the interface is much improved.
Places tracked: Brewpubs, beer bars and restaurants. Also wants to link you to hotels and bed & breakfasts.
Mobile Version: wap.pubcrawler.com
Interactive Map: None. Each individual listing's page does have a small map.
From the home page, click "Search for Beer Places" to get to the form. Place listings also show weather in that location and nearby hotels and attractions. Unlike RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, this site does not rate individual beers.
PubCrawler does have a unique feature in that its search form lets you search by area code. Search is a bit anal: you need to spell out abbreviations in names like "St. Louis" or "Ft. Lauderdale."
These guys are serious! They have a name that's bigger than the name of their website.
Places tracked: Brewpubs and brewers (no beer bars) on the larger maps. Its Location Lookup search will turn up beer bars, retailers, and homebrew supply shops. While it doesn't have the handy lookup by Area Code that PubCrawler has, it will allow you to enter the first three digit of a ZIP to find all the places in a postal region: "606" for the city of Chicago, "580" for eastern North Dakota (don't bother, there's nothing there).
Mobile Version: http://beermapping.com/m/
Interactive Map: The highlight. From the main beermapping.com page, pick the Map Selector links for either City Beer Maps or international Brewery Maps.
You also have an option to lookup by location. Your result is a Google map with pins linked to the establishment's location, website, reviews on BeerMapping, as well as on RateBeer, Beeradvocate or Beerme. A major drawback is that the maps you view only have pins in that region: Scrolling away from the Grand Rapids beer map will show you no locations in Chicago. The USA map is divided into six different regions, no doubt to keep computers from being bogged down drawing several thousand Google Map pins. This site seems to prefer redundancy over errors of omission: it lists the tiny Worth Brewing of Northwood, Iowa as both a brewery and a brewpub.
Places tracked: Brewpubs and commercial brewers. Those with no public beer service, like the MillerCoors corporate office, are marked with a red icon.
Mobile Version: None
Interactive Map: Yes
From the main page, there's dropdown labeled "Regional Brewery Guides." Expect to do a LONG scroll, as it puts the United States in alpha order, and you also to get pasts all the states or provinces in the UK, Australia, Canada, Russia, Belgium, Brazil, etc. But here's the kicker: They also maintain the Worldwide Brewery Map, a .kml file that plugs into Google Earth to represent their database of beermakers on Google Earth's cool interactive globe. So if you're taking a laptop or netbook around with you, this is a "must-have" accessory.
BeerMe.com also links to the "beer/breweries/distilleries" subgroup in POI Factory, which offers databases of places of interest for GPS units. Since I don't have a GPS, I can't review the worth of that one.
Beeradvocate.com.
A beer rating site like RateBeer.
Places Tracked:
Breweries, brewpubs, Beer bars, Beer stores, homebrew supply shops, brew on premises and Beer Marketing Companies.
You'll find a listing for Pabst Brewing in Woodridge as a beer marketing company, even though they make no beer of their own.
Mobile Version: None.
Interactive Map: None
From the home page, look for "Travel & Events," and click the "Beerfly" link. Again, a list of states and foreign countries. Large cities get a separate "Beer Guide" listing.
You do need to drill down by clicking on each place linked to find out how it rates.
Note: There is a search form that lets you look up by area code or 3-digit regional ZIP code, but you need to be a member (free) to access that feature.
Places Tracked: Everything! Brewpubs, beer bars, commercial brewers, contract brewers and micro-brewers, cidermakers, meaderies, homebrew shops, Brew on Premises, and homebrewing clubs.
Mobile Version: No
Interactive Map: Very good if you're looking in one of the site's 20 city maps. Not so good if you scroll away looking for something in the country. There are only the links to the city maps and a "Search by Address" box that fails to return any results. It wasn't always thus. Used to be you could scroll the map around and watch it take several minutes to fill in the location pins.
Started by in 2005 Michael Fairbrother of the New Hampshire Brewers club, this was one of the first projects I found that linked beer-centered location data through Google Map's APIs. As with many one-man internet sites, it has lost out in the features department to other, newer sites. But again, this is just one guy at work. I can't recommend this now, but it may improve over time.
I wrote this article to aid an old friend, Marc Nelson, who's about to spend nearly a year on the road with the national tour of Tracy Letts' play, August: Osage County. Hope this helps with those questions of where to go apres-show.
A personal icon!
For more info: BeerMe's Google Earth map can use a little sprucing up from the generic icons it displays. As a free service to you, the reader, I'm offering a more beer-centric icon to distinguish a beer place from any other restaurant or bakery.
Right click (control-click on the Mac) on the beer glass icon to the left ("BeerCon.png") to save it to your computer.
Once you've got the BeerMe! Worldwide Brewery Map loaded to Google Earth, look for the title in the Places directory. Right-click on the title to bring up a contextual menu; from there, select "Get Info."
At the top of the Info window, next to the title, is a button showing the current icon. Click the icon.
You now see a roster of default icons. Click the "Add Custom Icon…" button and navigate to where you saved "BeerCon.png." Select and upload it.
Set the icon's Color to white, Scale to where it look good, and the Opacity to 100%.
You can also find a tab for adjusting the size and color of the label. That's it. You now have a Google Earth map to make everybody thirsty.
This is turning into a multipart series, thanks to reader suggestions. Let's take a look at one more site in Part 2.
BeerMenus,com comes to Chicago Interview with Will Stephens
Comments
Don't forget www.pubquest.com as well!
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