Thoughts on Pintley
A few days ago I woke up with a couple emails about a new website called Pintley - Pintley as in pint, as in beer. In short:
- The emails were both a welcome affirmation and a unsurprising condemnation of time well spent.
- Pintley sells itself as the Pandora of beer discovery. Rate some brews and the idea is that they point you in the direction of others you’d like.
- Pintley is pretty geeky which is good because beer geeks are geeky too. Think BSG fans with liver damage.
- It’s up against two pretty well established players: BeerAdvocate and RateBeer. They don’t really do the recommending thing, at least not like Pintley, but they’re the big (although imperfect) folks in the surly online craft beer world.
- If the Pintley matching algorithm is little more than suggestions based off of style guides, then they’re fucked. If it can cater suggestions based on actual taste profiles (like being able to distinguish Ipswich IPA from Plinny the Elder) then Pintley would be pretty powerful. Even better would be recommendations based on common yeast strains (this would be intense), known malt builds (malt characteristics might be the only way to go), and hop varieties (probably the easiest of this three).
- Discovery is important to beer geeks, but after you’re fully indoctrinated it’s mostly centered around recently released beers or vintages or beers that you can’t get in your region anyways.
- The rest of the pintley offering is old news but still a pleasant sight since the discovery aspect can’t be expected to provide enough for a community by itself. Related: they better be good at community building. Related: beer helps with that.
- I’ll give it a go, but no review just yet. Reason one is it’s still in beta and reason two is something to do with my laziness.
I wrote too much, but here’s all you really need to know:
Today, go buy a beer you’ve never had before. Rinse. Repeat.
