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Frequently Asked Questions

• 1. Why does your sellers page not have a link to Cave Direct (AKA Beer Merchants), Only Fine Beer or LivingBeer.com? Surely they sell a lot of interesting beers?
  These companies are not linked because of personal experience (mine or that of friends) of them has been so bad that I don't want to link to them. I fully accept that anybody can make a mistake (I make enough myself), but deliberate spamming or a catalogue of cockups go beyond a simple mistake. Readers may draw their own conclusions from the following summaries of our experiences.
  

  1. Living Beer, promised delivery within 3-7 business days. After ten working days, my friend emailed to ask what was happening. He was told he should get his delivery within the next week. A week later, still no beer. So he 'phoned them in an attempt to find out what was going wrong and to get a clear delivery date. Even after telling the person on the other end of the line that he didn't mind if there was a problem as long as they told him what it was rather than just being evasive, he was still unable to get any concrete information or commitment to a delivery date. A further email to the company elicited no reply whatsoever.
     Eventually, after about a month, the beer finally arrived. And as they had taken up the suggestion in his last email that under the circumstances the least they could do was to waive the delivery fee, it's clear that they realised their service had been sub-standard even though they never acknowledged the fact.
  2. Cave Direct, despite the fact that I specifically declined to subscribe my email address to their newsletter when I did business with them, decided to spam me by subscribing the Beermad contact email address to it. Not only that, but they (illegally) failed to provide a working unsubscribe link and completely ignored my demand to be unsubscribed when I replied to the sender.
  3. Only Fine Beers, looked good; offering hard-to-find favourite Belgian beers. Unfortunately, after submitting a large order things soon went downhill:
     1. They 'phoned me at work to say that the boss would ring me the next week to arrange delivery details. I pointed out that I was on leave all week so he'd need to ring me at home, and ideally I'd want the delivery that week because I'd be at home to receive it. No call all week, but on my return to work I was told, "There's been someone trying to ring you all week about some beer".
     2. I 'phoned them and spoke to the boss to sort out delivery. As my week off had finished, I asked if he could arrange for delivery on Saturday when I'd be at home. "You don't want to have a Saturday delivery, they charge a lot extra for that. What time do you get home from work?", "About five", "No problem then, I can tell them to deliver it after five O'Clock."
     3. The appointed day arrived. I got home to find a card from the couriers saying they'd tried to deliver. I 'phoned them to ask what had happened to my "after five" delivery. Only to be told that they'd had no such instructions and anyway they couldn't guarantee delivery times even if they had.
     4. Contacting the OFB boss again to ask what had gone wrong, he told me that he'd never said anything about delivery times.
     Not surprisingly, I ended up telling OFB to arrange for their beer to be returned to them from the couriers' warehouse and to refund my money.

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• 2. I Can't find beer X on your site. Can you tell me anything about it?
  No. If I knew anything about it, it would be on the site.
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• 3. Who brews beer Y?
  There's a beer search option at the top of every page. Please use it.
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• 4. Where can I get a particular beer in some town?
  I have absolutely no idea. I've probably never been to that town and it's likely that I never will. Try asking the brewery.
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• 5. Where does Beermad get its information about beers?
  From a wide variety of places. The main sources include:

  • Breweries' and pubs' websites (I check over 400 every week for new beer information.)
  • Beer enthusiasts' mailing lists, such as Scoopgen and cask-uk.
  • Beer festival programmes.
  • Pub beer menus.
  • Direct information from breweries who are kind enough to send it.

