BreweryFans.com Updates, Additions & More

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a series of posts about the up-and-coming beer community website, BreweryFans.com. For the first post, which introduces the site and gives some more background information, click here.

Jonathon Lunardi here from BreweryFans.com. Luke is letting me write a guest post in honor of several milestones reached and new features available now on BreweryFans.com. Thanks Luke!

The site has been launched for about two months and it has been quite a ride. We attended the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago and even had a booth at the conference meeting and greeting brewers from around the world. In addition to gaining traffic and brewery clients (www.breweryfans.com/why_use_breweryfans is our new brewery sales page) we of course have been hard at work building several features to announce that were ideas given to us by our users. So, the below post will include a couple stories from the last few months and will end with the new features all craft beer enthusiasts will be excited about.

Story numero uno: Getting people to the site.

Once we launched the site in March, we were fortunate enough to have beer bloggers like Luke and Ginger of WomenEnjoyingBeer.com post the announcement. We immediately started seeing traffic from their readers and Google started recognizing us as a viable beer site. We were averaging close to 1,000 users per day, which was an amazing start. I didn’t plan to do much from a marketing perspective at this point as I felt we should hunker down and focus on adding new functionality and selling our backend reporting tools to breweries. By some sort of miracle I was approached by the national editor of Thrillist.com who wanted to showcase our site to their 75,000 + daily readership. Our entire team was shocked at the opportunity and even more shocked to see close to 35,000 visits to our site per day! With that traffic spike we now have a strong registered user base. In addition to Thrillist, we have now been approached by Brewing Newspaper and Ale Street News to do an article about our site and our story. I hope they how different and revolutionary our website is and they highlight the story front and center, one can hope anyway right!?

Story numero due: The Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) is Unreal!

In order for us to actually make some cash so we can keep adding new features and innovation, we need to convince breweries that our online reporting backend will help them sell more beer by tapping into their fan bases on BreweryFans.com. The brewing community is very close knit, which is awesome to be apart of, but sometimes it is hard to break into the approved brewery vendor circles. One of the best ways is to go to the Craft Brewers Conference, set up a booth, and attend one of the hundreds of nightly craft beer drinking events. It was not work at all, it was a blast! I brought my entire team, Brandon, Clint, Gosselin, Mitch, even my dad and sister. We must have met close to 100 different brewers or brewery owners and gave them the pitch on why they should invest in our tools. We made several sales during the day and then partied hard while sampling a diverse beer selection throughout the evenings. I think I had a little too much to drink one night and actually took off my shoes and left them in the hotel room when walking across the street to a bar. Oooops. The CBC was a spectacular time and I look forward to our adventures in San Francisco next year.

Story numero tre: New Features for all who love craft beer…

There are a ton of new features on the site, but here are a few that we really want to highlight in this blog post.

The Beer Requester function. You can go to any of the bars or beer stores on our site and request what beers they should consider carrying. How awesome is that?! These bars and beer stores get a weekly email with a summary of the most recent beer requests. When a bar or beer store manager logs in he or she can activate a request, which emails everyone that requested a specific beer letting them know to they now serve that specific beer brand. Here is an example:

The Beer List Widget. Now, a bar, beer store, blogger, or anyone can grab the entire beer list of a specific bar or beer store and put it on their webpage. For example, Swingbridge Wine & Spirits updates their beer list on BreweryFans.com and has close to 180 beers listed. Swingbridge doesn’t want to do this work again for their webpage, so they can just embed their widget on their webpage. Here is what it looks like on their website – http://www.swingbridgebeerandwine.com/beer.html. Users can also request a beer from their webpage now as well. We hope to see thousands of bars and beer stores managing their beer lists on our site and then embedding these lists on their websites. I am curious to see if bloggers embed these widgets into their blogs when they are writing around a specific bar or location. Who knows.

We have a lot in store in the future. Please tell others to register on the site and join their favorite fan pages. Our breweries use data on who is joining their fan pages to make critical business decisions. Join fan pages, a lot of them! Check out BreweryFans.com here and stay tuned for the next installment of the BreweryFans introduction series, only at BlogAboutBeer.com!