Checking In And Chugging With Untappd

In anticipation of what proved to be a brew-heavy weekend, last week I signed up for Untappd, a social check-in site similar to Foursquare. Rather than checking into restaurants, users “check in to whatever beer they’re drinking, and, should they be out somewhere more respectable than a park bench, locations can also be added. After recently acquiring RedPint, another social beer app, Untappd looks set to succeed in the niche. But I have to ask: how many hyperfocused social networks can one really maintain?

This is The Pub on the mobile site, which is designed to work like a native app. You can watch people get smashed in real time.

Untappd’s tagline is “Drink Socially,” which is a little better than the “Feel Better About Getting Shitfaced By Yourself” that I might have come up with. I say this because Untappd seems best utilized when enjoying a new brew on your own, rather than out socializing in the real world. Ignoring the ten-minute time limit between adding beers and the embarrassment of having fifteen Keystone Lights in a row in your feed, adding a beer in Untapped isn’t exactly fast. Untappd has both a regular browser page and a mobile site, but currently no native mobile app. Checking in on the go means navigating to the mobile URL, searching for your suds, and clicking a couple more screens for reviews and locations before actually confirming that you’re drinking a beer. A native app (on the way later this year) won’t help you type Weihenstephaner Vitus into your phone at three in the morning, but it should speed up the process.

Gripes about spending too much time on my phone aside – and let’s be honest, if you’re using this your friends learned to deal with your Twitter obsession years ago – the whole point of Untappd is to see what other people are drinking. Untappd has both a Twitter-style dashboard displaying a continually-updated list of your friends’ and your most recent refreshments and The Pub, which is like Foursquare, including the entire network’s most recent updates. The dashboard is what new users would be most familiar with, but The Pub is the most intriguing aspect of the site. I enjoy knowing that Abe B. just skulled a pair of Schlitz. However, Untappd’s inability to include bottle size is a glaring omission.

Here’s what a beer’s page looks like, with style, average rating and ABV. A dedicated comments section would be nice.

Untappd has users all over the globe, and finding out what’s popular in Japan right now is pretty cool. It’s kind of depressing that American users seem to be in a continual pissing contest over who’s drinking the beer with the highest alcohol percentage, but that’s more of a byproduct of the community than anything. In this aspect Untappd is pretty brilliant for anyone interested in beer because it offers such a constant influx of people drinking things you’ve never heard of. And should you find something you want to try but know you’ll forget (an all-too-common problem in my case), there’s the option to add a beer to your Untappd wish list.

Aside from showing off my knowledge and refined taste in obscure malt liquor brands to the internet, I’d really like to be able to rely on Untappd for beer reviews. While it’s focused much more on the Foursquare model rather than Yelp!, Untapped doesn’t aggregate tips like Foursquare does. Each beer is listed with its style, average user rating (out of five bottlecaps) and alcohol percentage, but you’re forced to sift through the list of check-ins for that beer to find any meaningful commentary. As compared to the community on Beer Advocate (who is also putting together a mobile app), there is a real dearth of knowledge on Untappd. And while the two beer sites certainly have different aims, it would be nice if Untappd offered users more incentive to offer useful tips (adding a “like” system to tips would be a start) and put those tips into one place. Untappd does a Top Rated section, making it easy to find a popular example of any of the scores of styles of beer, but it’s depressingly only available on the main site. Suggestions based on your history are available on both the main and mobile sites.

The Top Rated section does seem useful, as you can search within specific styles, but it’s only available on the main site.

While it’s obvious that Untappd is still growing and refining itself (despite being launched back in 2010), it has an enormous amount of potential. The beer community is the perfect realm for a niche social media network because its based on continual experimentation. With over 1,700 breweries in the U.S. alone, a network like Untappd is crucial to both discovering new beers and sifting through what you personally don’t care for. Because of those reasons alone, I’m excited to see how Untappd evolves.

However, as it stands right now, Untappd seems more for people with an established network of afficionados (as evidenced by my self-proclaimed beer snob friends’ obsessions with it) rather than for beer lovers looking for support navigating some of the more daunting beer selections out there. I’ll be waiting for shared commentary to be more of a cornerstone of Untappd, and the native mobile app will be a boon, but until then Untappd remains a cool way to both remember what you’ve had in the past and find fancy-sounding beers to impress with.