RateBeer

» see ratebeer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

RateBeer was the kind of thing a particular sort of hobbyist kept a spreadsheet for, and I was never in that hobby. Turkey in the years this site was growing had a beer market dominated by a single domestic brewer, under a tax regime that made anything imported a special occasion, so there was no local culture of ranking a thousand of them. The three highest-volume raters on the site were all Danish and each had logged more than fifty thousand distinct beers. That is a world with its own weather.

Bill Buchanan started it in May 2000 as a forum where beer drinkers could compare notes. Josh Oakes came in a month later as editor-in-chief and Joe Tucker joined in June 2001 as a web consultant, eventually taking full ownership. What they built over the next fifteen years stopped being a forum and became infrastructure: a canonical entry for every beer anyone could find, attached to every brewery that had ever made it.

By 2013 it held over 4.5 million ratings covering more than 470,000 beers. By the end it was past 640,000 beers and 9.5 million ratings. When RateBeer's annual list named Westvleteren 12 the best beer in the world in August 2006, the abbey that brewed it sold out. A volunteer database had become able to move actual inventory in Belgium.

~ the record ~

~ who was paying for it ~

Nobody writing the reviews was paid, and the reviews were the entire product. This is the arrangement every rating site runs on and it holds together only as long as the raters believe the scoreboard is honest. What they are actually donating is not text, it is their credibility.

In October 2016 ZX Ventures, the growth arm of Anheuser-Busch InBev, bought a minority stake in RateBeer. It was not disclosed publicly until June 2017. The world's largest brewer had quietly acquired a piece of the independent scoreboard its own products were being ranked on, and the people whose ratings made that scoreboard worth anything found out eight months after the fact.

~ what the disclosure cost ~

The reaction was immediate. On 5 June 2017 Dogfish Head's Sam Calagione publicly asked RateBeer to remove all of his brewery's data from the site, and other independent breweries followed. Breweries demanding to be delisted from a review site is close to unheard of, because listings are free advertising. They were treating the database as compromised.

ZX Ventures went from a stake to full ownership by February 2019. Meanwhile Untappd had taken the casual half of the audience with a phone app that wanted a check-in rather than a paragraph, and RateBeer's committed reviewers had less reason each year to keep filing carefully written entries into an asset owned by AB InBev. The site did not break. It just stopped being the place.

~ the postmortem ~

The closure was announced on 18 December 2024, giving users until 18 January 2025 to export their own ratings. The site ceased operations on 1 February and went fully offline two days after that. Joe Tucker, who had run it for more than twenty years under owners who kept changing, posted the export instructions himself.

A longtime user named Matt Berkowitz tried to buy it, saying publicly that he had the money and the technical contacts to take it over and keep it running. AB InBev stopped replying to him. That is the detail worth keeping: the company did not sell the archive to somebody who wanted it, and it did not keep running it either. Twenty five years of a volunteer reference work went dark because the owner had already extracted the only thing it wanted, which was the data, and the address itself was a cost line. ratebeer.com does not resolve today.

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