I just recently found the site 97Bottles, which allows users to enter profiles and reviews of their favorite beers. If you have friends that also subscribe to the site, you can send them recommendations for different beers, but I am not that social so I don’t have any friends on the the site.
97Bottles is a really easy site to use and has a nice artistic theme too. Membership is free (yay!) but you can’t see reviews or people or anything else on the site unless you are a member and logged in (boo . . . ). Another annoyance is the only current way to find other friends on the site is through Twitter, which I don’t use. Being able to search by geographical location or e-mail would be really nice — their feedback site does say they are working on a way to find other members in your geographic area.
I checked for Pigs Ass Porter, which I have been drinking lately. It’s brewed over in Belt, Montana at the Harvest Moon Brewery. Oddly, they had Harvest Moon in their list of breweries, but didn’t have any entries for beers brewed by Harvest Moon. Seeing the lack, I added all the beers I could find on Harvest Moon’s list, and added reviews for their Beltian White and Pigs Ass Porter beers.
Anyway, neat website. Hat tip to Jeff Croft, whose blog I found it mentioned on.
UPDATE, Feb 19, 2009: Jeff Croft left a note and kindly explained that 97Bottles is in private beta and is only open to those who have received an invite or who have an OpenID (see below). Once the site becomes a public beta, you won’t have to be a member to see beer reviews on the site. They will probably also add some of the features I was whining about, like being able to search for other members in your area. Thank you for the note, Jeff!!! And yes, I like the site very much!
(There are a whole bunch of social websites whose membership can serve as an OpenID for you, including Blogger, Flickr, LiveJournal, Yahoo, and WordPress, and there are other ways to get an OpenID which are all explained here.)
(Original post and update crossposted on my MySpace blog, with some editing.)



Hi there! Glad you’re enjoying 97 Bottles! Thanks for mentioning. Just a couple of points…
97 Bottles is in private beta right now. It is only open to those who have an invite or those who have an OpenID. This is why you currently can’t see pages on the site unless you’re logged in. This is temporary. When we launch into our public beta stage, within the next month, pages will be viewable by non-logged-in users and those without an account.
And yes, we are working on other methods of searching for drinking buddies.
Thanks again!