The evolution of Beer Republic began on a Friday evening during the summer of 2015 as I stood in front of the craft beer section of my local Supermarket. I had purchased many different craft beers over the last few months and found that I really liked some but others weren’t for me.
The craft beer market has gone from strength to strength over the last few years and there seemed to be some new craft beers on the shelf every week. It struck me that a craft beer website that gave simple non-pretentious reviews for the ordinary beer drinker would be really useful so I decided to create one.
Phase1: Craft beer reviews and A&E
I discussed this with my friend Ken who also thought this was really good idea. We sat around and tried to think of a good name for the site , the first we came up beerwithme.ie and then beerwego.ie and finally we decided on Beer Republic which we all thought was a good fit.
So one evening in July 2015 we bought 5 or 6 craft beers and went to Kens house and started our first set of reviews. Much as we liked the beers we soon realized that writing reviews was difficult and became harder as the night wore on .
Then Ken started to feel unwell and agitated, it turned out he was allergic to the yeast in one of the beers and we had to make a quick trip to A&E. So things didn’t look good for Beer Republic as Ken was told that he had to keep way from certain types of yeast and we had discovered writing reviews wasn’t as easy as we thought.
Phase 2: The social network
One of the most difficult things in developing a website is creating content for it and we now knew we were never going to be able to create enough content ourselves. We came up with the idea of creating a niche social network for the craft beer sector. We knew we couldn’t compete with the likes of social networks like Facebook or Twitter, and to expect our users to create new content for our social network wasn’t a successful strategy.
We decided we would create a community social network with user profiles where users could import all their existing social media sources and showcase all their social media output in the one place. From that point on we have been working on Beer Republic and we made the beta site live on the 16th of March 2017.
After a few years of Beerrepublic.ie the real game changer came from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. All the social networks tightened up their API and we couldn’t connect our beer profiles to existing social media accounts anymore. As this was our main selling point, we decided to shut down Beerrepublic.ie as it was no longer viable as a platform. And in fairness the craic-beer-community took on the craft beer social network idea and have made a real success of it.
Want to look at the old social network version of the site click here
Phase 3: The beer news site
But we didn’t want to abandon craft beer community and so we went back to the drawing board to produce a completely new version the site.We decided to create a news aggregator for craft beer that pulls all the best beer news and blogs into the one place.
And that is what the site has become with currently over fifty beer bloggers, breweries and others providing content for the site and we aim to continue to grow that number. If you have feedback, questions or want to become a content provider please use the form on our contact page.
The Beer Republic team
