Note on the title: pun semi-intended! Couldn’t help myself!

Last year for the Letchworth beer festival we got the idea that we should try using some Google-fu into it and derived a map of the breweries featured in a simple mashup. I started off with addresses of the breweries from Quaff Ale then searched with their postcode (to a similar effect, getlatlon but plugging in all of the datapoints.)

Initially it was fine for the test cases but as there are restrictions on the number of geo location queries on Google maps and the asynchronous nature of the plotting we needed to obtain the equivalent lat/lon. At this point, the reigns were added to Yvan and he refined the map in such a way that it even generated a boosted brewery ‘bubble’ that listed the beers the brewery would be on offer. And custom pull-out markers to make the points easier to read.

Now it’s time for the Hitchin 2012 fest, and I thought it was a rather simple matter of taking the old code and switching the values.. Actually, this is almost correct but the tedium in obtaining addresses: how I forgot how long this took! Then the matter of adjusting the markers..