An Introduction to BreweryFans.com
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.






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