Hi everyone. Seems kinda quiet here since the news.
I really feel like the UK core of Ratebeer has always been good, and id hate to lose that. I suppose many of us will be going to Brewver, others not. Im going but not sure how active I’ll be. Might even be going back to spreadsheets for a lot of my rating/stats.
Anyway would be nice if we could all keep in touch and keep things going. There may not be the joy of stats so much anymore but I’m sure that we can still go on the odd wander or two through one of the UK’s beery towns. It’s good fun and good company.
I think I’ll transfer my data to Brewver but then (mostly) stop rating.
I was out today in deepest darkest northern Suffolk (Halesworth/Beccles/Lowestoft) with a non-rating friend, went to 4 places (3 new), drank pints not parts of thirds, had 5 new beers, but didn’t rate anything and instead talked without being on my phone.
It was quite novel and could be the way forward!
That said, I do still want to keep in touch with the many RateBeer friends I’ve made over the years here…and the spreadsheet won’t be abandoned either!
I’m an unsociable bugger in real life (I’m not a cunt, just awful anxiety) but I do enjoy the forum discussions and will miss this place dearly, I lurk here a lot actually even if I don’t post so much. I’ll especially miss things like the random stats threads.
If you’ve seen my posts in the other thread you’ll know I intend to maintain a forum set up identically to how they are here. I do feel Brewver is the most suitable home for them and I’m waiting to hear back to see what they say about it. I’m willing to deal with it completely on my own if they’re not interested though so rest assured we will have a forum to call our new home if people want to.
I won’t stop rating and reviewing beers though. I love keeping records of stuff like that. I rate every film I watch, every book I read too. Even without Brewver or Untappd I’d be doing it on a spreadsheet or perhaps even a proper database if I could be bothered to put the work in. In fact I’ll be keeping a spreadsheet as a backup from now on anyway.
Also one final note. I know a lot of you hate Untappd, and that’s fine and understandable, but there are plenty of people who use it simply as a log of beers they’ve drank. You don’t have to add a rating, a photo, or any notes at all. You can ignore badges and other shit you don’t care about. If all you care about is keeping track of what you’ve had I think it’s still the best option around.
I can see myself rating less. Drinking pints of Guinness… or Braybrooke which is always on at my favourite Leicester pub. Getting in bottles of Orval and Rochefort 8.
But there’s something so addictive about the chase. Dipping into Paisley for Renfrewshire place rate. Drinking a beer because it’s from a ln underrepresented county like Surrey or Worcestershire. Finding a Brut IPA in the '20s.
I have to remember that i didn’t particularly care for Ratebeer when i started. But i adapted and got stuck in. Never had the time for proper admin work but I tried to make a massive contribution anyway. Maybe I’ll do the same with Brewver.
Funnily enough this was me too. Back when ticks were a thing all I’d do was give it a star rating out of 5 just to keep track of what I’d had. When I hit about 50 or so beers I realised it didn’t count towards any kind of stats - you had to write a proper rating for that. Well I fucking love my stats, so I went back and retroactively rated each one (I did keep very basic notes in the notes app on my phone so it’s not like I just made shit up). After that rating beers became part of the beer drinking experience for me. Addictive stuff.
A positive that could come from this is reuniting with those users who left - there seems to be quite a few - and the potential press / beer articles around this suggesting Brewver to the more serious Untappd raters who want better stats that are actually FREE, more detailed in places and easier-to-read. I hear someone on Reddit suggested this recently and a flood of new users uploaded all their UT ratings.
Regarding the future, I can understand those who want to stop rating or take a break. Personally, I’m a bit like Chris. I once compiled and maintained a list of all the films I’d seen, and admired all the books Id read on my shelves - this is at around 7 or 8 years old well into my teen years. So keeping track of every beer, and every brewery or specialist beer bar I’ve visited, is probably something I need to do, for a reason I can’t explain.
But yes, lets hope the interaction and meet-ups can keep going. See you on Brewver or add me on Untappd: minutemat
The addiction of the chase is exactly what has kept me hooked for so many years and is what seems to have been so cruelly ripped away.
As I said as an example to my non-rating friend over a nice simple pint of Norfolk stout earlier today, I’d have taken a shitty Kazakstan lager over that any day, until just a couple of days ago.
But today, I just enjoyed beer for beers sake. Let’s see where it goes from here.
I would jump at a chance for a Cotts especially as i never made one.
It’s a bittersweet thing this Ratebeer death. Mostly bitter. Just 5 monutes ago i finally pushed Greene King out of my 10 most rated breweries after years of living in the East of England.
I’m certainly heading to Brewver, to be fair all but 500 of my rates are on there already. But still I will miss RB.
I did find RB a daunting place to be when I started. Especially the forum. I thought 10k ratings was ridiculous.
