Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Lots of Lovely Beer Goggles Maps

Real Ale Hunter

The Real Ale Hunter is a directory and Google Map mashup of real ale serving pubs in the UK. The directory holds reviews of over 5000 pubs that sell real ale in the UK and all of them can be found via a Google Map.

It is possible to zoom in on any area of the UK and real ale serving pubs in the current map view will be tagged on the map. Alternatively it is possible to select the option to 'view by town'. This option will zoom the map in on an individual town and that town's pubs.

The pub's in the current view are listed under the map. Each listing has the pub's name and address and a rating for the pub. Some pubs also have more information, such as the number of pumps and information about whether it is listed in the Good Beer Guide.

European Beer Guide

If you ever find yourself in Europe and you fancy a beer you could do worse than consult the European Beer Guide. The site uses Google Maps to help users navigate to beer guides for individual countries.

Each country is tagged with a link to the section about that country. Clicking on a country's link takes you to the pub guides for that country and to brewery and beer guides. As beer and brewing traditions vary greatly throughout Europe this website is an essential guide for any beer drinkers planning to undertake a European wide pub crawl.

Livermore Valley Winegrowers
The Livermore Valley Winegrowers Association has created a cool Google Map mashup to help visitors to the area plan their visit.

To use the map users enter a starting address and the date they wish to visit the Livermore Valley. They can then explore the mapped wineries and vineyards by clicking on the map markers. If any of the wineries grab the user's interest they can then press an 'add' button to add the winery to their itinerary.

When the user has selected all the wineries they wish to visit they can drag them around and place them in any order. Once finished it is is possible to get driving directions for the visit. Just get somebody else to drive!

Some Other Beer & Wine Related Maps Mash-Ups
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5 comments:

Sébastien Gruhier said...

About Real Ale Hunter they should use mapeed (http://mapeed.com :))

Keir Clarke said...

They definitely could do with some sort of clustering. If you avoid London though the map works well.

Anonymous said...

So, for the European Beer Guide ...

"Each country is tagged with a link to the section [on the same web page] about that country."

This should win a prize for the weakest ever use of Google Maps :-(

Anonymous said...

The best beer mapping sight i've seen is

BEERMENUS.com

It's only for NYC right now, but I've heard that it's going to expand to other cities in the US

Anonymous said...

Hi, I built Real Ale Hunter. The site has only recently had lots of pubs added and I haven't had much time to sort the map issues out. I will have to look at a clustering solution, Mapeed looks good but they don't say what their prices will be when they do start charging.

As a quick fix iv increased the level of zoom required to start showing markers and removed the marker shadow which should speed things up a but.