The database is made up of a collection of records, where each record contains information about either a beer, a brewer or a hotel. Each record has the name and other appropriate information (e.g. beers have a brewer and an alcohol content, hotels and brewers have an address and phone number).
The simplest way of asking a query is just to type in some keywords. The system will find the entries that contain all of those keywords. So, for example:
Note that the query interface is not very smart. It treats singular and plural versions of the same word as different words, and doesn't remove stop words (like "the", "in", etc.). If you put these in your query and they don't happen to match the record you're looking for, you'll miss it.
The best advice is, keep queries short and sweet.