Breweries tend to foster very loyal customer bases, but for the most part they’re at least one step removed from the people who drink their beers. Distributors, bars and stores are in the middle, making it difficult for breweries to gain a direct path to the people who are actually drinking their beers.

“We’ve seen phenomenal growth in the past year, and have really enjoyed watching how beer enthusiasts interact,” said Tim Mather, CEO of Untappd in a press release. “In the course of that growth, we’ve learned a valuable lesson – our users are passionate about the beers they drink, which means they don’t just want to connect with each other, they want to connect with the brew masters and breweries. With brewery claiming, now they can. This benefits the breweries as well, as they now have a vehicle for connecting directly with passionate consumers, and gaining greater insight into their products.”

By claiming their pages on Untappd, these breweries connect directly with Untappd’s audience, which is made up of many of the most passionate beer drinkers. They can then gain insights into which beers are really the most popular and where they’re being purchased the most through the new business dashboard. They’ll also be able to edit and merge the beers in their portfolio to clean up their appearance on the service.

Perhaps most importantly, users will be able to follow their favorite breweries. This opens the door for direct communication from the brewery in the form of check-in comments and toasts (all in an age appropriate environment). I know a simple “thank you” from a brewer would go a long way to making sure I drink their beer again.

Untappd soft launched the service a few weeks ago, and more than 150 breweries have already been claimed, showing how popular the service has become within the craft beer community. Some big names are already involved, like Dogfish Head, Kona, Boston Beer and Tenth & Blake (the “craft” division of Coors).

For breweries, this is a great way to connect with their consumers and gain insights without relying on middle-men. While claiming is free, it also shows a potential monetization strategy for Untappd, which has grown rapidly, especially for a bootstrapped startup.

Untappd launches new claiming tool to let breweries gain insights and interact directly with their customers originally appeared on About Foursquare

Untappd users who check in to one beer from the Vanberg & DeWulf portfolio (check the complete list on Untappd’s site) between November 15 and December 15 will unlock the badge.

Even cooler than the badge, though, is the contest that’s attached to it. Everyone who unlocks the badge will be eligible to enter to win a trip for two to Belgium, sponsored by the Belgian Tourist Office and Delta (contest is only open to US residents).

You can find the list of more than 350 bars participating in the Coast to Coast Toast on their Eventbrite page. Visit your nearest one on November 15 or look for one of these great Belgian beers at your local store and check in. If you win the contest, just remember where you read about it, OK?

Untappd launches Belgian beer badge and contest originally appeared on About Foursquare

Untappd users will be able to earn the special birthday badge by checking in to any beer on Untappd’s birthday weekend, October 22–23.

The parties will be held in New York, LA and Boston. Each city is home to one of the members of the spread out Untappd team. The New York party at Rattle N Hum will feature Untappd’s top 25 beers on tap and a special anniversary IPA from Bolero Snort brewing.

On top of all that, they’ve announced that they recently crossed the two million checkin mark. It’s only been five months since they marked their millionth. That’s great growth for such a niche startup. They’ve really managed to create an active network of beer lovers in a way that no other app has really been able to. Congrats to the Untappd team!

Untappd prepares to celebrate first birthday originally appeared on About Foursquare

Ever since beer checkin service Untappd launched a year ago, it’s been a web app because both of the founders, Greg Avola and Tim Mather, had backgrounds in web development. It had a great interface for a web app, but it led to slowness in anything other than ideal network conditions and prevented them from adding photos to the service. Today that all changes with the launch of their native apps for Android and iPhone.

Now that it’s an app, Untappd has added one of their most requested features: photos. You can add a photo of your beer or your drinking buddies right along with your checkin. It’s a nice feature that helps to make the network feel more social. The photos appear to other users within the app (checkins with a photo have a camera icon next to them) or inline on the website, much like foursquare photos (they don’t get pushed to foursquare, however).

Another new feature is the notification center. Instead of email notifications, you can now get comments, toasts, friend requests, etc. directly within the app.

The native apps each get a new navigation interface that makes them fit in better with other apps on the OS. The iPhone version, for example, gets a big check-in button at the bottom, just like foursquare, Instagram, Gowalla, and many others. Android retains the tabs across the top.

By making Untappd a native app, they gain tremendous speed improvements because most of the graphics are already stored on the phone and not downloaded every time as they were in the web app. It also remembers your state when you switch away, so it doesn’t reload from the very beginning every time you open it. This will be a huge improvement for people who often experience slow networks in crowded areas like football games and theme parks (cough, AT&T, cough).

Perhaps the biggest advantage to native apps, though, comes in the form of findability in the app stores. Both platforms have done an amazing job of conditioning customers to search the app store for apps, which puts web apps at a major disadvantage. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten tweets and emails along the lines of “Hey, what’s that beer app you use? I searched for Untappd in the app store, but couldn’t find it.” By offering native apps, they’ll finally have a spot in the app stores.

