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Tech

CraftCrawler: the App for What Ales You

This app shows you where the nearest craft brewery is.

​At the intersection of "local," "apps," and "beer," sits CraftCrawler. What could possibly be more "now" than an app that steers you to the closest craft brewery? Only an app that never makes money, as it turns out. But even though it's entering the easy-to-enter-and-easy-to-fail-out-of world of apps, CraftCrawler's got a plan for that.

The plan isn't to make you pay for the app though. CraftCrawler is free in the iTunes app store as of today and will be available for free in the Android App store before the year ends, John Bentley, CraftCrawler's founder and owner told me. I had called Bentley to hear about how CraftCrawler works.

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"If you allow it to locate you, it locates you and it will tell you all the breweries around you," he said. "For any of the featured breweries, it'll have a bunch information about them: the reviews, their 'About Us,' their beers, some pictures, and information on whether they have TVs or a full bar or full menu. For all of the others, you can call and get directions and their phone number and the app links to their website. The first build we're pushing today is pretty simple. It'll tell you the breweries around you, and then you can search by city or search by individual brewery and find the hours and information about it."

Consumers have made it abundantly clear that they don't like paying for apps. Even well-reviewed games like "Monument Valley" get raked over the coals if they deign to make someone pay even two bucks in the app store. Even if you could charge people, that's only a one-time small fee, which doesn't seem viable for maintaining an app that you want to keep fresh and updated for the 3,200-3,300 craft breweries already operating in America, and the roughly 1,700 breweries that Bentley told me are in the planning stages.

So CraftCrawler's plan is to have breweries shoulder the bill.

"How we're first hoping to generate revenue is that breweries have the option to register their brewery for $300/year," Bentley said. "That gives them a login to where they can control their own profile and their own information."

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Being a "featured brewery" also overrides CraftCrawler's geographic restrictions.

"That featured brewery comes up at the top of a list regardless of distance," Bentley said. "Using Denver as an example, we have three registered breweries out of 35 or whatever. Even if those breweries are further away from you, they'll be listed at the top of your search results, and highlighted, and straight from the menu screen it will say whether they're open or not. So hopefully breweries will see right away that there's a reason to register. Getting breweries to register is our first crack at generating revenue."

So breweries are paying to game the CraftCrawler search results. Obviously CraftCrawler isn't Google, so it's hard to imagine someone arguing that there's an ethical breach happening here. But it is worth considering: if the breweries are paying the bills, how does that change the business?

One way is that there aren't plans for CraftCrawler to offer a space for consumer reviews, like apps like UnTapped do, per the request from breweries.

"Traveling to some of these smaller breweries, they're really not such a fan of UnTapped and Yelp other places that let people give their beers two stars or stuff," Bentley said. "So we're trying to avoid that. We want our app to be the app that gets people into breweries, not let people look at the app and just say 'Oh they don't have good beer, I don't want to go there.'"

CraftCrawler is now Bentley's day job, a passion project after a foray into working in South Georgia farm and farm-related businesses. It's easy to see the appeal of running a craft beer app, especially as he describes it.

"Being able to walk to a brewery and see the people making it and hearing their story, that's been the coolest part for us," he said. "We've gone around to probably 100 breweries and everybody's story is different but they all make good beer. They all obviously take a lot of pride in what they do; in a lot of cases they take a lot of pride in their city as well."

And that's what's attracting young people into craft breweries. "They're liking extra options and exploring their palates and finding the beers that they like," Bentley said.

Oh millenials. We like options; we hate paying. CraftCrawler is so now.