Beeradvocate > Untappd

Apex Aleworks, a local brewery I'm very proud of, will put any of theirs beers (unless a limited is running low) in 12oz cans right in front of you. You could order any number, so I often leave with a handful of the English Dark Mild to send out and get thoughts. They produce some other clean beers that I need to start sharing.

Otherwise, many of our locals don't offer any sort of to-go options, or the options are pretty limited. Fortunately, Apex does and I think they're well worth sharing.

 

I'm not a member of Untappd but I do notice (besides bad spelling passing off as being clever) "Untappd" seems to be more up to date with new beer entries as opposed to BA. That's a problem here.

 

There used to be a few members here that appeared to compare brewery website tap lists with their BA page and add any beers that were missing, probably to get karma points (or were being good BeerAdvocates). You could tell because you'd see an entire page of beers for a new brewery that didn't have a rating. I wonder where they are now.

 

I do this from time to time, but have fallen off. When I do it, I will pull up a brewery on Untappd and go through and add beers to the system here. It's not horrendously tedious, but anymore, I don't see a lot of value in it. I come back a few months later to find there have been no new ratings or reviews. Often times, I don't have the beer in hand either, so I can't add any substance or numbers.

One habit I've been trying to pick up is to acquire a beer, and then add it immediately prior to review. This is what I've been doing with Apex, which has made it easy since I can order a 12oz can of everything, bring it home, and review at my leisure. In the past, I've taken public transit around and ordered a flight at a few places to provide some short reviews. Of three of the breweries I've done this with, they have a total of 20, 28, and 11 reviews/ratings respectively, and I'm responsible for 5, 5, and 8 at each of those, so 25%, 18%, and 73% of their data. In other words, there just isn't a lot of others helping substantiate beers from local taproom beers.

Today, I just added a new limited release from one of the bigger local breweries in town. This beer has been the talk of the town since its release. It's been on tap for two weeks in the brewery, and not a single local user added the beer until I did today, which is strange considering this brewery gets a lot of attention compared with most every other brewery around here.

Maybe I'll set aside some time this NBS to post up another dozen or so listings, or complete a brewery's full line up here.

@jzeilinger

 

I am friends with one of them, and he decided to change lifestyles and now lives out of an RV and travels the country.

 

Untappd is like fantasy football, it's an unnecessary nerdness.

 

The Untappd app is damn good, though. Wow. That thing is clean as hell.

 

I like Untappd because I can keep track of some of my favorite bars from where I used to live, and use it to scope out places I want to go when traveling. I also can keep up with family and friends' to see what they are drinking. I've been using the app for about 3 years now, and only have about 7-8 friends. I have had a few occasions where I've received a request from someone I don't know, that posts about 5 beers a day, and never "Toast" any of my check-ins. They get removed pretty quickly.

I've never really thought to compare BA Vs Untappd because to me they are completely different animals; to each their own.

 

To actually obtain knowledge, discuss beer with people who have been drinking craft for a long time, and to get the latest news, Beer Advocate is hand's down above and beyond untappd. There's a community of people here who enjoyed beer before the "hazeboi" "Barrel aged everything pastry" explosion, so it's nice to discuss other styles. With that being said, the app for untappd is much better, and way easier to track my beers.

 

It's a janky, slow-loading mess, that is more difficult to add a beer on than BA is, in my experience.

 

Interesting, my browser gives me warning messages about BA all the time that its using too much memory and slowing down the system. Some times I get halfway through a post and the page reloads due to memory issues. Most likely its the ads and not BA itself that are causing problems though. Untappd generally gives me no problems on my phone but this whole argument is like trying to compare two IPA's based on their looks

 

I love beer advocate and appreciate the community. My beer buying decisions when I was new into the hobby was based solely on the BA review score. As I progressed into the hobby beers I traded for were based on the top ranking scores. However I have not turned my back on BA but I have stopped coming to check scores for beer decisions. I am 100% using Untappd for that for the sole reason that they have a bigger sampling size. Now I wait until I have 10 or so beers on Untappd before I check in on BA. I realize that I am part of the problem by not being diligent on adding beers or scoring right away while fresh in my mind instead of waiting two weeks and using my memory.

Personally I think the best example of the BA vs Untappd rating is the upcoming IPA Fest the majority of the beers on BA have zero ratings yet almost all show up with several hundred on Untappd. I feel like I am cheating on my wife using Untappd to figure out what beers I want to drink at BA function.

But at the end of the day I live for the BA community and the forums where Untappd is just a guilty faceless pleasure.

 

It's kind of an apples to oranges comparison.
Untappd is the facebook for beer.
Beer Advocate is a forum, a trading system, a magazine, and a place rating and beer rating system.

The strength of Untappd lies in the ability to quickly find beers and rate them. The strength of ratings are the sheer amount of them.

But you can't go on untappd to have in-depth discussions .. about anything.

 

BA for information about beers and beer news
UT for keeping track of what I drink and how I rate it (for future reference) and reading random comments in the tasting notes sections. "great game last night #OKC" 5 stars

 

After I started using UT the same thought crossed my mind. Way to enable alcoholics. lol

 

If they do ever add forums to their site, I'd still stick to BA for my beer conversations.
Too many friends here to jump ship.

 

I agree but I highly doubt they would go that route. They’re a mobile app company first and foremost. The website for PC is almost an afterthought and lacks features that the mobile app does.

 

And that app is a really useful tool. I'm not ashamed to admit that I use it all the time as a prelude to posting a new beer to me review. The opposite of the Ratebeer app.

 

I have never once visited Untappd. What I can say is that conversation on this sight is a very worthy happenstance. I have learned a great deal from some folks around here. I love the humor. I cherish the general orderliness of Beer Advocate in this age of electronic bombardment.....

 

Both have their uses. Sure, I trust ratings on BA more (though with a grain of salt depending on the sexiness of the style being reviewed). But when I'm out and about in a new place, a quick search of nearby checkins on Untapped is a great way to find out where I'm going to find some excellent beer.