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You’re looking at the first known record of RateBeer with a logo still visible, courtesy of The Internet Archive. This page is from July 21, 2001, and showcases the site a little more than a year after it began. However, the earliest known record is actually from August 19, 2000, when there were a whopping 3,143 ratings in the database. Not to mention that at that time, the beer with the most ratings was… Budweiser…with 34. Eight years later, the number of ratings has skyrocketed to 1,790,546. Come take a mini-journey through history as we visit the site’s roots.

Pictured above are some of the first forum posts ever at the board. Are YOU one of these posters? Unfortunately, it appears as though the earliest viewable threads are from late 2003 as pictured below which can be found here.

Early ‘top’ stats? We can actually get a glimpse of some of the top beers and top raters from May 2000, when the site launched, through this elusive link Note that some of the ‘best beers’ as we know them had less than a dozen reviews.

Rogue Shakespeare Stout was the early favorite with a 4.63 average.

PhillyBeer2112 topped the raters with 65. Is this guy still on the site? Have usernames changed since back then?

Finally, a tour of some of the earlier versions of the site make it look as though early adopters arrived to vent frustrations. Just look at the many early reviews slamming Budweiser and fewer reviews supporting the better beers. It must have been quite difficult to get craft beer eight years ago. It is, thankfully, a whole different story now…