Want to score a sweet T-Shirt? Check out our new online store! We’ve got some pretty nice T’s for men and women in there, featuring designs for PintLabs, BreweryMap and BreweryDB.
If you make a purchase before May 12th 2012, you can also get free shipping! Just enter the coupon code “MOTHERSDAY12″ and you will be all set!
Today, we’d like to announce the immediate availability of the BreweryDB API Premium access tier. Our premium access is for users who require a bit more than the limited daily requests, or want to use BreweryDB’s data in commercial applications.
For only $6 a month, you get some awesome features. If you signup for the yearly subscription, you only pay $60 per year, essentially getting you 2 months for free.
Premium access includes:
To sign up for the premium service, log into your developer account at http://www.brewerydb.com/developers and click the “Go Premium” button.
As always, the basic access to our data will continue to be free for anyone to use.
Cheers!
The last few weeks have been crazy busy for our team, but we have some awesome news to share with you! After much anticipation and hard work by our team, we have gotten both the BreweryDB.com website and BreweryDB.com Version 2 API ready for full fledged, unbridled production.
Check it out now by going to http://www.brewerydb.com/. You’ll hopefully notice some improvements, including…
This marks a complete overhaul of BreweryDB.com and its API. Not just from a user experience standpoint, but from the ground up, BreweryDB.com is brand spanking new.
We hope you enjoy the new site, and as always, we’d love your feedback so let us know what you think!
For Developers:
To signup for the new API, visit the “Developers” section and create an account. For all of you using version 1, this API will continue to work but you will need to get a new key to work with version 2. You can read more about it at http://developer.pintlabs.com/brewerydb.
We all know the best beer is local beer, and with two of us at PintLabs being North Carolina natives, we wanted to showcase the state of North Carolina beer in a special way. North Carolina has grown significantly in the last few years, with Asheville being voted “Beer City USA” for the last three consecutive years!
So we figured, we have this brand spankin’ new BreweryDB API that needed a test drive, let’s do something cool to promote our local beer! With that, http://ncbeer.brewerymap.com was born.
Similar to BreweryMap.com, the NCBeer mashup displays all the breweries in North Carolina, showing you their beers, hours of operations, descriptions, addresses, and all other kinds of cool stuff. But what makes the NCBeer mashup different is what makes it awesome!
First off, you can see how the number of breweries has grown in the state by using the timeline slider at the bottom of the site to scroll through the past, and even see what the future of NCBeer will be!
We also added in the ability to Follow a brewery on Twitter or Like them on Facebook directly from the site. Another cool feature is the integration of the North Carolina Brewers Guild, highlighting all the members and any specials that Enthusiast members can get.
One more cool feature is an extension of the sharing feature you see on BreweryMap.com, where you can embed a brewery from BreweryMap in your website. All you need to do is click on the brewery you want to embed, then click the “Share” link. Copy and paste the code and, voila! You can feature a brewery on your blog or website! Kinda like this…
We love doing things like this to promote craft beer. If you are interested in having PintLabs create a site like this for you, please let us know!
We’ve told you about a lot of cool stuff over the last few weeks, but nothing is as cool as this. We have made (almost) the entire API writable. That’s right, you can build apps to upload images, edit breweries and beers, add new content… Whatever you like. And the most important thing – you can always be sure that GOOD data gets into our system.
Each one of our main entities (beers, breweries, brewery locations, brewers guilds, and events) are all writable. That includes any of their sub-attributes like social media accounts, ingredients, or awards. When you send a request to write something to our database, the API automatically creates a change order and lets us know. Our team verifies the changes, presses a new fancy button, and your change is in the database.
When you add a new beer, brewery, brewery location, brewer’s guild, or event to the system, it is immediately added as part of our data set. It can be viewed, searched, edited, whatever. However, we set the status to “new_unverified”, which means as you are reading data from our API, you immediately know what you can and can not trust. It’s up to you, the developer, to handle this case but we wanted to make sure the data was available to you. Once our staff checks it out and verifies the information, we change the status to “verified.” This status marker is one you can trust, because our staff has made sure the data is accurate.
When you edit an existing beer, brewery, brewery location, brewers guild, or event, the change order is sent to us and that change is not visible in the API until we verify it. For example, if you make the call to our API which assigns a new twitter handle to Oscar Blues Brewing Company, we get a change order to add the account. Until we verify the change, the data DOES NOT show up in the API when you query the social media accounts for Oscar Blues. This way you can be sure that whatever data you read from the BreweryDB API has been curated by our staff, ensuring the highest quality data. We will also set the status to “update_pending” for the entity, so you know that your change has been received.
Deletion of existing entities works the same way editing does. If a brewery is no longer in existence or something is just wrong in our database, a request for deletion can be sent to us and we will process it accordingly. A status of “delete_pending” is then set for the entity so it is up to you, the developer, to display it or not.
