During a recent brewery horizontal of Against the Grain (AtG), several of their beers turned out to be collaborations. This is all well & good, but the problem (?) arises when there is no set standard for formatting the names of these beers. What ends up happening is that without uniform naming guidelines and the default sort guidelines of the site, it becomes problematic to find these beers as they do not show up (strictly) alphabetically. Phew! I am not going to bother with examples as they are rampant, but I would like to give an example of my proposed format for collaboration beers: Primary Brewer / Secondary Brewer / Tertiary Brewer - Beer Name Please note the spaces between the diacritical marks. At first, I was against them, but in retrospect, a) they make the delineation clearer between brewers, b) this seems to be the consensus format, based on many users' entries & c) it allows one to see where the breweries' names end and the beer name begins. An example: Stillwater / Sleeping Giant - Collaborations Are For Lovers and another: Against the Grain / Freigeist - Gegen Den Strom Knupp I know that this may come across as pretty anal, but as an early-database US Navy Storekeeper, when you do not have standardization within the database, you lose the ability to see all entries equally. It may seem invisible to you as an enduser, but those spaces and diacritical marks are essential when sorting in alpha order as this site does. Without them, it skews the sort and may render a beer "invisible", leading to the addition of a duplicate listing simply because the sort put the entry lower on the page. Jeez, I know that this sounds like the rant of a Data Programming Specialist (DP), which I initially thought of becoming, but it is simply attention to detail. The old adage, "The Devil is in the details" applies. I will be VERY interested to hear of others' thoughts.
Woody, Primary Brewer / Secondary Brewer / Tertiary Brewer - Beer Name This is exactly the format that we have been using - the Site Editors fix the name when it is reported or when we come across one that is formatted incorrectly but please keep reporting them if you see them incorrectly. Cheers! David Site Editor
That may be the case, but it needs to be widely publicized or else you run the risk of having to correct others' ignorance.
Sentence style capitalization is well known yet I correct numerous of those daily... As is the style differentiation for things like single and double/imperial IPAs or Stouts but again those are fairly common errors. @Todd Can we get How to Add Beers updated with the guidelines for collaborations?
It's something we've discussed, but we're going to wait to add guidelines. @Mike and I need to create a better way to handle/display them first.
Woody, we are at the whim of the people that create the beers. Most are created without a second brewery and we have no clue its a collaboration until we're told it is. And to be honest, most people arent gonna read any guidelines, but will be good to have. I spend more time correcting spelling and grammar than anything else.
Feel free to ignore this suggestion, especially if (as @dbrauneis suggests) there's already a BA Standard that is already being applied. But anyway... For my own spreadsheet, I enter collaboration beer names as Beer Name (with Secondary Brewer, Tertiary Brewer) Two main advantages: 1) No duplication of information 2) Easier to find beers alphabetically 1. This naming standard adheres to the otherwise-standard practice on BeerAdvocate of NOT entering the brewery's name as part of the beer name. It becomes duplicate information at that point. And duplication that becomes hindering in cases of long beer names, causing portion of the beer name to be dropped. Example: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/22150/223702/ 2. When viewing an alphabetic list, there would only be ONE place to look for the beer's name. 2a. This is especially important if the viewer is unaware that the beer in question is a collaboration (or who the collaboration is with), potentially leading to duplicate entries. 2b. Also important when a beer - that IS a collaboration - is not entered as such. Again, the listing would not be in the expected location. Example (that is an Omnipollo collab): https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/32409/271681/ While I feel like this would be better, I don't know if it's worth changing all entries from the current standard. But I thought I'd put it out there. Cheers! ps - Woody, I enjoy reading your reviews immensely. Keep it up!
I know this thread's over a year old, but I didn't find anything newer. I recently added a couple of beers that were collaborations between a brewery and local artists, I used that exact format but they were all edited to just the beer name later. Did we move away from the "[Brewery] / [Collaborator] - [Beer Name]" format at some point? Or was it just because the collab. is between a brewer and a non-brewer that it was removed? Just want some clarification in case I've been adding stuff wrong all this time.
Yes. Trying to stuff every collaborator's name into the beer's name and before the actual name of the beer is something that we'll be addressing soon. Basically, it needs to stop. That info can go into the notes. More to follow...
I'm super glad this will be addressed. I vote for the parenthetical style ie: "Whatever Stout (collaboration with Generic Brewing)". I like having the collaboration on the name line because it is often very clearly stated on the label, but the concatenated brewery names get out of hand and do seem to be likely to produce duplicate listings.
This would be completely counterproductive to what is supposed to be achieved here though, as this would actually make the beer names longer, not shorter. I would actually suggest adding a new field for collaboration breweries right under the main brewery field, kinda like it is on untappd.
I've already begun changing beer names, eliminating collaborating breweries and putting them in the notes. I'm gonna need to quit my job to get through Evil Twin, but whatever it takes!
I also recommend not sending us change requests on this just yet. Give us a few months to burn through most stuff, otherwise the queue will be ridiculous
How about we just stop drinking collab beers? The are never better than either brewery's regular beer and it's probably just another NEIPA anyway.
So we are already at the stage where we do not put collaboration breweries into the beer name anymore and should ignore such reports?
Yeah, I'd assume so. Todd was talking about it on Telegram, so I'd just add "Collaboration with Joe Blow Brewing" in the notes and not add it to the name.
Sehr gut, but let's await the final say from on high. @Todd ? You DO know what happens when you assume, right?
I like just adding the collaboration brewers in the notes. Less data points are better, unless we intend to make that feature searchable. And if that's the case, those searches for Mikkeller or Stillwater collabs might break the search engine....
Coming from a background that included some data entry and database design, that would seem to be the ideal solution, but I've always felt that adding fields here was not on the table. From a database point of view, that would make them searchable too, which would be more awkward in a notes field.
