It’s a simple idea and a simple process, so I won’t water it down with dramatic prose: Rate 20 or more beers, and automatically be entered to win a $15 gift certificate from Belmont Station.  We’ll be giving away at least two $15 gift certificates to you, our dedicated users.

If you’re more of a “list” person, it breaks down like this:

1. Go to the beer page: http://www.portlandbeer.org/beer/
2. Login with your Facebook credentials on the right (a Facebook account is required ¹)
3. Rate at least 20 beers using the 5-star system next to the beers. You can bring up beer lists by brewery or by style. If you’ve already been using the system and have rated more than 20 beers, you’re automatically entered into the contest.
4. Wait patiently and rate more beers until June 15th 2011, when winners will be announced!

The motivation behind this free beer giveaway is simple as well: We want to create some momentum around our beer rating system. We think it’s a great way to track your favorite beers, but also to give you a bird’s eye view of what people are drinking—and enjoying—in Portland.

While we do our best to have most beers represented on our site, they aren’t all there. If you feel like complaining that a beer isn’t on the list, just contact us instead, and ask us to add it. We are a handful of people trying to track hundreds and hundreds of beers released every year in Portland. We do our best to drink every beer that comes out, but we miss some here and there.

If you win, you’ll be getting a $15 gift certificate to Belmont Station. Because of this, it makes sense for you to be in Portland, or coming to Portland as well as being legal drinking age. Neither Belmont Station or anyone here will be shipping any beer, though we will mail the gift certificates anywhere.

¹ We merely use Facebook to authenticate our users. This makes our jobs much easier by allowing us to focus on beer and beer related information rather than writing a custom user authentication system. Your information is not used for evil. In fact, we are only asking for the information you’ve already agreed to share with everyone, nothing more.

Ok, the updates aren’t better than beer, but don’t leave just yet.  We’ve made some big improvements to help you find beers by styles, breweries, and top rated beers.

First of all, we’ve expanded the functionality of the top beers list on the home page.  Not only are we tracking your favorite beers, but we’ll show you the week by week changes in rank as votes come in.  The list has been expanded to the top 20 beers, and everything is is now active: click on the beer name for details and stats, click on the brewery for a list of beers by brewery, and click on the style to get a list of beers by style.  This method for searching for beers is continued throughout the site and you can constantly expand and narrow your searches as you look for great Portland beers.  Of course, you can still rate your favorite beers by logging in through Facebook on the beer pages.  Let your voice be heard!

We’ve also tweaked our similar beers algorithm to give you a better comparison.  Every beer you see on the site will also display a link to any similar beers we can find.  Here’s a list of beers similar to Hopworks’ Original Red, with beers that also have their own similar beers.  It’s as if Alice fell down a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole! Start with beers you love, find beers you need to try.

The breweries section has also been updated to show you the latest posts tagged with the brewery.  Not only will it show you what’s been happening with each brewery, but it will also show us the gaps where we need to provide more coverage.

This update represents a significant improvement in the usability and performance of the site.  All of the changes were based on suggestions from our team and from you.  The process is ever-evolving, and we’d love you input.  Let us know how we can keep improving!

Cheers Portland!

Imagine this: Winter is just around the corner and you’re dreaming of Barleywines.  You remember that delicious Old Tavern Rat you had at New Old Lompoc and you’re wondering what else is out there.  Simple.  Click on the Beer Finder and select New Old Lompoc from the brewery drop down list.  Find Old Tavern Rat in the list and click on Show Details.  You’ll notice that the bottom says that there are 7 other similar beers.  Click on that to start your journey.

Now, these beers aren’t hand-picked matches (we’re not made of free time).  We’ve hired monkeys to roll some dice and then flip some levers.  Actually, they’re retired space-monkeys, so they’ve got a little bit of smarts: they’ll match beer style and point you toward a range of IBUs, and ABVs (as well as fiddling with some other beer-related variables).  Again, it’s not an exact science, but it’s meant to be more of a pondering experiment where the result leads you to beers you might not have thought of before.

As with everything else on the site, these tools are here to help you discover the great world of Portland beer.  Comments, suggestions, and lambasting welcome!

So, while we could see that many people were interested—and attempted to submit the contact form—all of the information went into a black hole.  If you’re still interested in helping test this feature, please let us know—the form is working now.  For those that we’re caught in the black hole, I apologize for the inconvenience, but you’ll have to contact us once again.

We will be sending out logins starting this weekend.

Cheers!
Matt

In order to personalize your experience at our site, we’re investigating the world of beer rating.  There are plenty of sites that let you review and rate beer, but we want to do something a little different.  Most sites will compile ratings and offer them to the world at large to keep a current tally on worldwide beer tastes.  It’s great for the history books, but as selfless as you might be, wouldn’t you like a little something in return?

