The Internet is a great tool for staying current on topics you are passionate about. But navigating it for information can also be a time vortex that sucks hours out of your life. You can lose the better part of an afternoon becoming an expert on the history of Las Vegas when you originally just meant to buy round trip tickets there for the weekend.

For beer fans living in San Francisco, the effort and reward of a living a sudsy life is greater than in many other cities. For example, searching Google for “San Francisco beer” can get you over 120 million hits while performing a similar search on “Philadelphia beer,” a city that has twice the population, will yield you only a quarter of the hits.

After careful and repeated dives into the Internet, we’ve identified the five essential beer links you’ll need to stay current in San Francisco.

Best Local Calendar for Beer Events - The Bay Area Craft Beer Calendar - Brian Stechschulte, the Gallery Director at Richmond’s NIAD Art Center, is the founder and editor of the Bar Area Craft Beer site. While there’s a wide variety
of beer information here, the primary reason to bookmark this site is the calendar: Local festivals, meet the brewer nights, openings, tap takeovers, beer pairing dinners and most other public beer-related events are listed. The calendar page includes a handy iCal button which enables you to import the events onto any device that has a supported calendar application. Load it up and delete the events you aren’t interested in.

Best Beer Locator - Beer Menus - Although this site has an event calendar, beer descriptions and a space for members to enter tasting notes, the big draw is the beer finder with location info on thousands of beers.

Best Beer Reviews - Beer Advocate - If you want to record your tasting notes and read others, this is the place. It’s got a million and a half reviews covering over 60,000 beers. The full-featured site includes suggestions for writing beer reviews so members’ input tends to be more focused and comparable. Contrast Beer Advocate with Wine.com where the Wine Advocate reviews are done by Robert Parker and his associates, and you can confirm that beer, for
all its increasing gentrification, is still the democratic beverage it’s always been.

Best Beer Comparisons - Find the Best Beer - A relatively new site started by Double-Click founder, Kevin O' Conner, findthebest for beer uses a data comparison engine to pull and consolidate information from BeerAdvocate.com, RateBeer.com and The Opinionated Beer Page, into
easy to read charts. Genius. Easily compare beer brands by ABV, style, color, origin, price or ranking in the world. Pliny the Younger is currently ranked #2. Wonder what beer is crowned #1? Have a look.

Best Local Beer Social Group – Bay Area Beer Socials - This active Meetup group makes plans to attend many of the events listed on the Bay Area Craft
Beer calendar, as well as other events such as brewery tours, private tastings, and garden parties.

Did we miss an important beer link? Add it in the comments.