About Beer Check
Beer Check helps you look up dietary and allergen information for beers — whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or avoiding specific allergens like gluten or barley.
What it does
Beer Check lets you look up dietary and allergen information for beers — whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or avoiding specific allergens like gluten or barley. You can photograph a beer label, scan a barcode, or search by name and brewery.
How it works
Your photo is sent to the backend where an AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) pipeline — combining Tesseract and Google Cloud Vision — extracts the text from the label. That text is then fuzzy-matched against a catalog of known beers to identify the product and look up its dietary information.
Upload a photo of the EAN or UPC barcode on the bottle or can. The backend decodes the barcode using ZXing and looks up the product in the Open Food Facts database to retrieve dietary and allergen data.
Beer name and optional brewery are matched directly against the catalog without any image processing. This is faster and more reliable when you know the beer's name.
Data sources
Vegan and vegetarian status comes from Barnivore, a community-maintained database of alcoholic beverages. Allergen data and barcode product information is sourced from Open Food Facts, an open-source food products database. The brewery catalog is seeded from OpenBreweryDB and Wikidata. The 100% gluten-free brewery list is sourced from coeliacslikebeer.co.uk — view the full list →. Full services list → How results are determined →
Accuracy & limitations
Results with a high match confidence (80%+) are generally reliable for well-known beers with established database entries.
OCR results depend heavily on photo quality. Blurry, dark, or partial label photos produce lower confidence matches. See How to Use for photography tips.
Database coverage is incomplete — many craft and regional beers are not in Barnivore or Open Food Facts. See the FAQ for known limitations.
Cask ales are often fined with isinglass (a fish-derived clarifying agent) and may not be suitable for vegetarians or vegans even if the database says otherwise. Learn about cask finings →
Always verify with the manufacturer if you have a severe allergy. Recipes and ingredients change; database entries may not reflect the latest formulation.