Just got a reply from Pete Brown, probably one of the best known beer writers in the UK. It was just a message letting him know the situation, on the off-chance he might mention somewhere the site’s influence on the beer scene over the last 25 years, linking the beer connoisseur article to re-jog his memory about the site:
"I appreciate your point of view on this. But I never really aide much attention to Rate Beer when it was out. I didn’t use it, so I don’t know enough about it to write about it. I don’t think review aggregator sites are much use, because they’re self-selecting and only represent the views of a particular niche of the population (I think Untapped is even worse.) I think the fact that AB-InBev are now shutting it down tells you all you need to know about why they bought it. They’re single-mindedly trying to kill craft beer.
Maybe there’s be something in writing about this, but I have book to write and submit by the end of January so I can’t really think about anything else at the moment.
I was under the impression every user was going to receive or received an email letting them know the site was closing. I contacted 2 active users just to see what platform they will be moving to. Neither one of them even know RateBeer was closing. @joet how can you let everyone know?
To be fair, an email was sent out a week or two ago, and there’s been a message pinned to the front page for about a month. I’m not sure what else he can do.
I contacted a few users who stopped rating but have thousands of ratings. One got back and thanked me as he had no idea.
The only other thing I can think of is a holding page when the sites turned off, advising users to contact @joet if they want their ratings. Then after a month that’s it.
You don’t need update the beer or brewery names before uploading to Brewver. The way it works is that the breweries and beer names are linked via the RateBeer IDs and Brewver IDs, so if it’s already on the system there – like it will be for Unibroue Éphémère – it’ll end up in the right place. For new breweries or beers, you may have to change things manually after uploading.
For the special characters in my reviews, I just used ChatGPT to figure out what the messed up special characters were, then applied “Find & Replace All” in Excel. Seemed to do the trick.
A sad day that we have to get in touch with each other with the site shutting down. It’s been a long time, my friend. Hope life’s treating you well these days. I currently live in Utah enjoying life, skiing and an host of other things. Hope to be on the East Coast again someday. Until then, my friend, take care and enjoy life.
For the characters I am more thinking for my own purposes - I want to have an Excel format offline record. I may or may not look into Brewver. My other consideration is I want to have an offline searchable list. So far my experience is that neither ios Notes or Google Docs works as well as I want it to.
If anybody put some thought into that, I’d like to hear it.
It’s not only the beer names, it’s also other characters in my reviews as well; they were downloaded with some encoding (e.g. & #39;), and I’d like to understand if there is a way to download them that prevents this encoding, or if it’s a setting on my laptop that I can change, or if they are stored in that way in the database, and there’s nothing I can do (other than search+replace in excel/notepad).
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