At the back end of last week I exchanged a couple of emails with Terry Dicks of www.YourRound.co.uk, a new website that aims to put real ale drinkers in touch with their favourite pints via the medium of text and email alerts.

From the drinker’s perspective: at entry level, there’s a simple search that enables you to check for pubs in a particular region and see what they’re serving, or check for a specific beer and see which pubs or beer festivals in a particular region might be able to see you right. Then, if you sign up for free membership, you can add your favourite beers to your profile and opt to receive alerts – the website promises to send you a text or email note when a pub within a specified distance of your postcode announces that they have one of your favourites available.

Terry tells me that they’ve successfully trialled the site in Cheltenham, but it’s still very much early days in terms of a national roll-out; they’ve been concentrating on encouraging breweries to sign up and supply up-to-date data – this sort of real-time offering is always going to be dependent on the goodwill of its data-suppliers for its overall effectiveness – and 710 of them have come on board so far. They’re now working on the next phase: signing up as many pubs as possible and persuading them to update the site with their ale (and cider) selections.

So whilst it’s still a bit hit and miss at the moment, results-wise, the system shows a lot of early promise. And with an iPhone App version of the site available via the Apple App Store, Terry is clearly hoping that YourRound.co.uk will become a useful mobile ale-location tool as well. One to keep an eye on, definitely.