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by dougiebuckets • 14 years ago

39 21 14 years ago

hi everyone - myself and another dev built this at a Twilio hackathon over the weekend. would love to get some feedback/suggestions.

simba-hiiipower3• 14 years ago

like the concept; but i just tried it out with a couple beers and no hits as of about 10mins later..

admittedly, i threw it some pretty difficult ones: eichhof (swiss), taybeh (palestinian), but I just tried heineken and still no luck.. any thoughts?

dougiebuckets7• 14 years ago

sorry, we ran out of requests to the brewerydb api. just upgraded -- should be all set now! give it another whirl ;)

artmageddon2• 14 years ago

I just tried it and it's pretty neat. How large is the database of beers?

Also, is it possible to do a character count on the message and insert page numbers on individual text messages? For instance, when I tried "Guinness", I received 9 text messages. I know there's no way to control in which order the recipient gets the messages, but sometimes there's a little bit of mental work scroll back & forth through various out-of-order texts and try to read them in the correct order. Something like (1/3), (2/3), (3/3). I realize that only adds to the payload, so maybe it should only be done for the really long ones?

Just my 2 cents. Very cool! I will definitely tell others about this.

bluetidepro• 14 years ago

It looks like they get the info from http://www.brewerydb.com/developers?

dougiebuckets7• 14 years ago

yup. that's the case. it was our first time playing around w/ it. really nice api! i'd encourage you all to check it out ;)

dougiebuckets7• 14 years ago

great feedback, really appreciate it!

i'm going to increase the delay between messages being sent (hopefully upon doing so, you'll receive them in the right order).

thanks again ;)

prsutherland• 14 years ago

Jack D'or got me over 40 text messages. A bit of overkill I'd say.

artmageddon2• 14 years ago

40? Wow - I thought the one for Guinness was rather excessive at 9. They may wanna cull it some, or allow keywords to be added that can just get specific information(i.e. +ABV) or whatever.

simba-hiiipower3• 14 years ago

yeah, it would be ideal if it could send just some of the highlights (beer type, abv, brewery, country of origin, year first brewed) formatted in just one text.

maybe adding an alternate command, something like "<beer name> details", for the full description instead would be nice

rush340• 14 years ago

eep, that's 1/5th of my messaging plan, and exactly why I'm afraid to send a text to any automated system.

swaraj• 14 years ago

didn't work for 2 beers i tried: http://imgur.com/GTMoG

dougiebuckets7• 14 years ago

it doesn't look like drakes heffe is in the db unfortunately. concerning pacifico, it's in the db but it's not populated with any data. http://www.brewerydb.com/beer/xfQQiO

thanks for sharing this!

xoe26• 14 years ago

Doesn't work internationally (UK) it seems.

sciurus• 14 years ago

If you'd like to search for breweries instead of beers, the developers behind BreweryDB offer that service. To use it, send a zip code as a Jabber IM to brewerymap@tropo.im or as a text message to 919-701-BREW (2739)

The source is at https://github.com/PintLabs/BreweryMap-Tropo

(Disclaimer: I work for Voxeo)

abrichr• 14 years ago

Not sure if you have this or not, but I think that a useful piece of information you could include is the number of calories. In fact, that alone would be a good service for any type of food.

Also, is there some sort of revenue generation happening here?

freiheit• 14 years ago

It's rare to find actual Calorie information for a beer (except mass-produced "light" beers).

You can estimate it at about 30 Calories (kcal) per % ABV in a 12 oz beer. About 40 for a 16 oz (american pint), 50 for an imperial pint.

Basically, yeast converts a fairly predictable percentage (70%-80%) of the sugars into alcohol, so the Calorie difference between two different styles at the same ABV will tend to be small because they'll both have similar amounts of residual non-fermented sugar. (well, sours will often have a lot less residual sugar and particularly strong beers are likely to have more, so those estimates get further off for those).

Some beers do print the Original Gravity or Plato, and given that and either the final gravity/plato or the ABV you could calculate the amount of residual sugar for a much more precise answer.

mgurlitz• 14 years ago

If you have an Android phone, on the BreweryDB's Apps list (http://www.brewerydb.com/apps) it looks like "Beer Friend" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.friendly.b...) will do this and more (calculate BAC for you and your friends).

Want to learn about that beer in your hand? Send an SMS to learn more.

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