About

Beer Republic got its start on a laid-back Friday evening in the summer of 2015. I found myself staring at the expanding craft beer section in my local supermarket, thinking back over the variety of bottles I’d tried in recent months. Some had been absolutely brilliant. Others… not so much.

Craft beer was increasing in popularity, with new labels appearing on the shelves every week, and it struck me that there was a real gap for a website that offered straightforward, no-nonsense reviews for the everyday beer drinker. So I decided to build exactly that.

Phase1: Craft beer reviews and A&E

I bounced the idea off my friend Ken, who immediately agreed it was worth pursuing. We spent a while tossing around possible names for the site. The early contenders were beerwithme.ie and beerwego.ie, before we finally landed on Beer Republic. That one just felt right.

In July 2015, we grabbed a selection of five or six craft beers and headed to Ken’s place to kick off our very first batch of reviews. The drinking part was great. The reviewing part… turned out to be trickier than we expected, especially as the night went on.

Then things took a turn. Ken suddenly felt unwell and restless, and it turned out he was allergic to the yeast in one of the beers. Cue an unplanned dash to A&E. After that night, the future of Beer Republic seemed a bit wobbly. Ken now had to avoid certain yeasts, and we had learned that writing beer reviews wasn’t quite as simple as cracking open a few bottles.

Phase 2: The social network

One of the biggest challenges in building a website is filling it with enough content to keep people interested. We quickly realised there was no way the two of us could produce enough reviews on our own. That got us thinking. What if Beer Republic wasn’t just a review site, but a niche social network for craft beer lovers?

We weren’t trying to take on the giants like Facebook or Twitter. We knew asking users to create fresh, original content from scratch wouldn’t work. So we flipped the idea. We would build a community platform where people could set up profiles and pull in all their existing posts from their favourite social channels. Everything they shared about beer, all collected in one place. That became our mission, and after a couple of years of work, we launched our beta site on the 16th of March 2017.

For a while, it was great. Then the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit and every social network tightened up their APIs. Overnight, we lost the ability to link beer profiles to those existing accounts. Since that integration was the whole point of Beer Republic, we had to accept it was no longer viable and shut the platform down.

If you want to take a peek at the original social network version of Beer Republic, you can still check it out click here 🍺

Phase 3: The beer news site

We didn’t want to walk away from the craft beer community, so we headed back to the drawing board and dreamed up a brand-new version of Beer Republic. This time, the idea was simple. We would build a craft beer news aggregator that gathered the best stories, blogs, and updates from across the beer world and brought them together in one place.

That is what Beer Republic is today. We already feature content from more than sixty beer bloggers, breweries, and industry voices, and we’re excited to keep expanding that number. If you’ve got feedback, questions, or you’d like to share your own content with the community, just drop us a message through the contact form.

Cheers to the next chapter. 🍻