If you had walked into any BrewDog pub between the 19th and 22nd of October, you would have been met with a menu filled with unique and foreign beers. Each of these from a different brewery around the world, in collaboration with their local BrewDog bar, all extremely different and individual. This is BrewDog’s annual CollabFest – a short craft beer festival in which breweries share and serve each other’s finest beers.
These beers are best served as a “flight”, where instead of getting a pint of just one beer, you can order four small glasses of different beers – a yeasty tasting platter.
On Friday the 19th, we headed down to BrewDog Liverpool for CollabFest; and as we were all excited to try everything, and as software developers, we had to ask ourselves what the nerdiest way was to ensure a proper selection of beer throughout the evening. The answer, of course, was to access the Untapp’d page for BrewDog Liverpool, web-scrape the page for the current beers on tap, filter this down to CollabFest beers, and randomly generate a selection of four. We’d then show our list to the bartender, and they would assemble our randomly generated flight. We coined this creation the “Flight Planner”. We turned this into a web app and soon everyone who had attended with us was excitedly looking up their new selection of beers.
We had a few bugs in development - such as a blindingly fast generation of randomised beers, causing an infinitely changing flight-plan. As well as an unclosed WHILE loop ticking on in the background and seemingly doing nothing. But not long after, we had created an efficient and exciting way to create an order that certainly would surprise us – and ensure we take full advantage of the given menu.
My first generation landed me ‘RIVER’, a sour beer created by Mammoth Beer and BrewDog Canary Wharf, next was a ‘Foggy Skyline, a refreshing New England IPA. Also on the flight was a ‘Crowbar Cold IPA’, a fruity Swedish pale. And finally, ‘Original Pirate Material’ from the area I call home, Birmingham. All of these were delicious, and despite being randomly generated, worked very well together.
This was the first of many flights, each with a different combination of random beers. I do believe this was the best way to take full advantage of such an amazing menu. And once we’d had our fill and split off to various other pubs, we had to admit we’d had a great night – mostly in thanks to the Flight Planner.