If the Map Room, the Bucktown beer mecca, has an archetypal customer, then Jonathan Surratt must be it. On a recent afternoon he sat at a table there, drinking a hard-to-find Belgian pale ale (Von Honsebrouck’s Brigand) and scrutinizing a map–a Chicago beer map, no less–on his laptop. “I could do this all day,” he said, scrolling west on Irving Park past an icon for Mike’s American Ale House.
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Surratt launched his Web site, beermapping.com, last October. Using Google maps, the site marks beer destinations–breweries, brewpubs, bars, and stores–across the country. So far he’s listed some 3,158 locations in 22 cities; the national brewery and brewpub map covers more than 1,400. All are select, drawn mostly from publications for beer aficionados. The Chicago map has 138 listings. “People will say, ‘There are 400 bars in my neighborhood and only 4 on the map’,” says Surratt, a 32-year-old e-commerce student at DePaul. “Well, if I were to put every place that had PBR on tap what good would that do?”
“The thing that’s kept me going, because I have a short attention span, is the e-mails I’ve gotten from brewers,” he adds. “Greg Koch from Stone”–the founder of Stone Brewing Company, a near legendary craft brewer in San Diego–“wrote and said, ‘This is a great thing you’re doing for small brewers.’” At a cheese and beer tasting at Goose Island, brewmaster Greg Hall heard who Surratt was and said, “Oh, you’re the beer mapping guy!”
