In case you were not aware, RateBeer sold a minority stake to ZX Ventures which is an arm of AB Inbev.
Dogfish Head put out a press release today:
Now that’s shady. Like a politician owning a newspaper shady.
ETA - like northern brewers users reviews shady (pre-ABI)
I have tried to remain non-judgemental in regards to ABI’s purchases of craft breweries and other related entities over the past several years. One reason is that I visited 10 Barrel Brewing in Bend shortly after it was acquired by ABI and spoke to several employees there. All of them assured me that the only change was that they no longer had a full bar. I found the food, beer and service to still be excellent. I was at 10 Barrel just 3 weeks ago and still saw no change.
Personally, I would not have boycotted a business solely because it was bought out by ABI. After reading about this, I have changed my mind. IMHO,there is no reason, other than attempting to influence the market, that ABI would buy into RateBeer. I have now joined the masses and will boycott all businesses that are owned, whether partially or wholly by ABI.
Before, Ratebeer was only humorous and ridiculous, with all of the highest rated beers either being IIPA or RIS. Now it’ll be amusing (and not surprising) to see if all the low end Goose island beers (and others) end up all suddenly rated 99+. ;D
People actually pay attention to Ratebeer and Beer Advocate? Huh…who knew?
Now if AB buys Untappd, I’ll be really disappointed.
When liquor stores here started posting Ratebeer rating scores next to beers, I wanted to see if there was anything remotely legit. One visit was more than enough.
I find Ratebeer and Beer Advocate to be completely useless. Generally, the reviews provided by individuals are very poor quality and the reviews are very inconsistent from reviewer to reviewer.
I think untappd is slightly better. But, I would buy a beer because of good scores there.
Then again, I generally hate buying craft beer. I get as many duds as studs. I go back to the same breweries over and over.
That’s not even possible. :o
Is it? :
Beats me. I was being tongue in cheek mostly. But I could see ABI beers being rated pretty highly. They bought it for a reason .
I think it’s more about data mining than getting good ratings for ABI products.
Yeah, there’s that, too.
Maybe, but much of that could be done with page scrapes. If true, maybe they are after search terms to see see trends.
Probably the most likely approach.
old bump, but ratebeer.com seems to no longer be maintained actively, as well as it having some site issues.
the frontpage has links for “top brewers of 2020” and other mentions of 2020 results. site looks the same as it has for as long as i can remember. people still use it daily for reviews but i couldn’t log in on firefox the other day. have had that problem before and had to use a diff browser i recall to log in.
i started using it 15+ years ago to keep track of any beers i had already drank and liked/didnt. at that time it was fine, but i remember more “serious” and homebrew beer people using beeradvocate.
i don’t try new beers as often as i used to, but what sites do you guys use to review/keep track of beers you buy?
I use Untappd on the phone, but I know you can login on a laptop. I only tag in new beers and it’s rare that I have to add a beer to their database.
I quit giving BeerAdvocate content in 2007 after the Bros did a friend of mine dirty. I think they are now owned by Untappd, but the Bros are still involved.
A recent article indicated RateBeer was sold in total to AB in 2019.
I’d venture a guess that the overall dip in the beer market plus the decline in beer chasing has made that site a lot less valuable than at the time of purchase. It may not make sense to continue investing money into new content.
Untappd has pretty well won the day with beer reviews/check-ins. I used it for several years mostly in friendly competition with friends but I got tired of feeling like opening a beer came with a chore. I also didn’t write reviews so I didn’t really engage with anybody I didn’t already know. I can send the same group of people a text that I’m drinking something interesting.
My reviews on Untappd generally contain the star rating and less than 10 words. Most of the time it’s simply the word “Tasty” 
Untapped review quality is pretty poor, it’s more of a personal tracker/ticker showoff space imo. I don’t spend a lot of time on beer reviews these days regardless.
yeah tbh i don’t understand the point of untappd, all i see are scores without words or just “username was drinking a (beer name) on may 4th, 2021”
i used ratebeer as a way to keep track of my thoughts on beers, so if i was at the store and i saw a beer i hadn’t had in so long i forgot if i liked it or not i could check
At one time you could have almost every new release. Nowadays in just NC we have over 350 breweries and it’s impossible to even begin to try them all. I quit keeping track of anything other than what I drink several years ago. I do use Untappd to make decisions when I am staring at a draft list which includes several breweries. While the reviews may not be perfect anything above 3.5 is typically going to be a safe bet.