Frequently Asked Questions

• 1. Why does your sellers page not have a link to Only Fine Beer? Surely they sell a lot of interesting beers?
• 2. I Can't find beer X on your site. Can you tell me anything about it?
• 3. Who brews beer Y?
• 4. Where can I get a particular beer in some town?
• 5. Where does Beermad get its information about beers?
• 6. How much do you check information before adding it to Beermad?
• 7. Do you reply to every email you get?
• 8. Can I buy advertising on Beermad?
• 9. Is Beermad connected to any company or organisation?
• 10. Why do you do this? What do you get out of running Beermad?
• 11. What is the scope of the information on Beermad?
• 12. What do I have to do to get linked from Beermad?
• 13. You say you use Beermad to record your own beer ratings. Can I use it for mine?
• 14. (this question has been deleted)
• 15. I keep getting spam emails from Beermad. Why are you sending these?
• 16. You're obviously good at Web design. Can you do a website for me?
• 17. You list lagers for some breweries. Surely they're not Real Ale?
• 18. Brewery X or pub Y has a website, why haven't you got a link to it?
• 19. I use Beermad on my mobile 'phone but everything gets squashed up or distorted on it. What can I do?
• 20. How accurate are the brewery location maps?
• 21. Why do you have several names for some beers?
• 22. Why don't you differentiate between Roosters and Outlaw beers?
• 23. Can you give me some tips on how the search works?

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• 1. Why does your sellers page not have a link to Only Fine Beer? Surely they sell a lot of interesting beers?
  1. They do indeed have an impressive range of beers. The problem is, my experience of their service is so bad that I would never consider doing business with them again and can't recommend them to anybody else. Anybody can make a mistake, but I had to suffer a ridiculous catalogue of cock-ups, broken promises and lies that by the time my order got to their carriers' depot (they'd attempted to deliver during the day, when I was assured they'd be told to deliver after 5PM) I eventually told them to take the beer back.
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• 2. I Can't find beer X on your site. Can you tell me anything about it?
  
  2. No. If I knew anything about it, it would be on the site.
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• 3. Who brews beer Y?
  3. 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?
  4. 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?
  5. 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.
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• 6. How much do you check information before adding it to Beermad?
  6. 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?
  7. 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?
  8. 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.
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• 9. Is Beermad connected to any company or organisation?
  9. 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?
  10. 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?
  11. 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?
  12. Read the Linking policy and if your site fits within my rules, send me an email with details. If I then think it'll be useful to Beermad's visitors, I'll add it when I have the time.
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• 13. You say you use Beermad to record your own beer ratings. Can I use it for mine?
  13. 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. (this question has been deleted and I'm too lazy to re-number.)
• 15. I keep getting spam emails from Beermad. Why are you sending these?
  15. 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?
  16. Happily. Get in touch and we'll discuss what you want and what the cost will be.
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• 17. You list lagers for some breweries. Surely they're not Real Ale?
  17. 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.
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• 18. Brewery X or pub Y has a website, why haven't you got a link to it?
  18. 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. The most likely reasons for me not linking to a site I've looked at is that it's a pub website that doesn't actually say anything about the beers the pub sells (why do so many pubs that have gone to the effort of keeping good enough beer to qualify for the GBG not even mention on their websites that they sell beer?) or that the site is either impossible to use without Flash (which is so insecure I don't have it activated in my browser) or because the site can't be used without allowing it to set un-necessary cookies. If you've spotted a pub or brewery site that doesn't have those problems and fits in with my linking policy, please let me know and I'll have a look at whether I think it's worth linking to.
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• 19. I use Beermad on my mobile 'phone but everything gets squashed up or distorted on it. What can I do?
  19. This is probably because the browser on your 'phone isn't reporting its size, so the Beermad layout isn't being adjusted accordingly. At the bottom of the front page, you'll see a link which says "Page squashed up on a small screen? Click here to fix it (sets a cookie)". Click on this and it should fix the problem by removing some pictures and the menu at the left (which you can then use by clicking the new "Navigation" link which will now appear at the top.) If you have cookies blocked, make sure you allow Beermad to set them, otherwise this won't work.
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• 20. How accurate are the brewery location maps?
  20. 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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• 21. Why do you have several names for some beers?
  21. 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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• 22. Why don't you differentiate between Roosters and Outlaw beers?
  22. 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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• 23. Can you give me some tips on how the search works?
  23. 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 both 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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