We’d like to take our site one step further and have it feel like a tailor made suit.  Our rating system will simply act as a trigger for certain events.  Do you have twenty-three five star beers on your list?  Well, every time any of those beers are re-released, we’ll let you know.  Ever wander the streets and wonder how close your four or five star beers are?  You rate the beers, set the threshold, and we’ll let you know.  Simple as that.  Well, simple for you once we go through the painstaking process of implementing these features.

There is also some benefit to the cloud of combined data.  If one hundred locals give a beer a five star rating, and you haven’t tried it, wouldn’t you like to know?  We think that is a beneficial aspect to the data we collect, so we’ll turn that over as well.  Your ratings will always remain private to you, except where they are anonymously featured as part of the bigger ratings cloud.  So, we’ll be working on ways to make this aspect beneficial as well.

So, we’re looking for Beta testers for this new ratings feature.  If you’re interested in lending a hand, please get in touch with us through our contact form and let us know you’d like to help.  As always, we rely on your suggestions to keep us growing in the right direction.

Cheers!
Matt

Five years ago, this site started out as an idea on a napkin. We’ve gone from tracking a few beer releases between friends in town, to serving over 150,000 pages each year to users all over the world (96 countries in the last few months, according to a quick glance at the stats).

Sunday’s site relaunch was implemented for several reasons. We wanted to make sure that the content was easy to find, especially in cases where there is a lot of data. So, beers are now easier to find, sort, and compare; maps are a bit more interactive; and the blog is much more organized. There are also a lot of behind the scenes features that were added to make it easier for us to get the content up and delivered to all of the areas of the site as well as to the users subscribing to our feeds. This makes our overall process much easier, allowing us to focus on the content, and not trying to unravel the ever-growing technology infrastructure.

We are also going to be experimenting with different advertising options. We will keep these as out of the way as possible, but as the site and traffic grow, we need this to offset our costs. This site is a labor of love, and we’ve never made a cent from running it. But we do incur costs to keep it up and running and those costs grow as the site grows. We’ve never intended to turn this into a money making machine, but we also never intended on investing so much money into it. So, these ads are just a simple way of offsetting these costs. Our primary goal is getting Portland beer information out to you, so if you ever feel that our advertising is intrusive, please let us know.

As for the future, well, we’re going to need some help. We’d like to bring on a few more contributors to make sure that we’re not missing anything. Nope, we don’t pay. However, you get media access to some of the events, you get to propose and write your own stories, you get a better excuse for drinking so much beer, and glorious local fame. If you see yourself as a lover of beer, a writer of tall tales, and a self-motivator, get in touch. Use our contact form to let us know you’re interested and we’ll give you more details.

Of course, many of these changes were made because of suggestions by you—so if you have any other ideas, get in touch.  Cheers!

We’ve done our best to make this a smooth transition, but there are a few things that still need to be finished. Rather than delaying the launch (again), we’re finally pushing it live so that we can regroup and make sure that we’re getting back to the content side of things. This is the best time to let us know if something needs to be fixed, or if you just want to see something that we don’t have.

So, take a peek around and let us know what you think!

Cheers!

In our beer lists, you’ll now see the tag “Find beers like this one” at the end of the description of many of the beers on the site. In order to be part of this feature, the beer must include a certain number of stats so that the tool can do it’s job. For some beers, this information is not available, and this feature will not be available.

To use this new tool, just click on the link under the description and our database monkeys will go to work and deliver a list of similar beers. I know, it seems like magic, but it’s really only monkeys making guesses, pushing buttons, and flipping switches. These monkeys compare styles, IBUs, ABV, Plato, and other proprietary weights and measure to give you the most accurate list.

So there you have it, one more tool in your arsenal for finding great Portland beer! As always, keep sending us your feedback and do our best to make this your Portland beer home!

To simplify the process, we’ve added the Beer Finder tool to our site. The idea is simple: if you can remember part of a beer name, type it in and we’ll make suggestions based on your input. For example, if the only thing you can remember about a beer is that the work black was in the name, just type it in and we’ll match it to our database. As you can see in the image above, we’ll narrow down your search–just click on a beer name, hit Get Beer Info, and get the details.

Hopefully, this helps you to get closer to the beer you’re looking for. Check it out and let us know what you think!

After the redesign of our site, we want to make sure that people are checking out the other areas of our site, and not just the wonderful blog area. Of course, in the blog section, you can find articles, news, events, photos, and almost everything else you need. Almost.

It made sense for us to consolidate a few areas together for the blog, but there are still some great features that exist outside of the blog. For example, did you know that you can print up or save dynamic PDF beer to-do lists, based on our current inventory of 199 beers brewed in Portland? Damn right! 199! In fact, you can customize your lists to include things like: All Pale Ales in Portland, or All Beers from Amnesia Brewing, or All IPAs available at Laurelwood.

Print it up, put it in your pocket, and make a weekend out of it. Check it out in the tools section. Let us know what other tools you’d find handy while exploring Portland’s beer scene!