Beer Etc Review

Following on from my wine experiences with Pocket Wine, I thought I'd see what Beer etc could teach me about the world of beer. Beer etc isn't as pretty to navigate through as Pocket Wine but does serve some benefit.

Rather than educating you on the ways of the different tastes that each bottled beer presents, Beer etc is an app that lets you rate each beer and read the views of others through it. To do this, you have to search for each beer. This presents a problem if you're trying to discover new beers randomly as you can't basically. However if you're sitting at the bar wondering what to order, it's exactly what you need.

Each entry offers a rating, an ABV value and a ratebeer.com link for more details. You can also add your own notes to the database and search via location if you've found that a certain area produces particularly good beer. One really useful feature is that, excluding the ratebeer.com content, everything is accessible offline. Particularly handy if your local haunt has poor phone reception or no wi-fi access.

It's all potentially very useful but it also feels terribly minimal. It's fair enough to overlook the very basic presentation of the app but the actual content is lacking. It'd be nice if you could search for a beer randomly to try something new, or to have more information on each beer.

Beer etc certainly has a market desperate for more information on beers, it just needs to exploit this a bit more to make it indispensable.