Tag: ZX Ventures

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RateBeer is now Fully Bud

Looks like the takeover of RateBeer is now complete.  SABInBev now fully owns the rating website.  Technically ZX Ventures owns them but co-founder Joe Tucker is not in charge any more.  Tucker is now in a “community” ambassador role.

And while it may be true that users are up overall, how those new users came to join is probably more due to advertising budget from the parent company.

Which is fine.  Spin this as a positive or “road bump” or write them off completely for making this deal.  Either way, beer ratings sourced from the masses are never going to be the same force that they were in the early days.  I don’t know of people that use the site (or their new-ish app) when making buying decisions.  I certainly don’t.  I don’t expect people to make those type of choices based on my reviews. 

I haven’t used the site since the partial sale because that is the line that I have drawn in the sand but from what I remember, it didn’t have the fun, game aspect that Untappd has unless their app is completely changed. 

I believe that at some point, if RateBeer doesn’t make money or doesn’t draw a minimum amount of eyeballs to the site that it will be slowly shut down.  Remember the “Beer Necessities”?  The ratings may get shunted into another website (possibly October or a new version).

It has been offered up that the data was the draw for the deal but what is ABInBev gonna do with data on thousands of beers that they won’t make themselves?  Perhaps the High End might use the information?  But I would guess that the breweries themselves already know most of the trending information already.  My RateBeer data is now way out of date and probably of little use at all, I know that.

I think this full sale marks a time where we can look forward and dream of what may be the next big thing.  Is there a game-changing new app on the horizon? 

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X Rated

Now that the dust (comments and counter comments, you’re wrong, I’m right) has started to settle on the latest craft beer imbroglio involving RateBeer and the ABInBev ZX Ventures division there are two things that I want to talk about. One briefly and one a bit longer.

First is that RateBeer lost a chunk of credibility and will now be viewed with more jaded eyes (at least) and with outright scorn from others in the future. I certainly hope they learned a lesson from the Wicked Weed Funk Fest debacle when it comes to their RateBeer Fest.

But what chaps my hide more than selling a stake is that they hid it, from multiple groups of people for close to 8 months and would probably have just let it ride even longer if not outed. Also, it would have been a gesture to allow users to opt out from having their beer drinking history in the grubby hands of ABInBev. Thank goodness, I haven’t rated any beers in the last couple of years. Though they probably would be OK with my review of the Golden Road Hefe. Bottom line, if you are hiding where you are getting your money from, you need to take stock of your choice of financier.

A second point came to me after reading Bryan Roth’s piece about data and the future of beer. (Read it HERE)

I kept reading the article and I see that ZX Futures seems to be infiltrating craft beer across the board, from grain to glass. But nowhere to be found was an explanation or theory as to what The King of Beers marketing was actually going to do with these companies or the data they glean from them.

A good example is ZX having a share in one beer website, October and the “high end” running a website, called the Beer Necessities. The latter is tactical marketing. Cloaking oneself in the company of craft beer. The former, is what? Beer Education maybe. But Budweiser can’t put a dollar figure on that. And they certainly aren’t going to pull a nationwide best selling beer out of the comments section.

ZX seems intent on gathering data but how will that help the mothership? What spreadsheet from PicoBrew or Northern Brewer or RateBeer will tell them what beer to brew and when? They might see a style trend coming and then going but they are not going to brew the next hazy IPA themselves and I doubt that they will be able to wrangle their 10 former craft breweries through layers of vice-presidents and managers into hopping onto a bandwagon early enough.

For the life span of craft beer, the industrial corn pop lagers have not once had the realization that perhaps they should make a full line-up of beers to suit the needs of all Americans. They have engineered beer to fit into a factory and a distribution chain and to be the same. The consumer has told SABInBev what they want but the consumer was ignored. The consumer drank beer that voyaged for months to the U.S. from Europe or homebrewed what they wanted for themselves just to get something/anything different. That need does not fit onto a self-driving 18 Wheeler.

“The more we know about our consumers and products, the better chance we have of anticipating their needs in the future.” Per Roth’s blog post, that is the goal of ZX Ventures. But what happens when the needs and what SABInBev can/want to provide are poles apart? Personally, I think they will succeed short term with their other goal of being a disruptive growth group. Creating havoc in beer world and splitting people into pro or con RateBeer, or just splitting people into smaller camps. I have already opined that I believe that is a long term bad idea because the comment section kerfuffles are like sunlight on their nefarious plots.

Now that I think about it, it is even more sad that RateBeer sold even a little of itself. Not only does that sale create a rift between the community it had created, but the data that will come out of it hasn’t been used in the past and I doubt it will be ever.

The only funny thing, so far, is how Noble Ale Works chose to distance themselves. They typed over their brewery name, beer names and descriptions with nonsense and song lyrics. A new form of redaction.

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Peel the Label – Good ZX Hunting

There is inside baseball and then there is inside the dugout baseball. It is one thing to know that Golden Road is owned by SABInBev, it is another to know that SABInBev owns ZX Ventures, the so-called “global disruptive growth unit” which bought out a home brew supply company last year. And then you have inside the locker room baseball when you know that the same ZX Ventures is part of a team that is producing a new web series of stories (along with Beer Graphs, Conde Nast, Pitchfork and Good Beer Hunting) under the rather plain moniker of “October”.

That last name, GBH is one of the blogs that I read on a regular basis. They have great long form pieces with some eye-catching photography. They have done some revealing work on the behind the scenes of beer getting from brewery to glass. I have attended one of their Uppers & Downers coffee beer events at Intelligentsia Coffee.

Setting aside that having that many media cooks in the kitchen can cause problems, it is the smell of Bud Money that is causing the bigger stir. If a well-read craft beer fan looked over the website without any background, they would probably say that it looks and reads like Good Beer Hunting. But when you hear that it is partially funded by the Belgian Corn Water Overlords, it makes people suspicious.

(Add to that my somewhat cynical view that having so many media entities involved is supposed to deflect negative attention away from GBH to the other participants.)

That “You’ve Been Bought Out” suspicion inevitably leads to a minor skirmish in the comments section of blogs. Some of which is trolling and/or name calling and completely counter-productive to an actual discussion.

With that prologue done, here are my two cents on the matter. (‘cause I gots opinions to spare)

1. I would not have so grandly linked GBH to “October” (also would not have called it October). Keeping them separate would have given the cover needed to quell the shill tag. In that proud announcement they likened the duo to Grantland (GBH) and ESPN (“October”). They left out that ESPN bought out Grantland and it promptly started swirling the drain and is now kaput. A metaphorical wall between the two makes sense since they are looking for different eyeballs.

2. Stop acting surprised. Seriously. Any taint of ABInBev or Miller (to a lesser degree) or Heineken (to an even lesser, lesser degree) WILL be met with disdain and people leaving the building. No amount of wordsmithing will make you immune to it. Craft beer fans DO NOT LIKE Bud. As Sean Spicer so eloquently put it, Period. You can claim and have journalistic credibility. You can put out great articles. But any positive mention of Industrial beer or large companies in general will be met with skepticism at best.

I will keep reading Good Beer Hunting because I believe that the quality won’t go down. I may touch down on the “October” site but it will be with a cocked eye because I can’t shake the realization that ZX Ventures would not throw their hand in without getting something positive out of it.

Peel the Label is an occasional series where I opine about the big picture of craft beer and blogging without photos, videos or links.