Sshhh! We don’t come here for hard hitting truths like that. Wait… I want truthful ratings though? Shit… Idk.
Just to place some emphasis on this. Last week I had to add 2 beers to the database that I was considering buying… they were from a New York brewery… New York being a huge metropolitan area that I live over 3000 miles away from, so not local at all. The fact they have some cans available here in the UK right now means they must have been available in NY for what, at least a month or so? I get that NY is an enormous place with a lot of breweries to keep track of, but by the same token you’d think this would also mean more users, so with that in mind it still came as a bit of a surprise to me when realising they weren’t yet in the database. I think this is the first time I’ve ever had to add foreign beers from a major country to the database without even travling to said country.
It might of been us that added them (if they were New York beers) We get a whole load of fresh New York beers at Himmeriget here in Copenhagen (due to the Evil Twin angle) pretty frequently (both tap and can) - i remember having to add quite a few. Does always feel strange adding beers from another country (especially when its being done from your own)
I also want to point out that with respect to Interboro, their beers do appear at bars in NYC, but not extremely frequently. Most Interboro beers I have had, I had at the brewery, which I have not been to in a few months. Also given that these were both haze bomb NE IPAs, they were probably shipped out as soon as brewed to the UK. Now that I heard about them, I will keep my eyes peeled to see if I see them, but overall not surprised that two Interboro beers got their first rates elsewhere.
The best way to prevent the places database from being out of date, which it isn’t in a lot of areas, is by contacting the admins (directly, or through various threads on the boards) and pointing out he towns/areas/cases where shit is wrong. I, for example, while fixing a place someone reports is wrong, if I can, usually fix and update the rest of the town as well.
It’s probably not that uncommon of an occurrence. It’s been that way for years, though I’m strictly speaking about it from a domestic . I’ve added beers from from pretty big breweries that are hundreds/thousands of miles away and have been on the shelves for a while. This was all before 2017. It’s even more amazing when you’d see that the same beer not in RB had 1000+ checkins on Untappd already.
It’s probably gotten a bit worse over the last year, but I think in some areas it has more to do with general attrition of big RB folks “retiring” or moving away from a given area, with no replacement raters who are interested in adding those beers to the site. I know of at least one rater who will wait for someone else in the area to add a beer. They won’t do it unless they absolutely have to.
GIven that the RB website no longer works on my phone, and there’s no app for my phone’s OS, and that I’m not prepared to change phone. I’m basically in 404 land.
It was fun. And I have enough backlog to get to 24th in the top raters table, but I guess that will never be.
I did initially vote “sometime this year”. I know technically that’s true, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon - can I change that to “already stopped” now?