It’s likely no one reading this was aware, but the beer review site RateBeer.com is closing down on February 1.
The site was established in 2000, a few years after the similar rating site BeerAdvocate.com. But I had come across RateBeer first, in 2003. I had already been homebrewing at least five years before then, and learning about brewing and drinking different kinds of beer with my local homebrew club. This was a time, though, when there were still fewer than a dozen brewpubs in the Chicago area. Through RateBeer, I was able to learn about more brewers as they opened in the area, and around the world. And I admit the main reason I hooked on to these sites was so I could track the new beers I tried, like mounting stamps in an album or collecting runs of comic books.
When I started out plugging beer reviews into this site, I had also tried to mirror my reviews on BeerAdvocate, but after the first 300 reviews, I stopped. It was a lot of duplicated effort, I had become aware of the site’s founders, Todd and Jason Alström, and how they tended to lord over the site, including shutting down accounts for anyone who somehow offended them.
In those early days of the craft beer boom, the beer rating sites were an extra means of talking to a worldwide beer community, even to the brewers. At a meeting of the Brewers of South Suburbia in 2003, one member brought in a growler fill of Dogfish Head’s Snow Blower Belgian style Ale. We thought it had some problems, and I duly posted it in my review. Not 30 minutes afterward I got a DM from Dogfish Head head Sam Calagione. He apologized for the state of the beer, and offered to send me a bottle freshly capped from their taproom taps. Yes, it was better.
I also got in on a few “beer trades” with members in different parts of the country. We’d offer beers in the Beer Trades forum, and get in touch with likely prospects. Usually we could trade 12 bottles through FedEx. I’d gotten some gems like New Glarus Smoked Barley Wine or a Harvey & Sons LeCoq Imperial Stout from England. In return, I could usually send local beers that aren’t normally found elsewhere, like Goose Island’s Hex Nut Brown Ale, or Schell’s Shmaltzs Alt.
The only issue I had with trades was when a shipment to a member in Utah spent sat overnight in a FedEx center in the winter, letter some beers freeze and burst. Luckily I had extras.
The sites put their names on well-attended festivals, or gatherings. BeerAdvocate had a magazine on newsstands.
The beer rating sites were also a source for others to answer the question of “What’s the best beer in the World?” Of course that relative honor is determined by a lot of jiggling of statistics. One of the first beers to be catapulted from obscurity was Westvleteren 12, an Abbey Abt made by the monks at St. Sixtus abbey in Belgium. The popularity only added to its mystique, fed by the fact that you could only buy it at the abbey, a case at a time, and by appointment. The Alchemist Heady Topper Double IPA was similarly sought after for its scarcity: it was only available on canning day at its Stowe, Vermont brewery. Over the years, various other beers have been among the top-rated: Three Floyds Dark Lord, Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout and Canadian Breakfast Stout, and Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout. When the site leaves us, the top spot will be held by Toppling Goliath’s Kentucky Brunch Barrel-Aged stout, with their coffee stout Mornin’ Delight at #4.
The beer rating sites may have planted the seeds of their own decline. They had sponsored gatherings of members to trade and try beers in good fellowship. But they also pushed brewers to keep up a steady stream of new releases and “events”, to attract beer fans looking for the latest “Whalez.” Brewers have also correctly pointed out that beer fans will always give their highest rating to strong barley wines, imperial stout, or double IPAs. But that is why these sites also sort out ratings by style: RateBeer’s highest rated American style Pale Lager has a rating of 3.88 out of 5.0 (it’s Trzech Kumpli Knotty from Poland, ironically). While Kentucky Brunch brought in a 4.88.
Many people lost interest in taking time to review beers. Easier to just “check in” to a bar on Untappd, with a picture of the beer in your hand. Untappd got a jump on the older sites by offering a beer menu service for flatscreen bar TVs, with user check ins scrolling across the bottom.
And like so many crowdsourced sites, there was the eventual “sellout” to corporate interests. In 2017, Anheuser Busch bought a minority stake in RateBeer from owner Joe Turner, through its incubator ZX Ventures. The claim was that they were looking to access RateBeer’s demographic data, but many fans and brewers feared AB would try to muscle their product into more prominent placement. This led many raters to quit, and some brewers tried to demand that their beers and places be removed from the site. Two years later, ZX claimed full ownership of RateBeer. BeerAdvocate was taken over by Next Glass, owner of Untappd.
The sites were now a small component of their owner’s larger plans. Though users continued to post new beers and brewers to the sites, the pace slowed considerably. RateBeer’s front page, even this January, headlined a link to “Ratebeer’s Best—” of 2020. Even so, in 2022, RateBeer users managed to have logged one million beers.
Exactly what state will RateBeer’s assets be in starting in February? Will there still be a repository for all those photos of beer bottles and brewpubs, or will they just be wiped out? There has been some talk of a last-minute buyout by one or more of it users, but nothing seems to be coming of that.
Those of us still wanting to full in our beer “stamp albums” have been looking into alternatives. The most popular for now seems to be brewver.com. Its structure is a lot like Ratebeer’s, with ratings for beers, breweries and beer bars. It went online in 2019, but only took off as Ratebeer announced its pending shutdown. They had an advantage over other rating sites in that it a new user could export his Ratebeer reviews as a CSV, and import them, converting Ratebeer’s 5 point ratings to their own 10-point system. A helpful RateBeer member filled requests to scrape a user’s Place ratings for importing as well. The site is still running as a bit of a hobby, with no ads, and a very slow Cloudflare verification screen. It took me awhile to get my nearly 4,000 reviews uploaded, since their conversion daemon was often overwhelmed. However, as of January 27, they’ve managed to get up to 2.9 million reviews of over 685,000 beers from 40,000 breweries.
There are a few drawbacks I’ve found, but only personally. RateBeer had decided to include the various styles of sakes, since they are after all the product of a fermented grain. That was a motivation for me to explore and enjoy a beverage I might otherwise not have sampled. Brewver doesn’t do sakes. To their credit, neither site has allowed rating for “hard sodas” or “alcopops,” even those from established brewers.
But neither Brewver nor any other site can scrape and import all the data from over 20 years of RateBeer. Brewver will depend on whatever RateBeer users remain to transfer their history. So far, the only evidence that Govnors Public House at Lake in the Hills, or downstate Elmwood Brewing, even existed, has been the few beers from them that I had rated 20 years ago. A lot of graphic assets and older beer ratings may be lost forever.
One interesting difference in Brewver is that it allows ratings of different “batches.” So you could enter Worldwide Stouts from different years, or one-off Imperial Stouts aged in different brands of bourbon barrel. Just for grins, I supplemented my original 2003 rating of Old Rasputin with a new “batch” rating for the 2017 vintage.
It’s my hope that Brewver will continue to improve and build out its features. RateBeer used to have a little Javascript available that I could put in the side of my page to show the latest five beers I’d tallied there. That my appear again.
Meanwhile, if you’ve read this far in my little bloviation, come check out my profile: brewver.com/users/1327/McDermottDrink
