Beer Directory: A WordPress Plugin for Brewers and Beer Aficionados

Craft beer and WordPress are a magical combination. Both cultures are built on some of the same values, like sharing knowledge and open sourcing happiness. With the explosion of the craft beer scene over the past few years, many new breweries are opting to build their websites on top of WordPress. When you’re bootstrapping a new brewery, the last thing you need to spend money on is proprietary software.

The WordPress community has many free and open source tools that developers can use to build a beer-centered website. Beer Directory is a new plugin released this year by Jami Gibbs, founder of Rescue Themes. She created it to support beer listings on her commercial Brewery theme.

Beer Directory gives you an easy way to enter beers and their details in the admin. It allows you to categorize and group beers, enter details, and display listings via a configurable shortcode. The post type includes fields for ABV, IBU, OG, FG, SRM/Color, Malts, Hops, and Yeast.

I tested the plugin by adding the details from a blueberry sour beer recipe. The output for an individual listing on the frontend will look something like this, depending on your active theme:

The plugin includes a shortcode for listing an individual beer: [beer id="17"] and one for displaying all listings: [beer]. The shortcodes can be configured by count, category, id, and any of the WordPress Order & Orderby Parameters. Beer posts also include support for a featured image.

Be advised that this is not a beer recipe plugin, so there’s no easy way to enter your hop schedule, amounts for fermentables, temperatures, etc. Beer Directory was created purely for listing beers on the frontend with a few key details. If you need to enter beer recipes, the BeerXML Shortcode plugin, created by Derek Springer, is a more suitable option.

The Beer Directory plugin is perfect for home brewers, professional breweries, or even beer enthusiasts who want to maintain a personal library of beers they enjoy. With this data saved in a custom post type, it will be transferable no matter how many times you change your WordPress theme. In addition to keeping track of your beers, the admin listing allows you to easily search and sort your library.

After testing the plugin, I can confirm that it works as advertised. Beer Directory is fully translatable and available for free on WordPress.org. If you want to contribute to development, the plugin can also be found on GitHub.