American Craft Beer The Best Craft Beer, Breweries, Bars, Brewpubs, Beer Stores, And Restaurants Serving Serious Beer.
Here at American Craft Beer the beer biz never sleeps. And here’s just some of what’s been happening in the world of craft beer, while you were senselessly drinking your way through the weekend.
RateBeer Backlash (USA) – Earlier this month we reported that that AB InBev had purchased a part of RateBeer organization. This leading ecommerce platform which allows the public to rank beers on their site, is a favored destination for many in the craft beer community who see any association with Big Beer to be nothing short of an ethical betrayal.
Even More Shocking was the fact that they’d kept this partial acquisition (made through ZX Ventures, a subsidiary of AB InBev) under wraps. They’d actually partnered with AB InBev in October of 2016, and declined to let their users know, till the story broke via Good Beer Hunting on June 2nd.
Dogfish Head’s founder Sam Calagione was the first major industry figure to forcefully respond to what may see as a major conflict of interest, asking on June 5th that “Anheuser-Busch InBev and RateBeer to remove all Dogfish Head beer reviews and mentions on the RateBeer website immediately.”
Words To Drink By (Milton, DE) – “We encourage you to shift the sharing of your beer opinions and reviews to another platform that remains loyal to the principles of journalistic integrity.” – Sam Calagione on new RateBeer AB InBev partnership.
Dogfish Head’s Sam Calgione
Harpoon, Black Project, Cantillon and Altitude Brewing are now among the growing number of breweries following Sam’s lead, and reportedly requesting that their product mentions be removed from the site.
But in spite of the backlash, brewery data actually being removed from this user-driven platform is simply not going to happen according to RateBeer’s Executive Director, Joe Tucker, who issued the following statement….
“The beauty and value of RateBeer comes in our users’ ability to add publicly available content to our database. If there is a particular piece of content that you are concerned with, please refer to the processes defined in the Digital Copyright Millennium Copyright Act section of our Terms of Service.
Got Something You Think We Need To Know About? Send Your Press Releases to: [email protected]
