Similar Beer suggestions should be based on tags, not Beer styles.
For example, Sour IPAs, Strawberry Milkshake IPAs and West Coast IPAs aren’t similar beers except for being listed as IPAs.
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They are all IPAs. The brewers say so. We really do not need a humongous number of choices for style when entering a beer. When a number of styles were coalesced, some time ago, I was irritated. No longer. Too many choices are likely to proliferate errors. We need just enough choices to keep things interesting and challenging.
Why start up the style debate again? Totally irrelevant to this thread.
I completely agree with Viper the similar beers feature should absolutely be using tags rather than styles, it just doesn’t work these days with so many hybrids and modern interpretations. The examples provided, “Sour IPAs, Strawberry Milkshake IPAs and West Coast IPAs” are all completely different types of beer, you may love or hate some of those and maybe don’t want to be recommended some. The fact they share a style category should not be the only requirement for similarity.
If I’m rating a strawberry milkshake IPA for example, it most likely has been tagged with “milkshake ipa” so I should see other milkshake IPAs, this is much more similar than what currently seems to be a completely random selection with little to no relevance other than a vague parent style.
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And it would at the same time make Tags more relevant
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Many things that are not necessary and add unnecessary complications make perfect sense. At this point in “site time” I advocate not adding bells and whistles for rather esoteric reasons.
I’m sorry but what are you even on about? Have you even read what any of us have written?
Complications for who? joet? or the users? In any case I don’t think it will take much to make it work off tags rather than style. It will have no effect whatsoever on the average user.
Bit of a stretch to attribute this to a simple modification to an existing feature.
Esoteric? Again, I don’t think you’ve read the OP. This will be quite the opposite of esoteric, it would show beers that are similar to what the user is currently rating or looking at, instead of random ones.
The people who don’t have specialised knowledge of beers are exactly the kind of users who would benefit from this change, but it will also benefit those who do.
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Compared to some I’m on about nothing. Just responding to folks. But now …
I don’t get the attraction of tags so far. Take a look at the following beer and decide whether tags are, well anything worthwhile. Not that they might not become worthwhile, but I am not sure folks are very good with them. The tags on the following beer arguably relate to the beer in some respects, but, please, tell me how they add value in this particular case. Just click on the #honey tag. What is the value from doing that?
https://www.ratebeer.com/beer/boulder-beer-a-honey-of-a-saison/193971/
I that case you can click honey tag and see the top rated beers with honey in them. That’s fairly useful if you find you enjoy said additive.
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Point. I’m so unlikely to get “top-rated” beers I’d forgotten about that. Checked the top 50 and I’ve got 25. Time to refocus. Not sure tags will help with that tho. 
As Jow says, now I can easily see all the best rated beers with honey in them. That’s useful if someone likes honey.
Notice the similar beers below it? NONE of them have honey in them, so how exactly are they similar?
Similar Beers is a currently useless feature that could become more useful with changes as Viper described.
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Similar beers have fun images. Not exactly useful tho. If we want entertainment, how about replacing similar beer function with the random beer function? Not at all “useful”, but it would be interesting to me to see what random beer the system would pop up with. And now I’m thinking that tags can also be entertaining, tho not necessarily meaningful. After all, if I click on #honey, I’ll see Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter, and I likely will not be able to get a bottle of that! On the other hand I do find it interesting to see the top rated honey beers I have had. Most/much of the time it is about me!
I don’t know how this is difficult to understand…
The suggestion is that instead of the “similar beers” feature just delivering beers in the same style, it also uses the “tags” feature in that calculus… So in the example cited above, instead of delivering just a random sampling of Belgian Strong Ales (which is a bit of a catch-all style to begin with), it only returns Belgian Strong Ales that have the “honey” tag. Probably much closer to the actual beer than a randomly selected Belgian Strong Ale!
Similarly, you would be able to pull up IPAs with similar hop profiles to the beer you have. Imagine two beers have 5 tags in common… Of course they should be linked some how!
This would be a great feature. I have absolutely no confidence that it would ever be implemented successfully, much less even considered.
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Other than simple curiosity, why do we want to do that? The beer most similar is the one we just had. If the idea is to get more ticks from similar beers, there’s a small point. But the ability to get those beers is problematic. So why?
I mean, I feel like half of all noob questions on beer forums are “I had this beer and liked it, what other beers can I find that are similar.”
I can appreciate that for the average beer ticker here on RateBeer it may not be of interest, but to the average beer drinker in general, something like this would probably be literally the most useful feature that could be made available.
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Well. If you just tried a Cherry NEIPA with coffee beans and you loved it. Maybe you’d want to try other similar Cherry NEIPA with coffee beans. If you get similar beers suggestions with the Cherry, NEIPA and Coffee beans Tags, you might find a similar beer elsewhere that you would give a try. Of course, the Similar beers should also be linked to “My Local” to be really useful. Suggestions should be Local by default first, @joet @services
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