I was excited when my friend Jonathan Lunardi who runs craftbeerclothing.com (see my review here) and a number of other craft beer-related web ventures told me about his latest start up, BreweryFans.com, so I asked him to tell me a little bit more about the project. What resulted was a very long-winded (I mean that in the best possible sense) interview with Jonathan about the site and what it provides to both beer fans and breweries around the country. Since the outcome of the interview was literally so much information, I’ve decided to break it up into kind of a multi-part series of posts, with each question serving as a different story posted sporadically over the coming weeks. We’ll start with the nitty-gritty, What does BreweryFans.com do for the average person?

Jonathan: Our mission is to better connect craft beer fans with the beer and breweries they love. Now that is a very broad mission and can mean many different things. For this first version of BreweryFans.com, which launched March 1st, we focused development on the following functions:

• The BeerSpotter – an interactive tool for distributors, breweries, retailers, and individuals to post where specific craft beer brands are available. This data is then easily searchable within a large Google Maps interface and within a filterable list on each specific beer page, see example of a SweetWater Brewery Beer here. This data will also be available on the iPhone soon as well. I will mention that since we are just starting out the data is a bit sparse at the moment, but we are constantly adding new beerspots and it is very easy for any craft beer fan to add where they have seen a specific beer by going to the add beerspot page. We are building a community and need everyone’s help to add beerspots!

• Brewery Fan Pages – there are over 2,000 breweries in our database from around the world. Each one of these has their own fan page where we pull in data on their beers, where the brewery is located, the latest twitter talk about that brewery, photo slideshows, videos from Youtube, and a wall for fans to post their favorite beer memories. Wow that is exhausting just typing that! Also, when you join a fan page, we ask you what beers you have tried from that brewery and what you thought of each beer. That information is then sent to the brewer so that new styles can be developed based on their most loyal fans tastes. For the site to be successful, we need people to join brewery fan pages so brewers can get a large pool of taste information to base their brewing decisions on in the future.
• Email Alerts – the next most exciting feature is our email watch dog alerts capability. Since we do not have a ton of beerspots on the site yet, you can get an alert on a specific beer when someone posts a beerspot in the city you live. This is a revolutionary feature and one that we hope a lot of beer fans will use because it has the potential to influence where beers are distributed. For example, we can show a brewery that there are 800 people will email alerts for the Oatmeal Stout of XYZ brewery in Dallas, Texas but there is no distribution there. If a brewery gets a distributor and the beer is availabe in Dallas, Texas an email will be automatically sent to all 800 people letting them know! How awesome is that? The brewery can minimize risk by determining the demand for specific brands based on real data, imagine the possibilities! I have alerts set for 10 beers that I want to find in Washington DC. They may be out there, and if someone posts a beerspot for one, I will know about it right away.
• Other Fun Stuff – there are a ton of other cool things on the site as well such as our daily craft beer quiz question, your craft beer buddies network, and a beer points system for doing activities on the site. We are constantly adding new tools for fans to connect with the beer and breweries they love, so if you have ideas, send them to jon@breweryfans.com

All in all, we love craft beer and the breweries that spend endless hours brewing truly incredible beers. We want to help craft breweries grow and make smarter decisions by connecting them with their most valuable asset, their fans!

Enjoy the website, be sure to register on the site, join your favorite brewery fan pages and tell others to as well! The site is integrated with Facebook Connect so it is very quick to register.

And look for part two of this series coming soon. Cheers.

I’m just back from a successful, if not wet and chilly, Kate The Great Day at the Portsmouth Brewery in beautiful Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And what a wild & crazy morning it was. Josh Christie (of BrewsAndBooks.com fame), a few mutual cohorts and I piled into the car this morning around 3:50am and departed from Portland en route to Portsmouth for The Portsmouth Brewery’s Kate the Great Russian Imperial Stout – the beer which is considered by many to be the best beer in America (and is towards the top of just about every list for sure).

The bottle "lines" at about 8:40am

If you’re unfamiliar with the way “Kate Day” (as it’s called) works, there are a total of 900 bottles of the infamous Russian Imperial Stout for sale one morning each year. The first 450 people in line get a single page from a page-a-day calendar (well, calendar and a half). When the pages are all handed out, the beer is essentially gone. Folks then mill around downtown Portsmouth in search of warmth and breakfast until they start letting people in to pick up their bottles (limit 2 per person; $10 a bottle) in order of month beginning at 9:00am.

Our carload arrived right around 4:45am and got December 28-30 of the first year. By 5:25 all of the 450 pages were gone. Reports said that folks began lining up at 1:00am last night when the bar closed and stood in line overnight until they began handing out pages at 4:30 this morning (so all the bottles were spoken for in less than an hour).

