Avoid the scourge of macro-brewed craft beer with Craft Check for iPhone

The trend of microbreweries making delicious small-batch craft beers has spawned a series of imitators. With the recent consolidation of the beer industry into four main camps — Anheuser-Busch InBev, SABMiller, Heineken Group, and Carlsberg — it’s sometimes hard to tell which “small batch” brew is in fact owned by a multi-billion dollar multinational.

Craft Check, an app recently released for iOS, aims to solve that problem with your smartphone’s camera and an extensive database of which beers are made by which company. Sometimes the reason for buying beer from a small, independent microbrewery will be about staying local; other times it will be about quality; others, about unique taste. The app scans a beer’s barcode to determine its origin, and its qualification is checked against the Brewer’s Association definition of American Craft Brewery.

While the app costs $0.99, the creators Barrett Garese and Rudy Jahchan are building and maintaining it in their spare time. They’ve also received, and acknowledged, requests for an Android version, which the pair says is coming soon.

[source]App Store[/source]