I think there's several things being asked here. Or at least it seems like any solution will almost certainly have to decompose the problem:

1. Iterate over the records in a spreadsheet, one at a time. You probably want to export to something simple like CSV or JSON if the original spreadsheet is complicated like Excel.
2. For each record, write a small script (I feel like you have to do some scripting here) to take the values in each column, and compose it into a text file. You could use just simple string concatenation in Python, or get fancy with template engines like Jinja.
3. You'll now end up with a lot of text files, one per record. Looking at https://www.dokuwiki.org/devel:dirlayout DW keeps a lot of metadata besides just the pages, so this is probably why just putting the files under data/pages didn't work. You need to use DW's own features to import the files, and those probably expect something like Markdown. You can convert Markdown to other stuff with pandoc. (...)

(...) 4. Lastly it sounds like there are some cases where multiple records are actually the same beer but different dates etc and need to be combined in a single page. This is trickier. If there's not too many such cases it would be easier to do it manually. If there's a lot, I think you would probably have to convert it into a nested JSON, so that each element in the list of records can itself be a list of (related) records. Easiest way of doing that IMO is to iterate through the CSV and build a dictionary, which you then import to JSON.

IMO these 4 should be separate questions. I know how to do 1, 2 and 4. I don't know 3 and don't have time right now to set up a test DW, so I can't post a full answer. 😢 But if they were separate, "how to import some markdowns into DW" seems like someone would know it (I even found https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:docimporter).

Also, if DW is not cooperating on imports, you have two more "nuclear options":

1. Export a backup of DW. Change it to contain pages you want. "Restore" the backup. This assumes you won't hit the metadata problem again.
2. When submitting a DW page, have inspector view open and capture the HTTP request. It's probably some POST with username/token/cookie in headers and the page content as request body. You can then use Python requests, curl, HTTPie etc. in a script to submit each of your pages to the Dokuwiki URL (I assume this is self-hosted). It's a bit overkill, since a wiki should really provide UX for importing easily, but not as hard as it sounds.

I suppose you could also use Selenium to literally go to the DW page, paste in the text from each row of the spreadsheet, and click "save page" for you, and even watch Selenium do it in a Chrome window.

I'll edit to clarify. I'm not asking for help on the scripting part; in fact, I've already transformed that spreadsheet into suitable blocks of markdown source. I'm just asking about the DokuWiki side of actually getting those pages (with the needed metadata) into the wiki.

Ah, got it. So it really comes down to figuring out a way to bulk import into DW at this point.

I tried searching a bit when I saw this question, and I was very surprised that DW docs don't have a whole section explaining how exactly to import markdown. They do discuss importing from other wikis, but I'm not sure if that helps. It seems like if it's not gonna be easier than just doing the Selenium, it's kind of pointless :)