If you’re not already aware, many brewpubs and some breweries across the United States have the ability to sell you “growlers” of their house brewed beer for you to take home and enjoy. Typically, a growler holds 64 ounces and in many occasions you can bring them back for refills (a refill price is often cheaper than a first fill because you are paying for the glass container).

So, we’ve learned that a growler that you purchase today is a reusable container full of beer that comes from a business that is local to you. Who wouldn’t like that?

If you have a brewpub nearby (search here), we’re urging you to visit it and ask for a growler of their finest beer to-go. It’s Saturday, and nothing goes better with a Saturday than some fresh locally brewed beer!

If you use twitter, tag your tweets with #growlerday so we can see who is able to buy fresh craft beer today!

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).

All applications are developed by third party developers and the apps listed here are built off of Beer Mapping’s Application Programming Interface (API). This means that if you decide to purchase one of these apps, you are giving money to the third party developer and your money is not going to Beer Mapping. These developers spent time creating these apps and in most cases the applications are priced at an extremely reasonable fee.

Check it out at beermapping.com/apps.

We are working on the problems and we hope to have the server back up and running the way it is supposed to very soon. Many links on the site will not work, the forums seem to be cooperating properly, but Location Lookup and many other important functions are broken at this time.

Thanks for your patience.

We have a full fledged mobile site (beermapping.com/m) with search, forums, reviews and even proximity functions available. And our system also works with all recent versions of google’s mobile mapping software. If this interests you, check out our Mobile Functions page.

Here is what we have to say about our mobile functionality on our tools and applications page:

Mobile Functionality

The Mobile Lookup page is simply a scaled down version of our regular location search functionality here on the main site. We’ve set up our Mobile Lookup page to be a very easy to remember url:
http://beermapping.com/m (the M is for mobile).

We also have set up some Mobile Map functionality that is now linked from the Mobile Maps Lookup page. You can read more about the Mobile Map functions click the following link:
Mobile Maps and Applications

Reviews, score breakdowns, weather, traffic and maps are all available through the beermapping.com/m url. We’ve even included a tiny version of the regular forums as well if you like to participate in discussions while on the go. As far as we are aware, there isn’t a beer based website around that is providing the level of mobile functionality that The Beer Mapping Project is giving you. Recently we’ve also integrated Twitter into our mobile application.

If you have any ideas about how we can better help flesh our our mobile interfaces, please let us know in the comments. We know that many of you will mention or ask about iPhone apps or applications for other platforms. Well, there are some applications under development for iPhone, Android and possibly Blackberry. The only one that we have been working on in-house is the Android application. You can watch a teaser video of it here.

Note: Even though our beers are mobile, we would still like for you to be responsible and avoid drinking and driving. We encourage our users to add any public transportation options to their reviews and if there is no public transportation readily available, please find a designated driver.

A search for ‘rock bottom’:

A close-up of the Map Link:

Clicking on the link on a search results page will take you to a map that will attempt to display all locations in the results from your search. There are still a few bugs, but we are working through them and have this feature fully flushed out very soon. For now, play around with it and let us know what you think in the comments here or in the forums.

The results of a mapped search for ‘rock bottom’:

The new feature is a little graphic that appears in what used to be some white space above and to the right of the location address information. This graphic is actually a dynamically generated image that is provided to us through one of google’s chart technologies. We’re using this technology to create what is called a QR Code (quick response code).

Here is an example of what the QR Code looks like on the review page (note the big red arrow):

These codes can be scanned via some special software that you can install on many different types of smart phones. Android phones can use the “Barcode Scanner” application to scan the codes. iPhones and Blackberries and other phones can possibly use an application provided by BeeTagg or possibly the Kaywa Reader.

After the image is scanned your mobile device will decrypt the QR Code and show you the information contained within. In our case, a scan will put the mobile version of that page onto your phone, allowing you to bookmark locations you want to visit or look at later.

An example of a QR Code containing the url for the mobile page for 21st Amendment Brewpub:

If you are still a bit confused as to what we’re talking about here, or if you just want to see this scanning technology in action, watch the following 45 second video. It is a bit blurry, but we hope it gets the point across!

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.

The Buddy Activity page will display the site actions of the people you wish to follow. This function is only available to registered members (because you need a trackable account in order to have buddies to follow). But since registration is simple and easy, this should not be much of a deterrent.

This particular page is now tracking reviews, image uploads and forums threads that are added to the site by your buddies over the past 2 weeks. If your parents ground you from the internet and you have to miss a day or two, this page will let you jump right back in and check out what your friends have been up to!

If you don’t have any buddies, jump on it and make some friends on the site!

This feature, along with pages such as the Path Crossers page are implemented with the hopes that they are able to build a sense of community on the site.