This means that you can write apps that completely encompass the entirety of BreweryDB. Your users can immediately add beers, breweries, brewery locations, brewer’s guilds, and events with limited moderation. Changes to existing entities get approved by our staff, so you can trust our data. Also, any requests you make to the write methods do not count against your API request limit. It’s a great way to contribute back to the data that you use in your application!
Certain things are not yet writable. Endpoints such as category, styles, ingredient lists, etc. are not writable yet. If changes are needed to these lists (which usually do not need changing) we will have to administratively alter them. Let us know by sending an email to the BreweryDB Google Group and we will figure it out.
We think this is the BIGGEST feature that we are offering with version 2 of the API. It gives everyone who uses the data an incredible, crowd-sourced opportunity to build our database. The more people who participate, the better and more complete the data will be. We at PintLabs are excited to see what you guys are building, so let us know what projects you are working on!
This is the third post in the series about the soon-to-be-released BreweryDB API Version 2. Keep checking back for more new features!
The original BreweryDB only contained information about beers and breweries. As we were looking at features for version 2, we really wanted to add a central hub for beer events and brewers guilds.
Brewers guilds are critical to the promotion and advancement of craft beer, so we wanted to make sure they were well represented in our database. Each brewers guild has attributes like name, description and website. Breweries can also be associated with a guilds to proudly show their membership.
Feature 1: Attributes for Events
We are really excited about this feature. Our system can now handle any beer event you want to throw at it. Festivals, tastings, beer releases, you name it. With each event, we capture the name, description, website, dates and times, price, venue (with address), and more!
Feature 2: Beers and Breweries
For each event, beers and breweries can be assigned as attending or pouring at the event. This is the perfect way to see what breweries will show up at a beer festival.
Feature 3: Competition Awards
A special type of event, competition, was created so that we could give the beers and breweries that win awards their proper recognition. Events can have award categories and award places, so you will be able to see all gold medal winners for a competition, or all winners in the American Pale Ale category, for example.
This is the second post in the series talking about the soon-to-be-released BreweryDB API Version 2. Keep checking back for more new features!
The original BreweryDB contained a lot of information about breweries and the beers they brewed. With version 2, we sought to expand on the data, and make it even more awesome.
Feature 1: Breweries with Multiple Locations
Our database now supports multiple locations for a single brewery. Perhaps a brewery has a brewpub along with a production brewery. Perhaps there is a chain of breweries (think Mash House or Rock Bottom). Each brewery now has at least a single location, which contains their address, phone number, etc.
Feature 2: Alternate Names for Breweries
Some breweries operate under different names (think Heavy Seas / Clipper City). Our API now supports alternate names for a brewery so when users are trying to find Heavy Seas, they find Clipper City.
Feature 3: New attributes for breweries
For breweries, we have added additional attributes for things like certified organic breweries and mailing lists. For brewery locations, we have added flags for being open to the public and whether they are currently in planning (therefore not open yet). We’ve also added a “location type” for brewpubs, production facilities, etc.
Feature 1: Collaboration Beers
Many times, breweries join forces to brew certain special beers together (think Sierra Nevada / Dogfish Head Life and Limb). The new API has the ability to assign a beer to multiple breweries, so when looking for all the beers for Sierra Nevada, Life and Limb will show up there as well as when you search for all beers by Dogfish Head.
Feature 2: Vintages, Casks, and Other Beer Variations
Each beer has a “beer variation” that can be filled out. That means that you can add special casks, vintages, or special brews of a beer to the system and relate them to their “parent” beer, while still maintaining their own unique attributes.
Feature 3: Hops, Malts, Adjuncts, Yeasts
Version 2 has the ability to associate types of hops, malts, adjuncts, and yeast to a beer. We have a pretty large database of ingredients to choose from as well.
Feature 4: Beer per location
We have also added the ability to not only attach a beer to a brewery or multiple breweries but to locations as well. Sometimes certain beers are only available at certain locations for a brewery (think Rock Bottom Brewery).
Feature 5: New attributes for beers
We’ve added a bunch of new attributes to beers, including original gravity, a flag for certified organic beers, ideal serving temperature, and food pairings. This is in addition to all the existing attributes like SRM, ABV, IBU, etc.
For any of you developers out there, we have some really exciting news! Last year, we launched BreweryDB, an online database of breweries and beers. Along with the website, we also launched an API which allowed developers to build applications (like BreweryMap) with BreweryDB’s data.
Since that time, we have heard your suggestions to improve the API. Today, we are announcing that the new and improved API will be available for beta testing in the coming weeks!
So what are all the awesome and shiny things in the new API? We have prepared a series of blog posts highlighting some of the major new features, so stay tuned to the blog. Until then, you can sign up to be notified when the beta is available.
The folks over at Tapped-In, an app review podcast from Fox News, have done an episode about Oktoberfest and included BreweryMap in their roundup! Check out the review below…
