The Beer Cellar: New Cellaring Site

(I also posted this over in the Beer Trading general forum; if cross posting is an issue, just let me know.)

Hi there! I've just developed and finally pushed live a new cellaring site, The Beer Cellar, accessible at http://www.beercellar.me

I designed this site initially for my friends and me, then decided to branch out and bring it public (I've been working on things for the past few months in my spare time). While it has many similarities to what I believe is the go-to online cellar, CellarHQ, I've tried to incorporate a number of enhancements and extra features. On top of that, I plan to continue actively developing the site, and have a number of future ideas for new features, including features aimed specifically at trading communities like this one.

For now, some features that might interest you guys include:

• Tracking of entries in both your cellar and fridge (on the same records)
• Ability to quickly increment cellar counts on existing entries
• Quick tasting note additions whenever drinking a beer, and automatic consumption history entries whenever drinking a beer
• Trading labels may be appended to beer entries (FT, ISO), and are visible to anyone who views your cellar
• Filter any cellar (yours or someone else's) based on cellar/fridge counts, trading status, or date each entry was added
• CSV Import and CSV Export of your cellar

For more info, I put up an inaugural blog post here: http://www.beercellar.me/blog

Hopefully some of you guys will find the site useful! My contact details are in the blog post, so feel free to get in touch with any requests, comments, etc. Also, while I can't promise when exactly any of these features will go live, here's some of the things I already have planned in terms of improvements:

• Add advanced search capabilities for trading purposes
• Add friends/favorite functionality to keep track of interesting cellars
• Along the same longs, add some sort of cellar activity tracker to see recent additions and changes

If you'd like to see my cellar, here it is: http://www.beercellar.me/cellar/josh

Nice. Can you please make a proper cellar app. Or anyone for that matter.

By app I take it you mean something on mobile?

On the short list of improvement plans is a phone-specific version of the site. Not sure that it will be feature complete relative to the full site, but I plan to make it easy to check your cellared entries at a glance, drink entries, and leave tasting notes at a minimum.

I'm not planning a fully fledged mobile app in the near term, but I definitely see that as a long term goal.

Cool. I like it a lot.. I really like the trading status of the cellar. B/c i have a big cellar but only a handful are really up for trade. This is something I would def. use if it became available.

The trading statuses already available, in fact! Once logged in, go to the My Account area and then check the box to enable trading labels. They'll then appear in your cellar, and clicking a label will open a drop-down for you to change the status. These labels will be visible to anyone who views your cellar.

Awesome work!!!!!

Nice UI. If you are considering an app, please allow for barcode scanning for quick and easy entry. The BeerBuddy app already has a database built. Just a suggestion

A few new updates have already been pushed! See the details here: http://www.beercellar.me/blog/small-batch-updates-served-fresh

A barcode scanner would be the most awesome thing ever. Simply scan the barcode and your beer is inventoried. Wow.

yes do that if you want to make money!

The Beer Cellar is now mobile ready! After the initial feedback, I've spent the last couple weeks working up a release of a phone-specific interface, and it's just gone live. You can now manage your cellars and add new beers on the go. For details, check out the blog: http://www.beercellar.me/blog/now-mobile-ready

And otherwise, just visit www.beercellar.me on your mobile device to check it out Please feel free to report any bugs, issues, etc., as it's quite possible there may be a few with this first release.

it just keeps getting better and better!!

Finally took a look at your site after seeing it mentioned a few times. I've been keeping an ever-expanding spreadsheet to track my beers across two cellars and a fridge (due to logistics of NYC living, not due to overwhelming quantity), and finally decided to make the transition to a purpose-built software program.

Overall - great site. Super clean, loads fast, includes all the necessary functionality and quite a few bells and whistles on top. I only made one entry so far to test the waters, but I'll definitely be devoting some time this week to getting my full cellar loaded up. And then I'll retire my franken-spreadsheet.

This is fantastic. I love how it has fridge and cellar. Great work!

Excellent site, can't wait to start the inventory!