  Since late 2009, we've given up trying to list every one-off beer produced as there are so many now any many of them vary little from other beers, often being re-badged to pander to the "scooper" market. In collating a brewery's regular or seasonal beers, we assume a brewery's website to be as definitive as it's possible to get, as long as that makes it clear which are regular and which are seasonal and appears to be up-to-date. Where we can't be certain from the website, we take whatever's listed in the GBG to be the range.
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• 6. How much do you check information before adding it to Beermad?
  Unfortunately, due to the limited time I have available to work on Beermad combined with the huge number of new beers launched every week, it isn't possible for me to do much checking, so I have to take most information at face value. However, when an information source contains things that I know are wrong, I always ignore it completely. I always regard sources such as brewery websites, the GBG, etc. as definitive where there's any doubt. And of course the advantage of the Web over print media is that I can amend or remove information if I'm informed that it's wrong.
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• 7. Do you reply to every email you get?
  Beermad is run as a hobby, so while I try to reply to emails that need a response this isn't always possible and it may be some while between you sending an email and me having time to respond. I don't reply to emails asking for information that's already on the site or others asking totally ridiculous questions (see Email stupidity for some of the more amusing and stupid examples).
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• 8. Can I buy advertising on Beermad?
  No. In order to maintain its independence, Beermad doesn't accept any advertising. If you have a website that I think may be of interest to the sort of people who visit Beermad and it fits in with my linking policy then I may provide a free link to it. But please note that I only link to sites in specific categories: online sellers, breweries and pubs. I do not link to sites not fitting those categories as I got overwhelmed with requests for links when I did.
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• 9. Is Beermad connected to any company or organisation?
  No, Beermad is entirely independent. My only connection with the beer and brewing industry apart from being an enthusiastic consumer of its output is that I have a number of brewers and publicans as personal friends and my investment portfolio includes small shareholdings in some breweries and pub companies (in order to be open and honest, these are listed in my declaration of financial interests). I am, not surprisingly, a member of CAMRA.
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• 10. Why do you do this? What do you get out of running Beermad?
  This started originally as an exercise to learn how to put together a website. I thought maybe a couple of people a week might visit, as opposed to the nearly 2000 people a day who actually come here. Beermad is my contribution to the promotion of interesting real ales by providing information to publicans about what's available so they can give their customers an interesting choice, and providing a reference to my fellow beer-lovers about what's being brewed and has been brewed in the past. I get nothing personally out of running Beermad apart from the satisfaction of knowing that I'm doing something that a lot of people find useful, as well as a tool to record which beers I've tried and how highly I rated them (this information is not published.)
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• 11. What is the scope of the information on Beermad?
  Beermad lists real ales that are brewed or have been brewed in the past by breweries in the British Isles. Beers from outside the British Isles are listed on an ad-hoc basis; I publish what I know (usually based on what I've sampled) but don't claim to be authoritative or accurate. Only draught British beers are listed, as covering bottle-conditioned beers would make it too big a job. However, for countries in the rest of Europe where bottled beers are more commonly drunk (especially by me) bottled beers are included.
  Links to pubs and breweries are limited to those in Europe (again, to keep things manageable) as are other links (though occasional sites outside Europe may be linked if I think they're of interest.)
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• 12. What do I have to do to get linked from Beermad?
  Sorry, we no longer link out to any sites other than those of the breweries we list. We used to have a lot of link pages, but the overhead of keeping them up to date, especially with the number of totally unsuitable link requests received, was too great for the amount of use they got.
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• 13. You say you use Beermad to record your own beer ratings. Can I use it for mine?
  Not at the moment. At some point in the future, when I've had time to make the necessary changes, I intend to release Beermad under a license such as the GPL. However, it will only work on computers running Linux or other Unix-style operating systems since I have neither the facilities nor the inclination to port it to others. So you won't be able to use it on a computer running Windows.
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• 14. A lot of Beermad's links don't point to the front page of the site but at another page within it. Why?
  In some cases, this is because the front page is just a language-selection page so as the vast majority of Beermad visitors are English-speakers, I point straight at the English language pages (though obviously where English isn't an option, I leave the link pointing to the selection page). In other cases, only a small amount of the content is relevant to Beermad (for example, I'm only interested in the beers produced by Trappist breweries, not their religious mumbo-jumbo). Also, many sites' front pages are just annoyances such as a picture saying "click here to view the site", or stupid things asking you to say how old you are before letting you in.
  In all cases, my priority is to link to the useful information as quickly as possible. If site-owners object to me deep-linking like this, then I'll simply remove all references to their websites rather than subject my visitors to their idiocy.
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• 15. I keep getting spam emails from Beermad. Why are you sending these?
  I'm not. Unfortunately spammers pick random domains and send their unwelcome rubbish with forged headers so it looks like that's where the spam came from and there's nothing I can do to stop them pretending to use Beermad.
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• 16. You're obviously good at Web design. Can you do a website for me?
  Happily. Get in touch and we'll discuss what you want and what the cost will be. See www.web-brewer.co.uk for more information.
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• 17. You list lagers for some breweries. Surely they're not Real Ale?
  It depends on the lager. OK, they're not actually ALES but all those listed on Beermad are real - that's to say they're un-filtered and un-pasteurised. Though how long they're lagered for would be interesting to know. You can be sure that the lagers Beermad lists will have a lot more flavour than the mass-market rubbish coming out of the fizz pumps. In fact, some breweries (such as Calvor's) are now producing filtered lagers which are full of flavour. But for consistency (and because I can't check most of them to see if they actually taste of anything) these are not listed unless they've appeared in an un-filtered form.
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• 18. Brewery X has a website, why haven't you got a link to it?
  Possibly because nobody's told me about it. Alternatively it may be because I've looked at the site and it doesn't fit in with my linking criteria. For example, I don't link to sites that can't be used without Flash, as that's so full of security holes and accessibility issues. I also don't link to holding pages that have been the same for long periods (for example, Mighty Oak's website has been "coming soon" since March 2005)!
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• 19. How accurate are the brewery location maps?
  The maps are generated by plugging the brewery's postcode into Google Maps. This means that the map is as accurate as Google's mapping of the postcode. Depending on the location, postcodes can cover anything from a single building to a whole village, so the accuracy will vary depending on this. In practice, breweries in urban areas will probably be mapped more accurately than those in rural ones. Treat the map as a reasonable guide and use it with the brewery's street address to find the exact spot. Unfortunately the maps for breweries in many continental countries are less accurate, as postcodes typically cover much larger areas (sometimes whole towns) than the areas covered by British postcodes.
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• 20. Why do you have several names for some beers?
  Sometimes a brewery decides to change the name of a beer. Other times a particular beer might be known informally by another name (for example, Shepherd Neame Bishop's Finger is often referred to as "Nun's Delight"). And one or two breweries (you know who you are) have a habit of selling the same beer under a lot of different names in order to con drinkers into thinking they're trying something new. Wherever Beermad knows of any alternative names for any of these reasons, they are cross-referenced so that you can see what other names have been used. Inevitably not all examples are known about, so inevitably there will be some beers listed that should be marked as duplicates, but we try our best where the information is available.
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• 21. Why don't you differentiate between Roosters and Outlaw beers?
  Outlaw is generally a name used by Roosters for experimental beers which may or may not become part of their regular portfolio. If they make the transition, they generally take the Roosters name. This makes it hard to be sure what branding is being used on any particular beer, especially as some more regular beers still retain the Outlaw branding. Not differentiating is pure laziness on my part, as it makes things easier.
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• 22. Can you give me some tips on how the search works?
  It's designed to be intuitive, but there are a few things worth knowing.

