Open Brewery DB Scraper

---

🎯 What this scrapes

Open Brewery DB is a free, keyless, no-auth JSON API listing breweries, cideries, and brewpubs. It is genuinely useful — but its raw shape is not friendly to a one-off integration: results cap at 200 rows per page, there are six separate by_* filter params spread across list and search endpoints, and telling "this filter matched nothing" apart from "the page paging just ended early" requires a second call to a meta endpoint most integrators never discover.

This Actor collapses all of that into one input form. Pick a search mode — city, state, country, brewery type, name, postal code, or lat/lng distance — and it pages the API on your behalf, validates every record against a typed schema, and hands you back a clean dataset. It also tells the difference, in plain language, between "your filter matched zero breweries" and "the source ran out before your max results cap" — two very different outcomes that look identical if you only watch a row count.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🔁 Automatic pagination — Open Brewery DB caps every request at 200 rows. We page through to your maxResults limit or until the source is exhausted, and merge the results transparently.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware backoff — on 408/429/503 responses we back off exponentially and honour Retry-After headers, retrying up to 5 times before surfacing an error.
• 🧊 Pydantic-validated rows — every record is typed at write time. A single malformed record is skipped and logged, never crashes the run.
• ✅ Honest empty results — a search mode that genuinely matches nothing finishes successfully with a status message naming the exact filter or query that came up empty — it is never confused with a broken run.
• 🌐 Proxy-ready — an optional Apify Proxy pass-through is available if your network needs it; the public API itself needs no authentication or rotation.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only for records that land in your dataset, plus a small run warm-up fee.

💡 Use cases

• Hospitality lead-gen lists — pull every brewery, cidery, or brewpub in a city or state and load contact details straight into your outreach pipeline.
• Beverage distributor territory mapping — filter by state, city, or postal code to plan sales coverage and route planning.
• POS / CRM vendor onboarding — populate a venue database for a beverage-industry product without hand-rolling API paging.
• Craft-beer travel and tourism apps — build a location-searchable brewery directory using the lat/lng radius search mode.
• Market research — count and map brewery density by state, country, or brewery type (micro, brewpub, regional, etc.).

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free — no credit card required.
2. Pick a Search mode: city, state, country, type, postal, name, dist, or all.
3. Fill in the matching field for that mode — e.g. byCity for city mode, or both byDistLat/byDistLng for dist mode.
4. Set Max results — the row cap across all pages.
5. Click Start. Results stream into the dataset in real time.
6. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
searchMode	string	yes	all	city / state / country / type / postal / name / dist / all
byCity	string	iff searchMode=city	—	City name
byState	string	iff searchMode=state	—	State or province name
byCountry	string	iff searchMode=country	—	Country name
byPostal	string	iff searchMode=postal	—	Postal / ZIP code
byType	string	iff searchMode=type	—	micro / nano / regional / brewpub / large / planning / bar / contract / proprietor / closed
searchQuery	string	iff searchMode=name	—	Free-text brewery name search
byDistLat	number	iff searchMode=dist	—	Latitude, -90..90
byDistLng	number	iff searchMode=dist	—	Longitude, -180..180
maxResults	integer	no	500	Row cap across all pages, 1-10 000
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": false}	Optional Apify Proxy pass-through

{
  "searchMode": "city",
  "byCity": "San Diego",
  "maxResults": 500,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

One row per brewery, cidery, or brewpub record.

{
  "id": "5128df48-79fc-4f0f-8b52-d06be54d0cec",
  "name": "(405) Brewing Co",
  "brewery_type": "micro",
  "address_1": "1716 Topeka St",
  "address_2": null,
  "address_3": null,
  "city": "Norman",
  "state_province": "Oklahoma",
  "postal_code": "73069-8224",
  "country": "United States",
  "longitude": -97.46818222,
  "latitude": 35.25738891,
  "phone": "4058160490",
  "website_url": "http://www.405brewing.com",
  "state": "Oklahoma",
  "street": "1716 Topeka St"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — pay only for what lands in your dataset.

Event	Price	Trigger
Actor start	$0.20	Once per run
Result	$0.002	Per brewery record written

At 1,000 results: $0.20 + 1000 × $0.002 = $2.20.

🚧 Limitations

• Covers only what Open Brewery DB itself covers — it does not include venues the source doesn't track, and it carries no beer/menu/tap-list data, only venue records.
• Only the current record per id — no historical/versioned data.
• Free-text byCountry/byState values are passed through unmodified; a near-miss spelling can genuinely return zero rows (the status message will name exactly what was searched).

❓ FAQ

Does this need an API key? No — Open Brewery DB is a free, keyless public API, and this Actor is keyless too.

What happens if my filter matches nothing? The run finishes successfully with zero rows and a status message naming the exact filter or query that matched nothing. That is a valid outcome, not a failure.

Can I search by radius around a coordinate? Yes — use searchMode: "dist" with byDistLat/byDistLng. Results come back in the source's distance-sorted order.

How current is the data? Rows reflect Open Brewery DB's live API response at run time; it is a community-maintained open-data project, updated on its own schedule.

🙋 Your feedback

Found a brewery-type edge case or a field that doesn't map cleanly? Open an issue on the Actor's Apify Store page or reach out via DevilScrapes on Apify — we read every report.