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In a few short weeks, Indianapolis will play host to the 2012 Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is one of the largest attended sporting events in the world and one of the biggest advertising and media focused events to boot. It’s a tremendous opportunity for the city of Indianapolis and the state of Indiana to shine as business leaders and celebrities descend upon us.What better time to show the world what fantastic things Indiana brewers are doing?
Of course, the Super Bowl is a corporate event and the corporate beers pay dearly to get their names onto signs, banners, shampoo bottles, potato chip bags and just about anything else that has room for print. Frankly, it’s an advertisers wet dream and the stakes are way too big for Indiana brewers to compete on the level as the big boys.
But we have the advantage. In Indiana we have real people making real beer. And we have passionate drinkers that care about what they consume and who they get their beer from. And we have the means to let visitors to our state know about it.
During the week of the Super Bowl, Monarch Beverage and World Class Beer will be sponsoring free shuttle buses that will run between downtown, Fountain Square and Mass Ave taking visitors to bars, restaurants and stores along the route. On that bus will be advertising for our “Drink Local” campaign along with a Twitter hashtag, #IndianaBeer.
During Super Bowl week, we strongly encourage everyone to use the #IndianaBeer hashtag to get the word out about local beer and where it can be found anywhere that Super Bowl attendees might be drinking!
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World Class Beer works hard all across the country to give people access to great beer. As beer distributors, our only profit motivation is to sell beer and we think that Beer Spy helps us to do that, by giving the beer drinker access to information on where the beer is and can be purchased. Beer Spy makes it possible for anyone to search for beer locations nearest their zip code!
What is Beer Spy?
Beer Spy is a complete sales history of each beer distributor in the World Class Beer network. It’s a list of all their brands and products and the locations that are selling them. Each day, we submit many thousands of new records to Beer Spy by importing the sales history of our distributor partners to our website, making them searchable by brewery, beer style, brand and then making it possible for you to search that data to find the beer you want at the beer seller closest to your zip code.
Mobile
It’s also mobile friendly. It renders very nicely on smart phones of all brands as long as they have a web browser. It’s not a native app (we’re working on that!) but all the features of the web version are available on your smart phone right now!
It Only Lists Certain Brands
Yes, though we’d love to list them all and are working towards that goal. Frankly, we list the brands we sell. That’s easy. But we’re always open to listing any other brands, even our competitors brands, as long as we can get the data for them. In some cases, individual brewers are happy to send us that data and we post it to Beer Spy, even though we don’t sell it.
Some of the Locations are Out of Date
Perhaps. We list what we sell and we list those locations for a 90 day period. After that, we drop them from the list unless the location has re-ordered. Most days we list around 45,000 different stores, bars and restaurants across the United States and there’s no way for us to look on every shelf or be certain that the beer is still there. It might have sold out the day it arrived, but that’s why we list telephone numbers and other stores that carry the beer you’re looking for.
It Isn’t Perfect
No, it isn’t. I sort of think of it like Winston Churchill’s take on democracy, it’s the worst possible tool for finding beer, except for every other one that has been tried. I think it’s the best possible solution to provide accurate beer locations on a large scale anywhere. It relies only on facts and it can track many thousands of different beers in many different states.
