Neiburg: Calm down, beer community, the world hasn't ended

Outrage in the beer community. Anheuser-Busch InBev continues to take over the world.

OK, it’s not quite like that, but close enough, some feel.

Due to a recently-announced partnership with the beer rating site, RateBeer, and ZX Ventures, a venture capital group backed by Anheuser-Busch, the craft beer community is off its rocker.

Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione, Burley Oak’s Bryan Brushmiller and breweries like Sixpoint, Harpoon, Prison City and others have requested their beers and any mention of their names be removed from the RateBeer site, citing a conflict of interest.

READ MORE: Dogfish Head founder requests removal from RateBeer site

ABI, of course, is one of the most powerful names in beverage.

But RateBeer’s problem isn’t just that it has partnered with ABI and, maybe unknowingly, helped drive a stake into the soul of the craft beer community. It’s the way the company handled the announcement and the immediate fallout that is taking place. With some heading for the hills to other online beer communities.

The first issue is timing.

Good Beer Hunting’s reporting unearthed the fact that ZX Ventures and RateBeer have been working together since October. That’s eight months ago. In our fast-paced, 24-hour news cycle of a world we live in, where tweets from the president containing typos are old news if you sleep in, that’s a long time. And it begs the question, why?

Maybe RateBeer knew exactly what it was doing.

Maybe, as Burley Oak’s Brushmiller suggested on the phone Tuesday, Tucker didn’t want to sabotage RateBeer’s big event because he knew the outrage from the craft community would come with the deal.

After all, RateBeer’s biggest event, the Best Beer Festival and awards program was in January in Santa Rosa, California. Tickets ranged from $80-150.

Brushmiller wondered if the news was public, would the event have been under attended? It’s a fair question, and one he and plenty of others will never know the answer to.

Tucker, who is based in Oregon, did not respond to an email Tuesday requesting comment on the requests from Dogfish Head and others. He did, though, talk to the San Francisco Chronicle about the arrangement. He said he can’t disclose financial particulars, which makes sense.

According to the Chronicle story, Tucker adamantly disagreed with Calagione’s take and said the backlash from the craft beer community wasn’t warranted.

“Nothing’s changed,” Tucker told the Chronicle.

“We’ve created an API through which other brewers, industry watchers, journalists and others can view the same ratings information that ZX Ventures does. This is a consumer-led platform, and the power of our scores and ratings will always lie with the consumer."

That may be true, and it probably is. I’m not sure Calagione or others are suggesting otherwise. But to completely turn away the idea of a conflict of interest isn’t sensical. There clearly is one.

It would be akin to this publication selling a minority stake to Warner Bros. and then writing a review of the top movies of the year. Sure, the person writing the review owes Warner nothing. Maybe the writer wasn’t a fan of Wonder Woman or thought Unforgettable was forgettable. Upsetting stakeholders isn’t a fun game to play.

But let’s be fair, does this mean Bud Light is going to get a score of 100 on RateBeer’s website? No.

And let’s also dispel the notion that this gives ZX/ABI any access to new data. The data on RateBeer’s website has always been available to all as it is and has always been entirely consumer-driven.

This is where some feel Calagione and others are out of line.

Sure the requests can flood in from breweries small and large demanding to be removed from the website. The thing is, RateBeer has no reason to remove anyone from its site. And it won’t. Because it doesn’t have to.

Calagione also cited an ethics code from the Society of Professional Journalists, which made me smile as a writer, but it felt sort of misplaced. RateBeer isn’t ran by journalists and doesn’t pretend to be.

"RateBeer's greatest value comes in users' ability to add any missing beers or breweries to the site on a continuous basis," Tucker told the Chronicle. "But if there's a particular image or piece of content breweries are concerned with, they can refer to our Digital Copyright Millennium Copyright Act section of RateBeer's Terms of Service."

Not everyone in the craft beer community is outraged.

Per the Good Beer Hunting Twitter account, American Solera’s (Oklahoma) Chase Healy said: “Joe Tucker and RateBeer have helped elevate my brewing for years. I’m not concerned with what they do with my publically available data.”

A rational take on the situation.

But even if there are plenty of others out there like Healy, which surely there are, it’s not like RateBeer gained any new fans now, despite the fact that this partnership will almost assuredly elevate the quality of the website as a whole.

More people will head elsewhere, to Untappd, Beer Advocate or somewhere else.

So what’s in it for ABI?

Outside of money, which, duh, ABI knows what it’s doing. The disruption of the craft brew industry isn’t a new idea for the company.

This partnership gives ABI a platform in the beer tech space and maybe access to events and other things that come along with RateBeer. ABI did not respond to a request for comment.

If history is an indicator, the company stands to make money.

But Brushmiller has no problem, he says, with fighting the good fight, even though his beers aren’t going to disappear from RateBeer’s platform.

“We understand there’s always been a David and Goliath kind of fight that we’ve fought as small brewers and even brewers as large as Dogfish, which, really, they’re not that large,” he said. “We’re still this small guy (at Burley Oak). But to say now someone is an enemy or whatnot, you really have to look at what makes them an enemy. It’s not because they’re bigger. It’s not because they’re a bigger business.

“It has nothing to do with their size, except their size is how they leverage all of this.”

And now, no matter what Tucker says, they can leverage it in a different way.

The beer community has other places to go.

So it will.