I’m always going to collect something I used to have every copy of empire magazine from issue 1 to about 400 odd. I also had to have every different cover. Even when they did 100 covers of the same magazine, but I’m not intending to reignite the whole neurodiversity thing.
I will miss RB. It’s the one place I go everyday. I don’t always rate a beer or post. But I have always been here every day since my day 1.
I thought it was rather quiet here too. I’ve been on Ratebeer for over 20 years now and was quite sad to hear that it will be winding up in February. I’ve been on Untappd for some years but not a huge fan of it and I certainly don’t log everything that I drink. Ratebeer is such a great reference tool and the forums are interesting too.
I don’t think I’ll bother with Brewver or Beer Advocate. I’ll just keep an up to date list on my computer with a simple score beside each beer. I’m getting older and have needed to drink less for some time. GP told me to cut back and get cholesterol down. I’ve shifted 15 kg since last spring. Ratebeer going will definitely make me drink less beer, no chasing top 5 brewery lists etc. I’ll just go to bars and drink what I like without obsessing over rates etc.
It’s been a fun ride over the last 20 years on here, we’ll all move on I’m sure.
I started out on ratebeer aiming to try all the beer styles and learn more about craft beer. Also found the site & forums abit daunting initially, but it’s a site I’ve logged into everyday since then as well.
Think I was lucky I started to meet & trade with afew other raters before finding out I was gluten intolerant, which was a big turning point and might have seen me leave the site, but instead have been able to keep rating cider/perry/mead/sakes and gluten free tagged beers which has seen me keep going to over 12,000 rates (and was always thinking initially I’d stop at 10k which seemed such a massive amount to ever reach!) and in the process have been able to meet up / swap pandas with lots of other raters.
Alot of this also coincided with a big resurgence in British craft/fine cider from 2018 which has continued over & past lockdown, which helped push on my ratings.
Am looking to continue on Brewver but also needing to cut back on the alcohol intake, and will miss the site - it went beyond solely rating beer for me, and its not going to be quite the same elsewhere
This reminds me of a thread posted a few years ago about neurodiversity among Ratebeerians. It turns out loads of us did and probably still do stuff like you’ve described. I never posted my own story in that thread, but long story short I too started keeping track of things I enjoyed, like films, in my preteen years.
I also can’t explain the reason why I feel the need to do this, but I find it so satisfying to do.
Yeah quick update on this since I received a reply back to my email. To summarise, they mostly all agree that forums are an important thing to have now. And it’s looking like we would move forward with me personally taking care of the setup and hosting of them. They’ll be designed to look like part of Brewver and be under the Brewver name, so pretty much exactly like we have here but the RB name and logo will be changed, so should retain its familiarity for those of you who intend to join there. Nothing finalised yet of course, but I’m hopeful they’re all on board with this.
Well RateBeer has been going downhill for a long time despite the best efforts of the admins to keep it going. AB InBev really didn’t know what they bought and how to manage it. Joe Tucker must also share much of the blame for the site’s demise and deserves absolutely no praise whatsoever. He sold us down the river and some more for his own personal gain and lazy is perhaps the kindest word I could use to describe him.
RateBeer has been fun though and i’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time here and met so many people. I always said that if RateBeer ever died then i’d stop rating. Right now i’m on the fence. I won’t ever move to Untappd. I simply don’t like it. I’ve never cared for BeerAdvocate either. I was using Brewver from the day it started until about two years ago. It’s very much RateBeer-like and place rating is possible too. It’s tough for admins though and reliability for me is a major issue and one of the reasons I quit. There’s nothing worse than walking into a pub, looking up at the board, then reaching for your phone to check if there’s a tick, only to find that Brewver is down again. At the moment there will be daily outages and that’s expected. Beer imports (of which there will be many) will take down the site. That’s something users have to live with until a better way to import beers can be found.
I will therefore spend some time at Brewver and give it a chance. I’ll certainly upload the 3000+ rates that are not already there, however long it takes.
If it doesn’t work out then it’s beer rating retirement for me and if i’m honest it’s well overdue. I’m carrying probably 15+ kilos more than I should be and the reason why is very obvious!
So, thanks for all the memories. I hope everyone ends up happy in whatever they decide to do … and never ever drink another AB InBev beer, not even the ones you actually like! Their behaviour in all this has been appalling.
*** Update - Just been over to Brewver and it’s down again. It just can’t cope with the volume of uploads right now. The admins have jobs too and it might be a long time before the database and the site can get restarted. Then more people upload ratings and the problems start all over again. As much as I like Brewver, the reliability issues that caused me to quit before are very much still there. It’s looking more like it will be beer rating retirement for me
My journey on here. Created an account in early 2016 yet didn’t log any beers until Aug 2017.
