AZ Beer Drinkers: My Most Ambitious Web Project Yet

Most of the websites I build start with a fairly straightforward goal. A business needs a better website. A directory needs a better way to organize information. A community needs a place to communicate.

AZ Beer Drinkers started differently.

What began as an idea for bringing together people who enjoy local breweries and craft beer in Arizona has evolved into my most ambitious web development project yet.

I’m not simply building another brewery directory.

I’m building a statewide platform around Arizona beer, community voting, and local breweries.

Starting With a Simple Idea

The original idea was simple: create a community where people could discover local breweries, find beers they might enjoy, and connect with other Arizona beer drinkers.

It originally started with an East Valley focus around Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe, Queen Creek, and surrounding communities.

But the more I developed the platform, the more obvious something became.

There was no reason to limit the concept to the East Valley.

Arizona has breweries and beer drinkers throughout the state. The underlying technology could support Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tucson, Flagstaff, Prescott, and eventually virtually any Arizona community.

That’s when East Valley Drinkers became AZ Beer Drinkers.

The Facebook group provides the social side of the concept. People can talk, share photos, recommend beers and breweries, and connect with other beer drinkers.

But I wanted the website to accomplish something social media doesn’t do particularly well.

I wanted to turn those individual opinions into organized, useful data.

That’s when the project became much bigger.

Building an Arizona Brewery Database

One of the foundations of AZ Beer Drinkers is a growing database of Arizona breweries and their individual locations.

Instead of creating basic pages containing a brewery name, address, and description, I’m building structured profiles that can power multiple parts of the platform.

Each location can have its own profile, beer list, location information, community votes, and rankings.

The same information can then be used throughout the website without manually recreating it.

A brewery in Chandler, for example, can appear on its business profile, a Chandler page, beer-style leaderboards, search results, and other areas of the platform.

The goal is to build the database once and let the platform do more with it.

Voting for Individual Beers

This is where AZ Beer Drinkers really becomes something different.

Visitors aren’t simply rating a brewery as a whole.

They’re voting for the individual beers they’re actually drinking.

Open a brewery’s profile, find the beer you’re drinking, and cast your vote.

The experience is designed primarily for a phone because that’s where I expect people to use it — while they’re actually sitting inside a brewery or taproom with a beer in front of them.

Beers can be organized by type, including IPA, lager, stout, sour, cider, pilsner, Kölsch, wheat beer, hard seltzer, and other categories.

And instead of complicated five-star reviews, the concept is intentionally simple:

Do you like the beer? Vote for it.

As participation grows, those votes become increasingly valuable.

Turning Votes Into Rankings

Collecting votes isn’t the end goal.

It’s what the platform can do with those votes that makes the concept interesting.

Every vote can contribute to rankings throughout AZ Beer Drinkers.

The system can identify customer favorites at an individual brewery while also comparing beers by city, statewide, and by beer type.

That means an IPA isn’t necessarily competing against every beer in Arizona. It can compete against other IPAs.

A beer could potentially become:

A customer favorite at its brewery.

One of the most popular IPAs in Chandler.

One of the most popular IPAs in Arizona.

The rankings aren’t something I have to manually decide.

They’re generated by the people actually drinking the beer.

Instead of me declaring:

“These are the best beers in Arizona.”

AZ Beer Drinkers can say:

“These are the beers Arizona drinkers are voting for.”

That’s a much more interesting model.

Connecting the Website to the Brewery

Another major part of the concept is connecting the digital platform to what happens inside the brewery.

A brewery can display a QR code that takes customers directly to its AZ Beer Drinkers profile.

The customer scans it, sees the brewery’s current beer list, and votes for what they’re drinking.

This is important because I don’t want AZ Beer Drinkers to be something people only discover through Google or social media.

I want the platform to become part of the actual brewery experience.

The website can essentially function as a mobile beer menu while simultaneously collecting community votes.

One interaction can benefit the customer, the brewery, and the larger AZ Beer Drinkers community.

Connecting the Website to the Community

The platform also includes a social component.

After interacting with the beer list, visitors can be encouraged to join the AZ Beer Drinkers Facebook group, share photos, talk about what they’re drinking, and connect with other members.

This creates a bridge between the structured website and the social community.

The website handles breweries, beer menus, voting, rankings, leaderboards, and discovery.

Facebook handles conversations, photos, recommendations, meetups, and interaction between members.

Rather than trying to recreate Facebook, I’m designing the two to complement each other.

Mobile First Isn’t Optional

AZ Beer Drinkers has also forced me to think differently about interface design.

This isn’t a website I expect people to primarily use while sitting at a desktop computer.

They’re going to use it at breweries, taprooms, patios, restaurants, events, and meetups.

That means the mobile experience has to come first.

Buttons need to be easy to tap. Beer lists need to be simple to browse. Information needs to load quickly. Voting can’t require a complicated process.

It’s designing an experience around someone holding a beer in one hand and a phone in the other.

That simple idea influences almost every design decision I make.

Giving Breweries Their Own Tools

The project is also growing beyond the customer-facing website.

The long-term plan is for participating breweries to have access to their own dashboard.

Instead of contacting me every time a beer is added or removed, a brewery could manage its own beer menu and location information.

The dashboard can also provide useful information generated by customer voting.

A brewery could see how its individual beers are performing, how many votes they’re receiving, and how those beers rank within different categories.

For businesses with multiple locations, each location can have its own information and results.

This transforms AZ Beer Drinkers from a website that simply lists breweries into software that breweries can actually use.

Building a Platform That Can Grow

The reason I consider AZ Beer Drinkers my most ambitious web project isn’t necessarily the size of the website today.

It’s the architecture I’m building underneath it.

The brewery database can power profiles and directories.

Beer data can power mobile beer menus.

Customer votes can power rankings and leaderboards.

Location data can power city and statewide discovery pages.

QR codes can connect physical brewery customers with the digital platform.

Business dashboards can give breweries control over their information.

Advertising can eventually be integrated into city pages and leaderboards.

And all of those pieces become more useful as additional breweries, beers, locations, members, and votes are added.

The platform isn’t being built around one feature.

It’s being built as an ecosystem.

From East Valley Drinkers to AZ Beer Drinkers

Changing the name from East Valley Drinkers to AZ Beer Drinkers represents more than a branding change.

It reflects how much larger the project has become.

The East Valley was the starting point.

Arizona is now the opportunity.

The goal is to build something that can help people discover local breweries, find beers they enjoy, see what other customers are drinking, and support Arizona’s local beer community.

At the same time, breweries gain another way to put their beers in front of customers and turn real-world customer activity into measurable exposure.

More Than Another Portfolio Website

I’ve built plenty of websites over the years.

AZ Beer Drinkers feels different.

I’m working on the branding, user experience, database architecture, custom functionality, voting system, rankings, mobile interface, business tools, community strategy, and the systems connecting all of those pieces.

There isn’t a template that does exactly what I want AZ Beer Drinkers to do.

That means I’m figuring out many of the pieces as I build them.

And that’s exactly what makes the project exciting.

AZ Beer Drinkers isn’t just another website in my portfolio. It’s the most ambitious digital platform I’ve attempted to build so far — and I’m still building it.