I am not really sure where I learned of TapCellar or of Gabe Weatherhead and Jeff Hunsberger’s Nerds on Draft podcast but I did and my beer drinking and podcast listening life has been better for it. Unfortunately in today’s app store environment this wonderful beer app had to be retired.

TapCellar was really everything I want in a beer tracking app and it is a damn shame that more people didn’t agree that the modest price was worth it. I think I bought TapCellar when it was first released and going for $5 or so on the App Store; well worth the modest price. The features I really liked were:

  • offline access to the beer database

  • private tracking of the beers I drink

  • ability to share via various social media channels if I so choose w/ the extremely well done mug shot

  • customized saved filters

  • the app icon

  • ability to track cellar inventory as well as bookmark beers

  • use of the SRM (Standard Reference Method) to showcase the colors of beer.

I used the custom saved filters in a variety of ways but my favorite was to use one to pull up all the beers I’ve had over the years during Beermas. What’s Beermas you ask? Well, it is an advent calendar of beer. Find 6 beer loving friends and have each of them recommend several beers to be considered for inclusion in that year’s Beermas event. The organizer then selects, purchases, wraps, numbers, and distributes the 25 beers (case plus one) that will be consumed for that year’s event. Each participant simply opens one beer a day for 25 days and enjoys the surprise and hopefully that day’s selection. I’ve been part of a group doing it for 5 years now. At our largest we had 12 participants and we inspired a friend of mine to start his own group which maxed out at 24 participants last year! So that is Beermas and I loved being able to pull up my lists with Tapcellar’s well executed custom saved filters.

Really, it was a well-thought out and beautifully designed app and know it is gone. Cheers Gabe and Jeff, I am pouring one out for TapCellar, I enjoyed it and will continute to use it until it stops working.

On that point, I have begun thinking about alternatives. For now I am going to test logging with a combination of Launch Center Pro, DayOne, and Drafts. Much has been written about this and I am already a DayOne user (even though they still don’t have encrypted sync rolled out and it isn’t going to work with iCloud or DropBox anyway but that’s a different post). For now, some combination of LCP, DayOne, and / or Drafts is the route I am thinking I will take. Looks like Gabe has been thinking about alternative workflows as well. I got a kick out of the fact that Citra Splendor, a beer I love by one of my favorite small, local brewers, was used as the example in his post.