Jason Austin's Blog Life and times of a PHP Developer in Raleigh, NC

BreweryMap.com – Find new brews!

Just after the new year, Garrison and I were sitting around the office talking about breweries.  I was planning a trip to Denver and wanted to know about breweries in the area, so we brought up Google maps and searched for "Denver Breweries".  The results sucked.  We couldn't find much of anything worthwhile.

Simultaneously, our friend Shaun was creating an open database of breweries and beers called BreweryDB.com.

It didn't take long for Garrison to put the two together and create a mashup, mapping all the breweries in BreweryDB.com onto a Google Map and making it searchable.  BreweryMap.com was born.  As soon as I saw what Garrison had done, I asked him for access to the code so I could make a mobile version of the site.  After about a week or so of work, we had a functioning site that allowed you to search for breweries and beers from your phone or your desktop.

Fast forward to last week.  We were asked to do an interview with Raleigh's #1 newspaper, the News and Observer, about BreweryMap.com.  We did a photo shoot and everything.  It was very cool.  Our article was posted earlier this week, with a teaser on the front page!  It was unexpected, but very cool.  I bought like 10 copies

Our goal with BreweryMap.com has always been to promote two of the things both of us love, craft beer and technology.  I feel like we are on the verge of something really awesome and am really excited for what the future holds.  If you like exploring new beers, check out BreweryMap.com and find some new breweries to try!