From a sweaty thought to an actual product: craftbeer-europe.com

I bought the domain first and came up with the product afterwards. Business schools call that a mistake. I’m calling it a journal.

It started on a morning run in mid-October 2026, with one question I had no business asking: is that domain still free?

It couldn’t be. Nobody leaves a domain like that lying around in 2026.

It was. Two hours later it wasn’t, because it was mine. craftbeer-europe.com. Now all it needed was a reason to exist.

A product, roughly

The brief I gave myself was short. Something I could start fast. Something that didn’t need months of building. Something that makes a bit of noise while I work out an actual plan (I’m still working on that).

So why not write about the things I do anyway? Drinking beer in places most people walk past is, it turns out, a skill I already have.

There’s a slightly more serious part. I want to help independent breweries grow, find new audiences, or at least find ideas for surviving the next winter. After a lot of conversations in Burgas and with craft beer people in the Algarve, I have a feeling this could be useful. Feelings aren’t data. But they’re a start.

The Algarve, Bulgaria and the Costa Blanca are where Germany, the UK and Norway were a while ago. Those markets took years of stubborn work before enough people were willing to pay for a decent pint. The breweries down here are only at the start of that work, and nobody’s writing about it.

So, a journal

Not a rating site. I go, I drink, I report back. Somebody had to, and I volunteered with suspicious enthusiasm.

It’s early. A handful of entries, in the order I got to them. It grows at the speed of my liver, which is a business plan with a natural ceiling.