At 7pm the first of five special casks will be getting wacked with the hammer. Come out and hang out with Beer Mappers and our friends over at the Hop Cast. There will be more details coming, but for now, mark up your calendar in pen!

Or just add it to your facebook events!

Five more years?

First off, the maps now have a nice blue top navigation bar. This navigation takes the place of the floating “main menu” from the older version of the maps. You’ll see that we’ve added the location lookup on the far right of the screen and we have more space up there to add more links to important parts of the site.

Map Legend

In the top left, you’ll see our logo and the hideable legend should appear pretty much like it used to. You can still click the “x” to hide and you can click the names/pins in the legend to hide specific types of locations.

City Map Selection

When looking for a city map, you’ll realize that they are now grouped by regions and hovering over a region will produce a flyout dropdown allowing you to select the city you are interested in.

Registered User Functions

People viewing the maps that are not registered and logged into the site will often get a reduced number of features. If in the top right you see the “login/register” links, this means you are not logged in. Click the links to do so.

When you are logged in, on many of our maps (City Maps and Proximity Maps) you will get extra links via little green and red colored buttons that will allow you to only see locations you have reviewed or locations you haven’t reviewed on a certain map. These links will allow you to plot the next location you may want to visit or help to find a location that you may have forgotten to review.

Toggles and Traffic

Note: If you are looking for the toggles to turn on or off the location list or the legend, those are up in the top right under the map selectors (view image above). We have also added the “traffic” layer to many of the maps, allowing you to plan your trips a bit better.

We hope you enjoy these new features and the new styling of the maps. Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment here or by posting in the forums (or replying to us on twitter @beermapping).

We hope to see you there! Wear your Beer Mapping t-shirt (or make you own!) and we’ll buy you a pint!

Well, the big news today is that we now appear to be showing up in the “reviews” section for some beer locations when people are searching Google Maps. In our opinion, this is a pretty big deal.

As you can see from the image above (click image to see live google result page), they are pulling contents from one of our reviews for the location and displaying it for people searching for that location. We’re sharing this honor with other sites like Citysearch, Metromix, Urbanspoon, Insiderpages and Google’s own in house review system.

We’re excited about this and will probably be searching google all day looking for new examples! Please let us know in the comments if you find any!

We would like to thank the author of the article, Molly Triffin, for including us. In honor of this article, we would also like to make a list of 12 Sexy Ways to use Beer Mapping!

12 Sexy Ways to use Beer Mapping

1. Use our Location Lookup Page
2. Bookmark our Mobile Site on your Phone (beermapping.com/m)
3. Participate in our Forums
4. Search the Maps by an Address
5. Use our Proximity Maps
6. Subscribe to our GPS Point of Information System
7. Add the Location of the Day gadget to your Google Homepage
8. Play the GABF Fantasy Draught (Late Aug/Early Sept)
9. Put a “Recent Reviews Map” on your Google Homepage
10. Build your own tools around the Beer Mapping API
11. Use our Beer Event Calendar
12. Add an Information Widget to your Blog

Here is the cover and a fuzzy picture of the article:

Basically this feature adds the ability to hide any locations on the city maps that you have already reviewed. If you want to see only the places that you have reviewed, that option is available as well.

As you can see from the image here, we have added three new icons/buttons to the City Maps (and Proximity Maps) that you can use to change the visibility settings. These options are only available if you are a registered user and if you are logged in to the site. They can be found at the top right of the map and they can be used to toggle locations you have reviewed on or off of the map. Hover over the icons to see what each one does, or read more about their functionality here.

The goal here is to help you find new locations in an area to visit and at the same time offer some help finding which locations you may have visited but have so far neglected to review. Get out there and drink some beer!

We hope to have this functionality available on all maps in the near future.

One section of the site that very few people check out, are our statistics. We like to be open about things and we intentionally expose many of the numbers that show how active (or inactive) parts of the site may be.

On our Statistics Page, you can see how many approved locations we have in the database (almost 8,000 at the time of this posting). We break it down by our major countries (scroll down). And on this page we list location images count (2,827), location review count (3,323) and other interesting statistics like average review score (82).

We even offer more statistics about activity on the site on our Activity Statistics Page. This page will show you graphs from the last 31 days (not including today). They’re not exactly real time, but they do give you an idea as to the activity of the site.

If you’re still digging the numbers and you aren’t satisfied yet, you can also check out our Forum Statistics Page. You can see when our most active months for posting were, and you can track how many users registered over the lifetime of the forums. I enjoy checking this page somewhat often and there is even a thread started in the forums about these statistics.

There is a little Beer Festival held in Colorado once a year that gives out awards to Breweries. Last year, we decided that if all other sports can have a “fantasy” side where people pick and manage teams, we could do the same with that beer festival.

So our Fantasy Draught allows the registered competitors to select Breweries from the list of entrants with the intent to build the best “team”. A Gold medal winning beer will award the person who picked that brewery with three points. A silver medal equals two points and bronze is only a single point. The competitor who has the most points when the medals are tallied will be the winner and will likely end up with a t-shirt and a book or some similar prizes.

The Draught proceeds in a snake like manner, going up and then back down the list of competitors in order. Then when a brewery is picked by a competitor that brewery is gone for good, narrowing the list by one for the next picker.

The competition is free. You simply need to be a registered member of the site to compete. The slots are about half way filled, so if you want to enter, all you need to do is click here to start the sign up proceedure.

Any questions can be asked in this thread in our forums, or left here in the comments.

After a search is performed, a user can choose to download the results of a search as a .csv based POI file.

The Point of Interest download ability is available to registered members who have subscribed to the service. A lifetime subscription is available now in the Beer Mapping Shop for 15 dollars.

Discussion about POI files and how you can easily format or manipulate them will be taking place in our forums. The discussion is open to all and that forum section can be found here.

Click Here to get Started.

Well, we are touched by his comment (on page 80 of issue 2 – Jan/Feb 08) and we think if you would like to read more about us or other Beer Sites on the web you should head out to your local Barnes and Noble or other news stand to pick up a copy. Or possibly you could click here and buy a digital copy of the issue online if you roll that way.

Regardless, we will accept that Pulitzer Prize nomination on the condition that we expect that any money that we could be eligible to win be distributed to some of the small Brewpubs and Breweries just starting out this year without hop contracts.