Thanks for the positive feedback everyone I've been working on some backend stuff recently to help me keep the database in good order (e.g., tools to help me find and fix duplicate beers/breweries in the database, correct mistakes, etc.) and fixing any bugs I've come across. Within another few weeks, however, I hope to have another small batch of features deployed. I'll keep you posted.

i find there are several beers that do not have bottled dates on them, so maybe you can have a "bought on date" option? It's very frustrating that some don't have a bottled date.

For that case, I'd use the notes field. Personally, if there's no bottle date, I'll just put the year in that field and add any additional aging comments to the entry's notes field.

Nicely done. Entering beers now

No support for a "Number" column in the importer?

Edit: Oh, I get it... "In Cellar" should be a number and I can map that to my "Number" column.

Josh, how long does the process take to import a cellar from a CSV file? I imported the file this morning, just spent 3 1/2 hours matching beers, creating breweries/beers, everything then showed as Matched so I clicked Finish Import and nothing............I go back to my account and all the imported data has gone. All I can see are the beers I entered yesterday before deciding to go the CSV route.

I don't want to have to come back and enter over 250 beers.

Weird! I'm not sure what happened--it's entirely possible you've discovered a bug, but I'm not sure what it might be. Looking at the database, there's no outstanding import linked to your account. I'll look into it.

Can we enter beers on the mobile site? Or am I just blind and don't see that option?

You definitely can! I will consider making it more obvious, as I was wondering if that'd be an issue.

When viewing your cellar, click the little Info button ("i") in the upper right corner, and that will bring you to a screen with your cellar stats (total beers, breweries, etc.) as well as a button to Add to Cellar.

Perhaps I'll change that icon to a plus symbol.

stoked I stumbled across this. My office runs prehistoric IE so I will have to get set up when I get home. Regardless, thanks for creating what appears to be a very user friendly, and well designed process of tracking!

I had some issues trying to enter a new brewing company - could not scroll down to add the brewer...

Otherwise - love the site man!

Immediate recommendation...change the password requirements. One lowercase, and one uppercase? I know things have to be secure, but someone's going to break into my account and check out my sweet cellar? Doesn't seem like a big problem.

Thanks! Could you elaborate as to your issue with entering new brewers? If you're referring to the Brewer drop-down autocomplete menu when adding an entry, unfortunately it's not scroll wheel enabled, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move up and down the list. And if the brewer you're after is not shown in the list, you should narrow your search so that fewer results are displayed.

It's funny--I had one other person request the same thing. However, as a developer by day, I've run into far too many issues revolving around password security, so despite the slight extra headache for some users, I'm going to leave the password requirements in place. Sure it's only cellar data, but I still don't want anyone getting where they shouldn't! After all, after a while, one's cellar may well represent quite a bit of work in terms of cataloguing, recording, etc.

Not to mention that in the future, as more trading-specific options are integrated, there may be more information tied to a specific account that you won't want to make public--e.g., messaging another user with your address in preparation for a trade.

Thanks for the feedback everyone! In the next few weeks I'll hopefully push out another batch of small feature additions and improvements

Great site bro! Finally have a way to track all my beer without using a spreadsheet. Glad it doesnt have a total cost function though!

I've tried using similar sites before and had given up when I saw this thread. After checking it out, I've got to say I'm really impressed-great job! I'm in the process of getting my cellar up on the site and am very happy with it so far. I do have a couple of suggestions, but keep in mind that these are very minor issues and that I think the site is, overall, extremely well designed and executed.

-As mentioned before, entering beers on the mobile site isn't terribly obvious. Moreover, once you figure it out, it is very cumbersome. If you're just entering a couple of beers you bought that day, it's not that big of a deal, but I entered about 70 over the last couple of days as I'm just getting my cellar list set up and it's a lot of (what should be) unnecessary back and forth with going back to my cellar, then hitting the info button, then adding a beer. There should be an option to "add another" once you enter one.

-A proper mobile app that functions offline and syncs to the online list would be freaking awesome! Having said that, it seems like you've volunteered a lot of work to get this thing off the ground as it is, so I really think I should be thanking you rather than asking for more!

Again, great job with the site, and thanks a bunch!!!

Could not find brewer which was expected. So went to create a new one. When creating a new one, you cant see the whole form.

My import is going okay, but it's extremely tedious correcting and entering new beers into the DB.

