I’ve spent the past week learning the ropes on Brewver, adding a brewery, a venue, as well as rating and generally exploring the database.
I’ve also been chatting to Roman who is an admin over there just to pick his brain on some of the subtle nuances of rating.
One question I asked was in relation to their policy on ABV changes within beers and what warrants a new entry.
The RB guideline set by Joet was always a 15% variation.
However some UK tickers always seemed desperate to get another tick and I’ve seen far lesser increases get added as a new beer, a 5.0% as a 5.2% for instance.
I personally don’t get interested by such variations and file them as batch variation, even if a 3.8% beer becomes 4.5% effectively increasing by 18%+.
On Brewver they will allow variations like this but it will simply be added as a separate batch of the same beer … NOT a new tick.
It requires a recipe change to warrant a new entry.
Therefore if you are adding ABV variations in hope of a new tick you won’t get one in Brewver world.
I lost a lot of cask/keg rates when I moved from BeerAdvocate to RateBeer, so I’ve lost track of which dispensing system RateBeer chose for each beer and I just carried on rating having lost a few bits of my drinking history.
I’ve been correcting my uploaded ticks and have noticed a few things.
Collabs and beers from breweries with brackets in their name do not appear correctly. A number of these are already on Brewver. This result in duplicates. I have been prioritising fixing mine so that they don’t get duplicated by someone else, meaning my entrybthen has to be deleted, etc.
Various breweries have now been duplicated. I asked if there was a way of reporting multiple duplcatwd breweries and was told to report them using the button on the brewery page.
Anyway, the admins are going to be really busy fixing all of the above
People seem to not spot that there are sub-styles. I.e. quite a few bitters where the option of best or ESB have not been selected.
Did make me laugh that certain ubiquitous beer styles don’t exist on there, but there are certain trad sstyles of whicb there are single digit numbers of beers.
If there are duplicates, it’s best to report them. Admins can merge beers. This stops future imports going wrong.
Yeah agree. I have asked to be an admin to help.
Other things to notes….
For England, Bristol is a separate region. There are also more regions in Wales and Scotland. Not sure about NI and the Republic.
Subsidiaries and some brewery brands are shown through ownership links. This is more like Untappd. I think this is a good change but requires some user or admin work to correct some rates. As the imports often put the beers with the patent brewery.
Personally I’m not too worried that JDW shows as a brewery. I think there are bigger admin tasks to focus on. This difference was originally down to imports from Untappd where it is separate brewery for the beers they commission and ratebeer imports following the same pattern.
It’s important not to overdo mergesfor beers that aren’t merged on RB here (for accidental import-related duplicates, it should be reported). Batch additions are fine as they are easily reversible if needed and more correct. I’ve battled and undone several needless merges, at least one major - which is time I could’ve spent getting fixing things up properly… I guess it’s people still getting used to the option, but yeah. I’m actually advising people (which I don’t know if it will be heeded) not to do merges of beers that are separate over here until the rush is over - as people will have ratings bounce, and that’s a PITA and a ton of manual work to keep track of (which may become impossible in less than a month unless you dig through the .csv’s…)…
The 15% rule is actually very problematic even in rb, because the official ABV info is often unreliable. Unless every batch is rigorously lab tested before the release, there is no way to be 100% sure about the exact ABV. Just a different batch of malt may cause slight ABV change… and then there is for example Orval where the beer continues to ferment in the bottle. (I would bet that most of the gushers are not the same ABV as on the label ).
I think that the original idea of the rule may have been: 15% or more change in ABV probably indicates a recipe change. Especially with macros there is no way to get the recipe change info - hence the rule. At some point the rule got twisted to the idea that 15% ABV change automatically means a new entry, even if the recipe stayed the same…
And just to give a couple of examples I have heard: a beer was served in a festival as 10% ABV (estimated by the brewer at the time), later when it was measured in the lab (for the proper release) it was actually 15% ABV. Or another time when a brewery estimated that the beer will end up being 11% ABV, so they printed the labels and prepared for the release… when it was tested in the lab, it turned out that the beer is actually 13%+ ABV, but they didn’t want to reprint the labels, and released it anyway. There was also a case when one of the local breweries tested bunch of non alcoholic drinks for ABV, they found that some non-alcoholic beers, which should be 0.5% or less, were actually 1.2%+ and the “non-alcoholic” kombuchas were even way more (which of course is very very illegal and even dangerous).