I’ve only been playing with the app for a few hours, but it feels very snappy and the UI is well done — just as we’ve come to expect from Untappd. This is a big step for a little company that should pay big dividends in terms of new users and engaging existing ones.

Give the native apps for iPhone and Android a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Untappd launches native apps for iPhone and Android originally appeared on About Foursquare

More than 11,000 people checked in during the day, almost 4,000 of them with IPAs. There were so many checkins that Untappd was actually down for a portion of the night and had to upgrade their servers to cope with the demand.

To show off the success of #IPADay, they’ve created an infographic and posted it on their blog. We’ve included it here for you to see. The numbers truly are impressive.

Untappd enjoys heavy traffic on International #IPADay [INFOGRAPHIC] originally appeared on About Foursquare

I’ve been thinking for a while that the only thing it was missing was my beer checkins from Untappd. Last week I discovered an easy way to get my Untappd data into Momento to be stored along with my other activities.

To add your Untappd beer checkins to Momento, follow these steps:

1. Log in to Untappd and visit your beer history page (untappd.com/user/chrisirmo/beers; replace “chrisirmo” with your username).
2. Find the “RSS Feed” link at the top of the page and copy the link to your clipboard. You’ll want to do this on your iPhone since the URL includes a unique key that you don’t want to retype. To copy the URL in Safari, hold down on the link until the options pop up.
3. Open Momento.
4. Choose feeds and then the settings icon in the upper right corner.
5. Click Feeds > Add Feed > Web Feed > Enter URL of feed.
6. Paste the RSS link you copied from Untappd into the box and click done.

Your Untappd checkins will now show alongside the rest of your activity from foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, etc. Since Untappd only shows your 10 most recent beers in the RSS feed, you’ll need to open Momento every few days to make sure you capture them all.

If you haven’t checked out Momento, it’s definitely worth a try. It offers a beautiful interface and tons of different ways to get your social media content into the app. I love that I can browse all the way back to 2006 (when I started using Flickr) and see what I was doing and seeing each day. The data gets even more rich as time goes on as I joined up with more and more social services.

Momento is available for $2.99 in the iPhone app store. They’re currently working on bringing the product to other platforms.

Connecting Momento and Untappd originally appeared on About Foursquare

Untappd <announced that they’ve acquired Redpint, with co-founder John Vajda becoming the third member of the Untappd team.

Vajda decided to join Untappd as a way to help unite the craft beer community and move it into the future, as he said in the Untappd blog post:

We truly love our RedPint community and in the spirit of the craft beer movement, grew to appreciate Untappd as a competitor and a colleague in this space. We want nothing more than to see the modernizing of the craft beer experience via mobile apps and change the beer industry for the better. At RedPint, we feel we’ve carried this torch alone as far as it can go alone, and we believe a collaboration is key to the success of making what we’ve built into a real company. Therefore, we are honored to announce that we have been acquired by Untappd and will be merging our companies together.

It’s exciting that Untappd has acquired a nice-sized community and added someone with beer checkin experience to their team.

UPDATE: A previous version of this post suggested Vajda is an iOS developer. He is not.

Untappd acquires Redpint originally appeared on About Foursquare

Users will be able to unlock the 1 Million checkin celebration badge with any beer checkin this weekend. The meetups will be held at Library Ale House in Los Angeles and Rattle N’ Hum in New York on Friday, June 3. Both establishments are offering half off your second beer when you check in and attach the location to your checkin.

We first introduced Untappd on September 28 and it officially launched to the public on October 22. One million checkins in eight months is a very impressive pace for an app as laser-focused as Untappd.

Congratulations to Untappd on hitting such an important milestone!

1,000,001 bottles of beer on the wall…

1 million bottles of beer on the wall… originally appeared on About Foursquare

Working with molecular archeologist Dr.Patrick McGovern, an expert on ancient beverages, Dogfish Head has created a series of beers called Ancient Ales. The beers buck the traditional limited ingredients mandated by the German Purity Law and offer creative ingredients modeled after ancient brews.

This year’s crop of beers includes:

Untappd partners with Dogfish Head with a badge to celebrate the Ancient Ales series originally appeared on About Foursquare

When you visit any individual beer screen in Untappd, you’ll now be able to find all the bars and restaurants nearby where users have had that beer recently. Simply tapping the location icon in the top right of the page will reveal a list of local places where other Untappd users have checked in to that beer within the last 30 days. You can see how far away you are, how many people have had the beer and when the last checkin was made.

To access the beer finder, you may need to clear your browser’s cache.

I often hear about beers that sound good, but usually have no idea where to find them locally. This will be a huge help in tracking them down, especially the craft beers that may only be served in a few places around town. I’m looking forward to taking this new feature for a test drive this weekend.

In addition to the beer finder, Untappd also updated their beer naming conventions to help with consistency and announced a dedicated email address for breweries to submit their beer logos for inclusion in the app. Read their blog post for more information.

Untappd launches its own “Explore” feature for beers originally appeared on About Foursquare