The Bar Towel

I joined this board some 15 months ago and I'm very glad that I did. On and off over my life I had tried to find good beer, and while getting close I never really achieved it. It sounds silly but finding good beer takes help. And whether you realize it or not you all helped a great deal.

The other thing I realized after being here was that knowing which beers to select was 75% of it, but finding them was the other 25%. In the west end of Ottawa finding good beer is like finding an oasis in a desert. The sands are always shifting and what you thought was on the horizon was really just a mirage. When you do find it people have already filled their satchels and there's only a drop left.

So in the fall of 2008 I created a little program that did the work for me. It knew what I was looking for and it emailed me if they arrived at any of my stores. It worked great. Many times I knew that stock was in before it had hit the floor. I became the first person to know instead of the last.

It wasn't too long before I realized that I'm probably not the only one who would benefit from the program. So as an attempt to give something back to the community that helped me, I tried my hand at making a publicly available version of my program. It's been a long journey. But a fun one at the same time and has been interesting hobby to get me through the winters.

So without further adieu I would like to very humbly release a website. I hope it makes your life a little easier and brings you an increased enjoyment of good beer in the future.

http://drinkvine.com

Cheers

Thanks for posting this and thanks for all the work you did in order to do so.
I am going to sign up and use it on a regular basis.


Cheers

Your sir,

May save me from rarely going to the LCBO website again.
The only thing I would suggest is to populate an LCBO number field. Oh how many times I have gone to look for something and they want the number rather than the product name. Just a thought.

But this looks pretty good.

The DutchCanuck

Whoa, awesome. Thank you for making this!

I have some suggestions that users might find helpful. Should we strictly submit through your form, or use this thread as a ready-made forum to discuss bugs and enhancements?

Also, do you want us to keep it to ourselves while it's in beta, or should we be telling everyone we know?

Thanks again. This is just what we needed.

Wow, thank you for this! I seem to regularly check the LCBO website doing individual searches when releases come out. This does make my life a little easier.

Also, for general curiosity I love the list of top drinks added by users. Assuming this site gets a lot of users, it will be interesting to see which products are being followed the most.

that's a pretty cool site. nice work. now if only there was a way to import my want list...

Very cool Ralphus, thanks man.

I love this idea wicked hard

Wow, very slick site. I really see this as a great tool. I particularly like the top drinks and seasonal relase links with the ability to add. Thanks for the effort!

Awesome work, Ralphus! Looking forward to using it. If/when you're ready for it to go fully public, let us know, and I'll give it a shout-out on my blog, TasteTO, etc.

Having just set up my account, let me say once again, awesome. Very nice website Ralphus, I'm impressed. You should sell it to the LCBO for big bucks so that they can screw it up.

Pretty slick. I was thinking of building something that lets me know what beers are available at my local stores (e.g. "show beer inventory for store 556") but this does everything I really need.

If you ever see me at the Cheshire Cat, I'll buy you a beer to say thanks. I look just like my avatar only 35 years older

ive tried twice to set-up an account but im not getting a confirmation email

matt7215 wrote:ive tried twice to set-up an account but im not getting a confirmation email

Check your junk mail. That's where mine went.

inertiaboy wrote:Pretty slick. I was thinking of building something that lets me know what beers are available at my local stores (e.g. "show beer inventory for store 556") but this does everything I really need.

I agree with this (well not the part about building it myself). I frequently wish I could just see which products are available at a certain store to see if I should make a stop on my way home. Searching many indivdual products was a pain. Now this just allows me to put the beer I want to buy on a list and I can pick the sort type by store. I have to find something else to do to waste time at work now...