Pouring in Melbourne – the search for great beer

Almost every Friday, my mind wanders to what beers I would like to drink when I finish work.

Who has what? What is new? What is back?

With social media being instant, it is pretty easy to keep up with it all but I know there are some bars that don’t update either their websites, facebook or twitter, and they may not be frequented by people I know.

It troubles me to think there are bars pouring great beer and I don’t know about it. You probably don’t know about it. If we did, chances are we would be banging down the door come opening time.

Over the years I have toyed with the idea of setting up an app, or a site where bars can update their taplists easily and people can access freely. One such site  is wherethetruck.at – which gives food trucks a place to log their whereabouts so hungry fans can seek them out. Excellent idea, works well and I would count myself as a regular user.

The problem with doing such a thing for bars is that they wouldn’t use it – it would be too much of a pain to update a new keg as it changes on a busy Friday night; and as mentioned many don’t update their existing social media so chances of them updating another are slim.

I would also need buy-in from a vast majority of good beer places to make it worth my while. No point doing it if only a handful of the good ones join in, and if they all did, the amount of “noise” wouldn’t really make it useful. Who cares if 10 different places have the same beer that is always on tap anyway.

As I’ve toyed with a few ideas I eventually decided to start with a simple twitter account and let it evolve from there. So about 2 weeks ago I created @PouringInMelb (originally MelbTapHunt but there is already a TapHunter app so I didn’t want to cause confusion).  My plan was to just start putting out there what I knew was on tap. Harvesting from a few different sources each day and sending out a daily update over a few tweets.

Even in these two weeks it has evolved into something useful and something I’m getting great feedback on from beer lovers and venues alike.

Now each day from @PouringInMelbourne my helpers and I send out a top 3(ish) “Taps of the Day” . Whether it is something rare, new or something we think suits the weather, followers of PiM will only get the best (as deemed by us of course).

Once the top 3(ish) is done for the day we will also retweet other taplists or new taps that come our way. No point in only restricting things to 3 if we know there is more beer out there.

As I move forward I hope to grow Pouring in Melbourne (PiM) by what social media “experts” love to call “crowd sourcing”. By using the small army of beer lovers across Melbourne to feed back photos of taps, newly tapped kegs and exciting beer to the PiM twitter account the result will be a comprehensive resource of the best beer available at any one time.

While this is only a twitter account, we do have plans for a site in the near future. There are some details that I would like to iron out before that goes live. I have a clear picture in mind for the site but creating that takes more time than we have at this stage (unless anyone is going to pay me to do this so I can go fulltime… anyone?)

Further down the track we have bigger plans for Pouring in Melbourne. All centred around great draught beer. More info as time goes though.

If you are a beer lover or venue in Melbourne, then we would love to have you following PiM on twitter. And we would equally love it if you could assist with any information you have.

Also if people want to assist with ideas or time, email me at aleofatime dot gmail dot com.

Edit: Also there is now a @PouringInSydney for you Sydney folk.