And so, after a while, it all feels somewhat arbitrary. Other people couldn’t necessarily rely on my ratings nor me on theirs. Even though I had a scoring system, it only worked for me. I won’t go into this in depth, but I will mention it as another source of my frustration with the app. Do you rate to style? Can you presume to know the brewer’s intention? How much should you try to account for the subjective nature of the whole endeavour? On nights out I faced an awkward choice: should I log the beers right away and interrupt my fun? If I decided to catch up later I risked relying on sometimes hazy memories – particularly when I’d sampled a few very similar beers. I wonder how many of us drink at home all the time. But if you’re buying into an app like Untappd it only really makes sense if you use it all the time. It was fine at home, where I had time to mull over my thoughts and compose notes at my leisure. Pretty quickly I found that logging the beers became a pain. On nights out I faced an awkward choice: should I log the beers right away and interrupt my fun? I was subject to a constant push-pull of wanting to build up this number and being annoyed and frustrated with myself for caring about something so transparently pointless. I was aware it was ridiculous but that didn’t stop that unique count pulling on me, and encouraging me to drink more beers. In some small way, this meaningless number mattered to me. And the ridiculous thing is that I was caught up in competing with them. It has plenty of users who are well into four figures. Untappd has been active for a few years now. This might seem like a fair amount but it’s actually not that impressive. I checked in 727 beers with Untappd of which 669 were unique. My aim was to create a record that I could go back and check if I wanted to remember what I thought of a certain beer, or find out whether or not I had tried one before. I used to use Untappd, and logged beers relatively often. The unspoken idea being that higher the number of unique beers logged, the more god tier your drinking must be. This is all gamified by the awarding of badges – so many badges – and prominently displaying the count of beers each user has logged. But really it’s the tracking and rating that lie at the core of the app users’ activity. On top of which there are some rudimentary social media elements: you can friend people and ‘toast’ (like) or comment on their check-ins.
It also helps you discover what beers are available nearby or at certain venues, so you can hunt down the rare whalez when they hit town. For those who don’t know, Untappd is an app that allows you to track and rate the beers that you drink.
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