Show HN: BeerBase – an accessible worldwide open beer database | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BeerBase – an accessible worldwide open beer database

beerba.se

90 pointsmidzer48 comments

It is obviously missing a lot data. The opportunity here is to make a better version of the open database.

What’s the coming back status of open beer db?

Is there an example of any dataset that is well maintained by a community? It doesn’t seem like a technical challenge but a organization challenge.

Yeah, this list is incredibly incomplete. Looked up a bunch of my favourite Canadian breweries, haven’t found a single one.

The ability for users to add breweries and beers would be big. With that being said, there are already sites like this, with massive amounts of brewery/beer data, like RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, so it’s not like this is an unserved space.

> Is there an example of any dataset that is well maintained by a community?

OpenStreetMaps comes to mind, though I don't know what their governance model looks like. Perhaps it's more centralized than I think?

The obvious place for a dataset like this is Wikidata. There's already a lot of content in Wikipedia listicles (including Dutch/German Wikipedia's) that could be copied over.

Untappd, RateBeer, and BeerAdvocate all should have much better data than this, which I believe are all at least partially crowdsourced in various ways. I'm mostly familiar with Untappd, but they're fairly strict about exporting any of their data. I looked into getting API access with them some time ago and basically decided that if I wanted to get any of my data, writing a scraper would be a better idea.

> Is there an example of any dataset that is well maintained by a community?

rateyourmusic.com

Nice, but it is missing a ton of small breweries. I will add Berliner Berg to the database of there is the option: https://berlinerberg.com/en/

I only knew of Untappd, but haven't used it extensively, just for casual search. Looks to be a considerable contestant in the beer database space. Here's Berliner Berg in it: https://untappd.com/BerlinerBergBrauerei

There are tons of microbreweries missing, some of which can be pretty popular (in Belgium at least). I'll be adding a few to the openbeerdb when possible.

Eschenbräu, Vagabund, Brlo, Rollberg and Lemke are also missing, but Kindl is there twice (both times with the wrong address).

Not sure how that data set was sourced.

It's missing 90% of the breweries in my city and some of them aren't that small either.

It's a little bit embarrassing that they cannot handle umlauts (dropping them completely), considering that the most well-known beers come from Germany, which is known for having lots of umlauts in their names and stuff...

Besides Umlaute they also either have no entries with other unicode symbols, for languages other than english, which will inevitably exclude a huge number of breweries and beers.

> the most well-known beers come from Germany

In the part of the US I live in, the most well-known beers definitely don't come from Germany. Maybe in other parts of the world?

Umlaut vanishing is easy to work around with, akin to how foreigners use them. Replace umlaut with letter + e. Example: schoen.

since you're missing a lot of data, here's a link to 10k breweries in the US:

https://www.brewersassociation.org/wp-content/themes/ba2019/...

might help fill in a little bit of the missing data.

https://beerba.se/augustiner-bra-u-ma1-4nchen/ there’s an encoding problem here (UTF-8 has been interpreted as Latin-1 at some point)

(edit: turns out it's a problem with the upstream data! interesting https://github.com/midzer/beerbase/issues/1)

Following the links, this uses data from the OpenBeerDB which was last updated in 2011?

https://openbeerdb.com

Some years ago a met a brand manager from the Radeberger Group in the train.

That time I learned that about 50% of the worldwide breweries are from Germany. Within Germany about 50% of the breweries are based in Franconia.

You should not mixup brands and breweries. Because there a big breweries, which own a lot of different brands.

So what I see from this database a lot of data from Franconian breweries is missing and other data is just wrong.

I think your brand manager might have been fudging the numbers a little bit.

as of 2019, there were ~1550 breweries in Germany. for Germany to account for 50% of the breweries in the world, there would need to be a maximum of ~3100 breweries in the world.

as of 2017, there were ~7450 breweries in the United States.

the link that I posted of ~10k breweries in the United States (elsewhere in thread) includes every location for those breweries, which accounts for an additional ~2500 entries.

those numbers definitely don't jive with Germany having 50% of the breweries in the world, especially given that a very large number of them in Germany are actually client brewers (like a virtual brewery that is just a "brand" that has real breweries brewing their beer).

First it happend to be about 15 years ago. Still when there was the big boom of microbreweries in the US.

Don't remeber the exact numbers it was something like 8.000 worldwiede. 4.000 in Germany and 2.000 in Franconia.

Never verfied that.

Currentl, just living in an old country house that was used for hops and the region is very well known for hops. The neihgboring city has his own brewery, which is not in the data. It's not a new one. It is here for more than 50 years.

> First it happend to be about 15 years ago. Still when there was the big boom of microbreweries in the US.

even 15 years ago, it would in no way been true, while we've added quite a few breweries in the last decade, we've also lost quite a few due to a mix of attrition and consolidation. so, the number likely even out to about the same.

as noted, a large portion (maybe 45%) of those in Germany are really virtual breweries, so that skews the numbers quite a bit. PBR is an example in the US (since 1999).

> Currentl, just living in an old country house that was used for hops and the region is very well known for hops.

awesome! I personally am always on the lookout for interesting hops! if you happen to have some interesting varietals, I'd happily take them off your hands in trade for some home-brew or one of the interesting breweries that I've worked with in the Portland area :)

> The neihgboring city has his own brewery, which is not in the data. It's not a new one. It is here for more than 50 years.

yeah, the data is ... not very good. the list I posted with 7500 is a big step up, but only includes the US. I really need to see if DigitalPour will do an export of their brewery list, and see if it can help add to a public brewery data source. there are so many great lists, but most of them are private.

