Craft Check Blog

After patching a bug that broke literally the one thing the app is supposed to do, celebrated craft beer application Craft Check fixed the bug before immediately issuing a completely superfluous press release touting their basic ability to support their app.

“We really wanted to ensure that we issued a press release,” said Craft Check co-creator Barrett Garese, “though I couldn’t quite remember whether co-creator was spelled as a single word or a hyphenation, making writing this sentence twice as hard as it should have been.”

While not even remotely approaching the kind of serious news and think pieces that the craft beer world generally gravitates towards such as “We’re now canning beers in cans that we’ve only previously bottled in bottles” or “One brewmaster doesn’t like what other brewmaster said, tells twitter,” Craft Check’s press release nonetheless spanned nearly a dozen paragraphs before hiding any real information way down at the bottom, far below what any rational human would read.

“I debated for a while whether we should post this to the craftbeer.com website or not,” Garese continued, forgetting whether he was supposed to refer to himself by first or last name, “because I really wondered whether they’d pull my access and/or yell at me. In the end, whether or not you read it there will have answered the question.”

Craft Check has a history of not taking this part of the job particularly seriously, with previous press releases touting their ambitions to “continue the company’s nefarious plans for ruling the world on a scale heretofore unseen by craft beer mobile applications,” or including parody songs set to overexposed Disney movies. This new press release takes their press releases to a new and innovative level, raising or lowering the bar for all of their press releases to come.

The press release then went on to separate single sentences into new paragraphs, seemingly to emphasize information, but really just continuing the superfluous theme.

“Rudy put me in charge of this,” continued Barrett, going for both name reference options just to ensure he got at least one of them right, “because I am literally useless for any of the actual work involved in this app, and I really feel like he may be thinking even that was a mistake right about now.”

Craft Check’s update is probably already on your phone if you have automatic updates enabled, and if you don’t then you really should. For reasons.

Craft Check is available free for iOS and Android at: CraftCheckApp.com/get-craft-check 

“Oh,” Barrett added as an afterthought, “we also completely revamped the iOS user interface in preparation for major changes coming to both platforms in the near future,” before declining to elaborate further and abruptly ending the press release.

ABOUT CRAFT CHECK
Craft Check was created by Rudy Jahchan and Barrett Garese, and is the world’s most popular craft beer verification app. First released in 2014, Craft Check has since been featured in Fortune Magazine, NPR, Fast Company, Wired, Parade, and nearly a hundred beer, mobile app, and cool hunting blogs, despite writing idiotic press releases like this one.

You may have noticed a shiny new Craft Check update sitting in your notifications - don’t panic, everything’s going according to plan!

• By user request, we added a button to let users manually trigger the flash to improve barcode scanning in dark or low-light scenarios.
• As this flash button was a feature we’d previously removed, we really tried to fit in a “Dark Night Returns” joke, but it just wasn’t happening today. Maybe next time.
• We fixed a bug that caused some users with iPhone 4S models to experience application crashes when they attempted to scan a barcode. Or just open the scan screen. Or click a button. We decided this was ultimately a suboptimal user experience, so we removed the “Instacrash on 4S” feature and replaced it with “Read The Documentation" and “Now It Doesn’t Crash on 4S Anymore” features.
• Read the documentation.
• Continued to be surprised that Apple lets us publish these as our official documented changeling in the app store.

Is that a real Craft Beer or just a crafty imitation? Get Craft Check Version 2.0 right here and find out!

There’s something often said about good intentions. I’m not sure what it is, because our intentions tend to barely graze “chaotic neutral” on the best of days, but suffice to say that sometimes what you get isn’t exactly what you’d planned. 

In our case, what we’d planned for Craft Check was monthly updates as we moved into the next quarter’s development cycle, culminating in a big, splashy release on Android, all of which netted us dozens of awards and a fleet of Ferraris apiece. What we got instead was over a year without updates of any kind (and zero Ferraris.) Those two outcomes are kind of different, regardless of how good our intentions were.

