Natasha's Website : Beer Lists

I didn't primarily create this beer list archive with the intention of making it a public resource. However, as I was regularly cross referencing beer lists against my own ticking database, the output had to be in some format or other. I find web-based tools are generally the most flexible and easy to use for this sort of thing, so they're what I used. From there it was just a few clicks of a mouse button to publication on t'internet.

If you would like to see your festival beer list here, the basic information I need about the festival is...

1. The Name of the Festival
2. The Location:
   • The Venue Name, if not included in the festival title
   • Street Name
   • Town or City Name
3. The start and end dates of the festival
4. Last, but not least, the Beer List!

The first three items can be in any format.

However, becasue I cross reference the beer list against my own database and then have the software automatically create the relevent HTML, sooner or later I need the raw data in a format the computer understands, namely:

Brewery Name,Beer Name,abv↵

Leading and trailing spaces are auotmatically ignored. Commas in the brewery or beer name do cause a problem so need to be escaped with '\' to avoid them being treated as delimiters. The abv can be in any format that is recognizably a number; it matters not if the '%' character is appended or omitted. The abv figure is not absolutely mandatory. If omitted and my database recognizes the beer it will use its own figure.

You will notice that some existing beer lists in the archive have a 'notes' column. An entry in this column can be made by adding a fourth parameter:

Brewery Name,Beer Name,abv,note↵

A note can be up to five characters long and can specify anything you like, but do tell me what so I can add an explanation at the end of the list. The notes column is automatically omitted if no notes are specified in the original input.

Don't worry if you can't supply the information in exactly the right format. I now have a formidable array of tricks and techniques to hack most lists into shape without too much typing or retyping but the less work there is for me to do, of course, the more inclined I'll be to put a list up here!

I reserve the right to amend 'obvious errors' for a more accurate cross reference against my database and you should note that whilst I have no objections to foreign beers being included on a list (so long as they can accurately said to be 'real ales') please bear in mind that my database does only cover breweries in Great Britain, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.