How this atlas is made

How a record gets published

Most of what follows is a rule about what we will not do. That is deliberate: a reference work is only worth reading if the gaps in it are real gaps rather than guesses somebody filled in.

A year is a fact with a source, or it is not published

Every founding year and every first-brewed year has to arrive with a link to where it came from. The schema refuses a year without one, so a year cannot be typed in from memory however well known it seems. This is why only 151 of 20,793 beers carry a year at all, and why the two facts are never mixed: the year a brewery opened is not the year a beer was first made.

Nothing is invented to fill a space

A beer with nothing written about it says so on its own page. It does not get a sentence assembled from its own data, which would read like prose and be worth nothing. 20,422 beers are in that state today.

Nothing is taken without permission

The data comes from open datasets used under their licences, listed in full on sources and licences. Nothing is scraped. Brewery writing and photographs are asked for rather than copied, which is slower and is the reason there are no label images here: labels are trademarked artwork, so every beer is drawn from its own colour value instead.

Figures are counted, never estimated

The numbers on a country or style page are counted from the rows behind it at the moment you load it. Where there is too little to measure, the figure is withheld rather than reported: a median of six beers is a coincidence, not a finding.

Corrections leave a trace

Every change made by hand is recorded against the record it changed, so a value can always be traced to who set it and when.

What is missingcounted today

The atlas is as deep as its sources, and its sources are uneven. These are the gaps worth knowing about before you trust a number on any other page.

Something here is wrong

Very likely. Every beer page carries a link to suggest a correction, which takes the field, the current value and what it should be. A missing beer can be proposed through the submission form. Both need a sign-in, which is what keeps the queue small enough to read, and both go to a person before anything changes. A year still has to arrive with its source: that rule applies to contributions exactly as it applies here.

Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send, especially for a country whose record is thin. If you brew something that is listed here and the entry is wrong, or you would like your own words on it rather than ours, that is welcome too.

Who makes it

One person, independently. Beer Map is not a company and has no commercial relationship with any brewery on it. Nothing on the site is paid placement, and a brewery cannot buy its way onto the map or off it.