Mikkeller Beer Celebration

Mikkeller Beer Celebration Copenhagen (MBCC) is one of the world's largest craft beer festivals. Since 2012 it has been held once a year in Copenhagen, Denmark, and invites over 100 craft beer breweries to showcase their beers. The festival is split into four different sessions (yellow, blue, red and green) spanning two days.

In 2017, an official app and website was launched, built with React Native and powered by Sanity. The app was subsequently used for MBCC 2018 and 2019.

The app lets users keep track of which beers they've tasted as well as rate, comment and favorite them. With a typo-forgiving search, it's easy to find beers based on the beer or brewery name, as well as beer style.

When the application is started for the first time, a unique, anonymous ID is generated and paired with a third-party Sanity session. When the user rates a beer, it is recorded anonymously to the backend in order to provide the staff with a real-time view on what people are tasting, what the top rated beers are, and even find "hotspots" in the physical venue.

A popular app amongst craft beer enthusiasts is Untappd, which lets users "check in" beers they taste and give them ratings, comments and photos. For the MBCC app, we added a feature that lets users connect their Untappd account to the app and keep it up to date with every rating and comment.

At publication of the app, a snapshot of the available data is bundled with the application, which allows it to work fully offline. Once the device is online it will check Sanity for updates and persist it to the local device. This was an important feature, as there are many international participants which do not necessarily have access to the internet because of roaming costs.

News updates are synchronized with the Sanity backend, and Firebase is used to provide push notifications - allowing for instant updates to all participants with internet access.

The website is powered by Next.js and provides general information on the festival, along with the venues that participate in the Mikkeller Beer Week, a week-long celebration of beer that culminates with the two-day long MBCC festival.

Every beer available at the festival is also available to view on the website, with the same typo-forgiving, instant search used in the app. Many people prefer a more traditional pen and paper approach to beer tasting, so the website also offers a real-time, generated PDF of all the available beers, ready to be printed on paper and annotated with a pen.