TOPIC:

Do off licence owners/managers know about this place? Surely it would be of benefit to them if they see a bunch of beer lovers discussing how much they would love to have certain beers available here as it would make life very easy for them? A bit over simplified i know but surely it would be a good thing to have them aware of people here and their demands/needs/wants/urges?

I have chatted with one or two who seem aware of our existence but they don't seem to see it as a resource. They're worse than the bloody publicans. If I owned an offie I'd be shouting about it on this site every time I got a new craft beer in.

We have had occasional off licence proprietors in here, for one thing and another, but no regular contributors.

Personally, I'd prefer it if any of them just had proper web sites with lists of beers, and prices. After several years of waiting, I have stopped believing that the sites of Redmond's[/url:28fvysv9] and McHugh's[/url:28fvysv9] are actually coming soon.

Martin's in Fairview asked us to put a link to their site up, but they have no useful information there, beyond "we sell beer, and some of it is probably drinkable[/url:28fvysv9]".

"TheBeerNut":7uho2xur wrote:
Martin's in Fairview asked us to put a link to their site up, but they have no useful information there, beyond "we sell beer, and some of it is probably drinkable".[/quote:7uho2xur]

Strangely i understand why their website is so vague, coming from a FMCG retail Outlet point of view. Keeping a constant list of what beers are available would be a technological nightmare, requiring all kinds of stock control so as not to disappoint anyone who has ventured in to the shop to purchase a particular item mentioned on the site, which may or may not be in stock.

this type of stock control is not such an issue with large retailers such as Tesco. the technology is usually already in place in their retail outlets so that they can build very complicated databases that tell them just exactly what type of underwear you want to be wearing when you buy a goodfellas deep pan cheese pizza.

Ruth from Deveneys Dundrum is also aware of the site, I dunno if she's joined or lurked or whatever. She is trying to build a database of people who would be interested in receiving monthly beer-packs, sort of a beer-club I suppose.

Since I live across the road from the place, if anyone slightly further afield would like to have their email address added rather than making the trek themselves feel free to drop me a pm with your address and I can supply it to her (nothing may come of this of course, it's all in the planning stage).

With regards to the website stuff - most offies I've been in are already computerized wrt stock, prices etc, so it would be very simple to interface to that database with the frontend webserver, don't know why more don't do it.

"beeristhereason":g1a58f94 wrote: Keeping a constant list of what beers are available would be a technological nightmare, requiring all kinds of stock control so as not to disappoint anyone who has ventured in to the shop to purchase a particular item mentioned on the site, which may or may not be in stock.[/quote:g1a58f94]I know what you mean, but I'm not talking a live database fed through from a fancy stock database.

I mean:
1. They must have regular beers. Some indicator that "world beers" means more than Fosters, Tiger and San Miguel. There are several English, German and Belgian beers that never go off the market. If they stock them, list them, even if they can't guarantee that they'll be on the shelves at any given time.

2. Carvill's and Deveney's have a dot-matrix-printed pricelist sellotaped to their fridges. I'm guessing every off licence has, or can produce, something like this. Stick a date on it, run it through a scanner, bung it on the web and you have something that's better than nothing.

3. Blog/Twitter/Facebook. It costs nothing, and you just say what's come in as it comes in. The wine retailers are all over this kind of thing (Bubble Brothers, Curious Wines, etc), and Dutch wholesaler Bierenco runs a Twitter feed which talks about whatever beers they're currently pushing.

I think most them haven't really copped on that marketing can mean more than a pretty Erdinger display in the window.