I know there's been a couple efforts which never really got off the ground, but it would be so nice if all the various beer sites / apps shared a single universal database of all beers.

Ah, thanks for the report; I'll mark down to do some viewport scaling for the height of that modal add window.

Tell me about it! Unfortunately, since the Open Beer DB ceased being updated, there's really nothing free currently, hence the need to build up this database (and even the paid ones I've looked at haven't been great in terms of depth). However, The Beer Cellar's database is growing all the time ^_^

Untappd has an API, although I have no idea what's in it. Untappd's vintaging system might cause issues, though.

Noticed a few brewery's being duplicated. Will there be a way to merge/report duplications, or will that be your job, Josh?

I have a rudimentary administrative interface in place for me to merge duplicate breweries/beers, and I am planning on a community reporting system whereby anyone will be able to flag a beer or brewery as a duplicate. This should hopefully be part of the next round of public changes.

I decided this wasn't a good route to take, for various reasons. Using their API, I can't store any data I retrieve from them on my server--this includes any beer/brewery/style data--which would remove the possibility to do some cool analytics/tracking features I have planned for future updates. Not to mention that if the Untappd API were ever to go down and/or change, I would potentially incur technical debt and/or things wouldn't work as a result.

That said, on the list of potential features is Untappd integration, where one could link their Beer Cellar account with Untappd and generate check-ins when drinking a beer. Can't promise when this feature will be coming, but it's definitely planned

Just to continue with the Untappd theme, get users to help you. You'll definitely have fewer issues than we do, but last time I checked untappd was getting hundreds of new beers added a day (I am a mod there). No one can keep up (hell, our whole mod team can barely keep up). Now, as I said, you'll have less problems with that just because it's a more niche app, but for the love of god make whatever merge tool you're using good and easy to use, and give access to people who volunteer.

That's definitely the plan. There have already been almost 2000 unique beers added over what was already in the database, so I'll definitely need help coming up! Thanks for the feedback, and perhaps I'll keep you in mind for when I have some moderator-level functionality ;-)

Hey Josh,

Thanks for devoting your time to making a site like this. I manually added all of the beers that I purchased last week, and then I did a bulk CSV import from an XLS I had been keeping for a while now.

Overall I am very impressed and definitely like what you've done so far! I had a question for you and then some feedback. First, the question...

I noticed that when I reduce a beer's count to 0 by clicking on the minus sign, instead of disappearing, it remains in the list with a count of 0. Why does it stick around in your cellar list if you don't have any in your cellar currently? I know I can click on the wrench and delete the beer altogether, but the warning made that sound pretty serious What am I missing here, as I'm sure you have a good reason for leaving 0 beers listed.

So now some feedback for you. First, you should be able to edit things in the consumed beers section. I might go in and remove beers today that I drank over the last couple of days, but then there's no way to accurately mark when I drank something. So, if you look at my consumed beers for today, you would think I'm quite a lush, but that's actually what I've drank over the past week or so. In addition, there should be a way to input tasting notes after you've marked a beer as drank. I may want to just mark it as gone for now and come back and put in notes later.

Next, I LOVE how you can differentiate between what is in your cellar and your fridge, but it would be great if you could add additional locations as well. This would essentially just be additional columns you could add with the existing functionality, just a new location title. This would be really beneficial to people that have multiple storage locations. For example, in my current situation, I have most of my cellar being stored off-site, a small "cellar" in my home, and then beer in the fridge that is ready to drink. Right now, I'm using notes indicating which box number something is in, in my off-site location, so that's how I'm able to tell, but it would be great to have them listed in their own column too.

Lastly, I also really dig that you're using BA for integrating your brewer/beer database and integrating direct BA links, but it might be cool to also try to take that to the next step. Maybe a way to integrate your BA profile (at minimum just a link would do at first), but then to also pull in your Avatar, hads, gots, etc. Would be really cool (don't even know if this is possible) if you marked something as drank on Beer Cellar you would have a rating system like BA, and it would update your had/rating/review on BA for you. That way you wouldn't have to enter the same data twice to keep your two lists aligned.

But again, it's really great as-is, so thank you again for putting it together. I will continue to use the site and look forward to any updates you might offer.