BrewTrackr is something I’ve been working on for the better part of the year. I’ve been using it to teach myself a bit of PHP, MySQL, and CodeIgniter (a PHP framework). But it’s finally launched – in a private beta for the time being – and it’s very exciting.
The Overview
BrewTrackr is an idea a friend of mine had that I decided to help him out with while I learned PHP. It’s a way to track what beer you’ve had. I’m sure many people have the problem of not remembering every beer you have tried, and if you do remember you may not remember how you liked it. BrewTrackr was built to remedy this problem.
With BrewTrackr you can add beers to your “tab” when you try them, rate them 1-5, write personal tasting notes (or where you were, who you were with, etc.), and write public reviews. All this is used to help you remember what beer you really like. You can even save a beer as a favorite to find it again more easily.
How it’s different
While there are other services out there which are similar, this is distinctly different in that it’s more of a personal tracker rather than something to broadcast what you’re drinking (for example, services like Untappd). There is certainly a social element to it where you can follow your friends and see what they’re drinking, it doesn’t lie at the core of the website.
Under the hood
Some technical points: it’s built on CodeIgniter and uses Foundation as a CSS framework. This makes it a responsive design so it scales down to mobile size very nicely. That way it’s extremely easy to add beer to your tab while out at the bar or elsewhere.
Private beta
We launched in private beta over the weekend and have seen some use already which is great! We’re really excited to see where this goes and want to see this succeed in being a useful tool to others.
P.S. If anyone wants or needs an invite code just let me know and I’ll hook you up.
Dan Hauk 