Downloadable White Beer Travels Guides:
Places, Breweries & Bars

Above is a reduced-sized cover from one of the A4 downloadable guides, this one on a Beer Hunt in the Pajottenland, the part of Belgium, close to Brussels that is famous for a unique style of beer: Lambic and its derivatives, such as Gueuze. Click on the cover to see a bigger version of it. On it, there is a photo of Armand Debelder, pouring out his world-class Oude Geuze for a group of White Beer Travels Beer Hunters, in the 3 Fonteinen, in Beersel; the visit is fully described in the guide.	Above is a page from the White Beer Travels Guide to Ghent. John White's May, 2001 photo is of Lieven de Vos enjoying a Helleketelbier by the fire in 't Velootje, his superb bar.
As appropriate, the guides (eBooks, Electronic Books) have an associated map. To the right is a reproduction of the Dinant Map. All  available maps can be downloaded from the site, free-of-charge; see below for details of how to print them. Note the guide entries accurately pinpointed on the map. The currently available White Beer Travels guides and maps are listed in the table below.
Why not test out the download procedure on the single page note on the Gambrinus Legend? Click on the name(s) of the guide(s) that you are interested in to download it/them to your PC, and, as appropriate, their maps. All the downloadable maps are free-of-charge "jpg" files.

Note that in addition to these downloadable guides, that information on a number of places is contained directly in the site itself. For example, the Past Beer Hunts and the Recce Trips pages, which are reached by clicking on the highlighted text in this sentence or using the links at the top or bottom of this page, contain or direct one to useful information on Specialty Beer (Craft Beer) in New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Middelburg, Würzburg, Tokay, Utrecht, Aachen, Prague, Budapest, Cracow, Hasselt, Vienna, Ypres, České Budějovice (Budweis), Plzeň (Pilsen), etc. On the Archives page of the site there are links to the White Beer Travels Pubs of the Month, where detailed information is provided on very special bars. All the pages of the site are detailed on the Site Contents page, from where they can all be reached.

The downloadable guides are in Adobe Systems' PDF (Portable Document Format) (Adobe Reader format), i.e. they have ".pdf" file extensions. As well as using Adobe Systems software, pdf files can be created by other packages. There is a free plug-in that comes with Microsoft Vista, but if you want to add security (password protection) to documents, then one needs a package such as pdfFactory Pro from FinePrint (www.fineprint.com). This is not as fully featured as the Adobe package, but is considerably cheaper, and produces much smaller files.

Depending on how your computer (PC or laptop or whatever) is set up, you may be given the option of opening the file or saving it to a location which can be changed to one of your choice. The file can then be read/printed using Acrobat Reader. Or the latter may boot up automatically, no such choice being given. In this case, after entering the password, the file appears on the screen, from where it can be printed. Should you wish to save it as well as just read or print it, click on the "floppy disc" icon close to the left end of the Acrobat Reader task bar and save it to whatever device and folder you like, which would typically be on your hard drive.

Adobe Reader (formerly known as Adobe Acrobat, the name change reflecting the fact that it can now read other formats and that it incorporates Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader) generally comes as part of a PC's software bundle, but if not, it can be downloaded free-of-charge by clicking on this "Get Adobe Reader" logo and then clicking on the same logo on the Adobe Systems Home page and then following the instructions.

It is generally preferable to select the "save to" option, which puts an executable 22.3 MB file (one with a ".exe" file extension) in a folder such as "my downloads" or equivalent on your hard drive. Finding the downloaded file and clicking on it installs the software. The version of Adobe Reader downloaded (June, 2007) is version 8.1. However, White Beer Travels guides can be read with earlier versions, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Trying to download the files with an earlier version of Adobe Reader than version 4. is a common reason for having problems with the download, but less so, since version 3 is quite old now. A more likely problem is when you get an "access denied" message; these are typically seen when one is trying to do the download using a computer in your workplace; your no-fun IT Department will have incorporated something to prevent you doing such downloads. The solution here is to wait until you get home and do it on your own computer, or should you not have one, to contact White Beer Travels and asking for the guide to be sent to you as a e-mail attachment, provided those IT people have not blocked this route too!

If you do not have Adobe Reader on your PC, but do not wish to download such a large file, the Reader is generally available on the front cover CDs/DVDs that come with computer magazines, tucked away in something like "Essential Utilities".

Note also that there are versions of Adobe Reader that work on PDAs (Pocket Computers) running under, for example, Microsoft Pocket PC and Palm (Windows and Mac). These PDA versions of Adobe Reader can also be downloaded free-of-charge from the Adobe website. Such PDAs can then be used to view the White Beer Travels Guides. Even though, on a PC, they are normally printed page size (A4), on the PDA the text and images are reflowed to fit the screen size. The bookmarks and search facilities all work, making it very easy to find your way around the large documents.

As an aside, it is often said that .pdf files are essential for transmission to those who do not have Microsoft packages such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Access, etc on their computers, as they will not be able to see them. In fact, this is not the case, as "Viewers", which allow documents produced by these packages to be, er, viewed, without the package in question being on your computer, can be downloaded, free-of-charge, from the Microsoft website; the appropriate page can be reached by clicking here. The Viewers are significantly smaller than Adobe Reader, so download is much quicker.

White Beer Travels maps are designed to fill a page of paper, roughly A4/Letter size. Sometimes just downloading them and pressing the nearest "Print" button can produce maps that are too big or too small. On a computer with a Microsoft Operating System, the way to guarantee that they print as they should is to save them to your hard drive by right clicking on the image of the map that appears on your computer screen when your click on one of the above Map Download Buttons; the "Save picture as..." option should then be selected. It is best saved into the My Pictures or Pictures folder or a sub-folder within them, and then, after selecting the image, click on "Print picture" and then use the Photo Printing Wizard, with the option "Full page fax print". The instructions for computers with other than a Microsoft Operating System, follow similar lines.

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