Beerscape is a project blog for the Field Guide to World Breweries and Brewing. I’m Lynn Pearson, an architectural historian with a particular interest in breweries; my book Built to Brew: The history and heritage of the brewery will be published by English Heritage in 2014. There’s more about me, my books and even beer on other blogs and websites – see the Beery Links page.

This is just the start of Beerscape, but the basic idea is to produce a guide to what brewery-related locations are worth seeing where. And where? Well, anywhere there are or were industrial-scale breweries. This is not a beer guide – there are lots of those and very useful they are – but a guide to extant buildings and objects related to the brewing industry. You wouldn’t want to visit Berlin, say, and walk within a stone’s throw of one of the city’s most famous former breweries without knowing; or walk past an old brewery on the river front in Turku (Finland) and not realise until too late. I’ve done both those things and learned from the experience!

The intention is to build up an array of photos and brief descriptions of locations, all searchable and categorised, until there are enough to make a publishable book or maybe a website or even an app, using map locations. That’s a long way ahead, but hopefully this blog will soon start to be useful for those planning trips abroad. I might include home-based trips (see this photo of Harveys in Lewes below) as well as foreign sites – we shall see. And feel free to comment or suggest sites, very welcome. Thanks for reading.