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The beer engine users guide

Introduction
Geographical information
Beer engine entries
Bars Brewers Beers Beershops
Searching the beer engine

This page is a work in progress

Introduction

The diagram below shows the basic structure of information within the beer engine.

The grey folders represent the geographical information. Start using the places link to browse the site geographically.							The yellow folders represent the various types of entry. The names of all entries are indexed so they can be found easily using the simple search.
		Countries
			Provinces
				Towns
					Bars
					Brewers
						Beers
					Beershops

Geographical information

Countries

The countries list is derived from the ISO list but has been extended to include the individual countries within the United Kingdom. It is not possible to add to or edit this list.

Provincies

Within this website province means the first level of subdivision of a country. This means province can stand for states, counties, territories, cantons, departments or whatever.

I would rather not have included this level of information were it not for two things. There are many examples of multiple towns in one country sharing the same name. Springfield in the US or Newton in Scotland are good examples. Additionally, some countries are just too big without subdivision.

Seriously, provinces are this website's achilles heel. They're necessary but thery're a pain. The worst problems arise from countries where boundaries have a tendency to move around. The UK is particularly bad in this respect so I've decided to use the same regions as the CAMRA Good Beer Guide. If you live in a country where the list of provinces is incomplete or just plain wrong please contact me.

Towns

For the purposes of this website, towns is what we call cities, villages and any other concentration of human settlement. There is no way in this site of giving a town more than one name so please take great care when adding a new town to the site.

Beer engine entries

There are currently four types of entries in the beer engine. Bars, brewers, beers and beershops. With the exception of beers each entry must be associated with a town. Beers are associated with the brewer

Each entry can be listed under 2 names. This is mainly to cope with bars that are more commonly known by a nickname than their official name. Please don't over use this by registering alternative spellings or other minor differences. My old local in Edinburgh is known as 'Wee Bennetts' but the official name of 'Bennetts Bar' is all thats needed here. The important thing is to make sure that anyone searching will find what they're looking for.

Bars

Because it would be ridiculously difficult to classify drinking establishments by type, not to mention a potential source of argument they're all called bars here.

If you can walk in off the street, order a beer and drink it on the premises, it's a bar.

The minimum information required to enter a bar is it's name and the first line of it's address. There wouldn't be much point having an entry with no name or no way of locating it.

Brewers

Brewers entries are quite simple as the most important information is the list of beers they brew.

Again the minimum information required is the brewers name and the first line of it's address.

Beers

Because beers are organised by brewer you cannot enter a new beer if there is no entry for the brewer. You can solve this problem by entering the brewer first.

The description should be a brief factual description of the beer. If you're one of those lucky people who can describe beer properly, please feel free to write tasting notes. Save opinions and comments for the reviews.

I made a conscious decision not to include a list of styles in the database because of the large overlaps and sometimes subjective nature of this subject. Where a beer is clearly of a particular style mention it in the description.

Beershops

There's not much needed here. Just let everyone know what its called and where it is. Full beerlists are planned for the near future.

Searching the beer engine

The simple search do dad that lives on the top right of every page is really, really simple. Just type part of the name of whatever you're looking for in the box and click 'GO'. The search is not case sensitive. For example, if you want to try and find The Dog and Duck type in 'dog' or 'duck' and when you click 'GO' you will see a list of matches. Don't bother typing in words like cafe, bar, the, beer or bitter, just use part of the name. If you want to find Robinson's Best Bitter searching on 'robi' will suffice. You can get to the beer through the brewer's entry. If it doesn't appear in the list of matches then it's not in the beer engine.