Posted by Joe Tucker (JoeT) at RateBeer: https://community.ratebeer.com/t/thank-you-all-a-special-farewell-to-ratebeer-1-feb-2025/20905 Thank You All! A Special Farewell To RateBeer! (1 Feb 2025) Hello all, I have some difficult news to share with you - RateBeer will cease operations as of February 1, 2025. RateBeer was born and evolved around a core purpose: To provide a place for beer enthusiasts around the world to share their passion and experiences. When I started building RateBeer over 2 decades ago, I couldn’t have dreamed of what it would grow into and become. Together, we’ve built a close community that helped shape the history of craft beer. Thank you all for your participation. It’s been a joy for me and I hope it’s been for you. You are encouraged to download your ratings and reviews from RateBeer by January 18, 2025. To do this, please: Login to the RateBeer website and navigate to the My Profile page In the right-hand column below “Beer Cellar” is the “My Account” section In the “My Account” section, click “Compile My Ratings” The next page will provide options for downloading your ratings in CSV (comma-separated value) format If you require assistance, please submit a request via https://www.ratebeer.com/feedback It’s undeniably tough news. In closing this chapter, I want to thank each one of you for being part of the RateBeer community. I am truly grateful for all of those who’ve contributed to our success. Thank you, JoeT ###
McBerko, a beer store owner and tasting group leader in British Columbia has tried and tried to get the assets to it before it vaporizes. Maybe then become a province of beer advocate?
I personally never participated on RateBeer so I have little knowledge/experience here. I wonder what this closure means for BeerAdvocate. Does the closure of RateBeer represent an 'opportunity' for BeerAdvocate (e.g., more users of BA?). Does this represent that the 'market' for these sorts of websites is contracting? Other? Cheers!
If this ever happened to this wonderful beer community I would be devastated. Feel sorry for those who made ratebeer their online beer community, such a loss for them
You and me both! Me too. Makes me wish that I had more time to create a beer rating importer for those who've wanted to migrate to BeerAdvocate (there's been many over the years; especially after AB InBev fully acquired RateBeer in 2019). But between the new admin tools, data cleanup, and massive forum upgrade, I'm swamped right now. That said, it wouldn't be out of the question with help from both communities.
The core tool itself would be relatively easy to bang out. It's the matching of breweries and beers that would take some effort; plus proper error handling to make it easy for users to manually enter anything that couldn't be imported; and then use those entries to improve the importer. I'd need help from both communities for all of that.
That sounds about right. The beer names will be the messiest because of naming conventions and policy differences. Would it make sense to look at a couple of test case breweries?
Where will we go to rate beers now!?!? I appreciated their annual awards list if only to help me navigate the over saturated beer options.
Depends on what's in the CSV file. Ideally, you'd want as much of RateBeer's brewery, beer, and beer style data (could grab this + the style ID from a pulldown) as possible so you can attempt to match beer ID to beer ID.
I never found RB's actual ratings to be as curated as BA's, but they did have a pretty vibrant community outside the US back when BA was mostly a US-based community. That changed over time and the BA forum tweaks (when BA was overhauled) changed that a bit, though.
I've been on Ratebeer since April 2001. A once very vibrant community that saw a huge exodus of members when some subsidiary of AB-INBEV acquired the site. Joe's a good fella. He emailed me every time I submitted a pic of a beer that didn't have one saying, thank you. There aren't any beers there that I have rated there that I have not rated on BA so there's that.
Too bad. I remember using both Ratebeer and BA when I first got back into craft beer, but quickly dropped Ratebeer. It wasn't bad, but BA was better for me and I didn't need two sites.