Now I wish we had a better explanation other than “we got busy on some other things” but the reality is that Rudy and I both simply got busy with some other things. Craft Check is a side project for both of us, and in the pursuit of continuing to stave off the haunting specter of homelessness, we both had to play a little life triage and prioritize some day-job-esque things. Unfortunately that means putting off serious work on Craft Check until we were both back to baseline.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that two months ago, we both decided that enough was enough, and we needed to get Craft Check back on track. The best news is that today we released a very new, very updated, and very free Craft Check 2.0!

Craft Check 2.0 is a culmination of a number of updates, primarily focused around technical and user interface improvements, plus a few highly-requested features.

Keep reading

Los Angeles, CA - October 23, 2015 - Craft Check, the world’s most popular craft beer verification app, released version 2.0 of the app to the iOS App Store, dropping the price to free while adding new features to ensure faster database updates, more efficient operation, non-craft beer ownership information, and a quicker answer to the question “Is this a real craft beer, or just a crafty imitation from a multinational beverage conglomerate?”

The biggest change is obviously the price - starting with version 2.0, Craft Check is now 100% free.

“We love supporting genuine craft breweries, and think it’s important to distinguish between what’s real craft beer and what’s multinational corporate beverage conglomerates marketing themselves as small craft breweries.” said Craft Check co-creator Barrett Garese. “So making Craft Check free lets every beer fan easily distinguish between what’s genuinely craft beer and what’s just a crafty imitation.”

Beyond making the app free, Craft Check 2.0 also boasts a number of new changes under the hood.

One of the biggest changes to the app is background database updates. Background updates allow each install to periodically sync with Craft Check’s database, and download any changes or additions. The instant news breaks - such as a craft brewery being bought by a larger multinational corporate beverage conglomerate - every Craft Check install will have access to the updated information so users can get the correct results. Background updates also allow Craft Check to add new breweries to the database as soon as they’re up and running, ensuring that as long as your phone has an internet connection, Craft Check will always be up to date.

Another prominent change in Craft Check 2.0 - one often requested from users - is ownership information for non craft beers. When users scan or search for a non craft beer, Craft Check 2.0 will now show additional information detailing which corporate beverage conglomerate owns or makes the beer.

Craft Check has also revamped its User Interface, streamlining the experience and ensuring that finding answers is quicker and easier than ever.

“I’m a big efficiency guy,” said Garese, “so streamlining it down to as few steps as possible was always a goal. Now it’s even easier to open Craft Check, answer your question, and get back to buying and enjoying your beer.”

Craft Check 2.0 also introduces better sharing options, ensuring users can connect and interact with the genuine craft breweries they love, on their social media platform of choice. Whenever available, Craft Check 2.0 will pull up social media account information to let users tag and highlight genuine craft breweries in their posts.

“Craft Check 2.0 is a huge step for us,” said Garese, “and it takes Craft Check from good to great. More importantly it lays the groundwork for where we want to go from here. We’ve got a lot of interesting ideas around continuing to inform consumers, cut through marketing confusion, enable discovery and experimentation of new beers, and connect our users with the craft breweries they love.”

Craft Check version 2.0 is available today in the iOS App store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/craft-check/id775598291

ABOUT CRAFT CHECK

Craft Check was created by Rudy Jahchan and Barrett Garese, and is the world’s most popular craft beer verification app. First released in 2014, Craft Check has since been featured in Fortune Magazine, NPR, Fast Company, Wired, Parade, and nearly a hundred beer, mobile app, and cool hunting blogs. Craft Check uses the Brewers Association’s definition of “American craft brewer” to help you distinguish the real craft breweries from the macrobrewed impostors - either by scanning the barcode or by searching the brewery name. The Brewers Association is a 501©(6) not-for-profit trade association whose purpose is to promote and protect American craft brewers, their beers and the community of brewing enthusiasts.

Contact:
Barrett Garese
[email protected]
www.craftcheckapp.com

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Rudy continues to stifle my versioning creativity, refusing to consider anything beyond “sequential numbers” for our release names. So this month we’re “proud” to announce Craft Check v1.0.3 (but not as proud as we would have been to announce Craft Check v1.0.MonkeysDoingPeopleThings.)

