I actually thought long and hard about Brewery DB. Their API is just fantastic, IMO. Really clean. Unfortunately, I wrote Recommendable (the Ruby gem that I wrote to power the recommendations) in a way that it really relies on ActiveRecord currently. My database also has considerably more beers than BreweryDB does right now, but yeah. Managing it by myself slowly gets more difficult as more and more suggestions on beers I need to add come my way. I'm working on an admin section for me to manage that more easily.
Cheers! I've been wanting to make a beer app for a while and always had BreweryDB in the back of my head. Maybe you should open up your database via an API too:)