I’ve always picked & chose which beers I rated for the stats, every beer I’ve tried from Herts, Worcs, Bucks is logged on RB yet maybe 10-20% of my Gtr London / Gtr Manchester beers are logged.
I was in awe of the Uber raters with 15k+ rates for a long time, but have subsequently attended two Cotts meet ups, everyone was sound & dead welcoming so I’m glad I took the plunge. We are all beer nerds after all!
Hope I can continue to keep in touch with folk I’ve swapped beers with/met & spent time with.
Disappointing it’s come to this but I’m not surprised.
I’m not fussed about Brewver, from all I’ve read on the other thread it sounds quite messy. I might join if a forum on there is established but I’m not bothered about transferring my ratings across given they are all on UT already
I’ve had an account at Brewver (account 232) for sometime as a back up to RateBeer. For some reason my user name was my real name, but I’m now SHIG again thanks to emailing support. I’ve got 8K of my 13K ratings already there. I’ll let this crash fest subside a bit before I add the rest. If @LazyPyro does get the forum going for them I will most likely hang my hat there.
I’ve also got Untappd, BeerPal, and Beer Advocate accounts but since 2006 I’ve been RateBeerian with no urge to invest any time in those. It will be hard not to click on the icon everyday anymore. I’m glad to have been part of the UK contingent for 4 years and almost half my ratings it seems. Plus the continued Panda gang boxes have kept me engaged in UK breweries. Hope to continue to get back every few years to enjoy the great hospitality and a few pints of hote cask goldes. But first I will go to Australia in Dec 2025 to catch one of the Ashes Tests.
Seems like I created a Brewver account 4 years ago, eventually managed to log back in and can see 2 ticks - not been able to see anything else mind, it crashes when trying to do anything. Hopefully it’ll calm down and I can get a proper foot in the door. I’ll miss RB, both the rating and forum side, not been active long so feel everyone’s pain, but it still hurts a bit. Hope to still see some of the usual suspects online, and maybe even in person …
I know we’re getting our place ratings compiled but I’ve also decided to screenshot all of my 1420 places. Just to have a nice little gallery of memories. Am I obsessive? Nah…
What can I say? RB has been a pretty big part of my life for the past 15+ years. I joined in 2008, when I was still a uni student, and my involvement with the site accelerated when I moved to London in September 2010.
The UK RB scene has been great, and the London crew especially so. As it happened, there was at least one other guy who moved (temporarily) to London around the same time I did, so some of the local RBians organised a ‘welcome crawl’ around London. Of course there were only a handful of really good beer pubs back then - as I recall, we started at the Harp, went to Cask Pub & Kitchen, went to the Bree Louise. There must have been other places but I’ve forgotten which.
Most of my friends in London/the UK I’ve met through RB. We’ve travelled together, I’ve been to their weddings. For the past decade or so, there has been a core group of London RBians that meet up almost monthly. All because of a beer-rating website.
What comes next? A little hard to say. I’ve been on Untapped for more than a decade, and I’ll continue to use it; to date I haven’t made the effort to log every beer there but maybe I’ll become more active. As for Brewver, I’ll try to transfer my ratings but at this point I don’t see myself rating as zealously on that platform. I’m an RB man, an RBian. I put in a lot of hard yards on RateBeer.com and [at this point] lifting and shifting the experience/effort to Brewver doesn’t seem likely - though I won’t rule it out.
I won’t stop drinking beer. I too love the stats (and I too have, at various times and in various ways, kept track of films, books, records, baseball cards, rocks…). So please do connect with me on Untapped/facebook/instagram/linkedin, and I will be on Brewver. If there’s a decent forum there with the old RBians, I’ll use it.
It has been real pleasure. This definitely isn’t a goodbye from me and I look forward to catching up with people whenever, wherever.
Sad news that it has come to this but have really enjoyed my time here, but a big thanks to all the admins who have kept things running through the years so well.
I started on RB in London back in 2012, and remember it well as it marked my last year in the UK before moving to Denmark. Have met many great friends through RB, both here in DK and back in the UK and from around the world - Ratebeer has always been great for bringing people together. As Leighton mentioned there is a core group that meets up in London and it meant so much to me to get to meet up and see everyone for a tasting again last month while I was back over
I have most my ratings on UT now (just last 3 or 4k left to go) but no rush for me porting them across as compiled the old ones here. I created a user on Brewver when it first opened but never got round to upload my ratings there but again no rush and will get round to it once it quietens down and the site is less stressed technically.
Sounds like a great idea for a forum and would be nice to meet up on there as well. Until then can find me on UT/Brewver - all the best, Reubs.
gang boxes have kept me engaged in UK breweries. Hope to continue to get back every few years to enjoy the great hospitality and a few pints of hote cask goldes. But first I will go to Australia in Dec 2025 to catch one of the Ashes Tests.