So you may have noticed that with our last release, there were certain things that were - and hang on here because I’m about to get pretty technical - “broken.” For those new to the tech world, “broken” is a term that denotes “functioning at less than optimal capability.” In this case, certain types of UPC codes - ironically, the kind that are most commonly used on MillerCoors products - scanned improperly about 20-30% of the time, which is just enough to ensure tracking them down is a major pain in the ass.

So we didn’t. We’ve got things to do here, people.

Instead of spending weeks on end trying to figure out why this thing happened sometimes but not always, we just replaced the scanning stack and now things work the way they should have the entire time. Easy, peasy, lemon squee - no. Stop fucking putting lemons in my beer. Limes are okay in certain circumstances. Oranges are never okay - it’s beer, not a fruit salad.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: when life gives you lemons (or oranges), keep them out my beer.

Release Notes:

• Fixed bug where certain types of short width-impaired UPCs improperly scanned and thus returned an incorrect response, those naughty, naughty UPCs. Fixed the issue by changing the scanning stack to native iOS scanning API, and ensured the short width-impaired UPCs were appropriately scolded for their insolence.
• Added or modified entries for a hundred new breweries, including some that contacted us asking why they weren’t in the database despite being authentic Craft Breweries. “Because you never call or write anymore,” we told them, before grudgingly adding them to the database and wondering whether they’re truly happy with that new beer social network or just acting that way on Facebook.
• Finally got around to watching the How I Met Your Mother finale. It went okay.

Good craft beer is hard to find. You might not know it, but most of the “craft” and “micro” breweries you see at your local store are actually made by the same assembly line multinational macrobreweries you see advertised nationwide.

So to help you distinguish the real craft breweries from the macrobrewed impostors, we made Craft Check for iPhone.

Just use your iPhone to scan the barcode of the beer you’re looking at, or search by brewery to instantly find out whether it’s an authentic craft brewery or just an imitation crafty brew from the big guys.

• Scan the barcode of the beer you’re holding, or search by brewery name.
• Uses the Brewers Association definition of American Craft Brewery.
• Instant responses for thousands of breweries.
• Monthly updates with new breweries, buyouts, and changes in the beverage industry.
• Share your results on Twitter and Facebook.
• iOS7 and iPhone 5S compatible.

Craft Check: Drink Craft - Not Crafty.

Just scan or search and instantly know whether you’re looking at a genuine Craft Beer or a crafty impostor from The Big Guys!

Featuring:

• More than 250 new Craft Breweries added to our database thanks to users throughout the country!
• Nearly four interface tweaks to save you precious time and energy!
• Better scanning!
• Fewer bugs!
• More words!
• The same number of people working on it (2.5!)

Everyone knows that there’s nothing sexier on New Year’s Eve than someone who knows their craft beer.** So don’t be the schmuck talking up your Beer IQ with a Shock Top in hand - make sure you’ve got something impressive to show off.

“Oh this?” you’ll say with a jaunty little smile on your face as you nonchalantly pull your party contribution out of its traveling receptacle, all the while cutting a beguiling figure not entirely unlike Han Solo or Princess Leia from Empire on, “It’s nothing really. Just a limited edition release from [insert genuine Craft Brewery here]. I figured I’d bring it along in case someone wanted to try it out.”

“My word,” they’ll exclaim in return, their voice indicating cautious intrigue but betraying more than a hint of wonder, “I’ve been meaning to try this/looking for it everywhere/hoping to find someone who appreciates the mind-boggling complexity of this seductive elixir! Marry me, Gertrude/William! Take me away from this tasteless peasantry and let’s spend the rest of our lives sampling the pleasures held therein!”

See what we mean? Those two are definitely going to enjoy their beers.

So let Craft Check make sure you’re bringing the good shit to the party this year - the rest of your life may depend on it.

**Seriously. It’s a thing. In fact, it’s all we talk about sometimes.

Craft Check: Drink Craft - Not Crafty.