  • Searches which would return more than 200 matches are rejected. This is to prevent overloads to both the webserver and your browser from searches like "bitter", which would otherwise return nearly 3000 matches.
  • Unless you are using the advanced search facility, your search will return everything which contains the string you supply.
  • Only letters and numbers are used for searching, so "Church End" will return the same results as "ChurchEnd". Similarly, "Roosters" or "Rooster's" will both get the same results.
  • Where names contain letters with accents or diacritics, they are converted to their plain equivalent, so for example, "café" or "cafe" will match any name containing café or cafe. Where possible, non-Roman letters such as ß are converted to their nearest Roman equivalent, so both "weiß bier" and "weiss bier" will both return the same results.
  • If you search for a beer and no match is found for it, the search is expanded to try to match a brewery with what you've searched for. Similarly searching for a brewery which has no matches will (if possible) return a list of beers which match. This is particularly useful for breweries such as Glastonbury, who brand a number of their beers as "Ales of the Unexpected", so searching for that brewery name will find Glastonbury's beers.
  • If your search matches only a single current brewery, you'll be taken straight to that brewery's page. If it's a beer name that matched, there will additionally be a link at the top of the page that will take you straight to where that beer is on that page. If more than one match is found, what happens depends upon what's found.
    • If none of the matches is exact, you will be shown a list of all matches so you can select the one that you want.
    • If more than one current brewery, beer or location matches exactly, you will also be shown a list of all matches.
    • If a single brewery, beer or location matches exactly (and the brewery is current) but others match partially, you will be taken to the page of the exact match, but at the top of the page will be a link that will take you to a list of all other matches.
  • The advanced search facility allows you to take a lot more control over your search, allowing you for example to only return results that match your search string at the beginning of the name, or the end of the name. In practice, the vast majority of people will find the simple search adequate to their purposes; out of an average day's 550 or so searches, the advanced search is rarely used on more than ten occasions.

  
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