Explanation of beer information
The following information is presented for each beer in the database.
- The name of the beer (including any known aliases.)
- The abv of the beer (or original gravity if I don't have abv data)
- If the beer is brewed by someone other than the named brewery (or if this is a brand for a larger brewer) then the name of the actual brewer may be shown.
- Optionally, some further information about the beer.
- Although I keep personal ratings of the beers I have sampled, these are not made public on Beer Mad. However, a small number of beers (23 at the time of writing) are shown as a Beer Mad Top Tipple! These are the rare beers that have scored 10/10 on my personal scale.
I try to reflect the current ABV of a beer where it has changed in the past, with previous ABVs bracketed after it - generally with the most recent used first. Where a beer's reported ABV only changes by 0.1%, I do not reflect this as small changes like that would result in huge lists of numbers.
New beers I encounter are marked as being of unknown status until such time as I can be sure if they are regular or seasonal brews.
Please note that I am only attempting to document the
draught beers brewed by these breweries. Bottled beers are outside the scope of this project.
Where I get my information from
Beer information comes from a variety of sources, including:
- Pub beer menus I'm always watching these wherever I go; most such information comes from either my local, the Ipswich Fat cat or from my almost local, the Ipswich Milestone Beerhouse.
- Beer Festival Lists Either those I've visited myself or others that have been published on the Web or Usenet.
- The Good Beer Guide CAMRA's flagship publication. Regardless of where I get information about beers (unless its from brewers themselves) the GBG is taken to be the definitive authority as to whether a beer is regular, seasonal or no longer brewed. Unless I have evidence to the contrary, I assume new beers to be one-offs until they are listed in the GBG.
- Information published on Usenet People often send information to uk.food+drink.real-ale which is a useful source of all sorts of real ale information.
- Scoopgen A useful, free subscription email resource. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scoopgen
- Emails Brewers are sometimes kind enough to send me details of their beers.
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