Every now and then I come across a beer from a brewery I’ve never heard of and turns out they’ve brewed a load of beers with only a couple of ratings each due to lack of coverage of the UK on here. However a couple of weeks ago I spotted a reference to Southey on Twitter and realised it was a second brewery started by former Late Knights people. The thing is they’ve been around for at least a year. I’ve added 12 beers and there are more I didn’t add due to lack of info or they’re 2016 Christmas specials, etc. Of 12 + beer there are only three ratings on here (two thanks to my sister-in-law buying three bottles as Christmas presents and one from a festival). Any worse represented breweries? A lack of Ratebeer raters in Penge?
Back in October I went through and added almost the entire “Pilot Series” series of beers produced by West By Three
https://www.ratebeer.com/brewers/west-by-three/32328/
Although it’s not worse than your example (and they’re in Wales, not London, so very underrepresented on RB anyway), they do seem to be an extremely similar case to Southey with just 8 of their 30 beers having ratings. I can’t think of any others I’ve come across with such a vast range of beers with little to no ratings.
I think this is just a problem with Welsh brewers in general though because even the likes of Tiny Rebel and Crafty Devil sometimes have their new releases go unnoticed on Ratebeer, so it’s easy to see how those that are much smaller really do fly under the radar. I mean I had to add one of Crafty Devil’s “new” beers to the site last month, turns out it had been part of their core range for the best part of 2017, and not a single one of us has had it!
I am currently in Southern California and finding beers not on the database and a new brewery too. Ratebeerians are thin on the ground everywhere, not just Wales.
Each beer I have added has had multi hits on ‘Untappd’. We on RateBeer are lagging behind in active numbers by a long, long way.
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Oh yeah Untappd has us beat by numerous country miles when it comes to active users. I calculated one beer I was looking at for example having 500 checkins for every 1 rating on Ratebeer. Their growth is astounding. I mean due to the nature of their app they’re always gonna be more popular but it’s quite shocking to see how far we lag behind here, we could really do with an influx of new active users to help out.
The tasting group in Shrewsbury I am part of (only 5 of us) has me, three Untappd and one who uses both on each beer.
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What really rubs salt into the wound, is that of every 500 of those Untappd ticks 499 are for the wrong beer.
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There are quite a few breweries I have found and entered in the last 2 weks here in Oregon.
The beer sites are way behind!
While that’s true, I am not too worried that not every beer in the world is in this (or any other for that matter) database. For me a beer in the database without ratings has little to no value. Yes I would know it exists, but that knowledge alone doesn’t really mean much to me since there are hundreds of thousands of beers that exist without me being aware of them, whether they are added to this (or any other) database or not. The value for me is in the rating, and I mean the text combined with the numbers. Numbers alone also don’t mean much. For instance, if I look for an RIS I might want to trade for I search for highest rated, but then start reading the comments / ratings, cause usually the highest scoring RIS have loads of additives I dislike, like cinnamon, so the ratings that describe the beer are what ultimately make me decide whether I want to go on the hunt for a beer or not.
Makes sense. But see I don’t mind if a beer is in the database with no ratings, I’m happy to seek out brand new beers anyway. Sure, they might be crap and not to my taste, but that’s part of the fun for me, it’s a “risk” I take I suppose. When rating new beers I do generally stick to styles I know I like 9 times out of 10 though which makes it less of a risk.
Ha! It’s not that bad! Some of you lot just love to hate, and same with UT users hating RB. Can’t we all just get along? I use both sites a huge amount and the problems each site have aren’t half as bad as what some people make them out to be.
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I also use both sites and use them for different things.
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