RIP RateBeer? (and this Week's New Beverage Labels)
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Apparently the end of the year isn’t just the time for breweries to announce their closure.
RateBeer, the beer review and rating site that launched in the early 2000s and was acquired by Anheuser-Busch’s ZX Ventures in 2019, announced today that it would be shutting down on February 1, 2025.
It may feel like the Great Craft Beer Fire Sale of 2023-24 has left A-B with next to nothing, but their current Brewers Collective page reminds me that they’ve still got a fair number of brands remaining from their buying spree a decade back. Those include Goose Island and Elysian, of course, but also Golden Road, Wicked Weed, Karbach, Four Peaks and a few others.
I was never a big RateBeer user1 but whenever a longtime online community has to face shutdown, the loss goes beyond just data. It looks like some superusers are trying to take it over and prevent that, and as a digital asset, I would think it’d be easier to shift a website to a new owner than a bunch of brick-and-mortar breweries would.
If RateBeer does go dark in a couple months, it’s because A-B wanted it to.
The New Illinois Beer Label of the Week:
Okay! Here’s something a little more fun than shutting down websites. Any brewery willing to name a beer after a Spaceballs reference is all right in my book. Well done, Shoehorn Brewing.
Up next for our Premium Subscribers: A Chili Dog, sex liqueur, a happy potato, a cryptography exercise, and what appears to be next for Busch Light.
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