--Who I am--

     I am a IT professional who is a craft beer enthusiast. This site is one of my major side projects. Building, managing, and data analysis of a large data set is the sort of thing I get excited about. This is the way I can link my two favorite hobbies. 

     This site has thus far required system administration, web UI programming, database entry and management, and some basic understanding of beer. Whether I was building this site or not I would be spending most of my time on these two things; beer and computers. That said, this combination of alcohol and programming leads to scripts designed to crash one or more of my servers. Nothing unrecoverable, but enough to require and reboot. I have come to call this Coding Under the Influence (CUI), similar to a DUI but for nerds. After a few drinks, programming a infinite loop to do database calls, echoing rows of data on a page endlessly sounds like a lot of fun. It is really easy to write bad code that makes a server do a hundred time more work to complete a simple task. I have only broken the site a few time while CUI'ing, metaphorically crashing the car into a ditch. Except my car is a server(Luckily no databases were harmed in the making of this site.). So if the site drops off the web in the middle of the night, you can expect some great beer reviews in the morning. 

--What is this?--

     This is my personal software to record the beers I have come across. I want to document all the unique flavors of beer. I built this site (software) to fill my needs in recording the beers that I have had and their taste. Beer has almost infinite varieties and styles, and knowing or even remembering your favorite can be a challenge. I seem to stumble into a phenomenon were the discovery of a new tasty beer leads to a high volume intake of said beer. Consequently causing amnesia of the drinking experience. So I built this tool to help me counteract this tasty beer amnesia effect. In time I hope to expand this tool so everyone can use it.

     Beer is always better closer to the tap. One of the greatest joys is to find a local tap house. Cooked, fermented, kegged, poured, and sold all under the same roof. Its a rush getting to order a flight of new beers at a tap house such as this. A line up of beers arranged by color lightest to darkest, invoking saliva glands to kick into overdrive. These tap house are starting to slowly popup everywhere, or maybe I just live in a place where this is happening. My goal is to seek out these places to discover the flavors they have cultivated and the culture surrounding them. Documenting not just the beers but the experience of beer. So cheers to finding, drinking, and vomiting the beer experience all over this website.

In The Beginning

     And God said, “Let there be beer,” and there was beer. God saw that the beer was good, and he separated the light beer from the dark beer.

     It started with the bottles. Shortly after moving to the Seattle area I found a craft beer store. Walls of beer, so many different unique flavors, names, styles, but above all else, art work. Each bottle decorated with amazing art work, in a variety of artistic stylings. I wanted to keep everyone of these bottles. I began to think of them as collector cards, and I was always dying to get my hands on the latest and rarest cards. The bottles took over the kitchen, filling every nook and cranny of the overhead shelf storage in my apartment. The kitchen no longer was the room I stored and prepared food in. Instead it became the room to stored and poured beer in. Craft beer is expensive, with good reason. Part of this reason is to pay an artist for the design of a bottle. Just disposing of a bottle after drinking it is like buying a piece of art, enjoying it for an hour then throwing it in the trash. My problem now became storage. Digitizing my collection was the most logical step for me. I first programmed a simple database entry form, and a display page. From there this project just grew(and is still). The project is still in the early stages for what I have planned, so much more still in the works. 

--Rating & Review System--

     A few words on ratings and reviews within the site. Everything expressed within this site is an opinion, and should be treated as such. My opinions on a beer can be greatly influenced by my current mood, situation, and time of year. For this reason I tend revisit beers I did not enjoy at a later time and place. So I reserve the right to alter my opinion at a later time. In time I hope to have rating system worked out to accommodate everyone's opinion.

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