So, I think a correct way is the brewver way. Only add a new entry when it is clear that the recipe is new…
Also, an unfortunate accidental victim of not looking at alcohol etc. was the Hardcore IPA whose 9.0% version was merged with the later 9.2% version. And I actually don’t blame the trigger-happy person over there thaaaaat much - just naming them Hardcore IPA (9.0%) and Hardcore IPA (9.2%) when the recipes are completely different, instead of separating them by years (2007-2009) and (2010+) is just silly.
I think that Tim split the two up again, and that you can split the ratings back up manually if you’ve had both (dead easy there as you can set time stamps and everything is preserved in the merged rating!). If not, I’ll do it in 10 minutes.
People there are doing a huge and important job for the community, it’s important to keep that in mind. Mistakes happen here as well - in fact, Brewver helped me track a huge, nearly irreversible one on Ratebeer made by someone who had absolutely no business meddling with Croatian beers and yet did an alias of two well-documented beers with detailed descriptions (including ingredients lists), then deleting the alias to make things harder to undo and less correct, because he knows better than the main content admin, who is local, is friends with the brewer and the owners of the brewery, and had had both beers… So, yeah, patience and understanding please for the admins there, and, if you are one, please take care if you’re admining if it can cost people ratings (which are not just random bits of text, but time, effort and money!).
I’ve made things clear on RB, and I undid the merge on Brewver. Moved the very obvious ratings, however, these people have them merged and need to split them up manually (which is easy and all the info is contained in the text, and you can set the time!), to rate the 2007-2009 entry.
Did you undo the Brewver merge record too? Once a beer has been merged once, any future ratings for that beer that get imported will simply be added to the beer that it was originally merged to.
One fruitjuice brewer, from down south, sold their beers for 8% and when someone took samples to the lab they turned out to be 4.2% or smth like that. Technically same beer, but abv was corrected in next festivals which automatically caused conflict.
Other problem is goverment applying more strict alcohol laws. For example high gravity brewing macros don’t change their (hobo) brands. What used to be sold in 2L PET bottles for 8% abv are now in 1L PET bottles for 6%. It’s not brewers choice, it’s laws changing.
Separate batches count as new ticks for your own personal statistics (such as ratings, number from country etc.) but not for the overall rating of the brewery (that is the list of top raters from the brewery).
I’ve seen many times that unratable beers or whatever has been added and rated, just for both the rating(s) and listing to be deleted completely. I think that is a bad solution. 1 - it often keeps getting readded, and 2 - at some point, it might get changed to ratable for some reason. Then it would be better to just reactivate it, and the old ratings get back into business. Some admins (noone mentioned, noone offended) are too eager to change and delete, and should have their fingers chopped off
Absolutely, the procedure was always:
-send the ratings back to the raters, with an explanation
-delete the ratings
-verify the entry (with all the steps) and make it unratable
But, of course, the chance it was always followed by every admin is zero. I also understand why the entry would be deleted if it was kombucha or hard seltzer by a producer that’s not normally a brewer
Having done a fair bit of administrating since 2014, the easy button is delete however that isn’t what we as an admin community have tried to push as policy. Those that I have made unrateable have received a BM from me on the beer because if you leave the rating it still scores the unrateable beer and creates animosity from the tickers. Now are all admin created equal, no but lets not forget that we didn’t get paid to do any of this we did it because we cared to see the database managed and not a semi-free for all like untapped.
This one was just added (again), after being deleted instead of made uratable maybe a month ago. It was announced as a alcohol free edition of a specific cider, but it turned out to be just a carbonated juice edition. But instead of just having it listed unratable, it’s now there to be deleted yet again, and I can guarantee it will show up again at some point. And for unratable to turn ratable, I’ve had several that I at some point siddenly could rate (again) since I saved the old ratings.
