Untappd: Find Beer You'll Love +17

In the beginning, it took me a while to get into this app. I didn’t get the point. I don’t think anyone would ever classify me as a “beer geek” and I can’t exactly handle more than a couple beers in a given day (albeit the latest “session” beer offerings are delicious and confess I do take advantage of that!) It was on my phone for a good 6 months before I started “checking in” my drinks. Fast forward several years and I love it! It’s great to discover that have or have not imbibed particular one and what I thought of it in the past and compare that to what I think of it now. One of the new features I really like is it’s easy to find out what my friends thought of a particular beer, in addition to the whole untappd world. It’s great that I can see what “my local” is offering even when I’m still 25 miles away trying to get out of the office. As the app designers added new features its stability experienced ups and downs. Lately, they are all ups and continue even farther upward! (Keep up the good work!) Anyway, if you like trying new venues and new beers, or are curious what the beer world is excited about, you’ll love this app! I highly recommend.

Good platform for sourcing & socializing. Intuitive & relatively engaging…and if you can’t find solid beers that fit your style here you’re doing something wrong. Solid fit for my objective of identifying new items to try and logging assessments of what I’ve sampled- so basically continual refinement of my personal beer preferences & ambitions. Being able to share the experiences of fellow craft beer fans adds another dimension to this value, and whimsical flare like badges and events adds fun ambience.

I will note that the platform does not facilitate true whale hunting - as everything you can source has to appear on a registered venue’s most updated menu…and so there’s very limited c2c exchange opportunity.

I’ll also add that the fairly recent pay to play “premium” access to provide ratings at more granular increments is a misstep. Completely understand that revenue has to be prioritized…but compromising the statistical integrity of your greatest value proposition - statistically relevant beer ratings- was an unwise source to tap. What’s done is done; but now the ballots are skewed towards the often questionable motives of the professional or quasi-pro social media personalities.

Before finding out about Untappd, I think it fair to say that I wasn’t even a casual beer drinker. The handful of beers I’d had to that pinpoint, with only a couple of exceptions, were terrible. It didn’t help that my state of Alabama put serious restrictions on what we could buy here. Once the restrictions were removed and craft beer became a reality, I went from too few choices to too many, and I had no sensei to help me along the journey.

Until Untappd.

Now I had an app that could help me make choices based on what beers I tried and how I rated them. Once I’d begun to add Friends, many of which were far more knowledgeable of beers than I was, I could tap their experiences by reading their ratings and tasting notes (Pro Tip: please always leave tasting notes! Ratings are helpful, but tell us why you left whatever rating you did). When you’re traveling, you can search for local venues and check out their offerings. And you might just be able to find that Unicorn beer out there with the help of this app.