Romania split

Just starting this since we talked a bit about it in the voting thread. Looks like there are two options here.
Developmental regions, of which there are 8:

And counties, 41 plus Bucharest capital region

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I’m fond of Romania because of reasons and would love to get region stats here. A healthy scene with over 100 breweries and it’s growing.

Ideally we’d have the 42 județe on RB as you see these used in addresses, however I feel at the moment this is a bit much for 100+ breweries, that would average only 2 per region, and in reality a large number of them will actually be empty.

I am voting for using the 8 development regions. Each judeČ› fits nicely into one of these regions with no overlaps, which helps keep adminning easier for non-locals.

  • Nord-Vest
  • Centru
  • Nord-Est
  • Sud-Est
  • Sud - Muntenia
  • BucureČ™ti - Ilfov
  • Sud-Vest Oltenia
  • Vest

I think those Romanian names will be fine too, they’re so close to English already, but if we use English then here’s the translations:

  • North West
  • Centre
  • North East
  • South East
  • South-Muntenia
  • Bucharest-Ilfov
  • South West Oltenia
  • West
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Kind of begs the question of why we don’t just use the English names then?

Edited my post with the English names. Just remembered we’re mostly using English for other countries too so yeah, either is fine.

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The eight regions seem to match NUTS-2, so looks ok. Not sure about the spaces around the dashes though, whether it is consistent with regions for other countries.

Replying in this thread as it’s more relevant. Currently the craft beer scene is very heavily based in the Bucharest region with at least a quarter of all breweries there. I’ve gone through what’s in the RB database and we would be left with a total of 16 counties without anything, and also 1 county with only a retired brewery.

I’m not against using them, but this is why I’m leaning towards the development regions as at least each of those will have breweries.

Yeah it looks a little weird doesn’t it.

But it’s because the regions without spaces round the hyphens (e.g. Nord-Vest) is just how they write “North West” in Romanian, the hyphen is redundant in English so I didn’t use it.
However the two with spaces around the hyphens are for the fact they’re 2 combined regions, but I suppose spaces aren’t strictly necessary.

Maybe replace with slashes like Bucharest/Ilfov

?

I’d rather Bucharest-Ilfov and South-Muntenia but I don’t think spaces are a problem. Also slashes might be an issue in the database?

I was in Romania back in 2016 and it looked like the craft beer revolution was starting. A bit surprised that there aren’t more considering that Estonia is way smaller and with cideries and meaderies, Romania has only few more than Estonia… But I guess beer being more Bucharest based explains some, it also looked like people in Romania are more into wine than into beer.

Tagging @dnicolaescu here, since he also admins Romania.

Yes it’s definitely still more a wine country, perhaps always will be. An even more extreme example of this is the neighbouring country of Moldova.

I’ve read that there’s a fair amount of red tape creating a bit of a barrier to entry when setting up a brewery and getting all the necessary paperwork and permits and licenses and whatnot, perhaps a reason why it’s not quite as big as you’d expect. Ground Zero rent out some of their brewery space though so that’s drawn quite a few gypsy breweries to the Bucharest area though.

Hop Hooligans and Bereta are the two major breweries that are exporting to other countries in Europe now and I think this has probably spurred other breweries on a bit recently as they’ve realised it’s actually possible to make it “big”. So yeah I think we’ll continue seeing Romanian craft beer grow, but I think it will take a very long time for some of the counties that are far away from major cities such as Bucharest and Cluj to develop any sort of craft beer scene.

hi guys,

I’ve been a bit absent in the last few good months, so I don’t really know where it all started.

Can you please point me to earlier threads where the discussion began, where I can learn what is the reason about this country splitting and how can it be better done for Romania?

Thanks,
Dorin.

There are multiple threads about it (for example, but not limited):

https://community.ratebeer.com/t/new-poll-for-next-country-split-vote/
etc.

TL;DR; you may have noticed that bunch of new countries (beside original Germany, USA, England, Canada) now have regions. The idea is to split up even more countries. There are no formal rules what to split or what not, but it is more case by case and what makes sense as far as beer drinking goes. Aka there is no point of splitting up Afghanistan to regions as it doesn’t offer any value for a beer site. At the same time it makes sense to split up Belgium to regions as it is very famous and quite diverse beer country. Most countries fall between these two extremes, hence there needs to be discussion about whether they need to be split, and if yes then how to split. Usually locals have a better insight especially about the second part - sometimes ISO/Wikipedia/etc info doesn’t make sense or is straight up wrong.

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Hi Dorin, haven’t seen you here in a long time.

A lot of this has been done because people simply like collecting regions, in the same way that they like ticking countries off.

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