Those of you that have read my blog may have wondered a time or two how I find the breweries and beer places I go to. Well here is the low down. I use two main sources Beer Advocate http://beeradvocate.com/ and the Beer Mapping Project http://beermapping.com/. Both are a valuable source to my beer travels. They provide me with great information on finding somewhere to go when I am not overly familiar with the place I am staying. Each on has it's strong points, which I will cover in individual detail.
Beer Advocate, as the name proclaims, this website is pro beer. This website was started by two brothers that really love beer and anything related to the beer industry. For locating a brewery or beer place I look down the left hand column under the heading Travel and Events, then click on Directory. This will lead you through a few levels to find where you maybe. First is country, click on United States, then you can click on the state you are in. It then leads you to choose the city your are currently in, when you select the city you are presented with a list of breweries, beer bars, beer stores and homebrew stores. The cool thing about this list is that each place listed is usually reviewed by other Beer Advocate users, so there is an opinion that you can base your choice off of. Also if possible they have a link to the establishments web site and a map showing the location of the establishment. This is valuable especially if you have not been to a place before. I have yet to really find a set of reviews that have lead me astray.
Also Beer Advocate has many other uses they have reviews of beers, an event calendar, a forum and an educational area. I use the beer reviews to see how my thoughts correspond or not with other people on the beers I am tasting. Also the event calendar is useful to find events in areas where you maybe in or soon to be going to. This is a cool website that has many uses besides locating a place to go have dinner and a beer at.
The Beer Mapping Project is predominately a website that lets the user search a region or country for breweries and brewpubs. On the left hand side under Map Selector there are two areas to make a selection in the first is Brewery Maps and the second is City Beer Maps. The Brewery Map allows you to select maps of 12 countries. If you choose the American Map it is further broken down into regions of the United States, so you can pin point the city you are in. If you choose one of the other 11 countries it provides a map overview of the entire country.
The City Beer Maps are a collection of the larger metro areas within the United States. Needless to say you can get a very good idea of the relation of establishments to each other, so it makes your adventure easy to plan out. Also there is a forum on the website and the user can review the places they go to. So this is another valuable tool to my arsenal in searching for great places to have beer.
Hopefully you will find these websites as useful as I do and you may have your own favorite site you use. I am not saying these are the only or even the best websites, but they work for me. If you do not like them no biggie, I hope you have your own way to find good beer and good food.
QC Beerguy
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