If you miss out on a calendar page and aren’t able to pick up a bottle, not all hope is lost. The Portsmouth Brewery opened for lunch at 11:30am and promised to have a couple of kegs of Kate on tap. However, when we left with our bottles at 9:30, the lunch line was already down the street and around the corner, two hours before they opened. Our rough estimate was that if we had gotten in line at that exact moment, we might have been eating by 3 o’clock. And the brewery was sure to kick all of their Kate kegs before the day is out. Pure insanity.

Look at all those bags of Kate The Great!

However, if you’re within striking distance of Portsmouth, Kate Day is a definite don’t-miss, at least once in your drinking career. I do wish they would host the event on a slightly warmer day than March 1st, but I guess standing outside in the cold and the rain adds a bit to the mystique.

Did you make it down this morning? What’d you think? And if not, I’ll see you there next year (BlogAboutBeer.com Kate Day Party Bus anyone?). Oh, and I won’t be trading either bottle so don’t waste your time. Sorry!

In case you missed the BeerAdvocate.com Extreme Beer Fest (EBF) this year — don’t worry, so did I — the folks at FloridaSPL.com shot some video interviews with a few of the brewers on hand discussing the extreme beers their brewed for the festival. Watch them and feel like you were there. Or even more bummed that you missed it. Either way, they’re good for a watch (more related videos linked at the end of this one):

If you want to learn more about yours truly than you ever thought you needed to, then check out the interview I just did with good friend and fellow beer blogger, Ashley “The Beer Wench” Routson over at her blog, DrinkWithTheWench.com (click here for the interview).

For those just coming here for the first time from her site: welcome, thanks for visiting. Please make yourselves at home.

And for my readers unfamiliar with DrinkWithTheWench.com, check it out – Ashley is far more talented and better looking than my goofy ass!

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Avantaggio of Beer ME Maine recently to discuss his new brand of Maine & beer-inspired duds and the brand he is silently but explosively building throughout the state (and beyond). Chris was also kind enough to pass along a “review copy” of one of their shirts and pint glasses so I can tell you first-hand that this stuff rocks! He was also kind enough to pass some savings on to all of you – for a limited time, enter the coupon code blogaboutbeer at the BeerMeMaine.com checkout and enjoy 10% off your purchase price! You can check out all of Chris’ designs at www.BeerMeMaine.com, follow them on Twitter @BeerME207 and become a fan on Facebook at Facebook.com/beermemaine Without further adieu, here’s a bit more about BeerMeMaine.com and how it came to be, straight from designer’s mouth:

BlogAboutBeer.com: How did you come up with the idea for BeerMe?

Chris Avantaggio: It began with blaze orange. Every fall a bunch of friends and I go the Maine Brewers festival. It’s always pretty chaotic at these events and we wanted a way of finding each other to re-group and compare tastings. Wearing blaze orange made the most sense. In the fall of 2009 I decided to design a t-shirt logo that we could wear to the event. After a handfull of designs that were all kind of lame, I came up with BeerME. It made perfect sense. It displays a love for the state and our beer!

BAB: What has been the reaction so far?

CA: People have been really excited about it. It’s great to see so much enthusiasm for the brand. I had a friend actually sell a shirt off his back at the Brewers Festival. I couldn’t believe that.

We’ve gotten a lot of response from fans living outside of Maine as well. Fans who no longer live in Maine but want something to wear around and show off. It’s like having a home team jersey.

Overall I would say the response has been very postive, and I’m really happy about that.

BAB: What do you have planned for the future of the company?

CA: I’d like to get some more variation in the apparel, I’ve had some requests for women’s t-shirts and other goods. More colors are always on the radar too. We’ve set up a few select wholesale accounts in Portland and we’ll be reaching out to other vendors across the state in the future. We may also offer some co/branded shirts with Maine Breweries who are interested. We’re just getting started, so there’s lots to do!

I also have some ideas for future designs, I can’t say too much, but they’ll be fun and Maine inspired!

BAB: What’s your favorite Maine beer/brewery?

CA: Ahh….man that’s a tough one. There’s so many awesome beers in Maine! How do you even judge?

If I had to pick an all time favorite, it would be Sheepscott Valley Brewing Co’s Pemaquid Ale. It’s a hearty beer fit for any occasion. Plus it comes in growlers! My wife and I served a keg of it at our wedding last summer and it was a huge hit.(which reminds me, I think we still have to get the keg shell back to them. Sorry Steve!)

BAB: And the catch-all, Anything else you think we should know?

CA: Support your local brewer! And if you’re interested in some of the goods we carry, we’re offering a special deal to the readers. Enter the discount code: blogaboutbeer in our shopping cart for a 10% off limited time offer.