My current tap list BeerSmith seems to have established itself as the most popular recipe construction & inventory management system available to brewers. Unfortunately, this information contained within the product is not normally available to end users in an easy-to-consume format. I was interested in driving a website-based tap listing using BeerSmith rather than having to hard code onto my site, or use some other system. Here's how to achieve something similar to [the tap listing on my site](http://cianclarke.com/beers).

Prerequisites

1. BeerSmith 2
2. Some place to deploy a Node.js application - we’ll use an account on Heroku.
3. A web site on which you can edit the HTML.

Setup

1. The first thing needed is to make the BeerSmith recipes file publically accessible. I achieved this by moving my BeerSmith documents directory to DropBox, but any file syncing service should work, once you can access that file over some external web address. 2.

2. Once in DropBox, I navigated to the data directory, and copied a public sharing link for this file.
   
   Make sure to share this file, and this file only - your password is stored in another file in this directory. Do not copy your BeerSmith data directory to your DropBox Public folder.

3. Set the Assistent Brewer field on every recipe you want to appear - I recommend setting “On Deck” and “On Tap”.

4. You’ll need a Heroku account to do this. Click the Deploy button at the top of the GitHub Page for BeerSmith Taplist. Once logged in, Heroku will ask you to fill in a text box in the ENV section. It’ll look something like this:
   
   In this box, fill in the public URL of your recipe file from the above dropbox step. The name of your application doesn’t matter - now click the Deploy button. This step might take a few minutes.
   Once completed, click the “View it” link. You should see a page full of funnily formatted text starting with { - this is your tap listing formatted as JSON data, and means everything worked OK. Take the URL of this page, and make a note of it.

5. Include the BeerSmith Taplist Code Snippet in the HTML of your web site where you want your listing to appear. Be sure to replace PUT_YOUR_APP_URL_HERE with the URL of your heroku app from the previous “Deploy to Heroku” step.

You can now style the tap listing using CSS to your hearts content!
If you’re a more advanced user who uses Node.js to build their site, you can also do some more advanced stuff with this - see the instructions on GitHub.

See it in action

I’m using this on my personal website here: http://cianclarke.com/beers I’m using the Node.js version, but with a little JavaScript knowledge similar could be achieved using the above code.

What’s next

Next, I’d like to try and add a route to the app which gets deployed in Heroku that returns a transparent PNG with the user’s tap listing. This would allow people to embed their tap listing in places like online forums. If I don’t get around to it, pull requests welcome!