Video: Untapped’s co-founder Greg Avola discusses coding and rating beers on the app he created in 2010 and which has become an indispensable beer nerd tool and a reference guide for the rest of us.
As Greg Avola explains in the interview with Beer Idiot Dieter Proost Untappd is a means to “start drinking socially”, which means he has tried to make it a social app, like Facebook for beer drinkers, rather than just a means to record what was drunk on a particular night.
Avola founded Untappd with Tim Mather in 2010. Avola is a coder and Mather a designer. Avola and Mather came up with the idea of Untappd, and Greg had a working prototype the next day.
In 2015 they had millions of users but needed to bet bigger. They merged the company with Next Glass, allowing them to quit their day jobs and go full time on Untapped.
Disrupted market
Untappd is a disrupter in the market, taking on previous stalwarts RateBeer and Beer Advocate among the craft beer nerds. Those rating and commenting on beers on Untappd are passionate and the app made it so much easer for them to enter their beers compared to RateBeer, for example. Sheer volume makes the crowd ratings and comments richer and more honest, in a way.
Even the RateBeer community has listed all of the advantages Untappd has over RateBeer, which lost credibility when that rating site AB InBev took over RateBeer in February 2019 (it held a minority share before). It was a data mining acquisition.
Social drinking
For some, Untappd is a way to keep up with all the incredible beers they’re swigging down; to others it is a way to record every swish in the mouth…reaching 5,000 to 6,000 beers tasted.
Other drinking friends, including one of the Beer Idiots, scorn such obsession and settle for their supposedly prodigious memory for beers.
It is a great app for for many reasons – helping drinkers everywhere to choose from ever changing bar menus through friend and crowd reviews, and checkout where they are and what’s on that menu elsewhere.
Some of us can’t keep up with the recording of beers drunk on the fly. We are too busy talking, or fumbling with my camera, or we just damn forget to do so on many of the OK and mediocre beers.
Drink, tap, repeat
So I am glad I have friends who swiftly do as they take pro-offered pecks from everyone else’s glasses, racking up five or six innings in a go, so I don’t have to.
It is also a good way of hiding 10-beer nights. They were mostly sips I believe.
