Ok, so a bit of nerdy talk. I have added a couple of beers today, and noticed that it seems that the beer number in the URL seems to just go up by 1 as beers are added. If my observation is correct (@Todd will have to confirm this), we are currently at 775,000+ beers in the data base. My question is based on number of beers being added per year, when is a good projection when that will hit 1 million. 26, 27, 28??? Just nerdy thought on when this might happen. And when we get close, what beer will put us over the top.
Somebody has to do the rough math and arrive at a projection, so it might as well be me. This site has been around since 1996 so it just finished the 29th year. If we're at 775,000 beers now, that means 26,724 have been added on average per year. To reach 1,000,000 we need another 225,000 so dividing that by the 26,724 means that we'd reach that 1,000,000 goal in 8.4 years. Adding that to 2025 gets us to sometime around April, 2033. (All that math assumes that the new beer additions would continue to occur at an average rate of 26,724 beers per year.) The math is done.
Honestly this is the key to keeping the DB up to date. "Adopt" your local brewery and check in with them for new beers. Add em into BA and we can increase the rate of growth . A countdown clock would be cool , but I feel like it makes more sense when the site is closer to the 1,000,000. Maybe 25,000 away? Fun geeking out with the math @PapaGoose03 . I do wonder if more beers are being added per year in recent past due to places creating so many beers in shorter time periods (ie Tree House, etc)
Yes, but there has been parabolic growth in the number of new beers released per year over that time.
Yeah, that's why I added the 'assumes' statement. With only a tiny membership and the smaller number of breweries in 1996 it's easy to see it was likely a slow start creating the database, and the huge increase in both factors since then means it's likely that the current annual pace exceeds the 26,724. An average number of submissions for the last 2-3 years would be a better number to use for the projection. We'll likely reach the 1,000,000th beer a couple years before 2033.
One hundred percent. According to the latest Forum Statistics, we have almost 800,000 members. If everyone added just one beer to the database, we're there. And I'll bet the One Millionth Beer will be a Mexican lager.
I wonder how much of a difference it would make if we all just added all the beers that are currently on tap in our towns? Since I stopped ticking, I don't think I've added a beer. I'm sure I could add 50ish just from the breweries in my county, and maybe more.
Great post, @cyclonece09! And yes, @sulldaddy, I have the numbers. After weeding out deleted entries, the actual number of beers in the database is 741,889 as of this post. If we group entries by year, starting when we introduced user accounts, we get the following: 2000 = 124 2001 = 1193 2002 = 4236 2003 = 5833 2004 = 5074 2005 = 8278 2006 = 6078 2007 = 5050 2008 = 6027 2009 = 7352 2010 = 9051 2011 = 11398 2012 = 11286 2013 = 20328 2014 = 40486 2015 = 52898 2016 = 51419 2017 = 55530 2018 = 67541 2019 = 64124 2020 = 66429 2021 = 54922 2022 = 50093 2023 = 48229 2024 = 42607 2025 = 45846 2026 = 238 (so far) So we need roughly 258,111 new beers added to reach 1 million, which will take us roughly 5,7 years at our current entry rate (under 1,000 a week) assuming that goes unchanged. If we do nothing, that number will probably drop, however, there's an opportunity here to encourage users to not only add new beers to help us reach 1 million, but to rate some of them too. LFG!
I think even just highlighting it as a stat on the main Beers page would be a good start. We used to do this, but I pulled it for performance reasons. That said, one of my many goals this year is to track some high-level daily stats for beers and places that are essentially cached, which would allow me to bring this back.
This kind of sounds like a challenge to the membership to me. We can publicize an 'Add a Beer Today' day for a couple weeks so that everyone has an opportunity to read about the challenge and has time to decide which beer(s) to purchase or target for addition. It would be interesting to see how many we can add in one day. @Todd likely can develop the stats for the number of beers and the number of participants in the challenge.
I could probably add a good chunk to the database assuming I get a few flights around Nashville at the breweries I've avoided. I've been meaning to try to get Stoke Haus in the database which doesn't have much but don't have photos. Most Nashville breweries also don't repeat beers (at least the ones I go to a lot) so I've been adding probably half of all the beers I drink to the database.
We list over 9,000 breweries in the US alone, but it's a big beer world out there. And how many beers per year really depends on the brewery. Talking under a dozen to hundreds per year.
I just added 11 the past two days, so we'll be to 1 million in no time... But seriously, I've seen many express implicitly that you need to have the beer to add it to the BA DB. Not so! Add the beer with the details from the brewery website or menu. By doing so, you help keep the DB up to date and make it more likely that casual users will rate and review the beer. As @sulldaddy suggested, keep tabs on your locals and periodically add their new beers to the DB.
