Beer Map Revisited!

Many Coloradans take great pride in the beer produced within their state. I guess there are few who have not seen a Coors Light commercial with the "Silver Bullet" train rushing through the snow-capped Rockies. You may also not know that the Golden Software office is just a few blocks away from Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado. The Coors brewery in Golden is the largest single brewery facility in the world! Also, the annual Great American Beer Festival , a multi-day event dedicated to the celebration of craft brewing, is held in Denver the first weekend in October. 

Given our presence in a beer-loving state, I thought it would be good to update a Blog post from 2011 that used MapViewer to display a map of the many breweries located in Colorado. For this update, I will be using Surfer to create a similar map of the approximately 215 breweries in Colorado...at last count.

Below I have provided a brief description of how I obtained the data to create this map using Surfer 12 . Collecting and organizing your data is the most important step for updating this map. To update the Colorado Brewery Map I needed to find a list of all of the breweries in Colorado. One of the best resources for this information is the CraftBeer.com website.

The website currently lists all of the breweries in the U.S. that are registered with the Brewers Association. Using the website’s Find a US brewery tool, I was able to locate all of the breweries in Colorado. In 2011, when this post was first created, there were 115 breweries mapped. In the past three years, that number has grown to 215, or an increase of approximately 186%. Below I have described the process of updating the Colorado BEER MAP!

First, I created a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet that contains the names of each brewery listed with the Brewers Association. I then searched the name of the brewery and used Google Maps to gather the latitude and longitude coordinates.

Instructions to find the Latitude and Longitude of a point in Google Maps:

1. Visit Google Maps or use Google Earth to find the coordinates of each brewery listed in the attached Excel worksheet.
2. Double-click a location on the map.
3. The address bar of your browser will zoom to the location and display the latitude and longitude coordinates in the address bar of our internet browser.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Golden+City+Brewery/@39.7545983,-105.2239597,19z

4. Copy these coordinates into a worksheet containing the brewery location information, similar to the example show below.

Once you have compiled your list of breweries and locations (see BeerMapRevisited.xlsx), you can create a Post Map of those locations in Surfer. Below are the steps that I used to create the map shown above using Surfer 12.  

1. Click File | New | Plot to open a blank Surfer Plot window.
2. Use the Map | New | Post Map command to begin creating your Post Map.
   1. In the Open Data dialog, select your data file, i.e. BeerMapRevisited.xlsx.
   2. Click Open.
3. In the Object Manager, expand the + next to Map and select the Post-BeerMapRevisited.xlsx object.
4.  In the Property Manager | General tab, expand the + next to Worksheet Columns.
   1. Set the X coordinates to Column B: Longitude. If a Surfer Warning dialog appears, click Yes.
   2. Set the Y coordinates to Column A: Latitude. 
5. In the Property Manager | Symbol tab, set the formatting for the symbols displaying the brewery locations.

After creating the post map, I used the File | Import command to import the background and CO Beer Mug images. I also used the Draw | Text commands to add and format the title text. 

As a comparison to the new Beer Map shown above, you can view a similar map created in 2011 and included in the original Beer Map  blog post. 

If you have any further questions about how this map was created, or how you could make a similar map using your own data, please contact Golden Software Support .

Phone Support
8:00 am to 5:00 pm Mountain Time, Monday through Friday (excluding US holidays)
+1 303 279 1021
+1 800 972 1021

LiveChat (available by clicking the LiveChat link at the top of the page.)
9:00 am to 4:00 pm Mountain Time, Monday through Friday (excluding US holidays)