Thanks for suggesting the topic. I was interested in these numbers from more reliable sources. Apparently, a very detailed statistics is available in the BarthHaas Report (https://www.barthhaas.com/downloads/berichte-broschueren)

Here is a approximate bier production per year for comparison:

World's total: 200.000.000.000 liter = 200 Gl

Germany: 9.000.000.000 liter = 9 Gl (5th place; try to guess the leaders. We are talking about quantity, not quality)

Radeberger Group: 1.000.000.000 liter = 1 Gl

Bavaria: 2.300.000.000 ~ 2 Gl (terribly sorry, I didn't find Frankonia separately :) But for the region's defense I should say that excellent report comes from Nürnberg.

Data for years 2019-2020. There is even Top 40 breweries in the world in there.

Didn't talked about the produced beer.

Beer from the smaler microbreweries tastes much better than the one from those big ones.

Just to do put in relation, if there is one big brewery in Mexico who produces for the whole area, like Dos Excuies, its much more than a local one right next to me.

I type "westvleteren" in the search box and it finds 0 results.

This is the most complete beer in the world, how can it be missing?

The name of the brewery is "Brouwerij Abdij Sint Sixtus". https://beerba.se/brouwerij-abdij-saint-sixtus/

I tried that as well. There is a typo on this website. Sint, not Saint ;-)

The beer is known as Westvleteren, anyway.

Seems more a case of dutch/english spelling mixup of the word 'saint' (sint=saint).

The Sint Sixtus abbey is located in the town of Westvleteren. There are a few 'Westvleteren' beers, the most famous is the Westvleteren 12 Belgian quadruple.

It's brewed by monks who only want to cover the expenses of their abbey, so supply is limited. You can try to reserve a spot in the queue (by phone) to come to the abbey to get a case. Some specialty stores carry it but with a heavy markup (>10 euro's per bottle). I'd recommend trying it for the rich flavour, but there are comparable beers for half of the price ;)

You can order online. If you come to pick up your crates, the price is OK.

They also ship, but I think shipping is limited to Belgium and it is quite expensive.

Seems like the data is coming from here[1], which is now... defunct.

Both need a method for crowd-sourcing the data that doesn't seem present.

[1] https://openbeerdb.com/

The OpenBeer database seems to be out of date. it only lists Aass fro Drammen, Norway but there are at least four more.

It's a pity that there seems to be no indication of when the data for any given area was updated.

Found another Norwegian brewery and just commented on broken unicode support...

I think 'at least four' is a bit underwhelming considering the craft beer explosion that has been going on the last decade. Seems like everyone with a kettle is brewing nowadays. And I would expect homebrewing to be especially popular in Norway where beer taxes are through the roof.

How does a craft brewery help with beer tax?

Anyway I think four breweries including Norway's oldest isn't too bad for a town of 65 thousand. That's more than the English town I come from that has more than three times the population

Craft breweries don't help, but home brewing does. Craft breweries are what happens when home brewing is successful.

Thought you meant 4 breweries from Norway... seemed a bit of a low estimate ;)

Ah, now i understand. There are a lot more than 4 in Norway as a whole! :-)

Good start! I was hoping for ingredients list for beers, I’m lactose intolerant and recently discovered (the hard way) that some pale ales have lactose in them, and many beers don’t put the ingredients on the bottle - which I thought they had to do legally :<

I skip beers now because my lactose intolerance isn’t the “cheese makes me gassy” kind, but the “2 day splitting headache, flashes in vision, want to drill my skull, 10/10 on pain scale” kind, so it’s not worth the risk…

A beer database of ingredients to query would be awesome

You can always ask the servers at the brewery and they'll usually know onhand. Lactose is used to get a creamy texture - if you're able to easily see through the beer, it's not going to have lactose, and if I'm unsure I just take an enzyme pill to be safe.

Untappd is pretty good in the same space - https://untappd.com/

Kind of like Foursquare for beer.

The site or database seems to have broken unicode support: my favorite Norwegian brewery "Nøgne ø" is listed as "NÃ¸gne Ã˜" :(

My location is incorrect and there is no manual way to specify my location to find breweries.

Cool!!! Is there maybe something similar for wines and spirits?

Yeah - would love something like that for Gin

As someone building a cocktails website, I have a broad question. Why? You like Gin and want to try new ones, wanna keep track of what you tried, wanna go for something local, something else?...

I suppose we should have an argument now as to what constitutes a truly open beer, and if our favorite open beers are actually only partly open or perhaps even closed.

Open beer: does not emit a hiss when you open the escape hatch on its container. Don't let it linger around for too long, or it will develop a terrible taste.

When you remove the bottle cap, it's an open beer.

Said my next brewery would be 20 km away. But in reality, my next brewery is one kilometer away...

(I live in Bavaria - we have breweries in every village)

what is the most popular type of beer there? in the states right now or atleast my state it seems like everything new on my local stores shelves is either an IPA or some type of heavily fruited sour. which isn't bad at all I'm just wondering about global beer trends

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