Beer Selector: Coming Soon

Tapsucker · Post by **Tapsucker** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 5:10 pm

One benefit of the merchandising at the LCBO (or any self serve store like in other regions) is that customers can read labels and often P.O.S. material right from the brewer. This is much more helpful than just brand picking like most BS. The number of out of province visitors I have seen in the BS looking at 'the wall' and trying to figure out what they want confirms this.

For people who do not know much about beer, or even geeks like us who spot something new, this gives us a chance to see how a brewer describes their product or even what they were trying to accomplish.

Categories can be helpful, but also confusing. Furthermore, when it comes to craft beers, they can be very misleading. A simple example would be Creemore Lager. This could easily appeal to a light or amber ale drinker more than to someone looking for a mainstream lager. And don't even get me started on bock's, dunkel's etc.

El Pinguino · Post by **El Pinguino** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 9:41 pm

Looks like a fun tool to help non beer geeks expand their options. Also looks like it got pushed out way too early. I bet there is some poor guy at the LCBO who wanted so hard to make this beer selector work, but was given ridiculous limitations and deadlines that he was destined to fail.

Hopefully it gets smoothed out and this isn't the final end product.

carguy · Post by **carguy** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 5:55 am

Agreed El Pinguino!

$ · Post by $ » Fri Jul 24, 2009 9:39 am

I bet they paid some firm a million or more for it.

mjohnston · Post by **mjohnston** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 9:53 am

Tapsucker wrote:Categories can be helpful, but also confusing. Furthermore, when it comes to craft beers, they can be very misleading.

Case in point - Keith's IPA. A buddy from the US came up and ordered an IPA at a pub in Ottawa. He sent it back 3 times, confused, eventually leaving the bar convinced they had the wrong keg hooked to the tap! haha

GregClow · Post by **GregClow** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 10:17 am

Wow. Once again, for the few steps forward that the LCBO has been making in terms of carrying and promoting good beer, they've just taken about a hundred steps back.

Could you imagine them putting up a similar application for wine, where the only categories are "red" and "white", and a third of the wines were listed under the wrong category, and many of them had wrong descriptions or prices? Yeah, not likely.

As someone who manages developers in an IT/Data Warehouse environment, there would be no way that I'd allow such an error ridden application to be released into production. And if it was released, some heads would roll.

Good intentions or not, this thing is a fucking embarrassment that should be taken offline until it's corrected.

TJ · Post by TJ » Fri Jul 24, 2009 11:20 am

El Pinguino wrote:Looks like a fun tool to help non beer geeks expand their options. Also looks like it got pushed out way too early. I bet there is some poor guy at the LCBO who wanted so hard to make this beer selector work, but was given ridiculous limitations and deadlines that he was destined to fail.

Hopefully it gets smoothed out and this isn't the final end product.

I agree. The Beer Selector is part of the LCBO's Turn 5 promotion for beer which goes from July 19 to August 15 (go to any LCBO right now and you'll see it's all about the beer) and so I'm guessing that since it went online three or four days late, somebody was being pushed to go live whether they were 100% ready or not.

On the plus side, despite a lot of placeholder images, it's still a nice visual overview of what the LCBO carrries. And it helped me stumble across Aecht Shclenkerla Rauchbier, which I've never tried and didn't know they carried. So that's all right.

I'd love it if they added the pictures to the product listing, or whatever you call the part of the website where you can search for locations. It might help people find what they are looking for a little more easily when they get to the store.

It's just hard to understand the confusion over classifying something called Brooklyn Lager as an ale, or Devil's Pale Ale as a lager (although I think they've sorted out a handful or these since). It's such a fundamentally stupid mistake that makes me wonder if anyone at the LCBO even has the most basic understanding of beer.

Overall though it may help a little, but I don't think it's going to help people find beer they like per se, because for the most part it's really just that they organized the beer by ale/lager, country of origin and colour. I mean, if I was really in the mood for a German lager that was dark in colour or an English Ale that was medium coloured then this would help. But I'm not sure that's really how most people choose their beer.

GregClow wrote:Good intentions or not, this thing is a fucking embarrassment that should be taken offline until it's corrected.

I just had a look and it would appear that as of right now, this is the case. It says it's coming soon.

Bobsy · Post by **Bobsy** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 11:39 am

The fact that you can narrow down the results by the colour of the beer seems to be a stupid feature, and harks back to the fallacy of dark beers being heavy, etc.

There are a lot of mistakes in the categorisation of the beers in the selector, and I hope they fix them pretty quick, because its embarrassing. That aside, this will be a good tool when its fixed.

GregClow · Post by **GregClow** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 12:04 pm

TJ wrote:
GregClow wrote:Good intentions or not, this thing is a fucking embarrassment that should be taken offline until it's corrected.
I just had a look and it would appear that as of right now, this is the case. It says it's coming soon.

It's still loading for me. And still full of errors.

Belgian · Post by **Belgian** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 12:10 pm

Hello Bartowel!! I am new here and have a question:

Are Doppelbocks both a lager AND an ale? They are "dark beer" style so they must be ales too right?

Thanks!
Joe Consumer

Dear Joe,

Your confusion is understandable, and I encourage you to disregard everything The Beer Store and the LCBO websites tell you. They are both horribly iliterate when it comes to describing quality beer.

Instead, a suggestion... Go to www.ratebeer.com and read about the style of each beer you are curious about. The site will rapidly help you find more good examples of each one, so that if you really stick with it, in a few weeks or months you will learn more about beer styles than the LCBO or the Beer Store have learned in their many decades of selling Coors & Yellow Tail products.

Enjoy your beer-hunting quest, and feel free to pop back in here with questions or to share your own thoughts!

TJ · Post by TJ » Fri Jul 24, 2009 1:45 pm

GregClow wrote:It's still loading for me. And still full of errors.

Yeah, it seems to be up again. Must have just been temporary. Oh well. I'm sure they'll sort it out. Eventually.

Wheatsheaf · Post by **Wheatsheaf** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 2:01 pm

They're a bunch of fuckin' amateurs.

carguy · Post by **carguy** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 3:39 pm

You are right Greg, a complete embarrasment. Sad actually.

Bytowner · Post by **Bytowner** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 9:08 am

Nice big and bold beer flyer this morning... some gems highlighted in that vast sea of crap.

Belgian · Post by **Belgian** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 11:21 pm

Bytowner wrote:Nice big and bold beer flyer this morning... some gems highlighted in that vast sea of crap.

I was reflecting today, we DO have a LOT oif beers in Ontario... quite a number... just so many of them are along the lines of Pale Lager, so many are relatively similar, and so many are ones I would try once and... er, well you get the picture Bytowner.

There are a LOT of beers here already in Ontario, and that must be a kind of barrier for new ones breaking in - even porters IPAs stouts lambics or other virtually unrepresented styles must be at a double disadvantage - we have so much 'crap' already clogging the system, and the 'new' styles don't resemble what people usually think of as 'beer' (pale lager).

It's a conundrum.