Help: Adding Beers and Breweries

• How do I add a missing beer or brewery?
• How should I format the beer's/brewery's name/location/website?
• I just added a beer, but it didn't show up in the Recent Additions list - why?
• I just added a beer with a typo, or found a duplicate, or chose the wrong brewery - what should I do?
• Can I add wines (or other drinks) here?
• Can I add homebrew?
• What are tags? (Where do I specify the style of the beer?)

Once you're logged in, you'll see an "Add a new beer!" link on the left side of the page. Click it, and you'll be prompted for the beer's name and brewery.

Typing in a new brewery name will create a new brewery automatically. You'll have the option of filling in the location and website of the brewery. There is no way to add a brewery without adding at least one beer that it brews.

Quick tip: The easiest way to get the brewery's name right is to first navigate to the brewery's page (or any of it's beers' pages) on BeerRiot. If you click "Add a new beer!" on that page, the brewery field will be filled in automatically.

For beers:

• Use the name that the brewery uses to refer to the beer. For example, use "Natural Light", not "Natty Light".
• Leave the brewery's name off unless the rest of the name is something generic. The brewery's name will always beer shown with the beer, so repetition isn't necessary. For example, "Harpoon IPA" is fine because IPA is a generic term, but "UFO Hefeweizen" is unique enough that it doesn't need "Harpoon" on the front.

For breweries:

• Use the proper name of the brewery.
• If the brewery is a subsidiary of a larger corporation (for example, InBev, A-B, Miller), consider including the larger corp.'s name in parentheses afterward.
• Street addresses are encouraged, to prevent multiple breweries in the same city from stacking upon each other on the map.
• Link to the top-level of the brewery's website, not to their beer list. (for example, use "http://www.guinness.com" instead of "http://www.guinness.com/us_en/beer/default.aspx")

To prevent spam from showing up on the front page, we moderate the Recent Additions list. Everyone can still find your beer by searching or browsing, but it may not show up in the Recent Additions list imediately. Please be patient - we don't have many moderators yet.

Just click the "Report" button on the beer's/brewery's page. Indicate what the problem is on the form that you are presented. Submit the form, and an admin will take care of the issue. Thanks for improving BeerRiot's list!

In short, no. We'll remove anything we don't consider a form of beer.

Of course, "beer" is a pretty wide category, and we'll acknowledge things like barley wine and malt beverages made with grains other than barley or herbs other than hops. But, wine, hard alcohol, and soft drinks are right out.

Yes! We love homebrew here, especially if you also post the recipe in the comments. Just make up a name for your "brewery" (it may be a good idea to include "homebrew" in the title).

Be forewarned, however, that due to the limited-distribution scale of your homebrew, voting on them is likely to influence your grouping more than other beers.

Tags are a way to capture extra information about beers. For example, if a beer is homemade, it would be appropriate to tag it as homebrew. You might also consider tagging organic beers as organic, gluten-free beers as gluten-free, etc.

Another use of tags is to categorize beers by their style. One might consider tagging stouts stout, IPAs ipa, etc. That will make it easy for everyone to find a certain category, if that's what they're looking for.

What tags are not designed for is labeling beers as good, bad, or any other rating of their quality. The whole point of BeerRiot is that people disagree about what constitutes good and bad in beers. As such, tags of that nature are blocked from use.

The only limits on tags are that they can be no longer than 32 characters, and that they can't be only numerals. The range is open otherwise.