Ask The BeerFathers: Who Stole Your Beer?

By on July 29, 2008 @ 8 PM (No Comments)

A reader writes:

Q. So you had 99 beer reviews on your site and now you’re sitting at 88. What happened? Where did your beers go? Who stole your beer?

A. Astute reader, you are correct – we were sitting gloriously at 99 beers on the wall and then we dropped to 88. So where did those 11 beers go? Did we drink them? Technically, yes we did. But what you’re seeing is the result of us doing a little housekeeping on our site.

See we started getting really excited about our 100th review. I mean really excited. It’s a great fake benchmark. So we started looking back over all our old reviews, making notes on ratings we wanted to adjust and whatnot when we noticed something: we had a bunch of duplicate reviews. You see usually Father and Son Beer Love collaborate on reviews together during their normal Thursday night beer session and post these reviews with an author of “John and Dad”. But we also drink beers independently (we did this a lot more in the early days of the site) and we post those reviews as being from either “John” or “Dad”.

So you see, there were several beers (11 to be exact) that we had both done independently that added to our total. As we went back we realized we hadn’t really reviewed and rated 99 different beers. We technically had 99 ratings, but we only rated 88 different beers.

So we decided to fix it. We consolidated the duplicate reviews into a set of single reviews that include both of our original reviews in it. We felt this was a little more true to the idea behind the beer ratings number – it should be unique beers.

So now we’ve had a minor setback in our race to 100, but fear not dear reader, in a few weeks we’ll be back up where we were and ready to hit the triple digit beers. Again.


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